Chinese Roulette (1976)

Posted on June 19, 2013 by yearof44films

I recently announced I had wrapped up 1976. Not true! I forgot about Chinese Roulette! Apologies to anyone actually following this thing who might have rejoiced at another year’s worth of Fassbinder out of the way, but we’ve got one more to go. Does this qualify as a Freudian slip? In any case, I don’t think I’m the only person fixated on Fassbinder to have overlooked Chinese Roulette. It’s an odd one.

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed it. After I Only Want You to Love Me and Satan’s Brew, it felt like a reward. It’s a fabulous if confounding exercise in genre and style after the solipsism of the previous two films. Don’t worry, though: it’s still personal and highly idiosyncratic. But I really appreciated its cool formalism and the sense you get that the director was back in control after a brief time in the wilderness with his demons. Maybe RWF really did get something out of his system in 1976?

The most expensive of his movies to date and his first international coproduction (French-German), I think Chinese Roulette marks the entry into a new, more accessible phase of RWF’s career (“accessible” being a relative term, of course). In addition to a small cast of regulars, it features Anna Karina and Macha Méril, two more or less iconic French actresses noteworthy for their work with Godard (to whom Karina was of course married in the 1960s). It also seems to me to mark a return to a more accessible genre—although I’m not entirely sure what that genre actually is. It’s a certain type of European thriller I associate with the 1970s: stylized and formal, with an emphasis on fashion, adultery, mind games, and labyrinthine plots that twist and turn and confuse. Or maybe it’s not so much a genre as a style of movie making. A style built around, well, style. A very specific style set in a specific place and time.

First, there’s the sartorial style: hair, make-up, fashion. Everything is—here comes that word again—stylish. Margit Carstensen with her make-up and her hair helmet and her pinstripes, Ulli Lommel with his black turtleneck and white wide-lapelled suit, Volker Spengler with platinum blond hair and combat-evocative fatigues, the red red lipstick (even Brigitte Mira sports it!), the mascara—so much mascara!—not to mention the elegant country manor, the sleek BMWs, the acrylic furniture . . . it’s a sort of compendium of late 70s European style, like a fever dream you’d set to Roxy Music. There’s even a brief scene that uses Kraftwerk (which I won’t even attempt to describe. Let’s just say it’s a dance number.)

There’s the art direction, at the center of which is the setting, an enormous manor house on a large country estate which actually belonged to Michael Ballhaus (somebody was making money!). The house is stately and grand but minimally furnished. At the center of everything are three acrylic cabinets or armoires or fixtures, which hold 1) the bar, to which the principals keep returning 2) the stereo, and 3) the chess set and the gun (a movie such as this requires both, natürlich). Completely transparent, they facilitate some truly breathtaking camera work, both reflecting and doubling the characters’ images without need of actual mirrors (though there are plenty of those, too) and enabling the camera to see the actors at all times, even when tracking behind one of these fixtures. It’s an amazing effect.

The whole thing is intricately choreographed to an extent we haven’t yet seen. The camera movement is complex, and the compositions are stylized and dramatic and completely over the top, often consisting of two or more characters in 3/4-profile and frontal arrangements, and emphasizing flat planes and deep focus: it’s downright balletic. (Peer Raben said he deliberately composed the score as a ballet, in fact.) This sort of choreography between actors and camera was not new in RWF’s work, of course, but it is more dramatic, more flamboyant, and more audacious here than in any of his previous films. The climax features a swirling 360-degree track that very closely echoes that same movement in Martha (right down to Margit Carstensen, at the center of both), and which makes the earlier move look like the dry run which in hindsight it surely was. Completely nuts, it’s worth sitting through the entire movie for. (Interestingly, Ballhaus later described this movie as “unwatchable.” Was he ashamed of all that pyrotechnic excess? I can see how he might be.)

The movie opens with Ariane Christ (Margit Carstensen) perched atop a radiator in her Munich apartment, one leg stretched out straight in front of her, the other bent at the knee, listening to opera. (I wish I were better versed in that medium—I’m sure the choice of opera is significant.) It’s a strange and stylized posture, which will be echoed by other characters throughout the film (more on this later). Her daughter, Angela (Andrea Schober) leans against another window in the adjoining room, where the turntable is. Only when the doorbell rings do we discover that Angela is crippled, and requires the use of crutches. (This little surprise sets the tone for the plot twists to come.) Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson, the father in I Only Want You to Love Me) and his assistant, Kolbe (Ulli Lommel) arrive and the couple’s various travel plans for the afternoon are briefly discussed. Ariane will go to Milan and Gerhard to Oslo on business. Angela will stay in Munich with her mute nurse, Traunitz (Macha Méril).

When Gerhard drives to the airport, however, it is not to board a plane for Oslo but to pick up his Parisian mistress, Irène (Anna Karina), whom he will drive to his country estate for an illicit weekend. When they arrive they are greeted by the caretaker/housekeeper’s androgynous son, Gabriel Kast (Volker Spengler) and, after a romp in the countryside, his mother, who simply goes by the name of Kast (an icy Brigitte Mira, in hairsprayed ‘do and vamp-red lipstick). Gerhard leads Irène upstairs to the parlor where they find . . . his wife, Ariane, and his assistant, Kolbe, getting it on, right there on the living room floor. After an awkward moment of stunned silence, husband and wife burst out laughing. Looks like there will be more of them for dinner that night, observes Gerhard.

Gerhard goes downstairs to update Kast on the dinner arrangements and tells her, portentously, adopting a similar pose to Ariane’s in the opening scene (reclining on a table with one leg stretched out in front of him, the other bent at the knee), that “Ali ben Basset was murdered in Paris. We’re the last two left.” What does this mean? What is the nature of Gerhard’s relationship to Kast and their shared, presumably clandestine, history? Sounds ominous, in any event, even if Ali ben Basset is never mentioned again.

At dinner, Kolbe and Irène are a little uncomfortable, but the Christs don’t seem to notice or care. They laugh and tell stories and, after dinner, Gabriel joins them to read from his manuscript, which he hopes Herr Christ will pull some strings to help him publish. The manuscript, a bizarre quasi-Nietzschean discourse on god and man, man as god or “sun king,” and the godlike nature of the narrator, an androgyne, who reunites the primal division of man and woman back into one, is interrupted by the arrival of the child Angela and the mute Traunitz and a trunk full of creepy porcelain dolls, which infuriates both Kast, who seems to despise the child, and Ariane, who moves to strike Angela but is restrained by Gerhard. It is clear Angela knew of her parent’s respective adulteries and deliberately showed up to punish and humiliate them.

Everyone seems shaken by Angela and Traunitz’s arrival except Gabriel, with whom Angela appears to have an understanding. When Gabriel visits her room later, as instructed, Angela tells him that her parents’ affairs began when she fell ill (in the case of her father) and were told nothing more could be done to treat her condition (in her mother’s case). Both parents, she says, blame her “for their messed up lives.” It’s as simple as that. Everything has a simple explanation, she explains. Traunitz taught her that.

Angela haunts the mansion like a malevolent spirit, the tap-scrape-tap of her crutches and braced leg echoing down the long hallways and stairwells as she slowly makes her way from room to room, stirring up trouble. Menacing and manipulative, she appears the next morning in the doorway of each parent-lover’s room while they are in various states of post-coital undress to knowingly sneer at them. At breakfast she deliberately drops her crutch  and orders Kast to go and pick it up, an assertion of power not lost on the bitter Kast. After dinner on the second night, at which she insists on the attendance of Kast and Gabriel, Angela demands that the group play a game of “Chinese roulette,” a truth guessing game in which one team identifies someone from either group to be “it” and the other team must ask questions to figure out who “it” is. Each member of the team being questioned must answer each question, ensuring a multifaceted and potentially explosive portrait.

SPOILER ALERT
The questions start out innocuously enough (“What sort of animal would this person be?”) but soon turn ugly (“What sort of death would befit this person?”). Having used up their eight permitted questions (two per team member), Ariane’s team is allowed one last question, open to anyone on her team. Gerhard suggests to Ariane that she use “their special question,” which she does. “What would this person have been under the Third Reich?” Yikes. You know this one isn’t going to end well. After Angela answers “commandant at Bergen-Belsen camp,” everyone guesses that Kast was “it.” But no, sneers Angela, “You all picked on in a cowardly way the most harmless person. It’s you, Mama!”Ariane, incensed, grabs Chekhov’s gun (introduced, of course, in an earlier scene, waiting for its cameo there in plain view) and shoots . . . Traunitz. Gerhard rushes to his wife and vows that Ariane is the only one he loves, as Kast and Gabriel carry Traunitz off to await an ambulance, and Irène and Kolbe, awkward bystanders to this family train wreck, slink away.

Several important secrets are revealed in this scene. Most important, we learn that the name of the Christ estate is “Traunitz Manor,” which of course suggests that Traunitz the governess is descended from the original overlords. Gabriel tells Angela that he knows she orchestrated the whole thing, expecting her mother to shoot her. Angela tells Gabriel she knows that he does not write his own material but steals it all.  Cut to an exterior shot of the house, as what appears to be a religious procession, very tiny in the distance and barely distinguishable in the dark, passes by and an opera in which the “until death do us part” portion of the Christian marriage vows are sung (translated into German via a subtitle—again, I regret my opera ignorance). Another gunshot is heard from within the house.

What does it all mean? The film is utterly, tantalizingly opaque, riddled with innuendo and clues and symbols, some of which are clearly significant while others could just as easily be MacGuffins, red herrings, or maybe just jokes. I had to watch the movie three times to make any sense out of it. Here, briefly, is what I think:

The religious imagery is inescapable—including an enormous life-sized crucifix on the manor grounds. Gerhard is (literally) Christ, Gabriel is a heralding angel, and Angela is an avenging angel. Following Gabriel’s bizarre reading (“And if Christ is God become man he nevertheless died as a man and not as God”) I think Gerhard is Christ the man, who turns the other cheek and dies for his wife’s sins, on the receiving end of that last gunshot. Oh, and that super-stylized pose I mentioned earlier, adopted by Ariane and Gerhard? I think it’s Adam (Man) in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, reclining with one leg straight and the other bent at the knee, touched by the hand of God.

Traunitz is the serpent in the garden (OK, I’m mixing up my biblical metaphors here, but what the hell. She planted the seed in Angela’s mind that her handicap is linked to her parents’ infidelities.) That’s why Ariane shoots Traunitz (in the neck, echoing other gestures in the film I haven’t been able to make sense of) instead of Angela. Traunitz and Kast, in any case, are opposed: Kast is the loyal servant of Ariane and Gerhard, Traunitz of Angela. Based on a few judiciously placed clues, I think the Traunitz family were Nazis and Kast was a communist, and that Gerhard, with Kast, may have come into possession of Traunitz Manor by collaborating with the Russians in 1945. (It’s complicated and it’s a stretch, but it’s the best I can do.)

