Country: Germany
Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Time: 1 hour and 37 minutes
Where Can I Get It: YouTube (free)
Volker Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita harnesses ambivalence in order to examine certainty and its costs. Take the film’s opening shots: our armed eponymous hero enters a West German bank with her pistol-toting co-conspirators—members of a leftist-revolutionary organization based on the Red Army Faction—and announces, “Hey, everybody! We are the robbers!” And so they are. But they are also in the process of being robbed of their future agency, of future lives, of various potentialities now narrowed through amped and ammoed decision-making. And, of course, as they helpfully point out to anyone in the bank who will listen, capitalism is constituted and maintained by thieving. It is the original robber. “Property is theft,” they yell as the money moves from cash registers into bags. (Extremely pedantic side note: It’s not a Marx line, it’s actually a line he thought rather silly. Poor Pierre-Joseph Proudhon never gets his due.) Throughout the film’s opening scene, the handheld camera moves aggressively and cuts come quick. This exuberant burst of images is buttressed by a spare xylophone tune reminiscent of a children’s lullaby. Welcome to a fairy tale (see for reference Robin Hood) with deadly stakes.
The Legend of Rita concerns Rita Vogt, loosely based off Inge Viett, a real life member of the RAF who escaped from West Germany into East Germany and lived on financial support from the East German Ministry for State Security prior to German re-unification in 1990. The film adopts a tripartite structure centered around Rita’s different “legends”—the “legend” of the title refers not only to the myth built around the film’s titular character, but also to the technical East German term for the two identities Rita adopts in the German Democratic Republic after escaping West Germany. The first part of the film centers upon her actions within the RAF-like organization—itself subject of the somewhat less interesting film The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)—and, in part, her romantic relationship with a fellow armed revolutionary. After a prison break leads to the death of a West German police officer, Rita and her comrades flee to East Germany, where they receive training on different weapons in order to become PLO-linked partisans in Beirut. In the GDR, Rita receives her first exposure to living, breathing socialism, as well as to state actors who possess substantial skepticism of DIY revolutionaries.
In part, a general exhaustion with armed revolution, as well as a creeping doubt concerning the GDR’s own motivations—after all, the Stasi likes things it can control, rather than the idiosyncratic armed “revolutionary” praxis Rita has embraced—leads Rita to decide to remain in East Germany and begin working in a clothing factory under an assumed identity instead of venturing to Lebanon. At the plant, she meets Tatjana, a young alcoholic whose own hopelessness in the face of grim drudgery and stifled dreams contrasts with Rita’s strident determination to see life in East Germany not for what it is, but instead for what it might be. If this requires an act of knowing(?) self-deception, it also stakes a claim for how ideology maintains itself: through cultivated attitudes, through force of will, through gazes and frames that sublimate dissonance. Unfortunately for Rita, the need to hide her past—partly because the GDR has signed a series of international conventions against supporting or harboring terrorists that force her into the GDR’s version of “witness protection”—requires her to abandon Tatjana, with whom she has begun a romantic relationship, and eventually adopt a second “legend.” (The relationship between these two women remains central to the film and the work’s voice-over narration adopts the form of a letter from Rita to Tatjana.) In her second East German incarnation, Rita works at a day care facility and falls in love with a university student, while once again struggling to share her past with her present partner. Eventually, the Berlin Wall falls, the GDR evaporates, and various reckonings ensue. It’s a thrilling and emotionally complex ride throughout.
Shot in a manner meant to evoke 1970s cinema (aspect ratios, film type, lighting choices), the formal constraints imposed by The Legend of Rita’s budget augment the work’s content. Handheld cameras lend the film an improvisatory quality that mirrors Rita’s own trajectory. The world remains grainy, not always perfectly in focus. As the film’s final line notes, “This is how it happened, more or less.” (For German literature buffs, it’s a Goethe line.) Things and people are ill-understood and poorly perceived, much like the relationship between East German state actors and the anarchist-leftist revolutionaries who, in theory, share their aims. The film’s generative ambivalence towards its central character and her precepts gets reinforced through a series of sly oppositions: steadfast commitments and protean identities; East and West; individual revolutionaries and government bodies; forms of projection and sublimation; alternate romantic configurations; the cynical and the naïve. Perhaps the film’s primary tension results from the interplay between the isolation experienced by would-be revolutionaries in periods and places absent revolutions and the ways these postures confront the human need for companionship. Even ideologues must love, except love requires acknowledging the inherent merit in someone else’s understanding of the world. Rita’s thrill comes from the project, the belief, the hoped for thing yet to arrive—like most of us, after all—except her goals aspire to a vague post-revolutionary order that seems particularly distant (in the West) and dissonant (in the East). Her central virtue derives from her willingness to incur the costs imposed by her aims.
On some hastily cobbled definition, something akin to philosophical maturation probably entails a combination of recognizing that the complexity of systems renders paltry our attempts to move beyond reductive heuristics and categories; the recognition that robust structures (always and everywhere absent particular authors) undergird life; and modesty when pronouncing upon the processes that drive historical change. On the other hand, pretending for a second that a fictional character might engage in extra-cinematic debate, perhaps Rita would counter that action requires a posture of certainty that adopts bedrock principles and understandings in spite of their tentative nature, since without these any form of action liable to incur the sorts of costs that Rita willingly risks becomes impossible. Pace Hume, luxuriating in complexity simply paralyzes. In the end, The Legend of Rita maintains enormous respect and sympathy for its central character’s (very real) bravery, persistence, and suffering. Because even if Rita doesn’t effect meaningful change, she embodies many of the characteristics of those who do.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Volker Schlöndorff — The Tin Drum (1979)
Volker Schlöndorff — Baal (1970)