In a Year with 44 Films

Berlin Alexanderplatz – Part I: The Punishment Begins (1980)

Posted on November 15, 2013 by yearof44films

I don’t have to, but I’m going to come clean: about five years ago I rented and watched the first three episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz. And then I gave up. I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t handle the relentless darkness, couldn’t handle the stylization, couldn’t handle the dialog or the delivery, couldn’t even handle the music. It all felt too theatrical, too arch, too intellectually anti-intellectual, if that makes any sense at all. That, at any rate, is how I remember it. What, I have to wonder, was the matter with me?

Now, I hope I’ve already made it clear that I really cannot stand the sort of breathless adulation exemplified in the quote reproduced in my last post (look it up if you must), but here it is: after having watched only one episode with my newly Fassbinderized consciousness, it is already clear to me that Berlin Alexanderplatz is in some important ways qualitatively different from anything RWF had done before. Not orders-of-magnitude different, of course—every film prior to this one, clearly, was a stepping stone leading here, and quite a few of them are great—but different. More cohesive. More coherent. More organic. Is that what I mean? Finding the words to sincerely explain what I think makes Berlin Alexanderplatz different is going to take some time. Lucky for me I have 13 more episodes.

So. One of the first things you notice, watching Berlin Alexanderplatz—even before you stop to appreciate the expressionistic lighting or the set design or the pretty much perfectly realized mise-en-scène—are the multiple voices, which begin almost immediately, without introduction or warning. An omniscient third-person narrator, Franz Biberkopf’s inner monologue, the sarcastic intertitles (presumably the director’s or “the film’s” voice which, as in Effi Briest, is not the same voice as the literary narrator’s), other characters’ inner voices . . . all these chime in within the first few minutes. The effect of this, so suddenly, is jarring but effective. It thrusts you straight inside the narrative kaleidoscope even before you’ve had a chance to get your bearings. This is a modernist text, after all, a multilayered collage, pieced together, obviously, from a variety of media and perspectives.

The episode opens outside Tegel prison, from which Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) has just been released. Disoriented and afraid, he nearly refuses to exit through the prison gate. Curiously, the long tracking shot, as he makes his way to the gate, mirrors almost exactly the opening shot in Gods of the Plague, when Franz Walsch (Harry Baer) gets out of prison. Same close-up lateral movement as the newly free man makes his way along the exterior prison wall—I remember this because I liked the shot so much in the earlier film that I mentioned it in this blog. Evidence, if only on a small scale, of just how long RWF had been working this scenario out in his head and in his work.

Franz groans and whimpers and shouts and sings at full volume in the narrow, echoing streets. (Franz does a lot of singing: snippets of patriotic songs, what sound like nursery rhymes, and probably other things I can’t begin to identify are just a few of the many strands that comprise his particular tapestry.) He is followed by an orthodox Jew in long black coat and telltale hat+beard, Nachum (Peter Kollek), who takes pity on him and brings him home. In an effort to calm Franz’s nerves and give him hope for the future, the charmingly eccentric Nachum tells him a story, the Story of Zannowich, which teaches that all you need to get ahead in this world are eyes to see the world and feet to walk toward it, and, unafraid, you can become rich and powerful, like Zannowich and his son—whose successes succeeded even the father’s. Eliser, Nachum’s brother-in-law and landlord, arrives, however, and angrily tells poor Franz the story’s true ending, the moral of which is quite different: Zannowich the younger in fact committed suicide in debtor’s prison, his body thrown on a dung heap. Even with eyes to see the world and feet to walk toward it, it seems, life comes a cropper if you’re not one of the designated, privileged few.

Franz, angry and demoralized, next picks up a prostitute with whom, alas, he cannot perform. She reads him a scientific text describing in detail the mechanics of the male sexual apparatus and the causes of erectile dysfunction before he walks out, humiliated. Next stop, home, in a small dirty square next to a flashing “Kino” sign (it’s an iconic, and of course, appropriately self-reflexive image), where he is greeted by his kindly landlady, Frau Bast. (Brigitte Mira, whom I love more and more with each film.)

We soon learn the probable cause of Franz’s impotence—and the reason for his incarceration—via flashback. During an argument, Franz, out of control with rage, had beaten his girlfriend, Ida (Barbara Valentin), to death. The narrator (RWF) drily explains the physics by which this happened as, horrified, we watch it happen, watch a helpless Frau Bast watch it happen too, and watch a stunned Franz realize what he has just done:

What had happened to the woman’s rib cage a second before has to do with the laws of rigidity and elasticity, impact and resistance. Without a knowledge of these laws, the case cannot be understood. The following formula may be applied: Newton’s first law says that a body remains in a state of rest unless acted upon by an external force, open parentheses, which applies to Ida’s ribs, closed parentheses. Newton’s second law says that the change of momentum is proportional to the force and is in the same direction, open parentheses, the effective force being Franz, or his arm and fist and the contents thereof, closed parentheses.

Two intertitles illustrating this principle by means of its mathematical formula follow—sadly, I cannot figure out how to import them into WordPress (I did manage to reproduce them in MathType, which I have to admit I’m proud of, but that’s as far as I can go). The narrator, it would seem, has a scientific bent. (Döblin was a physician by trade.)

Despite this irony—or maybe because of it—the scene is kind of breathtaking: beautifully composed, beautifully lit, beautifully cut, beautifully articulated, at once shocking and poignant. I wish I could reproduce it here: the moment when the narrator describes the way Ida’s voice suddenly changed, the way we see her fear which had recently been anger turn into bewildered acceptance as she realizes in a flash that she is dying. And on the soundtrack that dry, objective description of the physics of her death—a physics which we all know will apply to each and every one of us, one way or another, eventually—contrary to what you might assume, only intensifies the poignancy and the pointless humble tragedy of this death . . . I wish I could re-create it for you because it’s moments like this that make this film so powerful, the self-conscious music and the ironic titles and voice-over as much a part of it as the actors’ performances. How to convey this?

In the scene that immediately precedes this flashback, Franz pays a visit to a woman who, we eventually learn, is Ida’s sister, Minna (Karin Baal), before we know who Ida actually is, with whom Franz finds himself capable of that elusive erection after all. (OK, he rapes her. Before we go any further I have to say it isn’t quite as awful as it sounds, and, yes, it’s complicated.) In this union with Minna, Franz frees himself from the hold Ida and his terrible crime against her has had over him and joyfully pronounces himself free, a human being again. The scene progresses via interior monologues, both Minna’s and Franz’s, and dry, detached third-person voice-over narration over some pretty dramatic imagery—and some really beautiful alternating close-ups (something you don’t ordinarily associate with RWF, I might add).

So, after a visit from a couple we know is probably going to play an important role at some point (the woman, Eva, is played by Hanna Schygulla), and another visit to Minna, who claims she doesn’t want him there but takes off her dress anyway, Franz runs into his old pal, Meck (Franz Buchrieser), who takes him for a drink. There, Franz meets Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar), a mysterious Polish girl with whom he immediately starts a relationship. Lina moves in with Franz the very next day only to find that Franz has received an official letter from the police informing him that his crime renders him unfit to live in metropolitan Berlin (or suburban Berlin, for that matter, whatever the word for suburban was in those days) and that he is therefore banished immediately. Franz enlists the help of a prisoners’ advocate (Juliane Lorenz, RWF’s editor and girlfriend–whom RWF had also, curiously, cast as a government bureaucrat in The Third Generation). The episode ends with a triumphant Franz having won the right to stay in Berlin.

But that’s enough for now. I realize, strangely, that I have barely even begun to describe the visual elements that comprise this incredibly complex film—elements which you’d probably have expected me to talk about before anything else. But I need to pace myself. You’ll just have to wait for Parts 2 and beyond for that.

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged Brigitte Mira, Gunter Lamprecht, hanna schygulla | Comments Off

Some Disorganized Thoughts About Beginning Berlin Alexanderplatz

Posted on November 13, 2013 by yearof44films

This is it. This is the film I’ve been working toward for the past two years (gasp—has it really been that long?). This is the film I’ve been dreading. Berlin Alexanderplatz: RWF’s magnum opus, the pinnacle and the summation of an entire career in 13 Parts and an Epilogue. Fifteen and a half hours of purest Fassbinder.

A Few Words on Process
I made a calculation when I began this little adventure that I would count each episode as a feature film (each episode is certainly as long as a feature film). As a result, I’m going to write at least a little about each one. Which means, of course, that I’ll be writing about material I haven’t seen all the way through, piecing my thoughts together as I go along. For better or worse, each post will necessarily be more impressionistic than the self-contained little essays I’ve been cranking out lately. (On the other hand, they will be more “blog-like,” right?) God knows why anyone would want to read such a thing—and perhaps no one will. But it’s the thing I set out to do so do it I will.

Döblin and Fassbinder
As I’ve suggested many times already, Alfred Döblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and its protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, provided threads woven throughout much of RWF’s work from the very beginning. Allusions and references occur throughout many of his films, beginning with Love Is Colder Than Death, with the recurring character of Franz Walsch (the name is said to have been an amalgam of Franz Biberkopf and Raoul Walsh, the Hollywood director) and Gods of the Plague, in which Harry Baer’s character uses the alias Franz Biberkopf. What is it about Berlin Alexanderplatz that so captivated RWF?

Set in working class Berlin in the late 1920s, Berlin Alexanderplatz tells the story of one ex-convict’s efforts to reintegrate into and survive within a society whose forces seem bent on pushing him back into the underworld from which he hopes to escape, at a time when Germany is on the brink of its fateful transition to National Socialism. Looking back over the predominant themes of RWF’s work—the stultifying effects of bourgeois morality and petit bourgeois values, the sheeplike ways people allow themselves to be subjugated and the eagerness with which they will subjugate others when given the chance, the inherently masochistic nature of love as it is experienced in bourgeois society, etc.—it’s easy to see the appeal, even without having read the book. (Sadly out of print in English; I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth paying over $50 for a used paperback edition. I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and read it asap.)

Moreover, Döblin’s narrative style (I’m told)—frequently compared to Joyce’s Ulysses—uses multiple voices and forms of narration, including newspapers, political speeches, music hall and nursery rhymes, folk tales and gossip and god only knows what else, in addition to third- and first-person narration, to create a portrait of a society and a place in time. (Some of this is already apparent in the first episode of the film.) This, of course, is exactly what RWF himself was increasingly occupied with throughout the 1970s: just think of the multiple literary voices in Effi Briest, the multiple media and multiple realities of World on a Wire, the radio soundscapes of The Marriage of Maria Braun, or the barrage of television broadcasts in The Third Generation.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is a sweeping melodrama full of simple characters, love and deception, crushed ambitions, punishment, shattered dreams—or to return to our old friend Merriam-Webster, it’s “characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization”—the preferred vehicle for so many of RWF’s greatest morality tales. Franz Biberkopf, moreover, is the perfect RWF hero: ignorant, simple, easily victimized and easily led, quick to violence, angry, guilty, trapped. But then haven’t I just described nearly every male protagonist from Love Is Colder Than Death to at least The Merchant of Four Seasons?

A Note on the Remastered DVD
Before I get started with Part 1, I’ll just mention that the Criterion Collection DVD boxed set is really gorgeous and, to my mind at least, renders mostly moot the controversy surrounding the remastered print—which corrects what was perceived by many at the time (including the cinematographer, who oversaw the 2006 restoration) to be the unacceptable darkness of the original transfer shown on German TV. Although some purists objected to the meddling and revisionism this restoration seemed to represent, arguing that RWF intended the dark scenes to be lost in shadow, I think in the absence of a verdict from the director himself, we have no choice but to trust the director of photography. The film is still plenty dark now, believe me.

This does, however, raise important (and to my mind unresolvable) questions about artistic intentionality and control of an electronically reproducible, not to mention manipulable, medium, especially in the absence of the work’s creator. Coincidentally, yesterday’s Keyframe independent film and video email newsletter included this timely and amusing tidbit, announcing an upcoming theatrical screening of Berlin Alexanderplatz in its entirety in London:

“It is possible to catch up with Berlin Alexanderplatz in a boxed set, alongside Breaking Bad and Mad Men and the rest,” writes Iain Sinclair. “But never, or very, very rarely, on film, and never ever before in England. It’s the difference between sampling Ulysses on Kindle and getting the heft of it into your own hands, smelling the paper, navigating acres of print. The unique grain of the moment, the lighting, the detail in those extraordinary performances, requires a projector, a big screen, shared darkness.” Sinclair and Chris Petit will introduce a second screening of Fassbinder’s 1980 adaptation of Döblin’s 1929 novel at the ICA this coming weekend.

Given that Berlin Alexanderplatz was made for television (and shot on 16mm film), this seems like a very odd statement—and one which I couldn’t pass up the chance to comment on. I have no doubt it must be thrilling to spend 15+ hours in “shared darkness” watching Berlin Alexanderplatz, but I don’t think it’s in any way a stretch to say that’s just not what RWF had in mind when he made the series. That’s why he had also intended to shoot a feature-length version of the very same story for theatrical distribution with an appropriately revised and condensed script and a cast of international movie stars (Gerard Depardieu as Franz Biberkopf!). Two different vehicles for two different distribution channels.

