Die Stille nach dem Schuß

Plot synopsis:
In a letter left for her friend Tatjana, fugitive Red Army Faction terrorist Rita Vogt (Bibiana Beglau) relates the story of her life.
During the 1970s, Rita and her fellow urban guerrillas carried out armed robberies, kidnappings, and various other attacks in West Germany, as part of their campaign of armed struggle against the capitalist system. During a visit to Paris, Rita is asked by a local police officer for her license. In response, she flees, the French police officer pursues her into a parking ramp, and Rita fatally shoots him.
Later, following a prison break which involves the murder of a West Berlin corrections officer, Rita and her comrades flee, via the Friedrichstraße train station into East Berlin. As the German Democratic Republic has signed conventions against terrorism, the East German secret police, or Stasi, is reluctant to help. The Stasi's chief, Erich Mielke (Dietrich Körner), disagrees. In a conversation with Stasi officer Erwin Hull (Martin Wuttke), Mielke expresses sympathy for the RAF's terrorist attacks against West German and U.S. targets, which he compares to his own similar activities during both the Weimar Republic and the Nazis. He orders Agent Hull to assist them unofficially.
Hull arranges a safe house for the fugitives and secretly trains them in the use of military hardware. As Rita watches her comrades training in the use of Rocket-propelled grenades, she is visibly horrified.
That evening, Hull boasts that the RAF has "to break laws; we can make them". He explains that those who wish to retire from armed struggle will be given new identities so that they can start a new life in the GDR. The group's two women, Friederike Adebach (Jenny Schilli) and Rita, accept the offer, much to the shock and horror of the men.
Hull's then prepares Rita for her new identity and coaches her on a fictitious "legend", or backstory, that becomes her new "truth". Once the "legend" is constructed and memorized, Rita is given a menial job at a Volkseigener Betrieb clothing factory. Explaining that she is a West German, who voluntarily emigrated across the Berlin Wall, Rita shocks her co-workers, who have never heard of such a thing.
To their further shock, Rita takes "solidarity" cash collections for the Sandinistas at face value and willingly donates large amounts of money. Disgusted, Rita's coworkers explain that the donations actually go to the East German government's coffers and that the claims about helping Nicaragua are just a confidence scam. Rita's patronizing response sickens her coworkers, who ostracize her.
Only her depressed and alcoholic co-worker Tatjana (Nadja Uhl) develops a friendship with her. They bond deeply, Rita helps Tatjana toward sobriety, and even begins a lesbian relationship with her. Then a television announcement about the RAF from West Germany stops Rita short during a birthday party. Not only has her former lover been killed during an RPG attack against a NATO base, but the West German media continues to broadcast her as a hunted fugitive. The next morning, a co-worker tells Rita that she recognizes her from the broadcast and vows to expose who she is. In response, the Stasi promptly relocates her, allowing her only a brief, painful goodbye to Tatjana.
Her next residence and workplace, "Legend Number 2", is a children's day care center. While on vacation on the Baltic Sea, she gets to know and falls in love with a student, Jochen Pettka (Alexander Beyer). Despite her cautiousness, it becomes ever more difficult for her to hide her past. After she becomes pregnant, Jochen asks her to marry him and to travel with him to an event in the Soviet Union. Agent Hull, however, tells her that this is impossible, as it will cause the Stasi's ties to the RAF to leak out. Explaining that the increasing unrest may soon topple the GDR, Hull urges Rita to have an abortion—implying that her child will be better off.
During a choral performance, Rita notices Friederike Adebach among the choir's participants. Now married with a child, Friederike is suffering under the Communist system, and bears it with grudging resentment — the same emotion seen on the faces of other GDR residents throughout the film. Rita and Friederike's reunion is sullen and they part unceremoniously.
Soon after, Rita reveals her past to Jochen. Deeply sickened, he breaks his ties to her.
In 1989/90 the GDR collapses. As Western consumer goods flood in, Rita is visibly disgusted and horrified. Ignoring her coworker's contempt for her opinion, Rita lectures them about how they "will never have it this good again."
Soon after, the Stasi is disbanded and its weapons are confiscated. Agent Hull informs Rita that he can no longer protect her. The news of her presence has gotten out and the GDR's Volkspolizei, or Vopos, will soon be coming to arrest her. In response, Rita expresses outrage that capitalism "has no borders". After watching news footage of Friederike's arrest and extradition to West Germany, Rita goes on the run.
Meanwhile, after years of imprisonment by Agent Hull merely for knowing about Rita's presence in the GDR, Tatjana is finally released and joyously runs to Rita's flat. Upon her arrival, she is grabbed by a group of plainclothes Vopos, who ask, "Are you Rita Vogt?"
