Voor de eerste screening in relatie tot Mikilaj Sobczak’s tentoonstelling Prophet Machine koos Jeffrey Babcock voor de volgende film:
BAMBULE 1970
Directed by Eberhard Itzenplitz
90 minutes
In German with English subtitles
“Back in the 1970s in Germany a new younger generation suddenly became aware of what their parents had done during WWll, and the extent of the atrocities committed during the holocaust. So many students took to the streets to fight for change. Their attempts were met with violence, and a police force that was intent on crushing any left-wing alternatives.
Among those young rebels was a female journalist named Ulrike Meinhof. When she saw how the newspapers were manipulating the population by censoring and distorting actual events, she decided to go underground and helped begin an armed resistance group called the ‘Red Army Faction’. But before she became an underground partisan, she made one attempt at reaching the general public through a movie to be broadcast on national television. The result was this flick called ‘Bambule’. The title is slang for a non-violent protest by prisoners that bang hard objects against the metal bars of their cells, causing a cacophony.
Extremely rare, this is the movie based on her script. It is directed by a man, which is not surprising since very few women were allowed to direct movies in West Germany at the time, but Meinhof’s perspective comes across crystal clear. It charts the story of a detention center for young female delinquents. The film centers on one day in the life of three adolescents that have been locked up, and their attempt to escape. What unfolds is a proto-feminist flick about women caged by the church and state. Although it focuses on a ‘reform school’ for female teenagers, it is also a microcosm showing how our society operates at large.
As Ulrike Meinhof wrote the script, she was in the process of becoming increasingly radicalised. A few days before the film was finally going to be aired on television, she went underground and joined the RAF. The network cancelled the broadcast, and the film was immediately banned by the government for the next 25 years.
As one viewer put it: “A One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Rote Armee Fraktion founding member Ulrike Meinhof for German TV, just before she helped Andreas Baader break out of prison.”
Jeffrey Babcock