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Clip description
A radio broadcast quotes from Jean Genet’s essay ‘Violence and Brutality’ (1977) while a bomb is constructed.
Curator’s notes
Against the Grain: More Meat than Wheat assumes a highly provocative position from the outset. Genet’s essay highlights the ideology of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group), a terrorist organisation active in Germany in the early 1970s. This sequence provides a framework for Ray’s actions. He subscribes to Genet’s statement that only violence can stop human brutality. The use of Genet’s writing and several other radical political essays makes the film controversial and inflammatory.