Attempting to flee to the People's Republic of Poland by motorbike, Rita is asked to show her ID at a Vopo checkpoint. In a deeply ironic moment, Rita accelerates, clearly expecting the East German policemen to chase after her like their predecessor in Paris. Instead, a Vopo raises an AK-47 and riddles Rita with bullets. As she falls dead from the motorbike, Rita's voice is heard in voiceover: "THAT'S EXACTLY HOW IT WAS. MORE OR LESS."

Tags: avant garde, murder

Review:
Volker Schlondorff reminds us that he's still a terrific director and really has gone back to his roots with this film.
Hollywood would have ruined this film by making Rita sympathetic.
Schlondorff's film and its portrayal of Rita is unflinching.
Very strong film by a great director and acted by a great talent in Beglau..
Maybe it's the cultural specificity of the piece, but somehow Volker Schlondorff's "The Legends of Rita" fails to hit the right emotional chords, where essentially the film's humanism-over-politics thematics want to evoke in the audience.
Don't get me wrong, "Rita" is an excellently crafted film, subtle and never forceful.
The film succeeds above and beyond expectations in its depiction of the latter years of the GDR, portraying an ideologically bankrupt nation whose environments and inhabitants seem to be caught in a state of limbo.
Good political film that could do with a better English title.
'the legend of rita' is an unfortunately choice of title when compared to the German 'die stille nach dem schuss'.
The film is about how members of small armed revolutionary groups come to terms with what remains of their lives ('die stille') between/after periods of action ('dem Schuss'), not principally about one person, let alone their 'legend', even if there is only one character who is continually present.Since the group in question hides out for a period in the ddr, a number of occasions arise in which the politics of armed guerillas and that of the ddr are compared, and both appear a long way off the kind of broad participatory socialism they are often mistakenly taken to aspire to.
The exchanges between the main stasi officer and rita about the role of violence and the state are particularly priceless..
The Legend of Rita is about the lives of some young terrorists from West Germany who dreamed of making radical changes in the lives of people using violent means.
It describes the tumultuous lives of these people especially their stay in East Germany by focusing on a particular person who is the film's protagonist.
As events in the life of a terrorist are shown in a rapid succession without bothering to concentrate on one particular aspect, 'The Legend of Rita' takes the form of an entertainer as it distances itself too much from the radical stance viewed in hardcore political films.
It appears that the director Volker Schlöndorff has sweetened his film to such a large extent that even East German secret service agents appear as if they were some kind of nice gentlemen with nothing but loads of goodness in their hearts.
As a festival film, 'The legend of Rita' won some important prizes namely silver bear and best actress price shared by Bibiana Beglau and Nadja Uhl during Berlinale 2000.
this film is about a fact discovered after the changes of 1989, namely that the remaining unfound RAF terrorists have been hidden in the DDR.Schlöndorff has considered many details very well.
the ending is very stupid and easy, like often in Schlöndorff-films, i regret to say.
but still i think every German interested in his country's history (and i believe it is the duty of Germans to interested in it!) should watch this movie in order to also consider this last "east"-chapter of RAF terrorism.
Rita is a woman of a thousand disguises: some adopted for her terrorist roles in the West, some given to her by her Stasi handler in the East, and some adopted to cope with the jarring dissonances that people experienced under Communism.The time is never right for Rita.
Rita's refusal saves her life, of course.I found the moral questions that a politically engaged citizen of either of the former two Germanies had to face were brought out better in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, but Rita has many lovely moments..
THE LEGEND OF RITA by director Volker Schlöndorff offers an intriguing look at East Germany's role in the international revolutionary political movements of the 1970's.
Rita is a member of a radical underground group that evolved from the American Civil Rights/Black Power/Anti-Vietnam movements of the 1960's.
It's almost a running gag in the film that no one who lives in East Germany can believe that anyone would chose to live there.
Although for a variety of reasons Socialism clearly was usurped by Capitalism by the early 90's, Volker Schlondorff has crafted a film that is a kind of a thoughtful advocacy for the positive aspects of a more collective political system.
THE LEGEND OF RITA is a terrific film of the Thriller Genre, yet perceptively makes political points without becoming a polemic..
"The Legend of Rita" follows the activities of a young female idealist who runs with a small band of second rate terrorists in West Germany just prior to the end of the Cold War, goes straight, and hides under assumed identities (the legend).
A well crafted, technically good Euroflick, "...Rita", equally split between character and story, puts the audience in the awkward position of having to root for a terrorist with only a marginally interesting story to tell.
Schlondorff has no strong sense of what to make of his terrorist characters.
Rita is idealistic but her personal life is pulled in rather conventional bourgeois directions.
The film points to the paradox of idealistic murder and suggests that society has no ability to appreciate the complexity of such a character, but why should it when even a work of art like this film is unable to explore what's inside its title character.
Die Stille nach dem Schuss (2000 - Volker Schlöndorff): **¾.
