The film is part of the event programme:
"HAVING REACHED A CERTAIN POINT OF CRUELTY, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO COMMITTED IT: IT SHOULD JUST STOP"
The Programme comprises a series of video screenings by the artists and directors Ursula Biemann, Klaus vom Bruch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Korpys / Löffler and Martha Rosler.
Each screening will be followed by an introduction, discussion and week-long presentation. States and political alliances are based on imposing their own ideological concepts as the ones that set the tone. What means do they use to do so? And how do governments act when their current political and cultural claims to leadership are challenged from within or without? When hegemony crumbles?
How do they hold together what may have been constructed from the outset on the basis of artificial narratives and the exclusion of divergent points of view?
In light of current events and using artistic means, the series examines how Western governments instrumentalized the experience of terrorist attacks in the context of the "German Autumn", "9/11" or the so-called "Middle East conflict" in order to homogenize public opinion. And even to discredit peaceful forms of protest and criticism.
Klaus vom Bruch: Das Schleyerband, 1977-1978, 55 min.The then young Klaus vom Bruch felt paralysed by the endless television programmes, newspaper articles and public discussions following the kidnapping and murder of German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer (†18.10.1977) by RAF terrorists and the death of RAF leaders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison on the same day. Everywhere there are demands for clear confessions or equally clear distancing. The left-wing scene came under general suspicion. In order to actively counter this situation, vom Bruch began to record and watch countless hours of television footage and to assemble selected sequences into a mesmerising video collage. This video, made before the widespread availability of home video recorders, removes the events, and especially the way they were reported, from the context of television and inscribes them in the context of art, where they are subjected to a new, perhaps more complex scrutiny.Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Deutschland im Herbst, 1977, 26 min. (Episode 2 of the episodic film of the same name initiated by Alexander Kluge).An episode from a film about the tense social situation in 1977, when the activities of the second generation of the RAF terrorist group were at their peak in Germany. The film opens with a timeless quote from a mother of five - "Frau Wilde" - on 8 April 1945: "Fassbinder's unfiltered documentary was shot in his Munich apartment; for six days he filmed arguments with himself, his mother and his friend Armin with "murderous honesty". Fassbinder expresses his concern about the totalitarian reaction of state power to acts of terrorism and questions the value of the concept of democracy in an age when restrictive practices by those in power become the norm and people are told not to resist and to remain silent.
