Growing up in the Seventies meant I was exposed to words I didn't know the meaning of. Words like Black September, Baader-Meinhof, Black Panther, Colonel Callan, three-day week, IRA, Idi Amin and Entebbe.
Watch film trailers now »My parents were news junkies. I grew up the same way. Even now the TV news is a constant in my home. Those words – key moments in the '70s that drifted through my young thoughts – have buried themselves deep in my subconscious and emerge whenever that period is revisited.
The Baader-Meinhof gang hit its savage peak in 1972. I was six. By 1977, when their story wound its way to a deliberate and shocking coda I was in that hinterland between primary school and grammar school.
Thirty-plus years on, the names of two long-dead German freedom fighters trigger memories of childhood and newscasters speaking to me from a bulky television set.
I don't remember much; the detail is lost. But what I do recall with clarity is the huge importance connected to the story.
Now with the release of a major new German film, my memory banks go into overload as they try to balance what they think they know against what the movie presents as fact.
No matter how faithful a film tries to be, it will always be a dramatisation – a version of the truth based on someone's interpretation of the facts. I am respectful of The Baader Meinhof Complex but one has to accept from the outset that, while based on a respected book, the movie emerges as the creation of the screenwriter.
Everyone has an agenda. Everyone has a tale to tell. Each teller relates it from a different standpoint. Memories fade, objectivity becomes subjectivity and fact holds hands with fiction to become a sometimes unwieldy partnership that celebrates the two.
Revisiting the actions of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof through a movie was weirdly negative.
The most peculiar aspect was that I found myself dredging up long-suppressed memories of several other bad news stories read by avuncular men like Gordon Honeycombe.
It reminded me of my reaction to The Last King of Scotland, a quasi-biopic of Idi Amin that was, in fact, based on a novel, not a factual book.
Both are examples of recent history being given a make-over. It's a generational thing; in 30 years time we'll be addressing al-Qaida as we delve into our recent past for filmic inspiration.
I wonder if today's kids – the fortysomethings of tomorrow – will feel the same as me. And I wonder if my septuagenarian memory will remember it then as I do now.
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