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The terror of the nineteen-seventies is also central to a series of works by Gerhard Richter. In the autumn of 1988 he produced a series of paintings on the Baader-Meinhof group. He comments on the paintings in his diary: ‘7 December, 1988. What have I painted? Three times a Baader, shot down. Three times Ennslin, hanging. Three times the head of the dead Meinhof after they’d cut her down. The dead Meins once. Ensslin three times, neutrally (almost like a pop star). And a large, non-specific funeral - a cell with a large bookcase - a silent grey record player - a portrait of a young Meinhof, sentimental in a bourgeois fashion - twice the arrest of Meins who was forced to submit to the united power of the state. All the paintings are dull, grey, often very vague, diffuse. Their presence is the horror of the almost-unbearable refusal to give an answer, to explain, to offer an opinion. I’m not so sure that the paintings question anything: they evoke conflicting reactions by their hopelessness and abandonment, their lack of choice. As long as I can remember I’ve been convinced that every rule, every viewpoint - in as much as they are ideologically motivated - is false, an obstacle, a threat or an infringement.’5 Richter searches for a way out of the ideological extremism of the nineteen-seventies but seems to stumble headlong into a wall of impotence. In this same period he writes: ‘Art is paltry, cynical, obtuse. Hopeless, confused - a reflection of our own spiritual impoverishment, our barren and lost condition. We are bereft of grand ideas, utopias, we have lost any faith, anything that was capable of meaningfulness. Incapable of faith, we roam in total helplessness through a toxic dumping ground, perpetually in the greatest of danger: each of these incomprehensible fragments, these remnants of waste and refuse threatens us, pains and mutilates us and, sooner or later, unavoidably leads to our death. Worse than derangement.’6 Richter’s words express a post-modern despair that can be compared to the quotes of Don DeLillo incorporated by Grimonprez into his film. The only remaining possibility for DeLillo's protagonist is finally to disappear from sight and stop making art. Richter doesn't disappear literally, but his refusal to take a standpoint has its visual pendant in the way in which the paintings are made: scant composition, no expression, no brushstroke, no colour or contour. As he often does, for this series Richter used existing images but in this case they are distinctly reminiscent of the drab photographs deployed by nineteen-seventies media to cast the urban guerrilla as the enemy. According to Richter, there's no escape: this grey image is the image we have to live with.

Richter’s series is current once again thanks to its inclusion in the exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF-Ausstellung, which is currently on in Berlin. Because almost the entire exhibition focuses on the image of the RAF in the media, within this Richter’s work suddenly acquires a generality that is undeserved. If we believe the critics, the exhibition’s major flaw is the reproduction of media images; any standpoint on terror is meticulously avoided, creating the impression that the participating artists are jealous and slightly admiring of the members of the Baader-Meinhof, while demonizing the media. 7 In such a context, the refusal to take a position becomes a platitude and the use of media images a facile way of pointing an accusing finger. The justifiable powerlessness Richter attests to seems, in the course of time, to have deteriorated in the hands of other artists to a fantasy of media omnipotence.
Grimonprez’ piece also ultimately concentrates more on the media and less on the motives and, in this sense, the film is part of this development. But the maker goes about his work with resolute assiduity. He accepts the power of the media or the fatalism of DeLillo. You could say that the subject of Grimonprez' analysis is the way in which art is sidelined by the mutual attractions of terror and TV. By allowing the image to once more become an act, he surpasses the medium. Here, act can be taken to mean visible manipulation and montage with the aim of 'perforating' the screen that holds our gaze captive.