i can't say i really understood this movie but i was gripped. i'd drunk 8 beers before watching and fancied something heavy and wot heavier than Fassbinder i thought. i've read all the reviews of this movie on IMDb and they tell me it's a comedy. i didn't laugh once but Fassbinder really is way above my head in every way, so u may see the comedy that i missed out on. i also read u need to see this movie 2 or 3 times to get it. i think this movie was just too complex for my little brain but i still loved it. Fassbinder's 'fox and his friends' is one of my favourite ever films so i will always be open to a Fassbinder film. i will watch this film again because i really think there is something special going on. i shouldn't have drunk 8 beers before watching this complex work but like i said, i still enjoyed it which i think says something about Fassbinder.

According to what R.W. Fassbinder said in an interview, the first generation of "terrorist" acted out of idealism, paired with a great sensibility and an almost insane despair about their own powerlessness regarding the state as a system and its representatives. The second generation were those who acted out of their understanding and compassion for what the first generation fought; thus, several of them were lawyers who used to defend the "terrorist" of the first generation.However, around the middle of the 70ies, in Germany, a "third generation" arose, but her motives were neither idealistic nor solidaric, but allegedly legitimated by their actions. Therefore, this hard to understand movie circles around the metaphysical question if actions can be self-legitimating or not, and their political consequences. The montage of Fassbinder's film suggests an almost total loss of coherence, the scenes are connected rather hazardly by abrupt cuts. Moreover, Fassbinder uses one of his favorite media of style: the sound-collage. In "The Third Generation", he combines three and more sound levels and in addition TV-broadcasting, video-registrations and more, so that the omnipresent media have started a life of their own: we understand nothing anymore. Obviously, according to the film director, only when this stage of despair is reached, our actions are self-legitimating, but mostly because all sense is gone.

Along with In A Year of 13 Moons, this is the only other Fassbinder film on which the director/writer/producer also served as director of photography. Like that film it features bold striking compositions and rich colours that are perfectly saturated and stylized to the right amount. The Third Generation was made in 1979 two years after the German Autumn, the crackdown of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Despite it's topicality however Fassbinder's film is about the future about the world of tomorrow as exemplified by it's evocation of science-fiction masterpieces like Solaris mentioned and cited in this film, the casting of the star of Alphaville, Eddie Constantine as the head of a computer business organization and the constant presence of technology in this film, either off-screen(speakers and recording equipment) or on-screen(TV screens and later guns and bombs). The score by Peer Raben is appropriately electronic.The story of The Third Generation is hard to summarize or describe and most people won't understand one bit of this film when they see it for the first time. See it twice and thrice and then it adds up. The story is just as fragmented as the personalities and lives of it's characters. The terrorist cell at the center of the film is a group of mostly middle-class misfits and apathetic junkies who are a mass of unresolved tensions and contradictions. Bulle Ogier's a stern history teacher(crucially introduced to us discussing the 1848 revolution in Prussia) but she's also a would-be feminist who submits to becoming a sex toy of Paul the "leader" of the group. Hanna Schygulla is your average bubbly corporate secretary but she's also carrying out a sado-masochistic affair with her father-in-law. Most of these "terrorists" activities for the first half are relegated to living in an apartment of a drug addicted young girl, later joined by her former boyfriend and his friend. Their activities here are confined to juvenile games and irritating each other out of their skulls later extended to breaking-and-entering and bank robbery. The sole murder committed by them is revenge acted out by a submissive over the dominant.The actions of the police, the business interests, the government bureaucracy however is that of self-justification, of ruthless exercise of power and repression whose machinery ultimately incorporates these terrorists willingly and unwillingly.The relation of this film to our current-day hell-hole needs little elaboration. This is a film for the 21st Century, the children of the third generation, one just as compromised and confused as it's forebears.

This director thinks terrorism is a stupid joke. The third generation of terror here is a bunch of bored citizens who are dumb enough not to wonder who is giving out the money that pays for their guns. It's a quite scary and funny way to look at contemporary society and some of its extremely radical enemies. Some viewers might find it disturbing instead of hilarious.