"Using the motto, 'Where there is no war, we'll have to make one,' the film deals with the familiar Fassbinder theme that making love is just another way of making war." (National Film Theatre, London) "The first Fassbinder film to be invited to Cannes and one that marks a transition to his 'Sirkian period,' Recruits in Ingolstadt has remained largely unseen since the seventies. The 'pioneers' of the original title are young German recruits whose military duty consists of building a wooden bridge in the town of Ingolstadt. Fassbinder focuses on their boredom, which is broken only by sexual escapades with the local women ('the love scenes between Hanna Schygulla and Harry Baer are perhaps the most beautiful in German cinema since Murnau,' wrote Wilfried Wiegand)-and by acts of class hostility and violence. Fassbinder mixes up the period cues-though set in contemporary Germany, there are signs and emblems from Weimar and Nazi Germany throughout-and keeps the tone shifting, from Brechtian epic theater to Sirkian melodrama and back." (James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario)