Sisters in Arms: Epic Narratives in United Red Army (2007) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

Elena Caoduro discusses two films on the 1970s revolutionary terrorism in Japan and West Germany, Jitsuroku rengo sekin/ United Red Army (2007) and Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex/The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008). Caoduro argues these films host tensions as well as anxieties between nostalgia for the spirit of revolution of the past as well as anguish over history. Caoduro is interested in the portrayal of the female terrorist figure and finds that the women in these films challenge stereotypical understandings of the female as passive and prone to nurturing, even though these combatants are depicted as the worst kind of transgressor in a patriarchal structure. Caoduro concludes that the female violence that falls outside traditional social expectations within these films is domesticated.