Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure

Breaking the Power of Manipulators

"The film," Helke Sander said in 1975, "does not follow the various activities of the APO on the Springer campaign in a documentary way, but tries to follow the main arguments of the campaign as I understood them. Above all, it was important to me not to manipulate in a film about manipulation. So I renounced everything 'atmospheric' like music, fast cuts, to a large extent also camera movements. The exceptions stand out as a means. The feature film-like sequences show the highly stylized communication between WELT readers, the manipulators, and BILD readers, the manipulated. For this I used loose constructions: Representatives of West German corporations, who at the time had formed a working group to rescue the Berlin economy, tied this rescue to political conditions. One of them was to shut down the incipient protest movement, whose opposition to the Vietnam War was also concerned with the West German economy's share in that war, and to use the press to achieve it."