As for the (to my mind) rather sneering insinuation that watching Mad Men or Breaking Bad on DVD is one thing, but subjecting RWF’s masterpiece to that inferior medium is quite another—I just have to shake my head in wonderment. We’re still flogging that old dead horse? The one that says television is for entertainment, cinema is for art? In 2013? This strikes me as precisely the sort of pretention that RWF would never have supported, no matter how reverent or sincere the intent. Come to think of it, I don’t know that he would have had all that much patience for the reverence, either.

Next Up: Berlin Alexanderplatz – Part 1: The Punishment Begins.

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | 1 Comment

The Third Generation (1979)

Posted on November 8, 2013 by yearof44films

No, the tenor, if you will, hasn’t changed. The theme’s remained the same, and always will remain the same: the manipulability, the exploitability of feelings within the system that we live in, and that at least one generation or more after us will certainly have to live in. What’s changed is the workmanship, the form, where I always try to get beyond what I’ve already mastered.

—RWF, “Cinema Between Autobiography and Criticism” in The Anarchy of the Imagination

I’ve been having a really hard time with this one—this is the third version of this post I’ve tried to write, for God’s sake—which is surprising, since The Third Generation is in many ways a pretty simple film. But maybe that’s the problem? Its so simple it’s deceptive: it encourages you to take it at face value. But just as you can’t (or shouldn’t) read Love Is Colder Than Death, say, as a straight gangster film, or Whity as a western, maybe viewing The Third Generation in a conventional context misses the point.

My first mistake was to try and write about The Third Generation as a political film, even if to do so would be perfectly logical. After all, it’s one of only a handful of RWF films that actually dealt with the issue of terrorism in contemporary Germany in the 1970s—which makes it, by definition, political, right? But as with Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, or RWF’s contribution to a Germany in Autumn, or even The Niklashausen Journey, neither politics nor even revolutionary activity are the true subject of the film; they’re effects, not causes, of a cultural malaise that precedes them. The true focus of these films if you look below the surface is precisely “the manipulability, the exploitability of feelings,” which is to say, people, “within the system that we live in.” Terrorism and its relation to the capitalist system just happens to offer a more extreme, more dramatic vehicle for examining this phenomenon. In any case, I’m sure RWF would say that all his films were political.

My second mistake was to view The Third Generation as a kind of deliberate throwback to an earlier time in RWF’s career when he did everything himself on a shoestring budget and worked with a stable of mostly unknown regulars (Margit Carstensen! Harry Baer! Gunther Kaufmann!)—a throwback which in this context would represent a reaction to the big-budget industrial milieu in which the filmmaker found himself increasingly working in the late 1970s. This too seemed like a perfectly logical approach, based on fundamental assumptions many of us share about the purity of art and the motives of the genuine artist, on the one hand, and the commercial demands of an industrial production system on the other. (The lower the budget, the more honest and authentic the work; the authentic artist by definition experiences working within the system as a conflict of interests, etc., etc. You know the arguments.)

Looking over RWF’s body of work and his many statements on the subject, however, I can see no reason to believe he found this dichotomy between art and industry all that meaningful. Maybe this is why he was able to move so easily between cinema and television, the underground and Cannes: it was only ever about the work. What mattered was getting the work done in whatever way he could get it done, mastering some aspect or other of his craft, and then moving on to the next project and the next hurdle, not remaining true to some Edenic ideal of artistic integrity. The integrity is in the work itself; I’m pretty sure the whole notion of “selling out” or “not selling out” was meaningless to him.

Anyway, the title, The Third Generation, refers to a third wave of terrorists in late 1970’s West Germany. The first generation was defined by the movement of May 1968 and centered around protest as a vehicle for revolutionary change, untarnished by cynicism. The second was dominated by the Red Army Faction and their emphasis on armed struggle, whose activities became steadily more violent and whose sympathizers were driven underground by the violence of the crackdown that this wave provoked. The third, it seems, were the remnants or the offspring of the second, thoroughly disillusioned and cynical, or just arrivistes, children of the middle-classes looking to the revolution for meaning, looking for thrills—nihilists more than idealists, easily manipulated, lacking a coherent ideology.

Synopsis
Susanne Gast (Hanna Schygulla) works as an assistant to PJ Lurz, computer magnate (Eddie Constantine). The rest of the time she and her husband, Edgar Gast (Udo Kier), are members of a revolutionary terrorist cell. Susanne and Edgar live in a grand house with Edgar’s family—grandfather (Claus Holm), mother (Lilo Pempeit)—who appears to be a bit “touched” (RWF does her up like a sort of latter-day Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane)—and father, Gerhard Gast (Hark Bohm), chief of police in Berlin with whom Susanne is having a sordid affair. (Yuck.)

The rest of the cell includes the bitter Petra Vielhaber (Margit Carstensen, naturlich), who is married to an abusive banker (Jürgen Draeger) and does not herself work; Rudolf Mann (Harry Baer), who works in a music store and lives in an enormous flat with a junkie roomate, Ilse (Y Sa Lo), whom everyone urges him to get rid of because junkies invite surveillance and attract police attention; Hilde Krieger (Bulle Ogier), who teaches history and lives alone in an equally large flat; and their leader, August (Volker Spengler), who has “gone underground” and so does not have a job. Nobody seems to question how August supports himself.

The cell is jolted into a state of increased excitement by the arrival of the debonair Paul (Raul Giminez), just returned from commando training in Africa. The calm is further disrupted by the arrival of two recently discharged marines, Franz Walsch (Gunther Kaufmann, taking the name of RWF’s favorite alter ego) and Bernhard von Stein (Vitus Zeplichal), who are looking for Ilse. Franz is Ilse’s old boyfriend; Bernhard, his buddy, is a naïve and well-intentioned son of the aristocracy who earnestly reads Bakunin’s anarchist texts. Neither of them knows that Ilse is a heroin addict, nor that they’ve just stumbled into a terrorist cell. Rudolf agrees to let them stay for a few days. (Petra posits that this “uncontrollable desire to do good” must mean that Rudolf was raised Roman Catholic. How else to explain such a desire?)

August informs the group that something big is about to happen. They will need new identities, so they draw lots to determine who will break into the local records office to steal them. (August preselects his own lot ensuring that he will not be chosen.) When the triumphant thieves return from their harrowing mission, their euphoria is muted by the discovery that Ilse has died in her room of an overdose. The despairing Franz, who happens to have been trained as an explosives expert in the military and is now hopelessly unemployed, agrees to join the group.

Spoiler Alert
August, it turns out, is not merely a coward but a traitor—a double-agent, a mole—accepting payment from none other than the industrialist PJ Lurz in exchange for tip-offs regarding the group’s every move, which August orchestrates on Lurz’s behalf. (Terrorism, Lurz informs us in the film’s opening scene, is good for business: the more paranoid the state becomes, the more computers it requires.) August sets up a meeting between Paul and Edgar at a local Japanese restaurant; before Edgar has a chance to enter, his father the police chief arrives with a team of armed police who gun down Paul where he sits by the window. Edgar, terrified, flees.

The group goes underground with their new identities, awaiting instructions from August. Petra is assigned to set a bomb, courtesy of Franz, in the town hall. August betrays both to Lurz; Gast and his men shoot down one then the other in cold blood where August indicated they would be. The only person who figures out what’s actually going on is Bernhard, whom the others left behind when they went underground. Bernhard follows August to one of his assignations with Lurz where he learns of the betrayal. After Franz ignores his warning and walks straight into the trap set by August, Bernhard goes to Gerhard Gast himself with evidence of Lurz’s duplicity. He “accidentally” falls down a circular stairwell to his death once his tale is told, however.

The remaining members of the group decide to take matters into their own hands. Without informing August they decide to kidnap Lurz, which they do on the last day of Berlin’s Carnivale celebrations, in appropriately ludicrous costumes. Lurz, delighted, knows that this will translate into skyrocketing contracts for his business. The film ends as the inept terrorists try to shoot a classic kidnap video, the smiling Lurz happily repeating his lines as they shoot take after take (“My name is PJ Lurz. I am being held prisoner in the name of the people, for the good of the people . . . .”).

As I’ve already said, The Third Generation is a pretty simple film, its sole purpose, it seems, to illustrate a single point: if terrorism didn’t exist, capitalism would have to invent it. The terrorists, RWF tells us, serve the interests of the state—which wants nothing better than to crack down on subversives with the full force it’s capable of—and of business—which profits directly from the police-surveillance-industrial complex—more than they do the revolution, or the people, or whatever ideal they think they are fighting on behalf of.

I am convinced they don’t know what they are doing, and what they are doing derives its meaning from nothing more than the activity itself, from the apparently exciting danger, from petty adventures within this system, which admittedly is administered ever more perfectly and therefore alarmingly. Action undertaken in danger, but without any sense of perspective, adventures experienced in a sort of a intoxication for their own sake—these are the things that motivate the “third generation.”

The third generation, in other words, is a bunch of bored, privileged, overgrown children, and this is exactly how RWF depicts them. Susanne gets off on taking risks and crossing uncrossable boundaries. (Sleeping with her father-in-law is bad enough, but when the father-in-law’s raison d’etre is to destroy people like her? Talk about thrill-seeking!) Edgar is a cry baby. Rudolf longs for adventure. Hilde claims independence but, it turns out, really just wants to be ravished. Paul is a patriarchal asshole. August gets off on elaborate disguises, like a child playing at spies, like a glorified cross dresser (RWF even dresses Volker Spengler almost identically to Elvira from In a Year with Thirteen Moons for his first visit to Lurz’s office). Petra thinks it would be really cool to go by the alias “Michaela Angela Martinez”.

The women cluck and coo over fashion; the men want to play cops and robbers. Like bullies in the schoolyard, they torment the earnest Bernhard when they discover he underlines important passages in Bakunin like a schoolboy, and they make fun of Rudolf for wetting himself with fear when he thought he was about to be caught during the records office heist. They are perfect little bourgeois, miserable to the core—products, in other words, of the system they claim to want to overthrow. Fassbinder despises them.

This is unusual for RWF, as a rule so magnanimous toward his characters. It was a bit of a problem for me as a viewer, too. The broad strokes with which he renders these people ensure that they remain crudely drawn and one-dimensional (rather like the simplistic black-and-white thinking the characters themselves practice). But maybe this is appropriate, since the characters are themselves products of the system they deride, incapable of authentic emotion or selflessness. The only characters RWF has any sympathy for are Franz and Bernhard—the one an actual son of the working classes and an ethnic minority in a racist society, the other a well-meaning if maddeningly simple aristocrat. Both are belittled by the terrorists and both distinguish themselves as people (not action heroes, not smart asses, not revolutionaries, not sex objects) through their sincerity.

“The world as will and idea” is the gravely spoken password of the terrorists in the cell, aptly chosen, no doubt, by August. It is also the title of a seminal work by Schopenhauer, in which a conception of man’s role as actor in the universe is posited. (I’m no philosophy student, so I can’t say much more.) Grandfather Gast overhears this password and points out that it is a false notion: it discounts the value of humanity, of actual human life, in favor of an abstraction. Bernhard and Franz confirm the truth of this objection: in the way they treat one another, in the love and respect with which they treat Ilse, whom the others hold in contempt, in the way Bernhard studies to better understand the world around him. It’s the hard, unglamorous everyday struggle to overcome bourgeois attitudes and assumptions that will bring about change, not abstractions, and not a few banks robbed or (forgive me) bombs lobbed.

RWF may despise these terrorists but I’ve got to say, technically, he does a really nice job of depicting the state of high anxiety they operate in, the adrenaline rush of living in a constant state of danger, the intoxicating thrill of covert insurrection. The scene in which Susanne, Hilde, and Rudolf rob the records office, for example, is a model of suspense worthy of a great heist movie—and an example of the ways RWF continued to push himself in terms of “workmanship” and technique, going beyond what he’d already mastered. This is a well-crafted film, budget or no budget.

Formally speaking, there’s a lot going on in The Third Generation—too much, really, considering the relative simplicity of the script. The opening sequence, for example, is a barrage of information, relentless and cluttered and just a wee bit bombastic (think late-60s Godard, whom PJ Lurz even indirectly quotes). Susanne watches Bresson’s The Devil, Probably—a morality tale of contemporary alienation (which RWF championed as a jurist at the Berlin Film Festival where it premiered)—in Kurz’s office. There is a long subtitle (“A comedy in six parts, full of excitement, suspense, logic, cruelty, and madness, like the fairy tales we tell children to help them get through life until death”), another title quoting chancellor Helmut Schmidt expressing gratitude that lawyers did not force his government to obey constitutional law in the Mogadishu hijacking investigations, and a curious dedication: “Dedicated to someone who truly loves—so to no one, probably.” All within the first couple of minutes.

