Forms of violent and nonviolent political protest that drew increasingly on the artistic forms of the avant-garde tradition and situationism\u2014especially the happening\u2014relied on physical bodies marked as different from or disruptive of larger social contexts in which they sought to intervene. Film as a medium may be particularly suited to convey both acts of highly stylized physical violence aimed at disrupting public spectacle and ideal images of the spectacle itself. When, for example, the viewer experiences the sequence of commune\u2014street fight\u2014ex-militant \/ isolated garden cabin\u2014elite \/ social golf and country club, then disruption, deliberate disorder, and violent confrontation are visually and aurally juxtaposed to the larger social context to which they ostensibly respond. (25\u201326)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The film depicts a variety of possible positioning of bodies in the public space and political sphere and probes the interdependency of the private and the political. That people\u2019s individual political decisions would lead to larger consequences, that i.e. the street riots in Frankfurt would result in three generations of RAF, could not have been foreseen (fig. 22). But when former chancellor Helmut Schmidt (from 1974 to 1982) appealed to the German citizens after the death of Holger Meins in Stammheim, it became obvious that this struggle was not just between the RAF and the state, but involved every individual citizen within the nation and that every citizen must choose a side, seemingly for the nation or against it (fig. 23):<\/p>\n