I found this to be one of the more strictly, and simplistically, satiric of the films I've seen by Fassbinder. The Third Generation lacks the emotional complexity and uniqueness of tone of the director's best work. Here, we are allowed to know how to feel as long as we catch the film's BIG MESSAGE. West German radicals tried to burn the print of this movie when it was released in 1979 and its not hard to see why it pissed them off so much. Fassbinder is telling us that the no-longer young "New Left" has, in West Germany at least, not so much "sold out" to the establishment as been co-opted by it. Revolutionary violence is only another tool of the capitalist state to justify its increasingly mechanistic systems of surveillance and control. This theme and the film's plot could have the potential to be a wonderful downer. But Fassbinder's misanthropy makes it difficult for the viewer to care that the main characters are caught in a trap. One has the sense that Fassbinder is shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Society is a cesspool and can't be otherwise because humans are irredeemable assholes." This might be true, but it's not an attitude that elicits narrative or thematic connection on the part of the audience. The quality of the film making, however, is quite high. The movie was made on a very small budget, and Fassbinder served as his own DP. This was a relatively late work in the director's brief career and by this time he had a very fine eye, with some memorably bizarre imagery particularly late in the film, and a wonderfully subterranean soundtrack.
Review of The Third Generation