There’s more: each of the film’s six parts opens with a transcription of a piece of graffiti taken from a public toilet in West Berlin. The first of these: “You always pull the short straw.” The last: “Mac Killroy was here.” In between: solicitations for sex, S and M, and a racist diatribe. I honestly have no idea what RWF was getting at here. Highlighting the difference between the sentiments of the “revolutionaries” against those of everyday people whose outlet for frustration is confined to writing shit on bathroom walls? Pointing out their juvenile, narcissistic, gratification-orientated similarities and their biased assumptions? Something else? Of course, the last of these graffiti also reminds us of the postwar American occupation and the ideological influence of the US on the newly formed BRD. Is that the point? (As I said, I really don’t know.)

But if all these titles and quotes tend to narrow our interpretation, or at least prescribe it, as I believe they mostly do (graffiti notwithstanding), the soundtrack does something far more interesting. Indeed, the most striking and innovative aspect of The Third Generation is its sound design—“densely layered” doesn’t even begin to describe it. RWF weaves a complex fabric of droning sound effects, music, television, radio, and overlapping conversation that is ubiquitous and pervasive. The tension this creates is almost intolerable and the cacophony utterly maddening. But it’s no mere trick to keep the audience on the edges of their seats (although it does accomplish that, too).

I would go so far as to say that the soundtrack is where The Third Generation’s most cogent critique of contemporary German society is realized: it is an auditory portrait of a culture in crisis, overstimulated and paranoid, media-saturated, schizophrenic, addle-brained. There is a television on in nearly every room in nearly every scene and it doesn’t matter whether it’s playing thoughtful political commentary, sensationalist reporting, historical documentary, or entertainment. It all blends into one manic, stress-inducing wall of sound, the backdrop against which the third generation acts out its incoherent pantomime of liberation as PJ Lurz and his ilk knowingly smile down on them.

God, how I wish Fassbinder were alive today.

Posted in German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged Gunther Kaufmann, hanna schygulla, margit Carstensen, Volker Spengler | Comments Off

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

Posted on October 7, 2013 by yearof44films

This is the one, right? This is the movie that put Fassbinder squarely in the pantheon of great directors (as opposed to that much smaller clubhouse for New German Cinema directors), the first of his movies to achieve international renown upon release. What’s more, unlike even the most celebrated of his earlier films, which had only been available to arthouse audiences outside Germany (if at all), The Marriage of Maria Braun received the kind of distribution RWF had hitherto only dreamed of—the kind you get with, say, a Hollywood melodrama. It’s the one title even people who don’t know Fassbinder are likely to recognize. It’s the movie that made Hanna Schygulla a star.

If Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is the favorite of academics (and it is: I swear I have seen it in no fewer than four different film classes), American critics loved Maria Braun. David Denby, Roger Ebert and, most famously, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, all wrote glowing reviews at one time or other. This makes a certain sense. The Marriage of Maria Braun looks and feels more like a “real movie” than anything RWF had made to date. The performances, the script—a rags-to-riches story of one woman’s rise from the rubble of the allied bombings to the crest of the German Economic Miracle—the production values, the incredible sophistication of the lighting and cinematography, the beautifully restrained mastery of Ballhaus’ camera work (his last movie with RWF, alas), even Peer Raben’s score, all demonstrate that, by 1978, RWF had fully mastered his craft, not to mention his art, and finally realized his ambition of making his own “Hollywood” films.

Except, of course, that Maria Braun is nothing of the kind. It’s a German film about a specific period in German history told from a German perspective—an unlikely candidate in nearly every way for this level of mainstream international adulation. (According to Juliane Lorenz, even RWF was surprised by its success; Despair was supposed to be his big breakout vehicle. He wasn’t even able to secure distribution for Maria Braun until 1979, although the film had been completed a year earlier, before In a Year with Thirteen Moons was even begun.) Why did it speak to American audiences so?

It’s not as though RWF or United Artists made it easy. Many of the cultural and historical references of Maria Braun would have been lost—literally foreign—to American viewers. What’s more, the subtitles in the original American theatrical version didn’t include the historic radio broadcasts woven into the densely layered soundtrack, which means that non-German-speaking viewers and critics simply didn’t have access to key historical allusions and context. And how many American viewers could identify the image of any German chancellor who held office from 1945 to 1978? That sequence, which follows the film’s closing credits, would have been simply confounding. (Still is, I imagine.) And yet the critics, and audiences, loved it. Maybe when the actors are this good and the movie is this well crafted it doesn’t matter whether anyone actually understands it?

Synopsis
Married in a civil service during an aerial bombardment in the last days of the war—the marriage license signed on the ground, the terrified justice of the peace forcibly held down by the groom to keep him from taking flight as everyone ducks and covers under debris from falling bombs—Maria (Hanna Schygulla) and Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch) are separated after “half a day and one whole night” when Hermann is sent off to the Russian front. When the war is over, Maria and her best friend, Betti (Elisabeth Trissenaar), dutifully wait at the train station each day amidst the devastation and the desperate chaos wearing handmade sandwich-board signs with their husbands’ names and photos on them, hoping for information as to the fate of their men. Betti’s husband, Willi (Gottfried John) eventually returns. He breaks the news to Maria: Hermann will not be returning. Hermann is dead.

Maria quickly learns to navigate the black market network in which postwar German society eked out a subsistence, earning cigarettes from American GIs through sheer bravado, which she could trade with her mother for jewelry, which she could in turn trade for the black cocktail dress that would get her a job in a GI dance hall—where she could be paid in currency or goods—which earns her the attention of one African American GI in particular, the kind and gentle Bill (George Byrd), who showers her with gifts and affection.

Maria is soon pregnant with Bill’s baby, about which she seems not the least bit troubled, although she makes it clear to Bill that she will never marry him. (How could she? She is already married.) But that’s okay. She’s fond of Bill, and the two seem perfectly happy—as does the rest of Maria’s family, all of whom benefit from the American’s largesse. Things are definitely looking up.

But then guess who turns up, quiet as a mouse, during a particularly tender moment with Bill, but a spectral Hermann—dead, it turns out, only metaphorically. When the naked Bill and the sunken Hermann begin to scuffle, Maria does what any loving wife would do: she brains Bill with a heavy object, killing him on the spot.

Maria is tried in a US military tribunal. At the last moment, Hermann steps up and claims responsibility for the killing. He is sentenced to several years in prison, which he dutifully serves. Maria visits him regularly and swears undying loyalty, if not, strictly speaking, fidelity. Both are strangely sanguine about Hermann’s incarceration, not to mention Maria’s pregnancy by another man (a black man, no less). Maria has bottomless faith in her own abilities to get what she wants (she “specializes in the future” she will later remark). She willed Hermann to come back, didn’t she?

Maria remains sanguine when she miscarries the baby, too. On her way home from wherever she had gone to deliver it she talks her way into a first class railway carriage, where she immediately and deliberately attracts the attention of a wealthy industrialist, Herr Oswald of Oswald Textiles (Ivan Desny) who, half-French, was able to comfortably sit out the war, presumably in Switzerland. His admiration for Maria is assured when Maria boldly dresses down a drunken and frisky American GI (played by Gunther Kaufmann himself, doing a truly awful American accent) who enters the otherwise empty fist-class carriage, in colorful English. By the end of the journey Maria has a job working for Oswald.

Maria, with her sharp intelligence, her disregard for convention, her command of English, soon rises to a position of prominence in both Oswald’s company and his bedroom, much to the chagrin of his upstanding right-hand man and loyal accountant, Senkenberg (Hark Bohm), and his upright secretary, Frau Ehmke (Lilo Pempeit). Always a step ahead, Maria dictates the terms of this affair, just as she had dictated the terms of her employment. A shrewd and canny negotiator, she seems unstoppable. Betti astutely remarks that looking at Maria, “nobody would ever know what you’ve been through.”

Maria doesn’t know everything, however. She doesn’t know, for example, that the lovesick Oswald is terminally ill and has only a short time to live. She doesn’t know that Oswald has already learned of the existence of Hermann Braun and struck up a relationship with him. Maria carries on, making money hand over fist, toying with Oswald, humiliating Frau Ehmke and mocking Senkenberg, convinced she is firmly in the driver’s seat, master of her own destiny.

Maria builds a mansion which she and Hermann will one day call home. And, indeed, one day Hermann is released from prison. He does not join Maria, however, intending, he writes, to return to her as an equal rather than a dependent. So off he goes to make his own fortune, in Australia or Canada or whatever remote entrepeneurial former English colony will have him. As per the laws of melodrama, a single red rose, delivered once a month until he returns, will remind Maria of her devoted husband.

Spoiler Alert
Oswald eventually, predictably, dies. Maria sinks into an alcoholic depression, from which she is roused by . . . Hermann! At last! The moment Maria has structured her entire adult life around, seduced men and institutions and moved mountains for, has finally come! Things start off a bit prickly for the Brauns—understandably—and matters are complicated when Senkenberg and a notary from Lyon appear for a scheduled reading of Oswald’s will.

What happens next has confounded audiences and critics alike for 35 years. Oswald, it turns out, has left a good part of his business assets and personal wealth to Maria, and the remainder of his fortune to . . . Hermann Braun! Maria, who uncharacteristically complains of a headache, goes to light a cigarette from the gas stove in the kitchen offscreen, which she had portentously neglected to turn off the last time she lit one. Hermann watches, then yells NO! as . . . kaboom!

A Critique of Capitalism
It goes without saying that The Marriage of Maria Braun is a political film packaged as melodrama (I was going to say “disguised as melodrama,” but I don’t think RWF was actually trying to disguise anything at all). This is nothing new: all of RWF’s melodramas have a core political message, after all. But it’s different in this case. Here, the German economy is as important an element as the characters of Maria or Senkenberg or Willi or Hans (Maria’s mother’s affable working-class boyfriend, played by the marvelous Günter Lamprecht, the ultimate Franz Biberkopf in RWF’s Berlin Alexanderplatz)—each of whom, I should mention, embodies a different position and perspective with respect to that economy. In doing so it implicitly offers a critique of market capitalism—the heart and soul, as we all know, not just of the wirdschaftswunder, but of the American ethos. As such, I think it’s safe to say that The Marriage of Maria Braun is an anti-American film. (This is why I find the American critical response to it so bewildering. Nobody seems to have noticed.)

The movie opens on a society in shambles. The Fascist economy has been obliterated under the allied bombardment. The only economy still functioning is the black market, which is to say, a barter economy. Capital has been reduced to its most primitive essentials: wood that can be burned for heat, bricks that can be sorted and used to rebuild shelter, food that can be consumed for survival, cigarettes that quiet the mind and keep hunger at bay, cocktail dresses that connect you with the people who control all these things . . . and sex, which can be exchanged for goods and services like any other commodity. Maria recognizes this and capitalizes on it immediately.

Everything has its exchange value. (Books, by the way, don’t have much of one: they burn too fast, says Maria.) The perfect object of value in this scenario is the cigarette, which RWF uses very precisely as a symbolic thread woven throughout the film. A discarded cigarette butt causes a pile-up of Germans in the train station canteen as they fight each other for the scrap. An American GI pays for his lewd comment to Maria with cigarettes, thereby launching her ascent up the economic ladder. When Hermann returns from the Russian POW camp the first thing he hungrily pounces on is not his wife but her cigarettes. On the train, when Oswald offers Maria a cigarette she declines, saying she doesn’t smoke (she knows this gesture of self control will gain her Oswald’s respect). A cigarette lit from a gas stove will, of course, be Maria and Hermanns’ undoing.

Mata Hari or Just an American?
Maria firmly believes she is master of her own destiny. In perhaps the most frequently quoted line of the movie, she mischievously tells a scandalized Senkenberg, who has just learned that Maria is friends with Willi (who represents Labor in discussions with Oswald Textiles), “I’m a master of disguises: a tool of capitalism by day, an agent of the working classes by night. The Mata Hari of the Economic Miracle.” It’s a great line, and I think Maria really believes it, too. She genuinely believes she is somehow beyond ideology—scornful of Senkenberg’s solemn reverence for economics, too savvy for Willi’s naïve Marxism. Which is, of course, a very American attitude. (How many Americans admit to subscribing to an ideology of any kind? For us, communism is an ideology, while capitalism is just a natural law, part of the natural order of things . . .)

Maria Braun is smart. Maria Braun is resourceful. Maria Braun is beautiful, modern, pragmatic, sharp. Maria Braun lives by her wits, but she knows how to use her body to get what she needs. She knows how to turn lemons into lemonade, how to seize the moment or the day and turn it to her own advantage. Maria Braun looks to the future and never, ever looks back. But through it all she is loyal to her man, come hell or high water, and she always, always stays true to her ideals.