I could go on and on, but unless you’ve seen the movie, it just wouldn’t be interesting. Here’s what I think is interesting, though: nasty as she is, Angela is the character RWF identifies with. Like the director, she blames her mother for her unhappiness while letting her father more or less off the hook. Both Angela and Fassbinder see themselves as victims and at the same time as godlike, manipulating the people around them like a bitter puppetmaster. And both use the game of Chinese roulette to coerce people into confessions and actions they would rather repress. During the shooting of Chinese Roulette, cast and crew lived together in the remote mansion, day and night, without leaving, just like the characters in the film. At night, for entertainment, they played RWF’s version of Chinese roulette. Margit Carstensen describes how, sensing an increasing discord between them, she felt driven to finally ask the director during one such game if he wanted to stop working with her. His answer? Yes. And that is how Margit Carstensen, until then the quintessential leading lady in a certain type of Fassbinder film, ceased to be one. As though, like Angela, the director had set the whole thing up as an elaborate trick to obtain a specific result.

Posted in 1970s style, German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Chinese Roulette (1976)

Satan’s Brew (1976)

Posted on June 8, 2013 by yearof44films

I’ve always said the others made me into the leader, whereas they say I was looking for followers. So I’ve simply tried to create a comedy about myself as seen from outside,  a comedy about what I would be if I were like that and what I perhaps am, but don’t believe I am.
—RWF, on Beware of a Holy Whore (quoted in Ronald Hayman, Fassbinder: Film Maker, p. 49.)

It’s widely accepted—axiomatic, even—that RWF’s films fall into a few easily identified, chronologically determined categories: the underground gangster film, the melodrama (whether Brecht- or Sirk-inflected), the political satire, the historical drama. Occasionally, however, RWF released a film that did not appear to fall into any of these categories, perhaps demonstrating the folly of such a schematic and reductive understanding of such a large body of work. Where does World on a Wire fit in, for example? Or Beware of a Holy Whore? And what about Satan’s Brew, strangest of all? Are these movies just outliers, or are they part of a larger pattern not necessarily discernible to the 1976 viewer (or the blogger trying to think like one)?

The answer, I think, is both. World on a Wire certainly feels like an outlier (that’s probably why I liked it so much), but you can still find themes and threads that link it to RWF’s other work (fragmented identity under capitalism, the smoke and mirrors of cultural production that looks like reality but isn’t,  the convergence of corporate and bourgeois ideologies, etc.). Beware of a Holy Whore and Satan’s Brew, on the other hand, stand out primarily because they are both “comedies” (without actually being funny) that lampoon the director himself as well as the media and institutions in and through which he was working at the time. On further reflection I think they might deserve a “category” unto themselves, even if after scrutiny they too exhibit themes that overlap with the rest of his work. (More on this after the synopsis—which, I’m warning you now, is quite long. The only way I can see to talk about Satan’s Brew is to describe it in detail.)

But before I begin . . . will it spoil everything if I mention up front just how much I hated this movie? I really did not like it at all. The pace is frenetic, the actors are manic and shrill, the sexuality is grotesque, and the jokes are ugly and cruel and unfunny. It’s deliberately distasteful and irritating and obnoxious—imagine the Three Stooges directed by Alfred Jarry, or a pornographic Punch and Judy show. I found it so annoying that I actually considered just turning it off halfway through and issuing a “sorry, but life is too short” apology for this post. But a vow is a vow, so I decided to soldier on. I’m actually glad I did, even if I can’t actually recommend the film. As I’m sure I have demonstrated already, you can appreciate a Fassbinder film without actually enjoying it.

The movie opens as Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), “poet of the revolution,” desperately tries to cajole his publisher into giving him another advance on a book he hasn’t begun to write. Failing this he visits a kinky aristocrat named Irmgart von Witzleben (Katharina Buchhammer) who gets off on giving Kranz money for . . . something. Sex? The honor of being a patron? Humiliation? It’s hard to tell. Writhing on the floor in her back-of-the-Fredericks-of-Hollywood-catalog underwear while writing Walter a check, she begs him to shoot her, which he does, inexplicably. Then it’s off to another lover’s place. Lise (Ingrid Caven) lives with her husband, Rolf (Marquard Bohm), who encourages her to sleep with Walter because they have an open marriage, or something, and he’s busy tinkering or inventing, or something. Lise doesn’t feel like servicing Walter, however (he owes them money already) and whines at a really gratingly high pitch until Walter leaves.

Walter returns to his own apartment where his bitter, beleaguered wife, Luise (Helen Vita), barks and yells and harangues him for failing to bring home the bacon and refusing to sleep with her while his mentally ill brother, Ernst (Volker Spengler), demonstrates his obsession with flies. (He wants to fuck them. Really, that’s what he says.) Walter gives Ernst the gun he used to shoot von Witzleben and asks him to hide it for him. Unable to write any new poetry, he decides that he will interview a prostitute and publish a book about it instead. (This is decades before Oprah et al. helped make the lurid confessional a mainstay of the publishing industry, by the way: how prescient RWF was!). He hires Lana von Meyerbeer (Y Sa Lo), who happily tells him grotesque and titilating tales of childhood abuse and horror (at her customary rate), and services him (at her customary rate) when he loses interest.

After Ernst reads him a few lines from a book, Walter, suddenly touched by the muse, begins reciting a new poem. It turns out, however, that the poem in question was actually written by the late-19th–early-20th century German mystical poet, Stefan George. When this is pointed out to him, Walter decides that he must be Stefan George (how else to explain it?) in a new incarnation. Meanwhile a peculiar police detective, Lauf (Ulli Lommel), begins sniffing around, suspecting Walter of the murder of von Witzleben.

Walter orders a belle époque suit with flowing cravat and begins wearing a Stefan George–style mane of a wig, with bizarre expressionist make-up. He hires a group of young male actors to attend soirées in which he recites his poetry. (George was famous for sharing his obscure but lyrical work with only a select group of young male acolytes whom he encouraged to remain celibate.) When Walter’s wife explains that he cannot be Stefan George because the latter was a homosexual, Walter heads for the public toilets in the subway and picks up a prostitute (Armin Meier) whom he dresses up as an Olympian god to recite George’s work.

Desperate for cash, Walter had earlier telephoned an ardent epistolary admirer, Andrée (played by Margit Carstensen, unrecognizable in bottle-thick round glasses and a quintessentially frumpy short gray wig), and invites her to come and stay with him. Convinced that she is Walter’s soulmate in the tradition of ecstatic 19th-century hysterics, Andrée immediately assumes the role of devoted slave; the more Walter mistreats her the more she claims to worship him. Her degradation includes being banished to the cellar where she is raped by Ernst, being sent down to the river in a light summer dress to streetwalk until nightfall in the dead of winter (she comes back with hypothermia), and, of course, giving Walter all her money. Ha ha.

When the Stefan George gig inevitably falls apart, Kranz visits his parents (played by Brigitte Mira and Hannes Kaetner, the night-watchman with whom Mother Küsters goes home to eat Himmel und Erde at the end of Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven—this might be the only joke in the film that made me chuckle) and talks them into giving him their funeral savings. Margit Carstensen follows him and expresses her disgust—not because Walter has just extorted an elderly couple, his own parents no less, but because he is not of the noble birth he claimed to be. The horror!

Next, Walter blackmails the prostitute Lana von Meyerbeer who, he discovers, has a husband working out of the country. After Lana retaliates by enlisting a couple of thugs to beat Walter up, Andrée realizes that Walter is weak “like her” and not the übermensch she believed him to be. Before leaving him forever she gives Walter, bloodied and lying in the street, a couple of good strong kicks and jauntily stomps on his hand for good measure.

Must I go on? It all gets predictably, farcically worse. Walter, no longer blocked, begins feverishly writing again and delivers a book to his delighted publisher. On his triumphant return home he learns that Luise, who had been showing signs of illness apparent only to Ernst, has died in hospital. Walter feigns abject grief to the disgust of the doctor (Adrian Hoven), orderlies, and the last of his devoted Stefan George–period acolytes (Vitus Zeplichal), all of whom are appalled that he would display such a petty bourgeois emotion as grief. Lucky for them he was just kidding! Ha ha! He returns home to find that Rolf has run off with Andrée to open a stationary shop in the country, so Lise moves in with Walter and Ernst, immediately assuming the characteristics of the hausfrau Luise, barking domestic orders and complaints. The police detective, Lauf, shows up with Irmgart von Witzleben, who isn’t dead after all, and everyone has a good laugh. Order restored, the three roll around on the carpet while Lise bustles and clucks in the kitchen.

Ach, so. As with Beware of a Holy Whore, Satan’s Brew feels like an elaborate inside joke (although I don’t think RWF cared whether the audience was in on the joke or not), a personal rant against the  business of culture in Germany, the delusions of the consumers of art, the pretensions of the artist and, I think, the expectations and criticism of the cultural and political left. It’s angry and its personal. I can’t help but think that, like Beware of a Holy Whore before it, Satan’s Brew was a kind of necessary outlet for an artist who had been averaging four feature-length films a year for five years (!) and needed to vent. I also think the same old subjects were getting a little overripe. 1976 looks to me like the year when certain of RWF’s obsessions finally came to a head and got the better of him: first with the self-pitying exhibitionism of I Only Want You to Love Me, then in the self-mockery of Satan’s Brew. (Both strike me as products of an unhealthy self-obsession). But it tells you something about RWF’s status in 1976. Unlike Beware of a Holy Whore, which depicts a director, cast, and crew on the set of a feature film shoot, RWF’s stand-in in Satan’s Brew is a poet, the loftiest of all figures in the classical Western tradition. Fassbinder’s woes are no longer merely those of a film director, in other words; they are those of the Artist.

RWF of course has an axe to grind, which is not surprising: as a beneficiary of government arts funding for years, he must have found himself in a uniquely uncomfortable bind. Mocking the hand that fed him necessitated that he mock himself for prostituting himself in the first place and working within a system he must have found morally if not artistically compromising. But as I’ve already suggested, there’s more to it than funding. By 1976, RWF was a major figure in the German cultural landscape, considered by many to be the voice of a generation. So he caricatures himself here not merely as a whore, but as a mouthpiece, a false prophet, a leader of sheep: the official poet of the revolution.

