A German Youth
The From Below Microcinema will be showing our first documentary this week, diving into the world of armed revolutionary anti-imperialist organizations with A German Youth (2015) on Wednesday, July 17th, at 8pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie at 8:10!
*A German Youth *is a documentary, a very peculiar one, on the development of the Red Army Faction (RAF) from a group of student filmmakers into an armed organization of insurrectionary Marxists waging urban guerrilla warfare in West Berlin in the 1960s and 70s. *A German Youth *is composed entirely of archival found-footage edited together by Jean-Gabriel Périot. It’s a composite of newsreels, TV interviews, experimental films by Faction members, and political comuniques from the eloquent Ulrike Meinhof. The film offers a wide view into the experiences of a generation of German youths growing up after World War II as they reckon with the Nazi legacy of their parents and grandparents amid global struggles for decolonization and communist revolution.
Rather than “neutrally” displaying events, Périot actually advances a unique and fascinating argument that the Red Army Faction were first and foremost avant garde anti-fascist artists of visual media who were theorizing about the aesthetics of terrorism. Rather than the RAF’s bombings and assassinations of bankers, industrialists, cops, and prosecutors being a break from their member’s previous lives as journalists and filmmakers, it may perhaps be a continuation of art by other means. Periot’s fastidious research brings into conversation the relationships between terrorism, filmmaking, image production, and the possibility of revolutionary political change. The mass and diversity of footage produced by and about RAF allows *A German Youth *to offer a remarkably detailed look into one cranny of revolutionary left-wing politics between 1960-1980, a significant moment when imperial powers were suffering military defeats the world over and the durability of the liberal capitalist order was in real question.