Maria Braun, in other words, is American. (Compare her to “fat little Betti”: simple, provincial, old-fashioned—Betti is quintessentially German.) Which is, of course, another aspect of the film I imagine would have been lost on American audiences. Maria embodies qualities that are so much a part of the American ideal, so deeply engrained in our own self-image, we’re not even aware of them as such. Schygulla’s Maria is an amalgam of quintessential 1940’s Hollywood actresses’ personae, their schtick: Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Bette Davis (and let’s not forget Germany’s favorite export/expat, Marlene Dietrich). Wise-cracking, fast-talking, cool as a cucumber, she’s like a cross between a Howard Hawks heroine and a dame in a Raymond Chandler novel. Just listen to the way she says, “Listen, Mister.” Just look at the way she lights a cigarette.

(The Criterion Collection DVD of Maria Braun includes a very good video essay featuring Eric Rentschler, Film Professor at Harvard, who makes the point that Maria Braun is directly linked to Mildred Pierce, which I think is incontrovertible, but ultimately not all that helpful—except perhaps to remind us that RWF was influenced by a variety of Hollywood directors, not just Sirk, and show how cleverly RWF was able to use Hollywood’s own types to send radically different messages. Mildred and Maria may end up with their illusions of self-realization and self-sufficiency shattered, co-opted by men, but that’s as far, I think, as the comparison goes. Mildred and Maria are ultimately punished for very different sins and in very different courts of opinion, according to entirely different standards. But that’s another whole essay unto itself.)

Maria and the BRD
As a thousand reviewers have undoubtedly already observed, Maria’s trajectory mirrors West Germany’s after the war. Quick to forget, eager to embrace a turbocharged, capital-infused, American-dominated future, Germany missed or ignored the opportunity to soberly reflect on its past and come to terms with its enthusiastic embrace of Fascism and learn from those mistakes. Instead, economic development became an end in itself; the political past of Germany’s leaders (which is to say, their ideology) was deemed irrelevant. And so, for example, you had former members of the SS, people like Hans Schleyer, running some of Germany’s biggest corporations. This, of course, is what the RAF and the rest of the radical left in Germany in the 1970s were reacting against: not just Germany’s refusal to come to terms with its own criminal past, but the willingness of a society to compromise anything and everything for the sake of economic development, happy to sell its soul for a buck.

This is what makes Maria’s life so hollow. Bill, Oswald, her career, everything had been a means to an end: to make as much money as possible for her life with Hermann. But Hermann doesn’t want her money, he wants his own money, and Hermann, anyway, turns out to be a stranger. Maria has led a joyless existence only to see the only thing she had, her symbolic power, stripped from her in a transaction between men. She thought she was her own free agent when really all she had ever been was the object of someone else’s Great Love—whether Hermann’s or Oswald’s. (Mata Hari, history tells us, was only ever a pawn of the governments she risked her life for, too.)

Is this what the BRD was? A pawn in somebody else’s game? There’s an interesting moment at the beginning of the movie when a craven German stealing fence boards for firewood is scared off by some boys with firecrackers; on the soundtrack a radio announcer, American, describes how US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthal had earlier proposed that Germany be turned into farmland after the war (“in other words, broken up,”) in contrast to the current strategy . . . but the explosion of the firecrackers and the boys’ laughter drowns out the radio voice, so we never hear what that current stratey is. But we get the idea: Germany’s direction, this passage tells us, is the result of a change in strategy.

Which brings us back to that ending. It’s ambiguous, certainly, and frustrating for sure, but it doesn’t come from out of nowhere and it does make sense if you think about it. But you have to look at it free of those ideological assumptions we say we aren’t subject to. Otherwise Maria, with her can-do attitude and her work ethic, her quick wit, her good looks, and her devout loyalty, really is just a German Mildred Pierce (which is to say, a mostly sympathetic, if cold and calculating and ultimately over-reaching, heroine), while Hermann’s self sacrifice and Oswald’s magnanimity are just plain noble. If you read this story without historical or ideological context. Maria’s suicide, if that’s what it is, is either illogical—since she has finally gotten everything she ever wanted in life (her husband, unfettered at last, and Oswald’s fortune, unencumbered)—or a hysterical reaction.

And if it’s not suicide? Well, then her death is just a random accident, senseless and arbitrary. Unless you keep the historic parallels in mind and remember that Germany’s great sin after the war was to forget its own sins, none of this makes any sense. This is Eric Rentschler’s thesis: Maria forgets that she forgot to turn off the gas. Or, to put it another, less allegorical and more literal way: Maria has been so single-minded in her pursuit of wealth that the realization that her success has been utterly hollow and meaningless simply undoes her. She doesn’t know what she is doing anymore and she just doesn’t care.

But speaking of willful forgetting: Adam Hochschild, reviewing Ian Buruma’s Year Zero: A History of 1945 in last Sunday’s New York Times reminds us (as if we had ever heard of it in the first place) of the widespread rape, unreported, that was perpetrated by American GIs after the war in Germany and France, where women outnumbered men, 8 to 5. A reminder, perhaps, of who was really in control all along.

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged hanna schygulla | Comments Off

My Picks for the Fall 2013 SF Bay Area R. W. Fassbinder Mini-Retrospective

Posted on September 18, 2013 by yearof44films

I would be remiss in my duties were I not to point out the serendipity or timeliness or sheer coincidence of the upcoming Fassbinder mini-retrospective at the Roxie/Yerba Buena Center for the Arts/Pacific Film Archive—to which I encourage my Bay Area friends to attend in whatever capacity they can. Since no one can possibly attend all screenings (nor would it be even remotely healthy to do so), I have prepared a list of the ones I recommend you see if at all possible, arranged by category (as defined by me—so not absolute by any means).

Thanks to the Fassbinder Foundation, all these films are available on DVD, so don’t freak out if you miss any. (Martha, Fear of Fear, and World on a Wire were actually intended to be viewed on the small screen anyway, so you can feel good about that, at least . . .)

Must-see titles are designated with an asterisk*. Which is, of course, misleading, since I genuinely love every movie on this list and would never, ever advise you to skip any of them.

Dates, times, and locations of screenings are included for your convenience. See each venue’s web site for a full list of RWF titles on offer.

The Best of the Classics
(These are the titles that are quite simply de rigueur Fassbinder; they also happen to be broadly representative of his overall body of work and are all really, really great films).

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul*
PFA: Friday, October 4, 2013 8:50 p.m
YBCA: Oct 17, 2013 7:30 p.m.

Effi Briest
PFA: Tuesday, October 8, 2013 7:00 p.m.
YBCA: Oct 24, 2013 7:30 p.m.

The Marriage of Maria Braun*
Roxie: Thursday, October 10 9:00 p.m.
PFA: Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:30 p.m.

The Merchant of Four Seasons
YBCA: Oct 20, 2013 2:00 p.m.
PFA: Friday, October 25, 2013 7:00 p.m.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant*
Roxie: Wednesday, October 9 7:00 p.m.
PFA: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 7:00 p.m.

Fox and His Friends
Roxie: Saturday, October 5 7:00 p.m.
PFA: Friday, November 15, 2013 8:35 p.m.

The Best of the Films You’re Not All That Likely to Have Already Seen

Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven*
Roxie: Tuesday, October 8 7:00 p.m.
PFA: Saturday, November 30, 2013 8:30 p.m.

In a Year with Thirteen Moons*
PFA: Sunday, December 15, 2013 5:15 p.m.
YBCA: Dec 21, 2013 7:30pm

Martha
YBCA: Dec 1, 2013 2:00pm
PFA: Thursday, December 12, 2013 7:00 p.m.

Fear of Fear
Roxie: Monday, October 7 7:00 p.m.
PFA: Friday, October 25, 2013 8:50 p.m

Chinese Roulette
PFA: Friday, November 1, 2013 7:00 p.m.

World on a Wire
PFA: Saturday, November 2, 2013 6:30 p.m.

Despair
PFA: Friday, December 6, 2013 8:50 p.m.

The Best of the Early Films

Katzelmacher
PFA: Friday, October 11, 2013 7:00 p.m.

Why Does Herr R Run Amok?
YBCA: Nov 21, 2013 7:30 p.m.
PFA: Friday, December 6, 2013 7:00 p.m.

Screening Information
Roxie Theater
3117 16th Street, San Francisco, CA
(415)-863-1087

Pacific Film Archive (PFA)
2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph)
Berkeley, CA
(510) 642-5249

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street (at 3rd Street)
San Francisco, CA 9
(415) 978-2787

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In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978)

Posted on September 11, 2013 by yearof44films

No one falls for the fairy tale that there’s a “real life” in a “real world” and that “real life” is more important than loving. What does it matter? I know we don’t really have a chance, whatever might become of us if we’d had the chance.

—Seelenfrieda, In a Year with Thirteen Moons

Fassbinder made two films for Armin Meier during the course of their four-year relationship, one marking its beginning and the other its sad end. RWF even dedicated the first of these, Fox and His Friends (1975), to Meier (“For Armin and all the others”) and explicitly used him as the model for the character of Franz Biberkopf, aka Fox. As he had done earlier with El Hedi Ben Salem (Fear Eats the Soul) and Gunther Kaufmann (Whity), RWF cast a lover (or in this case, cast himself channeling his lover) as a victim, a type intended to illustrate fundamental injustices of bourgeois society within a melodramatic framework. (Interestingly, El Hedi Ben Salem had a small role in Fox and His Friends—did he know about Armin yet, I wonder?—and Kaufmann a more substantial one in In a Year with Thirteen Moons.) In these movies, the characters inspired and/or played by the lover fulfill a function which I think is essentially polemical and didactic; as such, they tell us more about the artist and his preoccupations than they do the muse.

In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978) is different. Made quickly in a time of genuine crisis almost single-handedly, it is a profound meditation on love and death and loneliness. And while its implicit indictments of postwar German society are as abundant and as vehement as in any of his previous films, and while the emotions and events it depicts are as tumultuous and tragic as ever, In a Year with Thirteen Moons is not quite like any of RWF’s other films; it is not melodramatic—at least not in the sense that Fox and His Friends or Fear Eats the Soul were—nor is it didactic or polemical in quite the same way that nearly all RWF’s films to this date had been. It is a haunting and beautiful film. I think it is Fassbinder’s greatest achievement.

As with the segment he contributed to Germany in Autumn—begun and completed as events of the so-called “German autumn” were actually unfolding in real time—RWF wrote, directed, and edited In a Year with Thirteen Moons almost overnight, as though in a kind of fever or frenzy following Meier’s suicide on May 31, 1978. (RWF’s birthday, as it happens—the director himself was at Cannes for the premiere of Despair at the time; poor Armin was not invited—was not in fact permitted—to attend.) Fassbinder did almost everything on this film himself; he wrote the script, directed, designed the sets, did his own camera work, edited, and even financed the project (at least initially). An act of existential necessity, this film was a labor of love—a personal film in every sense of the term.

In a Year with Thirteen Moons follows the last few days in the life of Elvira (né Erwin) Weisshaupt, played with heartbreaking delicacy by Volker Spengler. A formerly straight transsexual (think about what that means), Elvira wanders from humiliation to humiliation, slightly bewildered as to how she arrived at this place exactly, unconsciously preparing to meet her inexorable fate. From the time she arrives home in the opening sequence of the film, having just been beaten up by the “associates” of an angry trick who thought he had been picked up by a man, only to be cruelly insulted and abandoned by her boyfriend, Christoph Hacker (Karl Scheydt), whose own career she had made possible by turning tricks herself but who now tells her he finds her disgusting, Elvira revisits the pivotal people and places of her life, accompanied by her all-too-human guardian angel, the prostitute Red Zora (Ingrid Caven). These include the slaughterhouse where Erwin worked before his sex change operation in Casablanca; Sister Gudrun (Lilo Pempeit), the principal nun who raised little Erwin in an orphanage, who tells the story of the long-suppressed trauma of his young life; Irene (Elisabeth Trissanaar), Erwin’s wife, with whom he has a now adult daughter, Marie-Ann (Eva Mattes); and Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), love of Erwin’s life, small-time criminal in the black market meat trade (for whom Erwin served time in prison), raised in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, one-time brothel owner and now a rich and powerful real estate developer, who replied to Erwin’s declaration of love once upon a time that maybe things could have worked out between them if Erwin had been a girl . . .

In a Year with Thirteen Moons does not literally tell the story of Armin Meier’s life, of course, but it incorporates elements of his sad history. Like Erwin, Armin was born at the end of the war and abandoned by his mother to an orphanage; perhaps he too was consigned to a sort of limbo, as Erwin was, needing the permission of his still-living mother in order to be adopted by another family, and so was raised without any hope of ever knowing the love of a mother or father. Like Erwin, Armin was uneducated and unable to obtain an apprenticeship in a desirable trade and so was forced to train as a butcher.

There are probably other aspects of Armin’s history in Ermin/Elvira’s, but we may never know what they are. There aren’t that many people left who might remember, and his life story does not appear to have been written. (Nobody has bothered to create a Wikipedia page for poor Armin Meier, for example, as they have for El Hedi Ben Salem.) But it doesn’t really matter; connecting the dots with biographical factoids is not really the point here. What the character of Elvira (né Erwin) Weisshaupt captures—and the actor, Volker Spengler, so beautifully conveys—is the simplicity, the quiet sadness, the slightly bewildered loneliness, the desperate need to be loved—which, perversely, seems to preclude the possibility of being truly loved—of a human being whom society deemed unworthy from birth, and who offers up his own life as a kind of unwanted sacrifice to love, his suicide almost a foregone conclusion.