But even that’s not the joke. The inside joke here is not an allegory about the politics of culture or the business of art. On a very simple level RWF is depicting himself the way he actually behaved: as a charismatic leader at the center of an utterly dependent circle of devoted followers whom he manipulated emotionally, sexually, financially and creatively. One example should do more than suffice: according to Ronald Hayman, RWF actually made Irm Hermann and Ursula Strätz turn tricks while the two were living with him during the Antitheater days so he could spend his time writing without having to earn a living.

Which brings me back to the quote at the opening of this post, which could just as easily apply to Satan’s Brew. It’s as though RWF could only confront his own deeply motivated sociopathic behavior when it was refracted through images, which is to say “seen from outside.”  And maybe this is where Satan’s Brew and Beware of a Holy Whore fit in. They demonstrate the only method by which Fassbinder could confront (let alone make sense of) himself: reflected in images, displaced through cinema. So maybe, maybe all those references to images reflected in mirrors in all those movies, maybe they’re not just metaphors for the relationship between image and reality, the illusory nature of film, the fragmented self under bourgeois capitalism, and so on. Maybe they’re a metaphor for the only way Fassbinder himself could confront reality.

Posted in German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Satan’s Brew (1976)

I Only Want You to Love Me (1976)

Posted on May 29, 2013 by yearof44films

As I’ve said many times now, one of Fassbinder’s great strengths as an artist was his ability to translate incredibly specific, personal, and often idiosyncratic experiences and emotions into terms that a much wider audience could relate to. You don’t need to know anything about RWF’s own history and personal obsessions, for example, to enjoy his movies (not even Fox and His Friends). You don’t need to know that, for Fassbinder, prostitution was a moral act, for example, or that the young Rainer equated his mother’s coldness and distance with bourgeois decorum, which is why he rejected the latter so vociferously, or that the illiterate Armin Meier, product of a Nazi eugenics program, was RWF’s lover for several years before killing himself, to understand the problems depicted in his films. They work on many levels, which is of course why they work. It’s interesting to connect the dots between RWF’s life and art, but it’s not necessary.

That at least has been the case so far. I Only Want You to Love Me is, for me, the exception. This one, made for television, is so personal, so bitter, and frankly, so overdetermined, that it really only makes sense if you look at it in relation to the director’s own biography. Which is odd, since I Only Want You to Love Me was based on a true story, published in a book by Christiane Erhardt and Klaus Antes. And all the more surprising since the use of literary source material as a platform for staging the director’s own vision and obsessions (Martha, Effi Briest, Mother Küsters, etc.) had long been standard practice. And yet here that staging just feels heavy-handed and forced.

The film tells the story of Peter Trepper (Vitus Zeplichal), a serious and gentle young man oppressed by his bourgeois café-owning parents, especially his mother, whose love he desperately craves yet cannot win. When the movie opens, Peter is building his parents a beautiful new house in the Bavarian Forest—by himself and with his own hands, no less—all the while working nights in their café. His parents show neither gratitude nor appreciation; his mother’s only response when Peter shows up for work after a long day on the construction site, for example, is anger that his fingernails are dirty. After he marries the quiet Erika (Elke Aberle), Peter decides to move to the city where he can start a new life.

Peter finds a job as a construction worker, laying foundations for skyscrapers (symbol alert: on the backs of labor are the monuments to capital erected), and sets up house in a sad company-owned apartment. Soon after, Erika announces that she is pregnant. It is clear that Peter’s wages will not be enough to sustain the family—especially given his penchant for buying Erika presents he can’t afford, a holdover from his fruitless childhood efforts to buy his cold and distant mother’s love with gifts.

Peter continues in the irrational and unwavering pursuit of the trappings of bourgeois affluence even after the baby is born, refusing to let Erika go back to work to earn money they desperately need, buying her gifts she does not. When the purchase of a brand-new bedroom set (on the installment plan, natürlich) threatens to bankrupt them, he tries to work as much overtime as possible. Overworked, exhausted, and on the verge of collapse, Peter is eventually required to take time off to rest, unpaid. This prompts his emotional (and fiscal) unraveling, which culminates in the murder of a café-owner—who looks remarkably like his own café-owning father—when he finally snaps.

All the major Fassbinder themes and motifs of the period are in play here: the crushing weight of bourgeois materialism and mores, the oppression of the working classes under consumer capitalism, the masochism of love and, towering above them all, the Bad Mother, whom the unloved son desperately and pathetically tries to please with gifts, acts of devotion, and his own subservience. I have no problem with any of this, of course—it’s all the stuff of Fassbinder, familiar and even comforting in a funny way after so many movies. So why do I have so little patience for this particular one? Is this film really any less plausible or engaging than, say, The Merchant of Four Seasons or Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven? Technically, no. And yet, for me, it just does not work.

That said, there are some great moments in I Only Want You to Love Me. Ballhaus’ cinematography is beautifully restrained, occasionally breathtaking. (The scenes in the subway are really amazing.) Kurt Raab’s art direction is pitch perfect as ever, if not all that different from what we’ve seen in so many RWF movies already: the Trepper family dining room, for example, is nearly identical to Eugen’s parents’ dining room in Fox and His Friends, site of some of Franz’s most crushing humiliation. (In Fassbinder, the dinner table is the battlefield where class warfare is waged.) The color palette, especially in Munich, is industrial drab, whether at the construction site, in the subway, or in Peter and Erika’s sad little apartment—a dull canvas against which the flowers Peter repeatedly buys for his wife, and had earlier presented to his mother, jump off the screen. It’s a really stunning effect, simple but beautiful.

The central image of the movie is a flashback when little Peter, no more than eight years old and still in lederhosen, has brought his mother a beautiful bouquet and is shamed as a neighbor angrily reports that those flowers were stolen from her garden. The wordless spanking that ensues—with a wooden coat hanger that eventually breaks under his mütti’s fury—is sadistic and bizarre, out of all proportion to the alleged crime. (Erni Mangold plays Frau Trepper with chilling cruelty, the mother of all Fassbinder’s Bad Mothers.)

And that is the problem. Frau Trepper is too cruel to be simply explained away by her bourgeois rectitude, and Herr Trepper too indifferent. Peter is too passive, too doglike in his devotion to his mother to be credible, even within the context of the film (which is to say, in Fassbinder’s world, where the laws that determine credibility are obviously different). Unlike Hans Epp, or Fox, or Emmi, or Petra von Kant, or Martha, or Margot, or even Whity, Peter is utterly one-dimensional in his victimhood, lacking any apparent internal conflict or complexity. His sole raison d’etre is to be victimized, both by capitalist society and by his mother (essentially the same thing). Which is just not that interesting. At least not in 1976 after you’ve seen so many variations on this scenario played out in so many RWF movies already.

It’s all just too much, as though Fassbinder, who has already shown us these characters (the bad mother, the innocent turned masochist by the desperate need to be loved) and these scenarios (individuals broken by capitalism and imprisoned by bourgeois morality and institutions, especially marriage) couldn’t help turning it up one more notch. As though he hadn’t quite gotten it out of his system.

Which all seems pretty Freudian to me. Like the fetishist or the masochist, consigned to repeat the same rituals over and over in an attempt to fill the void, or lack, or whatever it is that needs to be filled, left over from some ancient childhood trauma, Fassbinder, in film after film, has tried to make the deep suffering he blamed on his own mother go away by re-enacting and displacing it through his characters. But of course these ritualistic exorcisms never actually exorcize the demons or heal the wound, which is why you have to keep repeating the whole thing—wearing your wife’s high heels, tasting the whip, making movies that feature characters oppressed by bourgeois society whose desire to be loved makes masochists of them, whatever—over and over just to try and find a little peace. In film after film it’s as though Fassbinder had been scratching around an old, itchy wound without finding relief. With I Only Want You to Love Me he finally goes straight for the scab and just rips it off.

(There’s another Freudian element here, of course, which is Peter’s blatantly Oedipal murder of the café owner. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that RWF cast Erni Mangold, an actress far younger-looking and more haughtily attractive than any of his previous bad mothers, as Frau Trepper, or the far mousier Elke Aberle, who had been a child star in presumably wholesome family dramas in Germany in the 1960s, as his innocent young wife.)

More interesting to me from a psychoanalytical perspective is the appearance of the doppelgänger which, though not entirely new in RWF (think of the doublings and displacements of Franz Biberkopf and the director himself) seems more literal here. There is a moment when Peter first encounters the café owner whom he will later murder and he does a double take (pun not intended). I actually thought the man was Peter’s father, a resemblance which was certainly intentional.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this beyond the Oedipal business, but I do think it is significant, especially in light of some of the movies I know are coming (most notably Despair [1977], which is about an imagined doppelgänger). I should also mention here that in the interviews between Peter and the prison psychologist which are used as a framing device in the film, Vitus Zeplichal is clearly doing the director: his low voice, mumbled speech, even the way he holds a cigarette are pure Fassbinder. Another doppelgänger?

I Only Want You to Love Me features virtually no RWF regulars. Of all his vast stable, only Peer Raben and Ingrid Caven—arguably the collaborators with whom he had the closest ties both personally and professionally—have cameo roles as salespeople who facilitate Peter’s downfall (Raben sells him the bedroom set, while Caven sells Peter the weaving machine Erika never asked him for and which is the last straw that breaks the couple financially). Perhaps I’m just on a crazy roll here, but I can’t help but read a certain Freudian significance into this too. RWF famously referred to his actors as a “family,” many of whom lived communally with him in the early years. Is RWF suggesting that this family—Caven, to whom he was briefly married, and Raben, with whom he had a sexual and reputedly bullying relationship—were dangerous forces that wanted to suck him dry (financially, emotionally, artistically)? Did he need fresh unspoiled talent to facilitate the laying bare of his soul that this movie so clearly seems to represent, actors who did not already know him too intimately? Am I going too far in my obsessive reading of all this?

Maybe this is the problem with my methodology. I can’t help but wonder if I would have actually enjoyed I Only Want You to Love Me had I not already watched 19 of the 24 Fassbinder movies that preceded and informed it. Watching these films strictly in sequence, it is impossible not to read—and judge—them as part of a larger whole at the center of which is the director himself, whose inner demons, though fascinating when viewed obliquely, are awkward and a little disturbing when fully exposed.

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged , | Comments Off on I Only Want You to Love Me (1976)

Fear of Fear (1975)

Posted on April 26, 2013 by yearof44films

It’s impossible to watch Angst vor der Angst (the German title is just so much better, don’t you think? Just say it out loud!) without thinking of Martha. Both films feature Margit Carstensen as a high-strung housewife crushed by marriage. Both are adaptations made for German TV (Martha was based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich; Fear of Fear on an “idea” of Asta Scheib). Both prominently feature Roche Valium with it’s blue-diamond–labelled bottle. But, as with so many RWF “reworkings” of his own films, the short span between original and revision—only a year between Martha and Fear of Fear—made a world of difference. As should come as no surprise, the later film handles what is more or less the same subject with considerably greater nuance and depth. This is my favorite RWF melodrama yet. (I know, I know, I say that every time. But it’s true every time, I swear.)

