Red Sun (1970): Between the Commune and the comic-book (Blu-Ray Review)

There are many things you need to check before making a movie; cast availability, contracts, and filming permits. “The consent of a Leftist commune” is not usually one of them, but then there aren’t many filming environments quite like post-war Germany. Rudolf Thome’s Red Sun, newly released on Blu-Ray by Radiance Films, gives you a window into what that febrile era felt like. It clearly breathes the same air as Thome’s peers, with Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge and Rainer Werner Fassbinder also making their earliest films around this time. It is also, equally clearly, a product of the same society that brought you the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Munich Olympics massacre. Every country’s 1960s counterculture was a backlash against the wartime generation; in Germany, the terrible knowledge of what the wartime generation actually did transform that backlash into a kind of madness.

Having said this, Thome and his screenwriter Max Zihlmann were initially inspired by a very American scandal: the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol by the radical feminist Valerie Solanas. Many articles on Red Sun reveal what the cell of women its hero, Thomas, encounters are doing, but this is only fully unravelled in the last twenty minutes of the film. This review will, therefore, draw a veil over it: suffice to say they have male hostages, and they’re not afraid to kill them. Despite this, you’re never worried for Thomas, even as he gets deeper and deeper into their commune. The tone of the film is arch, absurd, and comic-bookish, a parody of the infamous 1977 “German autumn” wave of political violence made seven years before it actually happened.

Parodying political extremism as it happens is never going to win awards for good taste. Herzog found this out a year after Thome made this film, when his feature Even Dwarfs Started Small was lambasted by critics who misinterpreted it as a parody of revolutionary Communism. Despite being far more overtly political than anything Herzog’s made, Red Sun was not attacked in this way, perhaps because of the presence of Uschi Obermaier. Obermaier’s membership of the controversial Situationist group Kommune 1 made her a radical-chic pin-up in the late ’60s, despite her being fairly open about her lack of interest in politics. She joined Kommune 1 to be close to her boyfriend Rainer Langhans, and this ambiguous relationship to Left-wing and feminist politics makes her the perfect lead for Red Sun: close enough to give it a stamp of approval, distant enough to take part in something that’s hardly advocating for a Marxist world revolution.

It’s easy to define what Red Sun is not doing, but defining what it is doing is a little harder. On this evidence, Thome is on the side of New German Cinema who were inspired by the French nouvelle vague, an inspiration detectable in early Wenders films like Summer in the City or The American Friend. The closest thing I’ve seen to it is Fassbinder’s Love is Colder Than Death, both in its ironic, wilfully flat appropriation of crime cinema tropes and its flaws. Godard made plenty of crime films that don’t work as thrillers, but in place of the thrills he substituted a restless, discursive energy and bags of jolting, provocative ideas. Films like Red Sun and Love is Colder Than Death contain long stretches which don’t work as thrillers… and that’s it. The archness of allowing the audience to recognise that these are actors playing with prop guns becomes the sole subject matter, with the cheek and energy of the French films never arriving.

If the German New Wave was more serious than the French one, that’s only to be expected. The German directors were trying to rescue their film industry from the legacy of Goebbels, while the French were trying to rescue their film industry from making so many boring period dramas. Seriousness of purpose isn’t a bad thing – far from it – but it means there are long stretches where you need to take it on trust that Thome is making an ironically flat, affectless crime thriller, rather than actually trying to make a crime thriller and failing. The tone is carried best by Fassbinder regular Marquard Bohm, who is perfectly deadpan throughout as Thomas, and every time your attention starts to waver there’s another striking absurdity or quotable aphorism. I’m particularly fond of the early moment where Bohm suggests driving to Lake Sternberg, then Thome cuts straight to him and Obermaier driving a Volkswagen straight into the water. I can put up with a lot of people pointing guns in front of a blank wall to get to moments of inspired weirdness like that.

Chief among the extras Radiance have supplied is a fifty-minute visual essay by Margaret Deriaz tracking the fortunes of the New German Cinema generation up to the fall of the Berlin Wall; if any of the references in this review are a mystery to you, Deriaz will no doubt clear them up. There’s also another visual essay tracking the film’s pop-cultural inspirations, a booklet featuring new criticism and archival writing from Wenders, and a fun scene-specific commentary with Thome and Langhans discussing Kommune 1, the film’s success with young audiences, and more.

Graham’s Archive: Red Sun (1970)