When we meet Elvira Weisshaupt, the major dramatic events of her life have already taken place. This is one of the aspects of the film that distinguishes it from RWF’s melodramas (or anyone else’s, for that matter), a hallmark of which, as you may recall, is “the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization” (Merriam-Webster’s 11^th). A movie like Fox and His Friends or Martha or Fear Eats the Soul (or Written on the Wind or All That Heaven Allows) takes the viewer along for the ride on the narrative roller coaster with its characters, making us experience each twist and turn and humiliation as it occurs in the story. This is where melodrama derives its power. In a Year with Thirteen Moons, on the other hand, derives its power from someplace else: we don’t actually get on the roller coaster with Elvira, but rather sit with her, dizzy and sick, in those quiet moments after the ride has already ended, while she decides whether to get back on for one more go-round or just give it up. (If that isn’t too tortured a metaphor? I couldn’t resist the implicit reference to Martha, in which we really are forced to ride an actual roller coaster with Margit Carstensen . . .)

RWF doesn’t resort to the usual melodramatic tricks or tropes here because he really wants you to think about Elvira’s condition soberly and seriously, without manipulated or artificially cued sentiment. For example, in the opening sequence when Elvira, dressed as a man, goes down to the river in search of a few transactional moments’ intimacy (not surprisingly, she says she is less ashamed when she pays for sex dressed as a man), only to be beaten up instead, heavy scrolling text explains the meaning of the film’s title and actually obscures much of the action. At the same time, the choice of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on the soundtrack (the most achingly beautiful piece of music ever written?), actually undercuts the unbearable heaviness of the scene, overloaded as it is with other cinematic associations, most famously, Visconti’s Death in Venice. (Interestingly, RWF later uses another easily recognizable piece of music, Nino Rota’s theme from Fellini’s Amarcord.) The overt associations with another film have the effect of undercutting any facile emotional identification you might forge in this one; you’re one step removed, as it were. That is really important because RWF is deadly serious here: he wants you to really think about life and death in earnest. To do that, he can’t have you tearing up at the first musical cue.

RWF had always been interested in multiple forms of narration as distancing devices (written titles, voiceover, etc., perhaps most effectively put to use in Effi Briest). The long, sad story of Erwin’s childhood, for example, is narrated by Sister Gudrun (played by RWF’s own mother) in uninterrupted voiceover, giving the story an epic quality, as the camera pans across the empty cloister where Elvira has already fainted. At the very end of the film, the tape of an interview Elvira had given with a journalist (Gerhard Zwerenz), in which she disclosed the true story of her past relationship with the now rich and powerful Anton Saitz, quietly plays as, first the journalist and his wife, then Irene and Marie-Ann, all converge at Elvira’s apartment, only to find her dead in the same room as the sleeping Saitz and Zora, who are strangely oblivious to Elvira’s presence. These segments, powerfully emotional—tragic, really—hit you all the harder for being so carefully mediated.

In the notorious slaughterhouse scene early in the film, where Elvira brings Zora to explain the trade she used to practice as a man, RWF shows us images of cattle being killed and bled and butchered, hung upside down on enormous meat hooks, as Elvira narrates the story of her time living with Christoph, reciting the grandiose lines from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso she used to help him rehearse when he was a struggling unknown actor, imitating his bizarre, screeching, self-important delivery. The horror of these images is tempered by Elvira’s narration, and for good reason; I don’t believe the slaughterhouse was meant to simply induce shock or disgust (although, of course it does), nor do I believe it was intended to illustrate violence or cruelty as such. I don’t even think it’s a metaphor, exactly (although in certain moments, come to think of it, there is something distinctly bovine about Elvira; something about her calm, impassive dignity, her physical presence, her big sad slow eyes, that makes you think of the proverbial heifer to the slaughter . . .).

The slaughterhouse is a perfect representation of the inevitability and the necessity of death in life. This is why Elvira must take Zora to see it. This is what Elvira is attempting to come to terms with herself.

ZORA: It’s against life.

ELVIRA: No, it’s not. It’s life itself. The streaming blood and death. That’s what gives an animal’s life meaning. And the smell when they know they’re going to die and know that it’s beautiful and wait for it. Solitary and beautiful . . . When I was young I felt the same disgust as you. Today I understand the world better. Come on, I’ll show you, Zora. You’ll smell it, see them die, hear their cries, cries for deliverance.

This, of course, is what RWF is trying to come to grips with in this film, too: the inevitable necessity of death in life. That’s why he needed imagery that would shock us out of our complacency. And that’s why melodrama wouldn’t work here, because what melodrama does is enable us to project our deepest anxieties elsewhere (onto fictional surrogates) and thereby experience catharsis while preserving our own denial intact. But denial is not an option here.

There is a pivotal moment in the film when Elvira goes to Saitz’s headquarters in a highrise he owns (a favorite symbol of capitalist excess for RWF). Wishing to avoid Saitz and his cadre of close associates/bodyguards (led by Gunther Kaufmann) as they make their way down the building stairs, Elvira ducks into a vacant floor and falls asleep. She awakens in the dark, empty office to the sight of a strange man quietly and methodically assembling a noose over an exposed pipe or hook (echoes of the meat hook?), preparing, he matter-of-factly explains, to kill himself. After helping Elvira open the bottle of wine she brought, the man (played by Bob Dorsay, Volker Spengler’s real-life partner) eloquently explains his philosophy of suicide:

If you want to know the moral failing of humanity, as a whole and in general, just look at their fate, as a whole and in general. There is an eternal justice, and were they not so worthless, in general, their fate, in general, would not be so sad. We can therefore say the world itself is the Day of Judgment. But it would be a great mistake to see that as a negation of the will to live, to see suicide as an act of negation. Far from it: the negation of the will to exist is a bold affirmation of the will since negation means renouncing not life’s sufferings but its joys. The suicide wants life and simply rejects the conditions under which he experiences it. The suicide does not renounce the will to live; he renounces life by destroying the manifestation of his own life.

To which Elvira quietly replies, “I think you’d better do it now.” The suicide decided upon—the conditions of his own life rejected—what else is there to say? It is just death, solitary and beautiful, which comes when it comes.

This is a pretty sober and coherent assessment of suicide; I think it’s safe to say it’s RWF’s own. He follows it soon after with a representation of life, in the form of Anton Saitz in his dazzlingly empty white office, dancing along with a Jerry Lewis video on TV, while his men (plus Elvira, in black floppy hat and veil and hobble skirt and gold lamé ankle-wrap pumps) sing and follow along in the chorus (Gunther Kaufmann has a lovely voice, by the way). As haunting an image, in its own way, as Bob Dorsay hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling. And so the story moves toward its end, life and death hopelessly intertwined as they always are. Saitz returns to Elvira’s place with her to find Zora, asleep, with whom Saitz becomes immediately and fully occupied. Elvira puts on a man’s suit one last time and begins her final rounds, first to ask Irene and Marie-Ann to take her/him back, next to see the journalist to whom she gave the fateful interview, in a last effort to find some peace and understanding and a sense of an identity.

It’s impossible not to wonder whether, by making Elvira’s plight so impossibly dire and her acceptance of death so stoic, RWF was attempting to justify Armin’s suicide in some way, to diminish his own responsibility. On some level, I think that’s likely. At the same time, though, I think he clearly and honestly exposes his own moral culpability in the character of Christoph Hacker—a man not ashamed to prostitute his girlfriend, after all, who let her prop him up to the point where he could feel like just enough of a man again to be disgusted by the reflection of his own weakness he must have seen in her. I’ve got a strong hunch those hateful words Christoph hurls at Elvira before he leaves her for good were things RWF actually said to Armin at one time or other as their relationship steadily deteriorated. They just sound too familiar and too cruel. (If you’ve seen Germany in Autumn, you’ll know what I mean. RWF depicts behavior toward Armin in that segment that is really pretty contemptible.)

In showing the injustice of Elvira’s treatment, then, RWF implicates himself as much as he does postwar German ordinances regarding the handling of orphans, for example, or the unthinking cruelty of rent boys, or the inhumanity of a concentration camp survivor who learned everything he needed to know about how to run a successful business from the camps. Everyone is guilty because everyone is a victim, strange as that may sound. This is the hell that humans have created for themselves on earth. Of course this is also the reality Fassbinder had been trying to show us all along, in different milieus and using different tools; from the early gangster films to the domestic melodramas, in literary costume dramas and political satires, the goal, I think, has always been the same. Sadly, it took a cataclysmic event that shook him to the very foundation of his being to enable him to express his vision so clearly and so well.

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Queer Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged Ingrid Caven, Volker Spengler | Comments Off

Despair (1978)

Posted on August 3, 2013 by yearof44films

In many ways this is the movie that started it all for me. San Francisco, 1978. I really do still remember it! A short ride on the streetcar to Civic Center, then a long wait for the 19-Polk bus to the Lumiere on California Street. I was 16, going to the movies alone. I had no idea what to expect; I’d never read Nabokov, only knew about Tom Stoppard from my theater friends, and had barely heard of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But as a kid hell-bent on catching up on alternative high culture (if that’s not an oxymoron—it didn’t feel like one at the time) I knew the movie was going to be important. I knew it was going to be cool. How could it not be with all those reputations?

And it was! It’s hard now to describe the effect Despair had on me then. In addition to sparking a lifelong love of Dirk Bogarde (undiminished to this day) this movie, more than any other at the time, changed my sense of what movies could be, and actually planted the seed in my tiny head that film might actually be worth studying. (Less than two years later I would change my major at Cal from Art History to Film Studies.) The visual style, the camera work, the symbolism, the biting, sardonic humor, the head-trippy premise, the self-reflexivity . . . I had never seen anything quite like it.

Despair was unprecedented for RWF in many ways, too. It was the first time he had been hired “merely” as a director; for once he did not actually write the script, which was written in a language he did not even speak, by a playwright more famous than he was. It featured a bona fide marquee-caliber movie star with whom he also did not share a common language. The 6 million DM budget was nearly four times the budget for The Stationmaster’s Wife, by far the most expensive project he had worked on to date. (Chinese Roulette was made for 1,000,000 DM, while the average RWF movie prior to that cost about half that.) Despair, in other words, marks Fassbinder’s arrival in the big leagues, where the rules and the stakes are different. And it shows. This is a sumptuous film, rich and slightly decadent (like one of its protagonist’s chocolate creams?), despite what its creator may have had to say about it (more on this later).

The story goes that RWF had wanted to make Despair for some time but discovered when he set out that Stoppard had gotten there first. Hence the collaboration of these two unlikely talents, if indeed that’s what it was. (RWF said they “wrote the screenplay together;” Peter Marthesheimer, the producer, says Stoppard wrote the first draft on his own, which RWF edited, i.e., cut down, only in the actual production process. Given RWF’s lack of English fluency, I am inclined to believe Marthesheimer on this one.) If I seem to belabor the point, it’s because the script is one of the things that distinguishes Despair from RWF’s other films, which are noteworthy (among a good many other things) for their frequent depiction of the limitations of language as an effective means of communication. (Stoppard’s verbal pyrotechnics, on the other hand—mirroring Nabokov’s—are highly effective indeed.)

Which is not to overstate the novelty of Despair within RWF’s oeuvre. In many ways, it fits logically in terms of major themes, visual styling, music (Peer Raben, still, thank goodness), and historic setting. In so many ways Nabokov’s story of a Weimar-era candy manufacturer’s descent into madness and murder, written in Berlin in 1932, feels like a pretty natural fit.

Briefly: Hermann Hermann (Dirk Bogarde) is a wealthy Berlin chocolatier who lives with his simple and breathtakingly buxom, platinum-blonde wife, Lydia (Andrea Ferréol), and their raven-haired young maid, Elsie (Y Sa Lo), in a chic art deco flat. Lydia’s cousin, Ardalion (a marvelous red-headed Volker Spengler), with whom she has a flagrantly incestuous (yet strangely innocent) relationship, is a painter, a self-styled bohemian living out of his studio. The year is 1930. Germany is staggering under postwar reparations payments, Wall Street has crashed, and the industrialist Alfred Hugenberg has thrown his weight behind Adolf Hitler, thereby clearing the latter’s path to the German chancellorship. Against this backdrop, Hermann Hermann appears to be willfully losing his mind.