The film opens—and is set almost entirely in—a middle-class apartment in Bonn. Margot (a blonde Margit Carstensen), pregnant with her second child, is dreamily making a cake while her four-year-old daughter, Bibi, angrily sulks because Margot won’t let the child help her for fear she will make a mess. Kurt, her husband (Ulrich Faulhaber), comes home and patiently explains this simple truth to the little girl.  Tranquility restored, the three agree to spend a quiet weekend at home; husband and wife embrace lovingly in what should be a simple and idyllic portrait of family life. And yet even before the next scene (brilliantly coinciding with the opening credits) when Margot experiences the first of a series of strange and disturbing attacks of vertigo—conveyed by means of a classic Hollywood-style POV shot from Margot’s perspective; you know, the kind where the image swims—we know that something is wrong. Margot’s unease in her quiet brown and blue apartment is obvious from the first carefully-framed deep-focus doorframe-bisected shot.

The attacks of dizziness continue after the baby is born; Margot fears she is going crazy. Kurt, preoccupied with his upcoming exams (he’s some sort of grad student?), pays no mind. Margot’s behavior is not logically motivated—he knows she’s happy, after all—so not worth indulging. A visit to the doctor confirms that there is nothing physically wrong with her. The doctor writes her a prescription for Valium and soon Margot is hooked. When she runs out, she makes a beeline for the pharmacy, conveniently located just across the street. The handsome but creepy pharmacist, Dr. Merck (Adrian Hoven), explains that although he cannot legally dispense medicine to her without a prescription, he has always loved her round eyes, her clear skin, her hair . . .  And so begins a dance that involves rejecting then soliciting Dr. Merck, bouncing between Valium and cognac, deflecting the mounting insults of her mother- and sister-in-law (Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann, respectively), and trying to avoid the sad, spectral Herr Bauer from across the street (Kurt Raab), who haunts her like a guilty conscience. (Margot explains to Bibi that Herr Bauer is “sick in his head.”) Inevitably, Margot is overwhelmed by her illness, which the kind doctor at the sanatorium she is eventually sent to tells her is simply depression. Margot, however, has no words to describe her condition, and refers to it simply as fear. Fear of . . . she doesn’t know what. The film ends much as it began, with Margot, medicated and seemingly on the mend, suffering this unnameable angst yet again. And we realize, with Margot, that there can be only one end to this interminable suffering.

If Martha was a roller coaster ride (and yes, that’s a deliberately chosen metaphor, a pivotal image you might remember from that movie), in which the heroine’s journey is physical, shaped by events and experiences external to her and propelled by the threat of actual violence, Fear of Fear is an existential crisis, a depiction of a state of mind and a state of being. True, Margot’s mother-in-law, Frau Stautde, is nagging and unrelentingly disapproving (in a really delightful performance by Brigitte Mira, unexpectedly against RWF type), and Lore, her sister-in-law, is an unrepentant bitch (played very much to type by Irm Hermann, whom the director appears to have consigned eternally to this place of nasty shrewish bitterness), but they do not constitute an actual threat to Margot as Helmut did to Martha. Kurt, self-absorbed and clueless though he is, does genuinely want to help his wife, if only to the extent that he’s capable of understanding what that might entail. Even Frau Staudte believes she is doing what’s best for the children when she scolds her daughter-in-law for her dreamy absence, her vanity, or her inadequate cooking.

RWF has no need of monsters here, which is what makes this film so effective and so disturbing. The threat to Margot’s sanity is not her husband, or her mother-in-law, or Herr Bauer, or even Dr. Merck, it is a function of what she is (Kurt’s wife, Bibi and Jan’s mother, Dr. Merck’s lover, Mutter Staudte’s daughter-in-law), which is another way of saying, what she is not (a fully realized individual). Margot’s angst, in other words, is the product of her own dawning awareness, which she cannot articulate even to herself, of the network of relationships that constitute the fabric of her very being, which are themselves a product of cultural standards not of her choosing and over which she has no control. Margot’s fear, ultimately, is that she does not actually exist.

Fear of Fear is beautifully restrained compared to the explosive emotional pitch and saturated technicolor styling of Martha. The sunlight, the streets, even the blocks of flats along Margot’s street in Bonn are suffused with a lightness that is totally different from the rich color of Constanz. The furniture is sensible and comfortable looking (no gothic grandfather clocks or man-eating ferns as in the Victoriana-inflected Martha). The palette is consistently muted (earth tones and quiet blues), against which Margot, with her pale skin and hair, is practically lost. (And against which her coral nail polish and lipstick don’t stand a chance, although they do harmonize nicely.) Brigitte Mira’s blue paisley apron actually blends in with the wallpaper. This, of course, is the point: Mütter is part of the gestalt, like the furniture, while Margot . . . well, Margot just disappears.

As in earlier films, beginning with The Merchant of Four Seasons, RWF masterfully uses frames within frames in domestic interiors (doorframes, corridors, mirrors) to convey fundamental truths about the characters’ place in their world. But it’s the windows that really tie the whole thing together. They are the source of all that light, for one thing. Lightly screened by gauzy white lace curtains (classic signifier of bourgeois propriety: they’re what old ladies peek through to spy and pass judgment on the neighbors), they dominate the interiors and frame many of the exteriors as well.  In fact, they are the predominant framing device throughout the film. Margot’s trips to and from Dr. Merck’s cabinet of medicinal wonders and her encounters with Herr Bauer, for example are always shot (at least initially) through a window in Margot’s apartment building, which automatically constrains them as images within a frame, literally defining and delimiting Margot’s world, the box in which she is trapped. Quite often, too, such scenes are shot not from Margot’s but from Lore’s apartment upstairs as the latter gathers evidence against her erratic sister-in-law. It’s a perfect device for capturing and communicating Margot’s growing sense of hopeless entrapment.

One other thing I’d like to note: While Herr Bauer claims a dark understanding of Margot’s malaise, the one character who actually sympathizes with her while demanding nothing in return is her brother-in-law, Karli (played by Armin Meier, as Brigitte Mira’s son and passive husband to Irm Hermann’s shrew, just as in Mütter Kusters—I love it when Fassbinder does this. If only he’d cast Karlheinz Böhm as the pharmacist!). And this is where some knowledge of the director’s biography proves useful. I didn’t know this when I wrote about Fox and His Friends, but Meier, to whom RWF dedicated that film, was the director’s lover at the time, on whom RWF reputedly modelled the character of Fox. (I still stand by my take on his relationship to Fox as a character, however. RWF wants you to identify him with Fox.) Meier committed suicide in 1978, which makes his sad, gentle depiction of Karli—who delivers the news of Herr Bauer’s suicide to Margot, thereby ensuring her relapse—prophetic and chilling.

Posted in 1970s style, German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Fear of Fear (1975)

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975)

Posted on April 2, 2013 by yearof44films

My husband and I saw Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven as part of a Fassbinder retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive in the 1990s. It was one of our favorite movies at the time, so of course I was curious to see how I’d feel about the movie now, in a different context and a different century. I’m happy to report that it’s still one of my favorites. In fact, it’s actually better than I remembered. (Dave agrees. He watched it with me again.) It’s just a marvelous film.

This is going to sound odd, considering the darkness of the subject matter, but there is a certain, well, a certain lightness to this film which I found, then and now, surprisingly refreshing. This probably has to do with the welcome absence of sexual/emotional/ masochistic angst that dominates so many RWF movies of the period (which can get really overwhelming if you watch too many of them in succession). It may also have to do with the overall tone of the film—by which I mean both the visual tone (mostly high-key lighting, super-saturated color, really nice art direction, fluid camera work), as well as the narrative tone, which is often satiric. True, as in nearly all RWF films, the protagonist is relentlessly exploited right to the end, but in this case she is not depicted as a victim, at least not in the way that Fox or Hans Epp or Effi Briest or Martha or Whity or even Emmi (and so on) were, and this, I think, makes all the difference. For me the simple dignity and strength and determination in Brigitte Mira’s portrayal of Emma Küsters shifts the balance.

And then there’s the two different endings included in later prints and on the DVD—one tragic but mediated, the other almost optimistic and sweet—offering two different solutions to the riddle of the film’s title. Delightful stuff, even if the film’s ultimate message is bleak.

Or maybe it’s just that Mother K is an overtly political film, which we haven’t really seen from RWF since The Niklashausen Journey?

The film is beautifully directed. Shot exclusively in interiors (mostly the Küsters’ apartment), the actors and camera are deftly and precisely choreographed—so much so that you don’t even notice it a lot of the time. The camera movement is subtle and effective, and the framings are complex and often symbolically charged. (Have I talked about how beautifully RWF uses doorways? It’s been noteworthy at least since The Merchant of Four Seasons, but I swear he takes it to a new level in this film.) The color palette is mostly subdued, which makes the occasional splashes of bright red (from Frau K’s cooking pots and tools, to Ingrid Caven’s lipstick, to the flowers that appear in many scenes) really pop. The costumes perfectly but subtly telegraph each character’s essential traits.

The opening credit sequence sets the tone: a series of stills, colored like postcards from the 1950s (which is probably what they are) depicting the sights of Frankfurt, poster city for West German reconstruction after WWII. The story opens in Frau Küsters’ (Brigitte Mira) modest working-class kitchen, as she and her son, Ernst (Armin Meier, looking not a little like James Dean), are assembling electrical plugs at the kitchen table, a cottage-industry assembly line. A newsflash interrupts the big band music on the radio: a worker at a nearby chemical factory has killed a manager and himself on the factory floor! Soon enough the doorbell rings: the visitor regrets to inform Frau Küsters that the killer was her husband, Hermann Küsters, who must have gotten wind of mass layoffs at the factory and just snapped, killing the boss’ son before taking his own life. Frau Küsters is in shock.

Next thing you know, the apartment is swarming with reporters. Because she is both courteous and naïve, and because she respects the simple truth that everyone has a job to do (even tabloid photographers), Frau Küsters agrees to let the most persistent of them, Niemayer (Gottfried John), return the next day to take photos. Which he does, all the while questioning Frau Küsters, Ernst, and his bitter, pregnant wife, Helene (tight-lipped, mean, and slightly hysterical as only Irm Hermann could play her), not so subtly goading them into admissions that will easily be twisted for sensationalist purposes. When Frau K informs Niemayer that she must pick up her daughter Corinna (Ingrid Caven) at the airport, the reporter eagerly offers to drive her.

