Monday | October 6, 2003 9:00 pm

The Third Generation
(Die dritte Generation)

Screening on Film

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
With Hanna Schygulla, Bulle Ogier, Volker Spengler.
West Germany, 1969, 35mm, color, 111 min.
German with English subtitles.

“Terrorism is an invention of capitalism to better protect its capital,” Fassbinder once declared. That theory is put to the test in this story of a group of bourgeois compatriots who, mostly out of boredom and in search of kicks, opts for terrorism and ends up being used by a shady industrialist in the process. According to Fassbinder, the third generation of terrorists differed from its forebears of May ‘68 and Baader-Meinhof in its lack of coherent political ideas or beliefs. The Third Generation prompted Vincent Canby to dub Fassbinder “the most dazzling, talented, provocative, original, puzzling, prolific, and exhilarating filmmaker of his generation.” Eddie Constantine (the quintessential screen gangster) plays the role of the manipulative businessman.