It begins with an episode of “dissociation,” in which Hermann watches himself making love to his wife from across the apartment in a literal splitting of his own psyche. After a trip to the movies with Lydia and Ardalion—the silent film culminates in a showdown between a policeman, Sergeant Brown, and his identical evil-twin brother, Silverman (“there’s always a line down the middle,” complains Ardalion, even though “you can’t see it”)—Hermann meets Orlovius (Bernhard Wicki) whom he presumes to be a psychoanalyst (a real Viennese quack! he’ll know all about dissociation!), but who turns out to be a life insurance salesman. Next comes a chance encounter in a sort of fairground hall of mirrors with a man Hermann perceives as his spitting image—they are “as alike as two drops of blood” he exclaims—and Hermann’s plan is hatched: he will switch identities with his double, an itinerant fairground worker named Felix (Klaus Löwitsch), murder him, and Lydia will collect the insurance money from the policy Hermann will take out with Orlovius before meeting her man [sorry, I couldn’t resist] in Switzerland to start their new life.

Spoiler Alert
There is one problem with Hermann’s plan: his doppelgänger looks nothing like him. At first, the authorities are confounded by Hermann’s crime. Why would anyone exchange clothing and passports with a man he does not resemble and expect to get away with murder? Worse, Hermann forgot to remove Felix’s walking stick, clearly labelled with its owner’s identity; in a snap the authorities are able to track him down (he’s traveling with Felix’s passport) to Switzerland where—another overlooked detail—Hermann had already paid Ardalion to go, ostensibly to “dry out” but really just to get him out of the way. Ardalion spots Hermann on his balcony and summons the police, who arrive within minutes. As they take him into custody, guns drawn, Hermann explains that he is a film actor and they are making a movie; soon they will see him emerge from his room (“Don’t look at the camera”).

Nabokov’s novel is deliberately vague on the question of whether or not Felix actually looks like Hermann (anyway, as Felix points out, “a rich man never really looks like a poor man”). This makes sense: Hermann is an unreliable narrator, so of course he is not going to take us aside and winkingly tell us us “the truth.” How odd, then, that Stoppard is said to have wanted the same actor to play both characters—and how right RWF was to disregard this and cast two actors who bear so little resemblance to one another. Like the painting of a rose and a briar pipe with a crudely-drawn swastika on the back which Hermann swears is the painting of two oranges which Ardalion had earlier tried to sell him (same swastika on the back), Hermann projects exact correspondence where there is none. (Ironically, there is one instance where he appears to be correct in his recognition: the actor who plays the identical twin brothers in the silent film—the noble Sergeant Brown and the gangster Silverman—really is the same actor who plays the Hermann chocolate factory foreman: RWF cast Armin Meier, for the last time, in all three roles.)

Despair is heavily loaded; symbols and metaphors abound. The set, for example, is designed using the “fishbowl” model we’ve already seen in movies such as The Stationmaster’s Wife or even The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Hermann’s apartment consists of rooms separated not by opaque walls but by etched glass partitions and doors that enable a variety of changing views depending on the camera’s position and movement and the way doors and windows are opened or partially closed, while separating the characters from one another. (Hermann’s office is also built around a fishbowl, where his secretary, Frau Schmidt [Lilo Pempeit] sits at her typewriter; as the camera tracks around her we never lose sight of Hermann on the other side of the glass wall.) In other words, although they appear close enough to touch one another, Hermann is separated from the other characters by walls of glass—or in the case of his initial encounter with Felix at the carnival, a labyrinth made of glass. Not unlike a movie spectator faced with the image of an actor projected on a screen—so close and yet so impossibly far—or like an actor playing two different characters in a split screen, separated by an invisible line down the middle.

Then there’s the color. RWF’s awareness of the emotional power of color, traceable to Sirk, was nothing new, of course. Despair, however, is the first movie I can think of that foregrounds the symbolic value of color in quite this way. Hermann even defines himself and his history in terms of color:

When the war started I procured some papers that said I was a blackshirt fighting the reds in the white army. But after the revolution I got out as a Caucasian fighting the brownshirts in the red army. All I really am is just a yellow belly in a brown hat.

The trademark color of Hermann’s chocolate company is lilac, a color that positively engulfs him at work (the chocolate boxes, the delivery trucks, the factory walls, the workers’ uniforms, even their little hygienic shower caps), and sometimes even at home (Lydia and Ardalion both periodically wear lilac, as does Hermann’s mother in one of his conflicting descriptions of that protean figure). Lilac, of course is the color of effeminacy and effeteness, as is the yellow of Hermann’s driving gloves, which he refers to as such (“the yellow driving gloves,” not “the driving gloves”). Compare this with Lydia’s bright red lipstick and Ardalion’s red socks and red hair—an indicator, perhaps, of who experiences physical passion and who is merely a spectator? Times, however, are changing: Herr Müller (Peter Kern), Hermann’s second in command at the factory, will soon trade his lilac lab coat for a brown Nazi uniform (“how perfect,” mutters Hermann: “a chocolate-colored uniform!”)

The film’s central metaphor is dissociation, with its unavoidable parallels with the cinematic apparatus and the spectral nature of the projected film image (in which man watches himself as in a dream). Even before Hermann’s fateful visit to the cinema, which plants the idea of exploiting a look-alike to escape an undesirable fate, the parallel is drawn: as he sits in his living room chair watching his naked wife kiss his shiny, shiny boots of imaginary leather in the bedroom down the hall, the ambient light in the room (presumably, from a neon sign outside) flickers from light to dark to light, mimicking the flicker-effect of a movie projector. This effect will be echoed in different ways later in different scenes (e.g., the swinging light fixture when Hermann enlists Felix in his “plan,” or the flickering light that accompanies his fantasy of reunion with Lydia as Felix).

So. Doubles, mirrors, projections . . . Fassbinder to the nth degree, right? Up until now, he’d used reflective surfaces (mirrors, windows, shelving, that fabulous coffee pot in The Stationmaster’s Wife) to double his characters (among other things), but as highly suggestive stylistic elements rather than a central thematic one. In Despair, the effect is overtly self-reflexive, the cinema-metaphor unavoidable. This is probably one of the things that made me love the movie when I first saw it—I was big on self-reflexive anything back then—but it’s what bothers me a little about Despair now. It foregrounds and makes literal what had hitherto been brilliantly subtextual. It’s thrilling, and yet it all seems a little . . . pat.

There’s something else that’s been bothering me, although this is typical of the director and his sometimes stubbornly controversial postures. RWF adamantly maintained in writings and interviews that Despair was, first and foremost, the story of one man’s fight against the inevitable stultification that comes with middle age, and that the film’s subtitle in German, Eine Reise ins Licht (A Journey into Light), was not ironic, but rather an accurate description of the protagonist’s conscious choice to explore madness rather than accept the drudgery of the status quo.

You could list a whole series of reasons for that [Hermann’s despair]: the political, economic, and social problems of those years; but the real or, at least, most important reason is his sudden insight that everything’s pointless and that nothing has meaning anymore. Why? Because old age is approaching, the age when a person just doesn’t expect anything new, when a person no longer gets satisfaction from looking for things, desiring things, coming up with ideas . . .*

This strikes me as either incredibly naïve—a conception of middle age that exists pretty much exclusively in the imagination of the young (and, to this middle-aged mind, misses the point: it’s precisely the fear of losing our minds that’s so terrifying about growing old, not the fear of getting bored or complacent)—or flat-out disingenuous. The fact is, the film is loaded with imagery and references that have far more to do with “the political, economic, and social problems of those years” than they do with any garden-variety midlife crisis. Hermann’s socioeconomic status in that particular place and time, his identity as an already displaced foreigner who may or may not be Jewish, the nature of the luxury good he manufactures and sells at a time when the world is on the brink of total crisis, even his choice of doppelgänger (itinerant, anti-capitalist; in a mirror right is left, after all), his wife’s infidelity . . . all these things shape Hermann’s particular “journey” at least as much as his age does.

Hermann is a successful Russian emigré on the eve of the Third Reich, with plenty to lose and a lot more to escape than just ennui, even if he doesn’t know it yet. On that fateful journey to Düsseldorf, where he first encounters Felix while on a mission to take over a rival but failing chocolate manufacturer (a “merger” which, in a classic Freudian slip, he refers to as a “murder”), Hermann imagines telling the factory owner (Alexander Allerson) that his mother “was a Rothschild.” Why would he even imagine telling a German industrialist, who a moment before had been extolling the virtues of “that man” (Hitler), that he was of Jewish descent, whether it’s true or not? The factory owner, who had seemed so eager to sell out, ends up telling Hermann to “keep your fucking shekels,” an overtly anti-semitic rejection if ever there was one. Gazing at the bizarre naked chocolate figurines that are the rival chocolatier’s signature confection piled up in a mound, the Auschwitz foreshadowing is inescapable. Later, sitting at an outdoor café, Hermann will watch as Nazi youth throw bricks through the window of a Jewish butcher’s shop and the startled proprietors scurry to clean up the broken glass. Surely this is more than just colorful backdrop?

RWF dedicated Despair to three artists: Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh, and Unica Zürn. All three were artists whose life and work challenged contemporary norms and all three suffered from mental illness; at least one of them committed suicide (although some would say all of them did—but that’s another conversation entirely). Obviously RWF’s point is that Hermann’s “journey into light,” no matter how misguided, should be viewed in this context. Such a stance seems a little facile to me now—overstatement at the very least—but it is precisely the sort of dedication that would deeply impress a slightly precocious teenager in the late seventies looking for alternatives to the middle-class values of her parents. I can’t help but wonder if RWF, finally enjoying the approval and largesse of the international film industry, felt the need to confirm his anti-bourgeois credibility by spelling out this interpretation for us. How lucky for us all that the film transcends it.

*Quoted in The Anarchy of the Imagination (see Resources), p. 124.

Posted in German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged Dirk Bogarde, Volker Spengler | Comments Off

Germany in Autumn (1978)

Posted on July 19, 2013 by yearof44films

I knew a little bit about the Baader-Meinhof group before watching Germany in Autumn, but not much. I’d seen the Gerhard Richter paintings based on the newspaper images of the leaders’ alleged suicides (haunting, amazing) and Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Julianne. (Another bewildering translation for US distribution: the German title is Die bleierne Zeit, which means “the leaden times.” Do Americans really only trust foreign movies titled with characters’ first names? At least in the UK they called it The German Sisters.) But that’s about it. So I have to admit I was a little surprised to learn just how cataclysmic the events of autumn 1977 were in Germany. As revealing, I think, in terms of the fault lines and deep divisions within postwar German society as, say, Watergate had been in the US a few years earlier. Why didn’t I know this?

To understand Germany in Autumn you have to know what happened in Germany in autumn in 1977 and the events that led up to that fateful season. Which means you have to know about the Red Army Faction (RAF), the official name of the Baader-Meinhof group. Briefly, the RAF was a militant leftist revolutionary group whose titular leaders were Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Since the late 60s, they had been engaged in armed guerilla actions (bombings, robberies, arson, and later kidnapping) targeting the police, US military installations, German industrialists, and the Springer press (Germany’s analog to the Rupert Murdoch News Corp. empire). Five of the group’s leaders—Baader, Meinhof, Jan Raspe, Gudrun Ensslin, and Irmgard Möller—were arrested in 1972 and, since 1975, held along with other alleged RAF members in solitary confinement in Stammheim prison, a maximum-security facility in Stuttgart built specifically to house them.

In 1976 Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her cell, hanging from a rope made of towels, reportedly a suicide. Meanwhile, the RAF stepped up their guerilla campaign, culminating in the events of the “German Autumn” of 1977, which began with the violent kidnapping of a leading German industrialist and former member of the SS, Hanns Martin Schleyer. In October, a Lufthansa jetliner was hijacked by a team of PLO-based militants (Baader and others had trained with the PLO who, lest we forget, were a militant leftist political organization at that time) demanding the release of the RAF prisoners in Stammheim. The episode culminated in Mogadishu, when the plane was stormed on October 18 by an elite SWAT team of German police called the GSG-9 who killed all the hijackers (the captain had earlier been killed in Aden) but, miraculously, no passengers. That night Hanns Schleyer was executed by the RAF and the next morning three of the four remaining RAF leaders in Stammheim were found dead in their cells. (The fourth, Möller, did not die from the stab wounds she was found with and was eventually released from prison 17 years later.)

The Stammheim deaths were reported by the government as suicides (or in Möller’s case, an attempted suicide), even though the two men were killed by gunshots to the head (in a maxium security prison?) and Möller’s stab wounds near the heart sound logistically impossible to self inflict (she maintained that she was attacked). It is an article of faith among the German left that the deaths were a coordinated act of retaliation on the part of the German governmment. Not surprisingly, the prevailing mood following these events was one of fear and depression. This is the setting of Germany in Autumn.

This is a really interesting film, and not just for its subject matter. It’s an omnibus film (there were 11 directors involved), but it’s not like the multidirector films we’re used to, in which each director contributes a single discrete, clearly demarcated chapter or episode. (Interestingly, the only section that is clearly identifiable as a stand-alone piece is Fassbinder’s.) Instead, the film is woven together so that the sections flow together more or less seamlessly (Alexander Kluge oversaw the final editing and voice-over which ties the stories together), like a slightly meandering essay, a meditation on a place and time. It’s a really haunting film, worth seeking out.