If Ernst looks like James Dean, Corinna Coren (her kunstname or stage name) evokes Kim Novak in Vertigo. She arrives wearing a retro light gray suit over a turtleneck (Vertigo fans will remember that’s how Judy styles Madeleine’s trademark outfit in response to Scottie’s forced makeover); later, Corinna will replace the turtleneck with a sheer black scarf (another accessory worn by Kim Novak as Madeleine). And there’s more: Corinna wears this outfit to her father’s funeral, posing dramatically over the grave, flowers in hand, for the reporters’ cameras. Her gesture as she releases her bouquet into the grave mirrors Kim Novak’s at Fort Point when she releases hers into the bay; her posture, along with some suddenly eerie and melody-free organ music on the soundtrack, is also reminiscent of the graveyard scene at Mission Dolores when Madeleine visits Carlotta’s grave.

But why all these references to the 1950s, and why am I dwelling on them in such detail? I think they’re intentional and therefore important: they deliberately evoke the era of the German economic miracle (wirtschaftswunder) which, under Adenauer, established the  bourgeois capitalist system that RWF and his generation decried, and which radical groups like the Red Army Faction sought to overthrow. (As I said, this is a political film.) If I were more politically minded myself I might suggest that Corinna and Ernst, who are themselves apolitical (cynically so in Corinna’s case), model themselves after icons of the 1950s precisely because they accept the ahistoricism promoted by consumer capitalist culture. (But why Kim Novak rather than, say, Marilyn Monroe? Maybe because Vertigo’s Madeleine is precisely an invented persona, as “Corinna Coren” is? Or am I taking this too far? Maybe RWF just loved Vertigo like I do?)

But anyway: Niemayer goes straight to work on Corinna who, unlike the rest of her family, knows exactly what is going on and is only too happy to oblige in exchange for the publicity it will give her fledgling career as a nightclub singer. Corinna knows an opportunity when she sees one, which is why she gives Niemayer the kind of answers she knows he is looking for—and why she starts sleeping with him. (“He has a lot of contacts,” she tells a disgusted Frau K.)

Ernst and Helene go on vacation instead of attending Herr K’s funeral, then announce they are moving out. Corinna moves in with Niemayer. The latter’s article is published and, not surprisingly, it paints Hermann Küsters as a deranged alcoholic sociopath. Frau K is stunned. This is not the Hermann she was married to for 40 years. This is not the man she described to those reporters. Abandoned by her children and alone, Frau K vows to restore her husband’s good name.

Enter the Thälmanns (Karlheinz Böhm and Margit Carstenson, delightfully polar opposites of the couple they played in Martha), kind and solicitous—and wealthy— operatives in the German Communist party. (Lest he be perceived as a bourgeois capitalist, Herr T hastily explains that their beautiful house and its contents were inherited.) They patiently explain to Frau K that Hermann was not a murderer but a victim of the capitalist system, and that while the means he chose were wrong, his impulse out there on the factory floor that fateful day was noble and selfless. They promise to help her set the story straight and, indeed, the article that Thälmann publishes does defend Küsters. Too bad nobody but Communists will read it.

(Before I continue I need to mention the Thälmann’s costumes, which are just brilliant. Carstenson wears plainly expensive, beautifully-designed versions of what I can only describe as Stalin-era Soviet garb—flowing apron-like pinafores, shawls, floppy head coverings, her hair always pulled into a severe utilitarian yet elegant bun. And Thälmann’s full-length black leather coat is a classic of the spy genre. Isn’t it always the Russian who wears one?)

Alone, denied a pension by the factory where Hermann worked, Frau K has no one to turn to but the Thälmanns, who make it clear that she is always welcome in their opulent home, day or night. Assured that an action to restore her husband’s reputation is imminent, Frau K joins the Communist party. She gives a speech at a party meeting—her first ever—that is eloquent and powerful and suggests that she has found her voice and her strength in the solidarity promised by the party, even if she still doesn’t understand politics and is there primarily because she has nobody else to talk to and they are nice to her. (Brigitte Mira is really fantastic here.) But after the speech she is approached by a lurking anarchist, Horst Knab (Matthias Fuchs), who informs her that the Thälmanns are really just ineffectual armchair socialists who will never deliver on their promises. Unlike the Thälmanns, Knab is not constrained by the exigencies of party politics. He assures Frau K that what she needs and only he can provide is a “striking action” to make the world take notice. When the patronizing Thälmanns finally make it clear that they don’t have time to do anything more for Frau K, she turns to Knab, who proposes that they occupy the offices of Niemayer’s magazine and demand a retraction.

Spoiler Alert: The Two Endings

In the original version of the film, Knab and his cohort turn out to be armed and take the employees of the publisher’s office hostage “in the name of the lone revolutionary Hermann Küsters .” (Knab, who clearly has an ear for marketing, refers to himself as the Küsters  Commando.) Their demands: the release of all political prisoners in the Federal Republic of Germany, or else the hostages will be shot. At this point RWF freezes frame on the stunned face of Frau Küsters , and narrates the rest of the story via superimposed titles. The requested getaway car arrives, the terrorists exit the building, bullets fly, and pretty much everyone is killed. Corinna, who was in the crowd, cradles her dead mother in her arms and allows herself to be photographed.

The story behind the alternate ending is a little murky. According to the DVD, it was written by RWF as part of the screenplay (which suggests to me that it was the “original” ending), but only used in the American version of the film. According to Ronald Hayman, the alternate ending was offered as a “sop to German leftists.” None of these explanations makes much sense to me, but no matter. In the American version the anarchists “occupy” the publisher’s offices only to find that nobody takes them seriously. The secretaries just ignore them where they sit on the floor. When it is time to go home, the receptionist (Lilo Pempeit) merely steps over them to get to the door, while the others walk right past (some even cheerfully say “good night”). Knab and the other anarchist angrily decide to go home. Frau K, having run out of options, decides to stay. Eventually, a kindly night watchman explains to her that if she won’t leave he can’t leave, so why doesn’t she come with him to discuss a plan to get the magazine to retract the story, and just return to the office in the morning? A widower, he invites her home for himmel und erde (“heaven and earth,” or mashed potatoes and apples). Frau K happily accepts.

Although radically different in terms of actual outcome, the two endings both lead to pretty much the same conclusion: political action is ineffective because the actors are subject to the same petty motivations as everybody else. While the first version depicts the anarchists as dangerously absurd, in the second they are just absurd. Politics, this version seems to suggest, is futile: the best any of us can hope to find is personal happiness and maybe a certain dignity.

Curious about RWF’s motivation for crafting these two endings, I found the following quote on the World Socialist Web Site, of all places. (The 2003 review is excellent, by the way.)

In an interview in 1977, Fassbinder spoke about the two versions of the film: “And really I prefer the so-called happy ending [the second ending]. I made it because many people told me that the first ending was too hard. So I tried a gentler ending which I prefer because it is actually tougher than the original. The first ending, with the text, is perhaps more intellectual—but the other affects people more emotionally.”

He suggested that the second ending was, in fact, more uncompromising, “When the woman has fought for something for so long—and even gets sympathy for it…but has to give up, because no one will support her.”

I agree with the director inasmuch as I prefer the second ending, too, but I am skeptical of his explanation. The second ending is only “tougher” and “more uncompromising” if you genuinely believe that political revolution can deliver on the promise of a solution to the problem of human injustice. There is nothing in the seventeen Fassbinder movies I’ve watched so far that convinces me he actually believed that.

Posted in German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975)

Addendum to Fox and His Friends

Posted on March 8, 2013 by yearof44films

There’s one last thing I wanted to mention re: Fox and His Friends, but I couldn’t quite articulate it or figure out how to work it in until now. (I guess I have a lot to say about this one.)

After you’ve watched the movie all the way through, watch the opening credit sequence again. There’s this series of shots of the audience listening to Karl Scheydt’s spiel which follows the beautiful opening crane shot into the carnival or circus or whatever it is. These images struck me as both poignant and significant. The faces in the crowd are shot from a distance with a long lens, so there is a real candor to them. As they listen, these people seem simple, innocent, gullible (Eugen or Max would probably add slack jawed), happy to suspend disbelief even though the show, at bottom, is a hoax (there is no Fox the talking severed head, after all). Which is to say, Fox and his sideshow friends do to the audience what Max and his friends ultimately do to Fox, albeit on a different scale.

My initial reaction to this sequence had been to commend the director for the humanity with which he depicts this crowd (as I said, there really is something poignant about their faces). But then I recognized the hurdy gurdy music, which also accompanies the movie’s last scene, in which Fox’s downward trajectory is completed, and I realized that Fox and his friends, old and new, are all part of the same vicious circle of exploitation. These people willingly allow themselves to be fooled into giving their money to hucksters like Fox in exchange for entertainment, for a little thrill; Fox willingly allows himself to be fooled into giving Max, Eugen, and Eugen’s family everything in exchange for the illusion of love. How depressing is that?

Posted in German Cinema, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Addendum to Fox and His Friends

Fox and His Friends (1975)

Posted on March 8, 2013 by yearof44films

Fassbinder acted in several of his own films, but almost never included his name in the credits and rarely cast himself in the lead role. Love Is Colder Than Death: no acting credit. Katzelmacher: no acting credit. The American Soldier, The Niklashausen Journey, Whity: no credit. I’m pretty sure Fox and His Friends is the only film in which RWF both starred and credited himself. Surely this is no accident? Surely this tells us something about the importance of Fox and His Friends to the director personally: he was willing to lend his name, his persona, and even his full-frontal nudity to this particular film as to no other. [Addendum: Except for Germany in Autumn, which I hadn’t yet seen when I wrote this. Now there’s some real full-frontal nudity for you.]

RWF plays Franz Biberkopf (aka Fox). And, yes, you should recognize that name from 1980’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, if you’ve seen it. Franz Biberkopf is the hapless working-class antihero protagonist of that epic series. It is also the alias which Harry Baer’s character, Franz Walsch, uses in Gods of the Plague. I think it’s telling that the director would choose to play a character called Franz Biberkopf—just as it is telling that he would cast himself (in Love Is Colder Than Death) as the first of three characters he called Franz Walsch (Franz Walsch purportedly being an amalgam of “Franz Biberkopf” and “Raoul Walsh,” the prolific Hollywood director). Biberkopf clearly seems to be a sort of archetype for Fassbinder. More important, Biberkopf is a character Fassbinder seems to identify with—or rather, the character Fassbinder wants you to identify him with. This is significant, and I’ll come back to it.