Drawing parallels with real members of the RAF far-left militant group and events of the 70s and 80s in Germany, Die Stille nach dem Schuss depicts the relationship between the terrorist organisation and the East German Stasi through the eyes of an individual.
Rita is shown to be unique in her unconditional love for the supposed values of her adopted homeland, standing in stark contrast to her fellow citizens, all of whom refuse to have the wool pulled over their eyes.
The film lacks both the style and thrills of Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) or any real sustained drama.
Just when it seems the stakes are to be raised in Rita's personal life, the narrative moves on too soon..
The Legend of Rita, this movie's English-language title, is not as hokey as it initially sounds.
"Legend" was the term used by the East German Secret Police (the Stazi) for the cover stories created to disguise the identities of West German terrorists who had been secretly granted asylum in the East.
The German title, Die Stille nach dem Schuss (literally The Stillness after Rapid Action), is a German phrase that sounds fine in its original language but is too abstract for colloquial translation of a film that is, among other things, an effective thriller."Schuss" in the original title refers to the bank robberies and killings shown at the beginning of the film and "Stille" to the subsequent life, east of the Berlin Wall, of Rita Vogt, a member of a terrorist cell determined to change the world by violent action.
Eleven such individuals from West Germany, did, in fact, find refuge in the East, but only on condition that they live peacefully as ordinary workers and have no contact with one another.
Director Volker Schlöndorff says, in a lengthy audio commentary that accompanies silent images from the film on its Kino Video DVD, that "the episodes are authentic but the characters are somewhat fictitious." The "somewhat fictitious" Rita is assigned two identities during her years in East Germany.
Initially, she works in a textile factory and develops a passionate friendship with an East German woman.
His astonishment and rejection make their separation easier.Things change for Rita with the fall of the Berlin Wall and approaching German reunification.
Preferring tragedy to capture or a life in hiding, she steals a policeman's motorcycle, drives it through a border post, and is shot and killed by a guard.The reason for East Germany's granting of asylum to West German terrorists is not entirely clear, either in the film or in real life.
The closest the film comes to an explanation occurs when the members of the Red Army cell meet with their Stazi minder for a bratwurst barbecue at a pleasant rural villa.
East Germany has signed the Helsinki Convention against harboring terrorists and has no interest in supporting what Lenin called "infantile Leftism." Cell members are given a choice of transportation to a third world country or remaining in East Germany.
A Stazi executive at the barbecue suggests that a longing for lost revolutionary romanticism underlies the East Germany policy.Another aspect of the film is its portrayal of everyday life in East Germany.
It does this more completely than either Good Bye Lenin (2003) or The Lives of Others (2006) although these are, in many respects, excellent movies.
According to Schlöndorff's commentary, West German viewers found the portrayal of East German life insufficiently harsh but former Easterners thought it exceptionally accurate.I seldom give movies 10 ratings but, for The Legend of Rita, I can find nothing that should have been done differently.
Rita's story is one of the most moving films I have seen in a great long while.
It reveals some of the true story of terrorism through the life of one West Germany's notorious RAF terrorists.The world is at war with itself.
Rita is one of a group of ten in West Germany.
They do what they can as long as they can with GDR (East German) support.
Rita finally loses the vocation and wishes for a normal life - as a working class person - in GDR.
She loves twice as a civilian and loses everything on both occasions as a consequence of her former identity.The collapse of the wall ends any possibility of a conventional life for her.
Unlike her fellow GDR citizens, Rita knew the consequences of reunification and the destruction it would wreak on East German communities and lives.
But when Rita sees another former comrade arrested she must make a run for it.The final shot is tragic and beautiful of the collapse of a motorcyle on a rainstrewn country road.The image of Rita and her struggle for a better world will stay with me for a long, long time.
With the events of September 2001, it may be a decade before anyone can make such a film on this subject.The images are beautiful, if relatively conventional.
Frankly the story is better told well in the conventional language of good cinematography.
One of the key personalities in the film is their Stasi handler Erwinn.
The Red Army Faction (RAF) was a self-described, communist, anti- imperialist urban guerrilla organisation based in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).
These were young people, many of them college students, who felt both a guilt about and sympathy for Third World nationalist revolutions; revolutions they believed, were the vanguard of a world revolution which would eventually sweep the 'fascist imperialist' States away.Che Guevara captured what Schlöndorff is attempting to portray in his film concerning the mental spirit of these German student, revolutionary romantics when he reflected on his own audacity and political commitment: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.
We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force." Action and audacity were the Red Army Faction's (RAF) strong suit.
"The Legend of Rita" (original German title "Die Stille nach dem Schuß" ) is set in the divided Germany of the 70s.
Rita is a young fearless romantic in love with a left-wing revolutionary, one Andreas 'Andi' Klein, a guy who is more or less the leader of an RAF group which she is a part of.