Germany in Autumn is made up of both documentary and dramatic material. It is bookended by documentary footage of two funerals: it opens with images from Schleyer’s funeral accompanied by a letter read in voice-over he wrote to his son during the 43 days of his captivity, and closes with the funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe, whose burial was hastily arranged by Mayor Rommel of Stuttgart (yep, son of that Rommel). The dramatic sections that make up the bulk of the film, however, tackle the subject of the German Autumn obliquely, with stories of characters experiencing various levels of anxiety at various levels of political engagement. From a school teacher questioning how to teach her country’s history to a couple who may or may not be RAF crossing the border into East Germany, presumably for good, to an educational TV production of Sophocles’ Antigone put on hold by the producers for fear it will incite youth to sympathize with the terrorists, the movie depicts a traumatized society and a culture in crisis, consumed by anxiety and fear.

And then there’s RWF’s section which, for better or worse (I’d say maybe both), stands out like a sore thumb. Unlike the other chapters, whose very authorship is impossible to determine, Fassbinder stars in his section—along with his lover (Armin Meier) and his mother (Liselotte Eder aka Lilo Pempeit)—so there’s no mistaking whose work it is. The section is divided between increasingly paranoid scenes in his oppressive brown apartment shared with poor Meier, in which he despairingly learns of the October events as they unfold, and scenes in which he records himself and his mother in a Q and A about current attitudes (hers, mostly). Both are stark and brutal and uncomfortable. And disturbingly honest, even if they’re scripted (which they were). It’s a fascinating approach.

Whereas the other sequences in the film are told in the third person and are either poetic or tense, angry or elegiac (or ironic, in the case of Schlöndorff and Böll’s Antigone story), the tone of RWF’s contribution is slightly hysterical, the voice implicitly first person. I found this somewhat off-putting at first, but I think that is at least partly the point. In one scene, late at night or early in the morning, a naked Rainer calls Ingrid Caven in Paris on the phone to tell her of the suicides in Stammheim. No doubt in response to her question about what he thinks really happened, he replies “What I think is irrelevant.” Either Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe committed suicide or they didn’t; a film director’s opinion in the face of this unfolding tragedy is beside the point. And so he shows us the only thing on which he is qualified to hold forth: what it feels like to be a character called Rainer Werner Fassbinder at this moment in history.

The characters Armin Meier and Liselotte Eder are well chosen. RWF uses them as representatives of the prevailing attitudes among the German public at the time: his mother, who lived through the Third Reich, expresses alarm at the idea of criticizing the government in a time of crisis (you don’t know what people are going to do with that). She refers to democracy—the suspension of certain aspects of which she blames the terrorists for—as the lesser of evils. A better solution at a time like this would be a strong and benevolent authoritarian leader to set things right. (The sequence is followed by a series of Romantic German illustrations: a handsome and noble prince in battle, a goblin at the window of a castle, the idyllic German landscape at twilight and a picturesque cottage nestled in the woods, blanketed by fog. If I’m not mistaken, this is the same sentimental imagery celebrating heimat and Grimm’s fairy tales and Siegfried and all the rest, invoked by Hitler and Goebbels et al. only a few decades earlier.)

If Mother suggests that for every passenger and crew member killed on the hijacked plane, an RAF inmate at Stammheim should be publically shot, Meier, simple and uneducated, thinks the government should just blow up the plane and kill all the terrorists in captivity at once and be done with it; if terrorists can ignore the law then so can the state. RWF harangues them both for their willingness to give up their democratic rights and responsibilities, but ultimately turns his anger and frustration inward (drug use, deteriorating work habits, paranoid behavior). What else can he do?

He can’t stop the rightward thrust of postwar German politics, just as he cannot morally support the tactics of the RAF. Too jaded to pretend that human systems can transcend human nature as it currently exists, too honest to believe that violence can be a corrective against violence, his ambivalence about doctrinaire political movements, no matter how worthy their goals, had been evident at least since The Niklashausen Journey. Politics (to put it simplistically) is the work of humans, subject to their weaknesses, their desire for power, their selfishness, their cruelty. For Fassbinder, to reverse that famous feminist adage (and, I hope, coin a neologism, which I really hope nobody has used already), the political is always personal. Isn’t that, literally, what his movies demonstrate?

So if people are the problem, you have to get people to change. You have to change them emotionally and not just ideologically. And the first step toward this goal is to make them look at the ways their own consciousness and behavior are shaped by society and its institutions (school, parents, marriage, work), which is what I think every one of RWF’s films does or attempts to do. In this regard, making a film about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s personal descent into paranoid despair after the events of October 1977 is a political act. Showing himself vomiting from anxiety, verbally abusing his lover, arguing with his mother, even exhibiting his genitals are political acts. Movies are not supposed to show any of these things: they are not polite, they do not provide visual or narrative pleasure, and they are not morally uplifting. What they do, though, is offer a glimpse at another way of being in the world, of representing yourself to others, which is honest and open and, I think, really pretty brave. It’s not going to get people marching in the streets, but then it’s not intended to. (Germany in Autumn shows us what violent revolutionary protest leads to: police with riot gear and tanks in the street, emergency security measures, maximum security prisons, increased surveillance, a frightened electorate eager to trade their so-called freedom for security, etc. . . )

In the multiple endings of Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, the heroine either dies pointlessly in a revolutionary political action or resigns herself to her failure to achieve moral restitution for her husband. As I’ve already mentioned, RWF maintained that the second “happy” ending is even bleaker than the first. I don’t agree. Through the course of that film, Frau Küsters found her own voice and learned how to use it—something she had never even dreamed of doing when she was a good working-class hausfrau—and something RWF’s mother expresses alarm at the very prospect of doing in Germany in Autumn. Frau Küsters comes to realize that she cannot rely on “isms” or parties or movements—or bosses, journalists, or family, for that matter. She must determine her own moral code and her own way of being in the world. I think there is every reason to believe that her life with the night watchman, assuming such a life follows, will not be like her life as the wife of Hermann Küsters was before. This to me is cause for optimism, if only on a small scale. In RWF’s world I think maybe that’s the only scale that matters?

Posted in German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | 1 Comment

The Stationmaster’s Wife (1977)

Posted on July 7, 2013 by yearof44films

I’ve never understood why distributors feel the need to change the titles of foreign movies instead of properly translating them. Okay, I do understand why—they want to appeal to a broader, i.e., American audience—but I really think it’s annoying. In most cases it’s clear they’re just dumbing down (or sexing up) titles they don’t think an American audience will “get.” For example, some focus group or other must have decided that American audiences would find The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain too long and too French, and probably just too, well, fabulous, so we got Amélie instead: short and sweet but with the whimsical edges sanded off. I understand why they did this, but it still bugs me.

What I really don’t understand is why anyone would change a film’s title in a way that actually obscures the focus of the story. Such is the case with Bolwieser, released in the U.S. as The Stationmaster’s Wife. Why did they do this? Did they fear our notorious inability to figure out how to pronounce “ie” versus “ei, or “w” versus “v”? (It’s Bol-vee-zuhr, by the way.) Is a name like Bolwieser just too “weird”—or too close to Bullwinkle—for even the “serious” American filmgoer? Maybe. But if that’s the case, they could have called the American version The Stationmaster, which would have preserved the title’s meaning: it is the story of Bolwieser, after all, who is the station master at Werburg. But they didn’t, and I think the reason they didn’t is important and sadly predictable. I think the distributors were not interested in selling American audiences a movie “about” Bolwieser, station master of Werburg. They wanted to sell us a movie “about” adultery, and to sell a movie about adultery you have to focus on the adulteress. That’s who audiences want to watch committing adultery and that’s also who audiences want to blame for it.

The problem here is that The Stationmaster’s Wife is not really about the station master’s wife, and to assume that it is misses the point. In fact, I would argue that the film isn’t even “about” adultery, exactly, although the station master’s wife certainly does commit her share of it. This, I realize, is going to take some explaining, but I think it’s important. And while I don’t mean to suggest that The Stationmaster’s Wife does not tell the story of a husband so masochistically smitten with his unfaithful wife that it destroys him, I do think that focusing on the wife makes it easy to ignore deeper, more complex levels of meaning in the film. Bear with me on this.

The story is set in 1930s Werburg, a very small town in the Northern Rhineland (I think). The story opens as Xaver Bolwieser (Kurt Raab in his best—and last—performance for RWF) and his new wife Hanni (Elisabeth Trissenaar) unsuccessfully consummate their union on their wedding night. Although it is immediately clear from the very first scene that Bolwieser loves his wife with an ardor she does not share, the two seem happy enough. Or rather, Bolwieser, a simple man of simple needs, is deliriously happy—he devours both his wife’s body and the meals she prepares for him with the same greedy pleasure—while Hanni seems merely to tolerate her new life. Only when she convinces her Xaverl to invest in the Torbräu, a local restaurant fallen on hard times, to be taken over by “an old school chum” of hers—the mustachioed local butcher, Franz Merkl (Bernhard Helfrich)—do we see Frau Bolwieser express actual joy. Eager to impress his wealthy father-in-law with his investing prowess, Bolwieser agrees.

The restaurant is a success, but soon the whole town is snickering at the station master, who doesn’t even suspect what everyone else knows: Hanni and Merkl are having an affair. Eventually the locals openly mock Bolwieser, forcing him to confront his wife. Of course she does what all committed adulterers do: she explodes in righteous indignation, blaming the victim for not trusting her. Bolwieser for his part desperately begs forgiveness and drowns any further suspicions in alcohol. As the rumors about Hanni and Merkl increase, however, the situation becomes impossible to ignore. Merkl and Hanni go on the attack (last refuge of the accomplished cheater) and sue the townspeople for defamation. Bolwieser, desperate to believe he is not a cuckold and willing to do anything to make the suffering caused by his own suspicions go away, eagerly agrees to the plan.

Merkl’s case in court hinges on Bolwieser’s testimony, lent extra weight by the latter’s status as a trusted civil servant. When Bolwieser testifies that he knows nothing of any late-night assignations between his wife and Merkl and that he has never, ever, under any circumstances doubted his wife’s faithfulness for a single second of their marriage, Merkl’s case is won and the townspeople are forced to pay him restitution. Unfortunately, this testimony does not agree with Hanni’s story to which Bolwieser agreed to testify when confronted with several townspeople’s reports that they spotted Hanni on her way to Merkl’s, late one night while Bolwieser was on duty. This will come back to bite him in a big way.

Spoiler Alert
Hanni eventually tires of Merkl and takes up with her unctuous hairdresser (the wonderfully creepy Udo Kier). Merkl “regretfully” tells the stationmaster that his wife is cheating on him—as a concerned friend, of course—hastening Bolwieser’s descent into total misery. When Hanni refuses to go back to Merkl, the spurned lover vows to destroy her. Merkl returns to court and sets the record straight. Because Bolwieser is a civil servant (“a pillar of the community”) his previous testimony is declared perjury and he is sentenced to four years imprisonment. The film ends when Bolwieser, in prison, must sign the paperwork for a divorce initiated by his wife. His lawyer’s cruel laughter echoes in the background as he returns to his cell. (Even his own attorney delights in Bolwieser’s humiliation.)

So what does it all mean? On one level of course this is a classic RWF melodrama dressed up in period clothes, exploring many of the themes we’ve come to expect: the masochism of the lover who loves too much and the cruelty of the loved one who does not, the gusto with which humans exploit the emotions of other humans, the pettiness and vindictiveness of the bourgeoisie, the structural unsoundness of marriage as a foundation on which to build a life, and the inherent unfairness of that institution towards women. (What options besides infidelity did a woman have in 1930s Germany if she was bored or unhappy in her marriage?) And, really, that’s enough to make for a pretty interesting movie.

More than enough, if you take into account the amazing artistry on display in this one. I’ve already devoted quite a bit of space in recent posts to the choreographic skill with which RWF and his cinematographer Michael Ballhaus manipulated and integrated actors, camera, and sets in increasingly elaborate ways. The Stationmaster’s Wife really elevates this technique to a new height, and in a manner that feels unprecedentedly coherent. Even in as recent a movie as Chinese Roulette the camera movement, assured and audacious as it certainly was, still seemed overly self conscious, not always clearly motivated, a little de trop. (That’s why I loved it; still, such excess can become tedious.) I suspect this explains why Ballhaus later described that film as “impossible” for him to watch. The Stationmaster’s Wife is different.

It’s not just the camera movement that’s so impressive—according to Ballhaus, he and RWF were “trying to write a subtext*”— it’s the intricacy with which each image is composed, subdivided into continually changing surfaces and textures and planes, reflections and refractions in frames within frames, across space and through time, as in a kaleidoscope. I know I say this a lot, but the effect really is breathtaking. And more than in any other RWF film I can think of so far, the style (lighting, color palette, set decoration) is downright painterly, invoking both expressionism and cubism, as well as the aesthetics of German expressionist cinema (the film is set in the 1930s, remember). Amazing blacks. Chiaroscuro. Images filtered through gauze or lace or greenery. Images bisected by french doors, reflected in mirrors, bevelled glass, coffee pots . . . the whole Fassbinder-Ballhaus-Raab bag of tricks taken to a stunning new level.