Franz Biberkopf works in a circus/fairground act as “Fox the Speaking Head,” an illusionist’s severed head who amazes audience members by answering their questions live. The sideshow troupe is disbanded in the opening scene, however, when the master of ceremonies (Karl Scheydt), Franz’s lover, is arrested during a performance. Down but not out, Franz still has one card left to play: every week he buys a lottery ticket and is not above turning a trick or two to pay for it. To that end, Franz gets himself picked up in a public bathroom by Max (Karl-Heinz Bohm), a wealthy and sophisticated antique dealer, who drives him to a lotto vendor (Brigitte Mira) as she is closing up shop. And just as he had assured everyone he would be, Franz is the winner. I’m not sure what 500,000 Deutschmarks was worth in 1975, but it appears to have been quite a large sum of money. Max decides to bring Franz home to meet his friends.

Max’s friends—cultured, gay, mostly young, and fashionable—express bemused distaste for the uncouth Franz, but one of them, Eugen (Peter Chatel), ends up bringing Franz home for some rough trade. One thing leads to another and soon the two are living together. Franz cannot believe his good fortune—finally he has a guy who doesn’t need anything from him because he has everything he needs already! Eugen may be a little proper and prissy, and his culture and refinement make Franz feel inadequate, but Franz is on top of the world. He’s in love! His old friends are savvy enough to know who will have drawn the shorter straw in the deal, however, and tell him so. Needless to say, Franz doesn’t listen.

Meanwhile, all is not well with Eugen. The printing company his father owns is on the verge of bankruptcy. But wait: Franz has money! A 100,000 DM loan is hastily arranged, with a promise of partnership for Franz. Never mind that Franz doesn’t understand the contract; Eugen knows all about these things. What matters is that Franz has made it to the big time! To celebrate, Eugen takes Franz shopping for clothes—Franz pays for everything, of course—and, after the landlord evicts Eugen for “illegal cohabitation,” an apartment. Of course the cultured and discerning Eugen must furnish the apartment in a style that befits his stature and impeccable taste and so a trip to Max’s antique store is required. And then there’s the car . . .

You can see where this is going—which is exactly where it inexorably goes. By the end of the movie Franz has been thoroughly exploited and has nothing left, least of all any illusions about the possibility of finding love or transcending his station. His friends and his sister all told him so, and they were right: a guy like Franz could only ever draw the short straw.

On one level, Fox and His Friends seems like just another variation on a set of well-worn RWF themes: the pettiness of the bourgeoisie, whose obsession with decorum only partially masks their brutality (Fear Eats the Soul, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Effi Briest); the cheerfulness with which the powerful intimidate the powerless, who act out in predictable and ultimately self-defeating ways and who end up complicit in their own subjugation (Katzelmacher, Whity); the sadomasochism of love, which is just another power relation (Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Gods of the Plague, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant); the wisdom and integrity of the prostitute, who has no illusions about this (Pioneers in Ingolstadt); etc., etc.. What distinguishes Fox and His Friends, however, is this unshakeable sense you get that this film, more than the others, is personal.

Which I think it is. Especially after reading the first chapter of Ronald Hayman’s fascinating biography of Fassbinder called, aptly enough, Fassbinder: Film Maker. (I know, I know, I swore I would avoid scholarly studies when I started this blog, but I just couldn’t help myself. And, yes, I feel like the child who has sought and found the stash of Christmas presents before they’ve been wrapped. I’ve spoiled everything! Traded an innocence I’ll never get back for knowledge I don’t really want . . . but it’s too late now.) It’s all in there: the childhood spent in the company of prostitutes (the patients of Dr. Hellmuth Fassbinder, whose office was in Munich’s red-light district); the fierce loathing of the bourgeoisie unwittingly instilled in the boy by his own emotionally (and often literally) absent bourgeois mother; the son’s seemingly fruitless efforts to buy the mother’s love; the rebellious identification with and allegiance to outsiders, proletarians, and the marginalized in society; the adoption of deliberately crude, coarse language, behavior, and dress to spite the mother; the childhood spent on the streets and in movie theaters; the gay prostitution; and so on. Biberkopf/Fox, in other words, is the persona RWF invented to deflect his own feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness. (etc.) Who else could play him?

But does this actually matter? Maybe, a bit, to the extent that it helps you to make sense of the relentless repetition throughout Fassbinder’s work, or what might otherwise seem like odd contradictions. Here’s an example: Fassbinder, who was famously overweight most of his life, slimmed down dramatically for Fox and His Friends, which belies a conventional vanity and genuine self consciousness. At the same time, his character is almost grotesquely uncouth and ill mannered, to the point of making him unsympathetic: a classic posture behind which the insecure and self hating are known to hide.

But does that matter? Actually, no. In fact, I think these biographical tidbits, irresistably juicy though they are, may actually be counterproductive. What I would have posited re: the above had I not gotten bogged down in all this backseat psychoanalysis is actually more interesting and more useful to an understanding of Fassbinder’s genius: to the extent that we find Fox unattractive or embarrassing or distasteful we actually identify on some awful barely conscious level with Eugen and Max and the other bourgeois who dehumanize him, their revulsion a perverse justification for their shameless treatment of poor Franz. (You could argue that this same phenomenon is also at work, albeit to a lesser extent, in Fear Eats the Soul: Brigitte Mira’s unvarnished physical age introduces a certain degree of awkwardness and discomfort in the viewer which makes us less unequivocally sympathetic than we would have been if RWF had cast some “hot” older actress. That’s a hard thing to admit, but I think it’s true. Fassbinder exposes the injustice that lives in all of our hearts, not just the villains’.)

In dwelling on these little biographical nuggets, then, I’ve overlooked the work itself and neglected to describe the things that make this movie great: the beautiful art direction and cinematography (Ballhaus, stunning as ever); how masterfully RWF manipulates the signs and symbols of bourgeois affluence on the one hand, and the gay underworld on the other; how he sets Fox against a background—no, a diorama, like you see in a natural history museum—of bourgeois materialism (the lamps! the vases! the gilt!) and how cringingly awkward he is in this world, the proverbial bull in a china shop; how nobody does a humiliating restaurant scene like Fassbinder . . .

I’ve already remarked re: Effi Briest that if you need to know an artist’s intentions to appreciate a work, it’s a puzzle, not art. I realize now that I really do believe that—much as I love puzzles—and that it’s doubly true in this context. Knowing an artist’s personal history—that Fassbinder hated his mother while craving her love, for example, or that he collected rent from gasterbeiter tenants for his father, or that he treated Irm Hermann like absolute shit—may be fun, but it is not, ultimately, illuminating. What illuminates is the way the director channeled that history and those emotions into an art that continues to convey profound, often painful truths about the world he inhabited (and which we, to whatever extent, have inherited) in a form, or language, or whatever you want to call it, uniquely his own.

Posted in 1970s style, German Cinema, Queer Cinema | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Effi Briest (1974)

Posted on January 16, 2013 by yearof44films

Before we get started I just want to state for the record that my assertion that Martha just might be the movie in which RWF learned that he could dispense with critical distance altogether might very well be the stupidest thing I’ve written on this blog yet, and the most misleading. Case in point: Effi Briest. The film is a study in critical distance. In fact, the director refers to his technique in this film as consisting of a “triple alienation effect.” (When it comes to alienation effects, one just isn’t enough.) I’ll describe what he meant by that in a pinch, but for now I just want to apologize for my penchant for absurd and sweeping generalizations.

I shouldn’t be surprised at the apparent 180-degree directorial shift, of course. Fassbinder never stayed in one place for long, and if he told a handful of stories over and over throughout his brief career, he varied the telling and the tools constantly. Still, the gear change that Effi Briest represents from Martha is pretty stunning. After a lurid, almost gothic, technicolor melodrama based on a genre perfected in Hollywood in the 1950s, a delicate episodic costume drama in gossamer black and white adapted from a 19th-century German novel. Effi Briest is a sort of palate cleanser: the sorbet and wafer-thin tuiles that logically follow an over-seasoned and too-heavy (but compulsively delicious) meal. Or to put it more simply, Martha is a guilty pleasure; Effi Briest is an arthouse movie any film snob would approve of.

(Of course, even statements like the above are misleading, as though RWF finished Martha and then decided to do something radically different. I’m pretty sure Effi Briest was begun first and in any case, everything we know about the director suggests that he was always working on multiple projects in multiple idioms not to mention multiple media—laterally, if that makes any sense, whether in his head or in the studio, and not sequentially the way I’m viewing them now.)

Effi Briest (a luminous Hanna Schygulla) is an exuberant young lady of seventeen toward the end of the 19th century when her mother (Lilo Pompeit, the director’s own mother, in her strongest performance to date) announces that the successful Instetten (Wolfgang Schenk), her one-time suitor before she married the kind and sensible Herr Briest (Herbert Steinmetz), would like to marry Effi. Effi agrees, and so the story begins. Instetten proves to be an upright and honest husband, if a bit stuffy and formal, but it’s the 19th century and Effi has no cause for complaint. The couple are wealthy and live in style, even if the town where Instetten is stationed in government service is provincial and dull. After their first and only child is born (a daughter, for which everyone consoles Effi: better luck next time), Instetten must spend increasing amounts of time away from home attending to his prince’s business. In his absence, a ridiculously dashing and rakish acquaintance from Instetten’s youth, Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel), provides Effi with stimulating company on long walks which gradually lead to (surprise!) infidelity. When Instetten is transferred to Berlin, the affair ends and is forgotten—until the governess finds a packet of letters from Crampas to Effi and gives them to her master. Effi’s fate is sealed according to the inexorable laws of bourgeois rectitude which require both her husband and parents to abandon her, among other things. Down she goes, following her inevitable trajectory to its logical end.

We’ve been here before, of course (or someplace like it), but not by this path. Aside from being absolutely gorgeous cinematographically, Effi Briest stands out as a brilliant exercise in literary adaptation. Indeed, the actual German title of this film is Fontane Effi Briest, Theodor Fontane being the author of the novel. (OK, the complete title, if you want to get technical, is Fontane Effi Briest, or Many people who are aware of their own capabilities and needs, yet acquiesce to the prevailing system in their thoughts and deeds, thereby confirm and reinforce it, but that was surely only for use in the film’s opening titles: I don’t think RWF could have taken it seriously or expected it to be used in any other context.) The point according to the director, which is largely lost in translation, is that this is a film of a novel written by an author in a specific place and time, which is to say it is a film as much about Fontane’s 19th-century language and Fontane’s 19th-century voice which reflected Fontane’s conflicted 19th-century attitudes about women and marriage and infidelity as it is about the character of Effi Briest. It’s Fontane’s Effi Briest, not Effi Briest. (Come to think of it, I bet that’s what Coppola was trying to do when he made Bram Stoker’s Dracula back whenever that was. For whatever that’s worth.)

Of course I would never have known the significance of the German vs. English title of the film nor grasped the peculiarly “German” quality of the narration had I not read about them in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which I received as a Christmas gift from my lovely husband. (He got me into this mess, after all . . .) But I don’t think it matters. As always, if you need to know the artist’s intentions to grasp the work, it’s not art, it’s a puzzle. (Do I really believe that? It just came to me. Sounds good, though, doesn’t it?) And despite the director’s claims to the contrary, you don’t have to understand German and you don’t even have to know who Fontane was for the film to work. After all, the language is literary and old-fashioned in translation too.

But there’s more to it. The narration in the film is actually split between voice over (Fontane’s narrator), inter-titles (Fassbinder’s, presumably), the actors, and the images. This further emphasizes the film’s literary qualities and mediates the viewer’s experience of the images, which are themselves highly formal and self-consciously constructed through a variety of framing and screening devices (mirrors, fabric, lace, flora, etc.) or else curiously neutral. There are frequent fades to and from white, which also call attention to their own artifice in ways that fades to and from black simply do not.

I think the images are constructed in such a way that they almost function like blank film, so that even though there are images there, you can fill them again with your own imagination and your own emotions. What makes that possible is the triple alienation effect: the mirrors, the fade-ins and fade-outs, and the emotionless acting style. The detachment that’s created this way almost forces the moviegoer, I think—though I find that wrong; let me put it differently, he has freedom like with reading, where the sentence you’ve read doesn’t take shape till your imagination goes to work; what I mean is, he has the freedom with this film to make the film for himself, even though the images are there. It isn’t a film like most other films, which overwhelm the moviegoer. This is one which in my opinion gives the moviegoer room to maneouver, and that’s what makes this film special. (“A Conversation with Kraft Wetzel about Effi Briest,” The Anarchy of the Imagination, Töteberg and Lensing, eds [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992] pp 157-58.)

But all this talk of alienation makes it all sound so academic. What makes Effi Briest profound, at least for me, is actually the film’s delicacy. After that one silly title (“Many people who are aware of their own capabilities and needs, yet acquiesce to the prevailing system in their thoughts and deeds, thereby confirm and reinforce it”), the film does not shout its disapproval of Instetten or the Briests or the mores they tragically and dutifully uphold at Effi’s expense. Instead, it faithfully replicates the story’s central dilemma using language and imagery that mirrors the values and aesthetics of the novel’s own milieu, in which beauty, refinement, discretion, and decorum were paramount. The affair with Crampas, for example, is discreetly alluded to but never shown; Effi allows herself only one outburst of emotion when she realizes how Instetten has turned her daughter against her, which she later disavows as unreasonable (the outburst, that is); Frau Briest calmly wonders aloud to her husband if Effi’s tragedy might be their fault, not because they punished Effi but because they indulged her youthful exuberance and unwittingly encouraged her in her subsequent crime. More to the point, reflections in gilt mirrors, marble statuary, images glimpsed through screens of translucent damask or delicate lace are not just devices for creating alienation: they are also signifiers of the beautiful in 19th-century bourgeois aesthetics, symbols, in other words, of their society’s values. By foregrounding these elements, RWF shows us their destructive power without having to even raise his voice.

 

 

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Effi Briest (1974)

Martha (1974)

Posted on January 2, 2013 by yearof44films

I’ve always assumed that Fear Eats the Soul marks the pinnacle of RWF’s obsession with Douglas Sirk. (I believe I said as much in my last post.) But that’s only because I hadn’t seen Martha. Now that I’ve seen Martha I know better. Fassbinder’s relationship to Sirk goes a lot deeper than I realized.

In Fear Eats the Soul, RWF paid tribute to Sirk by borrowing the basic premise and structure of one of Sirk’s most famous movies (All That Heaven Allows). The nod to Sirk was obvious, but still maybe a little bit superficial: Fear Eats the Soul still looks and feels like a film only Fassbinder could have made. With Martha, however, it’s much harder to discern where Fassbinder’s debt to Sirk begins and ends. In this movie RWF doesn’t so much nod to Sirk as raid his entire toolbox. The result is bizarre and unabashedly melodramatic and of course really, really dark. At the end of the day it’s still a film only RWF could have made, but I swear it looks and feels in places as much like Written on the Wind as it does The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

The film opens in a hotel room in Rome, where Martha Heyer (Margit Carstensen) and her father (Adrian Hoven) are traveling. In the opening scene, Martha finds a strange North African man (El Hedi ben Salem) in her room, uninvited. The man begins to undress. Martha, outraged, throws the man out and hurries down to her father in the lobby after downing a tranquilizer and changing (beautiful outfit, BTW). While visiting the Spanish Steps, however, Herr Heyer suddenly collapses of a heart attack and dies. In the chaos that ensues, Martha’s purse is stolen. Distraught, she finds a taxi to take her to the German embassy.

Martha’s roller coaster ride continues at the embassy. Her taxi arrives in the courtyard just as a tall handsome man (Karlheinz Böhm) is leaving the embassy. He stares at Martha from the entrance as she gets out of her taxi. What happens next is extraordinary—which is why I’m going to interrupt this succinct little précis to describe it. Martha approaches the handsome man. The handsome man approaches Martha. Each stares at the other. Time slows down, although the camera does not. Face to face, the camera swirls around them (360 degrees, of course). They turn away from one another as the camera continues its arc, each swimming in their own desire, and finally continue on, Martha to the embassy, the man to the waiting taxi. The shot is audacious, breathtaking, vertiginous, completely over the top. (I must have watched it ten times in a row just to figure out what Ballhaus and the actors were doing.)

At the embassy we learn that Martha Heyer is 31 years old, a librarian, unmarried, who lives with her parents in Konstanz in the German Alps on the lake of the same name. It seems pretty clear that the bottom has just dropped out for Martha, however; she has no idea which way is up. She asks the secretary (Kurt Raab) for a cigarette even though she doesn’t smoke. She hangs up on her mother over the phone—something we can tell she’s never done before. Lest there be any doubt as to the territory we’re in here, Martha spells it out when she tells the secretary her permanent address: 21 Douglas Sirk Strasse, Konstanz.

Back home in Konstanz (scenic, staid, bourgeois), it’s all talk of marriage all the time. Martha declines her boss at the library’s marriage proposal, so he asks her junior colleague instead. (The latter joyfully accepts: He is a good man with a big house. What more could a girl ask for?) Martha’s sister, Marianne (the voluptuous Barbara Valentin—is there any actress in the Fassbinder stable who looks less like she could possibly be related to the skeletal Margit Carstensen than Barbara Valentin?), is already married and tells Martha she is dumb to have turned him down: her boss is a good catch. Meanwhile their friend, Ilse (Ingrid Caven), has just gotten engaged to a Dr. Salomon. (Ilse knows a good catch when she sees one.) The alcoholic Frau Heyer expresses only contempt for her spinster daughter.

But . . . just when things are starting to look hopeless for poor loveless Martha, who does she meet again at Ilse’s wedding but the dashing man from the German embassy in Rome! Turns out he is the brother of the groom, Helmut Salomon! Sparks fly. Outside the wedding reception, Helmut kisses Martha with a passion verging on violence and we know her fate is sealed. Later, after forcing her to ride on a (literal) fairground roller coaster that makes her physically ill, Helmut tells Martha he wants to marry her. The next thing we know, the deed is done, despite the suicidal protests of the pills-and-booze-swilling Frau Heyer. (What does that woman want? She calls Martha a disgusting spinster when she’s single, but tries to overdose when Martha announces her engagement. One of these days I’m going to have to dedicate a post to the character of the Bad Mother in Fassbinder. But I digress.)

On the first morning of their honeymoon, Martha Heyer wakes up Martha Salomon and everything is different. Helmut, it seems, has strong opinions about pretty much everything and makes it clear that he expects Martha to defer to them. She is no longer permitted coffee for breakfast, only tea. She must tan. OK, she thinks, she can do this. She is married now. At the same time her new husband makes her uneasy. Perhaps Martha already suspects that Helmut is a little domineering, a little cruel? An early scene during the honeymoon involving a sunburn certainly seems to confirm this. (You must see this scene to believe it. Seriously. It will make your hair stand on end.)

Back home, Martha slowly realizes she is a prisoner in her marriage. Forced to leave her job—a wife who works but does not have to is unseemly—she has nothing to do all day. Helmut, a civil engineer who builds dams (what would Dr. Freud say about that?) is away during the week. Martha has nothing to do, and what she does do Helmut strictly proscribes. He forbids her listening to music he does not approve of and tells her what she must read. He hurts her when he makes love to her and does not permit her to refuse him, whatever the circumstances. He loves her so much, he explains, he cannot control himself.

Helmut is a mind fucker of the first order. He tells Martha things he later insists are not true; his wife obediently questions her own sanity rather than his. Like women trapped in abusive relationships everywhere, she does not have the vocabulary to explain what is going on—she tries to tell her sister but ends up retracting everything when the words don’t quite seem to match her experience, which she cannot make sense of. When Herr Kaiser (Peter Chatel), her replacement at the library, asks her why her husband sent her letter of resignation without her permission, she grows angry and defensive. Nobody understands. Martha herself doesn’t understand and grows more and more uncertain of herself and the reality around her—while at the same time more afraid of Helmut. When she finally reaches the end of her tether and fatefully acts, things go terribly, tragically wrong.

This is classic stuff. The story unfolds like a gothic romance, without irony or self-reflexiveness, and follows a trajectory whose relentless logic is built in to the story’s very premise, if that makes any sense. Martha’s journey is in many ways foretold in the very opening of the film when she rejects The Libyan (who it turns out was sent by the hotel concierge who thought that’s what Martha wanted), and instead joins her bourgeois father for a tourist’s sterile view of a vibrant ancient city. (Poor frigid Martha. If only she’d taken the Libyan up on his offer things might have turned out quite differently.)

