In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death

The film takes place in Frankfurt during the carnival of 1974. Two women move about the city separately. Each is after something different. One is an agent working for East Germany. Her reports are not liked and she writes poems of her own. The other lifts wallets from men. Documentary footage comes in between these two stories. Houses were being pulled down in Frankfurt in those years. People who moved into emptied buildings came up against the police. In February 1974 there were hard clashes in the streets. What lay behind it was land value and the rebuilding of the city. Kluge and Reitz do not tell any of it from one side. They move back and forth between fiction and documentary. The humour of the thing comes out of that movement too. It won the editing prize at the German film awards in 1975. Dagmar Bödderich and Alfred Edel appear in the eighty six minute film, a German production Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz finished in 1974.