But as I mentioned at the outset of this post, there is another layer to this movie which I think the German title makes easier to grasp; you have to think about what it means to have this particular protagonist and hapless victim (Bolwieser, the station master) in this particular place and time (Germany in the 1930s) to see it. A mid-level government employee, Bolwieser takes his position seriously. (He spends a lot of time scolding his underlings for breaches of protocol; such gross violations, he indignantly reminds them, reflect on him.) Self-satisfied, officious, simple, Bolwieser’s sense of his own value as a human being is determined by three things: his position or office, of which his uniform is the signifier; his wife, whom he occasionally refers to as his property; and his ability to satisfy his appetites (whether at the dinner table, the public house, or in the bedroom).

Bolwieser is a good German: preoccupied with status and appearances, rules and protocol, and of course propriety. And isn’t it precisely the “good Germans”—the ones who followed the rules, respected authority, and did what was expected of them, pleased with themselves in their fine uniforms—who enabled the Nazis to come to power at this particular moment in history? Are Bolwieser’s stubborn blindness to his wife’s true nature, his capacity to cling to illusions that will eventually destroy him, his refusal to acknowledge what was going on right under his nose, so different from the way the majority of Germans responded to the rise of National Socialism?

And then of course there’s the railway itself, vehicle of Nazi atrocities, symbol of their power to herd people like sheep to their deaths. (Who was working the railways then? Talk about willful blindness!) About two-thirds of the way through the film, Bolwieser’s second in command, Mangst (a bald and pasty Volker Spengler), shows up at the Torbräu in a Nazi uniform and you realize just how similar that uniform is to the railway official’s: same style hat, same high stiff collar with the same tabs, same silhouette: only the colors, insignias, belt and boots are different. (The overall impression is the same.) The transition from one to the other would appear to follow a certain inexorable logic. Wasn’t the appeal of Nazism, at least for many, that celebrated emphasis on rules and protocol, hierarchy and efficiency? (Was it Hitler or Mussolini who famously “made the trains run on time?”)

After his conviction but before his final sentencing, Bolwieser is let out of prison and returns home (by train, of course). Mangst is now the station master, framed in the same position on the platform in a composition previously reserved for Bolwieser. Compared to the too-white Mangst, stiff in his station master’s uniform, Bolweiser, stooped in his civilian overcoat and hat, looks dull and gray (and quite a bit like Peter Lorre in M, that sad, archetypal Weimar-era deviant, come to think of it). The decadence of Weimar swept away, the next generation of civil servant has arrived.

__________

* Quoted in Chaos as Usual: Conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Juliane Lorenz (New York: Applause, 1997), p. 106.

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged Kurt Raab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Comments Off

Women in New York (1977)

Posted on June 29, 2013 by yearof44films

It’s easy to forget that RWF continued to work in theater throughout most of his career, especially considering the magnitude of his yearly output in film. (In 1974 alone he directed four stage plays and served as creative director at the Theater am Turm in addition to directing four feature-length films. Doesn’t seem humanly possible, does it?) Women in New York, however, was the last play he directed on the stage (Hamburg, 1976). After watching the filmed version of that production, made for German TV in 1977, I find myself wishing more of his work in theater were available on film. Seeing what he did with a stage confirms something really fundamental about his artistic vision and his methods which, for me at least, are sometimes obscured by the film medium (which encourages identification and collapses distance, if that makes any sense). Like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the most “stagey” of his movies, Women in New York is there to remind you what Fassbinder was really up to, what he was about.

Women in New York is Fassbinder’s interpretation of Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 Broadway hit, The Women, which was made into a Hollywood film by George Cukor in 1939. A sensation at the time, The Women featured an all-female cast (!) and focused exclusively on “women’s issues” (which is to say, on women’s relationships to men), depicted as either comic or sentimental, occasionally tragic, depending on the context. Celebrated as a two-hour catfight, the Cukor movie has remained a camp classic, in regular rotation at the Castro for decades. But for all its witty dialog and unexpectedly frank discussion of marital infidelity (this is post Hayes-code Hollywood, remember, where beds were for sleeping), its message is predictably conservative, not to mention bleak. Luce may poke fun at the lengths to which a girl will go to hold on to her man, but the need to hold on is unquestioned.

I haven’t seen or read the original play, so I don’t know the extent to which the 1939 screenwriters may have altered it to meet the expectations of a movie audience (although I can hazard a few guesses). My sense, in any case, is that RWF remained true to the original play’s script: the only writing credits for Women in New York are Clare Boothe Luce, for The Women, and Nora Gray, for the translation. This is important—and surprising—because the overall tenor, message, and moral of Fassbinder’s rendition is radically different from Cukor’s, despite what I presume to be the relative faithfulness of story and dialog in both. The comparison offers a unique insight into RWF’s vision and craft, with which he utterly subverts the implicit moral of the story using its very own scenario. (IMDB tells me there is also a 2008 movie version of The Women starring Meg Ryan and Eva Mendes, which I’d just as soon pretend didn’t exist—although I’m sure it would make a fascinating exercise to compare all three. Maybe if I ever teach that Women’s Studies seminar . . . )

Women in New York, revolves around five wealthy socialites in New York City: the gossipy but otherwise dull and perennially pregnant Edith Potter (Eva Mattes); Peggy Day, who constantly whines about money, which she has but Mr. Day doesn’t (Anne-Marie Kuster); Nancy, who doesn’t need a last name because she’s an unmarried writer, which is to say a spinster who can’t understand the mysteries the others are privy to (Angela Schmid); Sylvia Fowler, selfish, manipulative, and catty (Margit Carstensen, not quite as departed from RWF’s world as her anecdote about Chinese Roulette would suggest); and Mary Haines (Christa Berndl), selfless and honest and, as the story begins, happily devoted to her husband. In the opening scene Sylvia gleefully tells Edith that her manicurist knows for a fact that Mr. Stephen Haines (Mary’s husband) is having an affair with a certain Crystal Allen (Barbara Sukowa), who works at the perfume counter at Saks. Sylvia persuades Mary first to visit the manicurist (Irm Hermann), whom she knows will tell poor Mary the same story (which she does), then to confront Crystal when the two of them end up in the same department store fitting rooms at the same time. Edith spreads the news about Stephen Haines and Crystal Allen to a gossip columnist and soon the whole town is talking.

Despite her mother’s advice to ignore everything for the sake of her children and her security, Mary decides to get a divorce and heads for Reno where, for various reasons, Sylvia and Peggy also turn up seeking quickie divorces (turns out Sylvia had been cheating on her own husband, who found out about it, while Peggy decided she couldn’t tolerate having more money than her husband). Garrisoned on the same Nevada dude ranch as Mary, the tears and the whiskey flow as the women take turns sniping at one another and lamenting their fate—all except Miriam (Irm Hermann, again!), there to divorce her husband so she can marry none other than Mr. Fowler (Sylvia’s soon-to-be ex), and the aging “Countess,” who has had four divorces already but is a fool for l’amour and will soon marry a fifth husband, Buck Winston, the singing cowboy she meets on the ranch. Before the ink has dried on the divorce papers, Mary, still pining for her husband, learns that Stephen has married Crystal Allen.

Everyone eventually returns to New York where all hell breaks climactically loose at a soirée thrown by the Countess, to which all New York society (i.e., our principal cast) has been invited. Upon learning that Crystal has been cheating on Stephen Haines with Buck (already!), Mary plots her revenge. She tricks Sylvia, now loyal to Crystal, into confirming the rumor and unmasks Crystal herself, ensuring that Stephen will abandon his new wife. Triumphant, Mary Haines leaves Crystal and Sylvia in the ladies room to return to Stephen.

Whereas the Hollywood ending is unequivocally happy—order is restored when Mary Haines realizes the foolishness of her pride and does whatever it takes to get her man back; Sylvia and Crystal are unmasked and punished for putting their own selfish desires ahead of loyalty, whether to husbands or girlfriends—Fassbinder’s staging is relentlessly equivocal. And this is really interesting to me. Speaking the same lines, following the same dramatic arc, RWF’s Mary is no more a victim than Sylvia or Crystal or any of the others. (Nor is she any more of a heroine. She just happens to be a nicer person.) Crystal is no more to blame for trying to get what she can in life through the only means available to her than the Park Avenue wives are for their privilege and entitlement. Even Sylvia, undeniably a nasty piece of work, is only doing what it takes to get and keep what she thinks she deserves against the inevitable odds. Because what Fassbinder shows us, once again, is that the game is rigged, and the actors struggling to play within its boundaries have already lost. It’s the paradigm and the institutions that are rotten, in other words, not just a few bad apples. A system in which women need husbands for both livelihood and happiness is bound to turn them into monsters.

How RWF achieves this seems like a textbook example of Brechtian-style distancing and stagecraft. As with The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Women in New York was shot on a stage set rather than transposed to a variety of settings, contrary to the practice standard for stage-to-screen adaptations. Whereas the Cukor movie made every effort to “open up” the play to make it look and feel like (cinematic) reality—lots of locations, exteriors, real dogs and horses, etc.—RWF confines the action to a single modular, highly stylized set, emphasizing artifice and theatricality. As in Petra von Kant, the garish, claustrophobic set draped in brightly colored fabric and lit by colored stagelights functions almost literally as a gilded cage—rather like the large aquarium that dominates the opening scene, now that I think of it, in which brightly colored tropical fish swim pointlessly back and forth in the foreground.

The costumes and make-up are as fabulous as you’d expect, while having little to no verisimilitude. Blonde Mary wears a white satin evening gown throughout most of the film, not because that’s what a socialite would wear to a bridge game or the beauty parlor or a divorce court in Reno, but because it is a signifier of what Mary is: an elegant, pampered millionaire’s wife of the noble self-sacrificing variety (as opposed to black-haired Sylvia, the vamp, or fiery Crystal with her wild curly red hair and spaghetti straps). These are types, not people, and RWF wants you to remember that.

More interesting to me is what RWF does with the minor characters. While Cukor presented Mrs. Morehead (Mary’s mother) as down-to-earth with her white hair and sensible shoes, the voice of reason from a saner time when everyone knew the rules, RWF dresses his Mrs Morehead, abrasive and hoarse, in an electric turquoise silk coat and matching turban (Phyllis Diller springs immediately to mind). She’s last generation’s model of socialite, no better than the current crop, just a product of a slightly different context. Cukor’s Nancy, the spinster, is dowdy and plain: the fact that she is a writer makes her interesting, but without a husband she is not a real woman and therefore irrelevant. RWF’s Nancy, on the other hand, is more of the Trinity-from-The-Matrix type. Severe, elegant, self-sufficient, representative of a world that doesn’t yet exist. (She still doesn’t have much of a role, of course, because she doesn’t have a man.)

And then there’s the performances by the actors, at least as important to the overall distancing effect. Not surprisingly, RWF’s actors deliver their lines to emphasize their unnaturalness and play up their artifice. It’s amazing what this simple shift accomplishes. In the 1939 film you identify with Mary and you hate Sylvia and Crystal. You feel sorry for Mary’s daughter and you find Edith and the countess absurd. You think rich socialites and the lengths they go to for their looks are ridiculous, but you secretly enjoy the bizarre fashion sequence (filmed in color!) at the center of the movie. In Women in New York, however, nobody is realistic and nearly everybody is irritating. You listen to what the actors are saying. You don’t like or dislike them, you don’t identify with them, you don’t reject them. You can’t! They’re not people! This changes everything.

Particularly interesting to me is what RWF does with the characters who represent the serving classes. In The Women, the cook and the maid function like a Greek chorus, relaying off-screen narrative developments; Lucy, the woman who runs the dude ranch where the ladies await their divorces, is a cheerful salt-of-the-earth figure who can’t afford the luxury of divorce even though her husband beats her. In the 1939 movie, I think these characters serve another purpose as well: to show winking, eye-rolling solidarity with depression-era audiences: can you believe these crazy rich people? RWF, on the other hand, stylizes these actors’ delivery so that they function almost like music hall or puppet show figures, broad and comedic. And Lucy he depicts as a kind of automaton, endlessly wiping the invisible window that functions like a proscenium arch between audience/camera and stage as she tonelessly describes her situation—the perfect expression of the non-character she actually is in this milieu. (Does the kind and sensitive Mary Haines express any outrage, let alone do anything, about poor Lucy and her intolerable situation? Of course not! Mary’s is the only tragedy Mary is interested in here!)

It’s all pure Brecht, of course, but without the didacticism. The Women was not written to instruct, after all, as Mother Courage or The Good Person of Szechuan were, but only to entertain, by poking fun at a phenomenon everyone at the time could recognize, while reinforcing widely held cultural beliefs about women’s proper role. And I think that’s what makes Women in New York so effective and Fassbinder such a genius. Through pure stagecraft he breaks open this really pretty conventional play and exposes its latent meaning and turns a sneering but complacent portrait of women in a certain place and time into an indictment of the society that produced them.

Posted in German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Uncategorized | Comments Off

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