Actually, RWF would probably say that Martha’s trajectory is dictated by her physical environment—the sterile bourgeois interiors, picture-postcard exteriors (of course Herr Heyer has a heart attack on the dirty, hippie-dominated Spanish Steps, the very antithesis of pristine Lake Konstanz!), her impeccable clothing and make-up—which is to say, by the mise-en-scène itself. The techniques RWF employs here are, of course, right out of Sirk’s playbook. The mannered compositions, the saturated color palette, the overstuffed hothouse environments (literally: Martha and Helmut’s mansion is dominated by an enormous sun room full of hothouse plants), the lugubrious haute bourgeois furnishings and carpets, the flower arrangements that dominate nearly every room, as well as the ubiquitousness of women and their emotions in the narrative and the near total absence of men from any active roles other than love interest or doctor (have you noticed, there’s always a doctor in these movies?) . . . all these things are straight out of Sirk.

For me all this this marks a departure—or is it just an evolution?—from the melodrama of even so recent a film as Fear Eats the Soul, which, after all, still kept one foot planted on firm Brechtian ground, presenting a melodramatic story through a more or less objective lens. (As I’ve already said, as a viewer you don’t identify with Ali and Emmi, you critically judge the society that punishes them.) Martha does not offer the same clear boundary for the viewer. You still don’t necessarily identify with Martha (although you can—I did!), but that ironic distance that is so much a part of the earlier movies just isn’t there in the same way. As a viewer, you are right in the thick of it: there is no safe place from which you can view the narrative that is outside the narrative, if that makes any sense, there are no winking cues from the director that say “you and me, we know better than these poor idiots . . .”. For a director, this can be tricky stuff (this kind of sincerity leaves you vulnerable). For a 1970’s German leftist with roots in the avant-garde it strikes me as downright heroic.

Of course it would be easy in 2012 to dismiss Martha as over the top, de trop, heavy-handed in its depiction of the perils of sexual repression on the one hand, and the institution of marriage, on the other. Helmut is clearly a psychopath, after all, so what does the movie teach us except to avoid psychopaths? But as I’ve said before, I think RWF’s genius was precisely to draw his portraits using such bold and exaggerated strokes. Because the fact is, even in 1974 married women were subservient to their husbands, legally as well as morally. What matters is not how common or uncommon a man like Helmut was, but that a man could, in 1974, get away with everything Helmut gets away with. Martha shows us, through exaggeration, the brutality and injustice both of the institution of marriage—in which one party can legally control the rights and behavior of the other—and a society that represses female sexuality and thereby consigns women to a romanticism that drives them willingly into relationships in which they are powerless.

This is not new territory for RWF, of course. The conversation Martha has with her sister, Marianne, for example, in which the latter explains the key to success in her own marriage—don’t argue with your husband when you disagree with him, you’ll need fewer tranquilizers and can anyway get your way on the big issues without him realizing it—is almost exactly the same conversation Petra von Kant had with Sidonie (Kristin Schaake) at the beginning of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. (In both cases, Margit Carstensen bristles at the advice, which she considers dishonest and cowardly, and in both cases she is punished utterly for her audacity, her hubris.) But Fassbinder covers that territory differently here, just as The Merchant of Four Seasons and Fear Eats the Soul covered already trodden ground with new insight, more confidence, and less irony than in the earlier work. Martha stands as yet another milestone in a too-short career studded with milestones. We’ll see if history bears me out on this in viewings/posts to come, but I’d venture to say that Martha just might be the film in which RWF discovered he could actually dispense with ironic distance altogether. But, like I said, we’ll have to see about that.

Posted in 1970s style, German Cinema, Melodrama | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Posted on November 26, 2012 by yearof44films

I suppose it was inevitable. I seem to have lost all momentum with this thing and I don’t know how to get it back. Too busy the past few months, I think I may have just forgotten how to do it. It’s been six weeks at least since I watched Fear Eats the Soul and I just haven’t been able to find the time or the will to sit down and write about it. And what is there to say about everyone’s favorite Fassbinder movie anyway? Hasn’t it all been said already? But I’ve committed myself to this lunatic project, so I will soldier on as best I can. Maybe the spirit will eventually return.

OK, so. As any film student will tell you, Fear Eats the Soul is an homage of sorts to Douglas Sirk—German-American émigré and master of the 1950s Family Melodrama—and is, in fact, based on Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. In the Fassbinder film, however, Jane Wyman’s upper-middle class widow is an elderly cleaning lady named Emmi (the marvelous Brigitte Mira), while Rock Hudson’s tree trimmer whom she falls in love with is reconceived as a Moroccan gastarbeiter named Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). So, to a love story that crosses the strict boundaries of (middle) age and (middle) class, RWF adds the exponentially more complicating issues of race, culture, and sexual age.

Emmi and Ali are trapped by the strict codes and strictures of a society that marginalizes them, and which further condemns them when they marry. Emmi is shunned by her adult children, her neighbors, and her colleagues. Lonely and alienated, far from home, Ali can find only partial comfort with Emmi. (She will not make him couscous, for example, which she says he must learn to live without if he is to settle in as a German.) Emmi’s friends and family call Ali a pig, filthy, less than human. The women at the bar which is the center of Ali’s social world mock the aged Emmi and call her an old whore. At the very bottom of the social ladder, both Emmi and Ali are naturally held in contempt by polite German society.

We’ve seen this movie before, of course, and not just in Sirk. Fear Eats the Soul is a remake of Fassbinder’s own Katzelmacher (1969) which, as you might remember, depicts the plight of Jorgos (RWF), a Greek gastarbeiter living in a working class German neighborhood, and Elisabeth (Hanna Schygulla), the German girl who breaks ranks with her racist peers when she falls for him. The comparison between these two films is not trivial: it nicely illustrates RWF’s evolution as a filmmaker. Whereas Katzelmacher often felt like a detached and formal exercise (which I thoroughly enjoyed, don’t get me wrong), Fear Eats the Soul is genuinely compelling, even as it depicts the same phenomenon.

Of course we’ve seen this phenomenon before, too. I wrote in an earlier post about the stylistic and technical evolution evident in the comparison between 1970’s Why Does Herr R Run Amok? and the following year’s The Merchant of Four Seasons. Those observations hold just as true when you compare Katzelmacher to Fear Eats the Soul. But I realize now that there’s more to it than just stylistic and technical development, and that what makes the later films so much richer and more compelling than the earlier ones is precisely what RWF borrowed from Sirk: melodrama as a structuring principle and a sort of moral paradigm.

But why melodrama? What is it about this lowest of lowbrow genres—dismissed by serious artists and audiences alike as corny and overblown, trash for women (women’s pictures)—that was so useful and so liberating for Fassbinder as an artist? I’ve been grappling with this question for a while now (I still think about Fassbinder quite a bit even if I don’t get around to writing about him). I’m not entirely confident of my explanation, but I’ll give it a shot. God only knows if it will make any sense to anyone else.

Merriam Webster (Eleventh Ed.) defines melodrama as “a work characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization.” But that sounds exactly like every Fassbinder film I’ve written about to date—especially the early films—doesn’t it? So what’s different? American Heritage (Third Edition) has this to add: melodrama is “characterized by exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts.” Bingo. I think it’s this combination of stereotypical characters, whom we can “read” easily and immediately (Eisenstein called them “types”), engaged in interpersonal conflicts that follow a clear and inexorable emotional logic, within the context of social situations constrained by social laws, that makes all the difference. And I think it’s precisely RWF’s move away from an avant-garde minimalist aesthetic—in which characters weren’t so much stereotypical as they were simply opaque, and in which Hollywood genres like the gangster film (Love Is Colder Than Death, Gods of the Plague, The American Soldier) were quoted rather than harnessed—that enabled RWF to achieve what must have been his goal from the very beginning. And what’s really mind-blowing here, at least to me, is that I think that goal was exactly the same goal as, say, Bertholt Brecht’s—who was pretty gosh-darn avant-garde, as I think we can all agree. (Can you think of anything further from Epic Theater than As the World Turns?)

Brecht’s objective as I understand it was to prevent audiences from passively identifying with characters, to encourage them to interpret the conflicts depicted in a play critically rather than emotionally, to achieve understanding rather than catharsis. Part of RWF’s genius was to recognize that melodrama—a form of theater expressly rejected by Brecht, not surprisingly—could actually achieve this more effectively than Epic Theater (or Antitheater, for that matter) precisely by exploiting stereotypes, which permit easy character definition without recourse to complex psychology, and depicting conflicts that are unequivocal and immediate and don’t require lots of deciphering, but which show us something about the nature of our society. You don’t have to identify with Emmi or Ali to understand their oppression or to pass critical judgment on a society that marginalizes and rejects them. The fact that they are in love does not obscure or complicate this injustice, it only makes it easier to see.

But there’s something else going on here, something about melodrama as a paradigm that I think really suited RWF. It has to do with what I have previously thought of as his extraordinary generosity toward his characters. By concentrating on the emotional reality of the characters I think it becomes impossible to condemn or dismiss them—and equally impossible to glorify them. This strikes me as really brave, especially when you consider how unattractive some of these characters’ behavior and histories are. Think of Alma (Irm Hermann) in Pioneers in Ingolstadt, for example, or Petra von Kant, or any character in The Merchant of Four Seasons, really. There may be no wholly sympathetic characters in these movies, but there are no true villains either.

Early in Fear Eats the Soul Emmi describes her father’s hatred of foreigners with a shrug. “He was a party member. Hitler’s party. You know who Hitler was? I was in the party, too. Everyone was, or almost everyone.” These things don’t explain a person, they are just facts. When a colleague comes to ask Emmi to cover a shift for her but leaves in horror after she is introduced to Ali, Emmi defends her. “She’s OK. She was just surprised.” Good people do bad things, sometimes, just as bad people do good things. People do what they do. Everyone, as Renoir says in Rules of the Game, has their reasons.

At the end of Katzelmacher, Jorgos, eventually accepted by the rest of the neighborhood, expresses disgust at the fact that the firm he works for has just hired a Turk. Or was it an Arab? I’m afraid I can’t remember now, but of course it doesn’t matter. The important fact here is that Jorgos is just as much of a xenophobe when it suits him as the Germans who had earlier tormented him. Victimhood does not automatically bestow moral superiority, just as power does not only inhere to evil people. Everyone has their reasons.

So here’s what really impresses me about all this: at a time in European cinema when it was utterly unfashionable to do so, when narrative itself was often dismissed as a reactionary bourgeois construct, RWF embraced one of the most conventional forms of narrative imaginable to illustrate a profound truth: all human relationships are power relationships and all power leverages and exploits human emotions. His genius, I think, was to recognize that a dramatic medium designed to entertain middle- and working class housewives characterized by “exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts” could be used to achieve this, when other more critically respected “masculine” genres such as the gangster film or the western apparently could not. (He tried.) And I can’t help but wonder: would a straight male director have recognized this, let alone had the courage to act on it?

Posted in German Cinema, Melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Tagged , | 2 Comments