These revolutionaries naively explain their robberies in terms of 'anti- imperialist' politics : Yes, out loud, to customers as they clean out the capitalist bank vault and cash drawers, with weapons drawn.Adrenal rush and surprise hit one in this film from start to finish.
From jail breaks to motorcycle chases, to life behind the Iron Curtain, the film comes at you again and again with images you've been brainwashed to feel uncomfortable with.
As many, many of the New Left, Rita and her fellow RAF members are motivated to take violent political action in order to assuage a deeply felt guilt about being born in First World privilege.
Rita's boyfriend is one of them and when this happens, love dies.
Rita is a lover first and a revolutionary second.
Rita wants mutual love more than anything else and as she learns more about the duplicitous mendacity of the coldly calculating political apparatus in both the East and West, she comes to the realisation that political States are always ready to opportunistically sacrifice their oft repeated, propagandised moral goals and callously toss human lives on the scrapheap for political gain.
As a result, she grows closer to the only person who ever measured up to her romantic expectations, an East German woman named, Tatjana.Volker Schlöndorff has directed a master portrait of a political situation, a time and a place which is quickly disappearing down the 'memory hole'.
Not only are the West German RAF, with their Ton Stein Scherben albums and sneering hatred for bourgeois complacency critically and sympathetically examined; but the 'actually existing socialism' of the DDR of that era is laid bare as well.
East Germany is portrayed realistically, down to the last idiosyncrasy, from the near empty roads, to the Radeberger Pilsner, to the workers' apartments in those large, multi- storied college dorm-like buildings in urban East Berlin.
Rest assured, the film's honesty extends across both sides of the East/West border.
Far from revolutionary or socialist, most of the citizens of the DDR are portrayed as being quite conservative, endorsing whichever police are in charge of the political State.
The point is hammered home at the end of the movie, when the fall of the Wall in 1989 is portrayed; a time when Rita and her audience are supposed to come to the realisation of just what die Stille nach dem Schuß entails..
Certainly she is the little orphan Annie of Marxism-Leninism, and we see the DDR though her eyes (which may explain why the sets are so clean.) In a possible defence of her radicalism, may I say that the Bundesrepublik Deutchland(West Germany)was very much a conservative, yet apolitical state for the first 20 years of it's existence.
You can't live in the `50's forever, and when the 1960's wafted in, people like Rita were silently raging for change.
Okay, so I was really primed to love "The Legend of Rita".
Rita is a member of a radical group of German urban guerrillas somewhat based on the Baader-Meinhoff gang and somewhat based on the Hash Rebels.
She is aided by the East German Stasi, who see as normal people doing a job they believe in, rather than as the Stalinistic secret police we're told to believe they were.
We see East Berlin as a difficult place to live.
It's an objective film.Second of all, it's a film where the main character is a woman driven by her ideological convictions AS WELL AS her loves and desires.
Her political convictions and dedication to leftist revolution are what give her strong character and is not her Achilles heel.The film follows Rita as a young member of a radical group in '70s Berlin.
After killing a cop during a police chase, she creates a new identity and lives a normal life in the East.From there the film follows her life and the end of the Cold War (World War III).
And for revolutionaries around the world, including people like Rita many of whom were turned over to the invading right wing bureaucrats, it was a palpable defeat..
A credible film about terrorism and the Bolshevist state.
The film "Die Stille nach dem Schuss" has the problem, that the audience can neither identify with the characters nor with the society.
Some of the characters are German city guerrillas and thus loose cannons, not much different from violent criminals.
I have read the book Der Baader Meinhof Komplex by Stefan Aust (670p.), which is a leading work on the subject.
Even in Utrecht, my residence, a constable was killed by a RAF member, in a situation similar to the French officer from the film.
In fact this region had always been the most conservative part of Germany, so that the contempt for former terrorists in the film is probably authentic.
I don't know whether former RAF members had happy lives in the GDR.
Unfortunately, the endings of the Schlondorff films that I have seen (Die verlorene Ehre der K.
If you are interested in GDR life or social films, consider seeing my other reviews..
"Die Stille nach dem Schuß" or "The Legend of Rita" is a German movie from 2000, so this one will soon have its 20th anniversary.
The film runs for 100 minutes roughly and tells an entirely fictitious story about former West German terrorist and how she lives under an alias in the GDR.
I personally really wanted to like this movie here, but it was very difficult to end up appreciating.
The script is not a revelation either, but making a fiction film about the days of RAF Germany (or the years after) is something we don't see too often and Schlöndorff's and Kohlhaase's experience certainly shows in terms of subtle moments, but also the showy ending for example.
I just really wish they could have cast another lead actress here as Beglau does not have what it needs to carry this film from start to finish as she is in basically every single scene.
What I didn't like about this movie was the ending.