The political crises of the late sixties and early seventies...revealed the (auteur) filmmaker's isolation both from a mass public and his colleagues. As a remedy, Kluge expounded the notion of "the cooperative film," a pooling of resources and ideas which would enable filmmakers, relatively powerless when working alone, to communicate more promptly and effectively about political and social issues. Germany in Autumn became the first successful venture of this sort. The Candidate, a group effort by some of the contributors of the earlier film, was explicitly conceived as a political exposé of Franz Joseph Strauss, ex-Defense Minister, ex-Interior Minister, and reigning Minister-President of Bavaria who was running for the Federal Chancellorship in 1980. Stefan Aust uses old newsreels to underscore the many follies of Strauss' career, including the notorious "Spiegel Affair" of 1962 in which Strauss illegally authorized a raid of the liberal weekly's editorial offices. Home movies, contemporary interviews and sophisticated journalistic reports on Strauss' political rallies are synthesized to create a multifaceted assessment of a candidate the filmmakers regard with considerable anxiety... Stuart Liebman