In a Year with 44 Films

After a shamefully long hiatus—during which time I have come to realize the folly of this endeavor at this particular time in my life (thanks, Dave!)—I’m back at it. Acutely aware of how much my world and worldview have changed since I last spent time watching R.W. Fassbinder movies, and how distant my present concerns seem from those of his films. But perhaps that’s what will ultimately make this strange exercise actually interesting? I can only hope. (More on this later.)

Ach so. Today I watched Gods of the Plague (1970), a sort-of-sequel (more of a mirror image, really) to Love is Colder Than Death (LCTD), and a truly odd and very confusing film. Very confusing! Once again, Hanna Schygulla plays Johanna, the character she played in LCTD,  no longer a prostitute but a cabaret singer.  (As far as I can tell, hers is the only character to appear in both films, so I’m not sure whether this actually qualifies as a sequel at all. But no matter.) The movie opens with Johanna’s boyfriend, Franz, getting out of prison in a stunning sequence: great use of off-screen dialog, beautiful close-up tracking shot on Franz in profile as he walks away from the prison, and then a really marvelous scene in which he ends up dancing with a sullen waitress in a coffeehouse where he is waiting for a phone call. Black and white, low budget, sheer bravado. (Does anyone even do this anymore?)

But this is not the same Franz you may recall from Love Is Colder Than Death, the boyfriend/pimp played by RWF himself. Who is this new Franz (played by Harry Baer)? I actually thought he was Bruno from LCTD, whom Johanna had slept with and then betrayed after he and the original Franz robbed a bank. The actors look enough alike and are both objects of desire (and unusually handsome for RWF movies, I have to say). Besides, who else would Johanna be waiting for? But it turns out that Bruno was shot and killed in LCTD (I had to look that up—actually couldn’t remember!)

So, anyway, Franz Walsch (that’s this movie’s Franz) meets up with Johanna, who has been waiting for him and is still completely smitten. She’s a puppydog with her Franz but, interestingly, she holds all the power. Franz shows up at the nightclub where she sings (the club is called “Lola Montez,” no doubt a winking reference to the movie in which Dietrich plays a historic man-eater) but the doorman won’t let him in; after her show is over she takes him to her car, gets in the driver’s seat, but then offers to let him drive, as befits his status as her man; outside the restaurant later she hastily slips a wad of money in his coat pocket before they enter so he can pay for the meal. She goes out of her way to bolster him and belittle herself in an effort to reinstate that old gender/power dynamic which must have informed their relationship before. (Which is the same dynamic we saw in the earlier film, when she was number-one prostitute to Franz’s pimp.)  Surely this is significant.

But (or maybe, so) Franz ditches Johanna the first chance he gets and ends up with Margarethe (played by Margarethe von Trotta), an increasingly submissive and abject partner, whose bedroom is inexplicably papered in a giant billboard-size photo of herself. (She’s a model? Must I invoke that chestnut of golden-age feminist film theory, scopophilic fetishization, here?). Margarethe almost exactly traces Johanna’s trajectory in LCTD: she gives Franz all her money, begs him not to go through with the robbery he’s planning, offers to prostitute herself for him. Not only that: almost exactly as in the earlier film, Margarethe has to share her Franz with another more hardened criminal, Gunther (Gunther Kaufmann), who by all appearances is Franz’s true love. It’s a strange, sad, kind of creepy triangle.

But we all know whose fury hath no match in hell, and so it comes as no surprise when Johanna betrays Franz to the sleazy and persistent police inspector with whom she begins an affair. Needless to say, it all ends very badly. Franz, Gunther, and the manager of the supermarket they rob are shot and killed. Gunther makes it out of the store and back to Carla, a young woman who sells porn out of a wicker suitcase (seriously!) who had betrayed the pair’s robbery plans to Johanna, and kills her before he dies himself. His last words, in English: “Life is precious, even now.” The movie ends with the women—Johanna, Margarethe, and Franz’s mother—at Franz’s burial, weeping.

This is only the third movie I’ve watched as part of this project and already I am blown away by how consistent the themes and motifs seem to be across all of them. Hanna Schygulla plays essentially the same character in all three: hopeless romantic doomed to unhappy love. RWF plays 1) Jorgos, a maligned gastarbeiter in Katzelmacher, and 2) an alienated gangster who falls in love with another criminal sent to kill him but with whom he becomes enmeshed in a tragic love triangle (LCTD). Here, the new Franz loves Gunther, who is black and so an outsider, like Jorgos; Franz loves him even though Gunther murdered Franz’s own brother, again within the framework of a love triangle of which the woman is both the most sympathetic and the least loved.

It’s surprising to see the extent to which these films predict other later RWF motifs: the  dangerous-and-hulking-innocence and brute magnetism of Gunther made me think immediately of the American GI in The Marriage of Maria Braun, and to a lesser extent, Ali. At one point in Gods of the Plague, Franz gives his name to a hotel clerk as “Franz Biberkopf”—which is the name of the protagonist of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which RFW didn’t make for another decade.

All three films are claustrophobic and joyless—this one in particular. It is also very dark (literally). There is very little dialog and nobody smiles; any laughter is mirthless. The characters are flat and opaque, affectless except in moments of crisis, when they explode. The sense of alienation is overwhelming. The women are cynical, full of hopeless narcissistic longing, at times hysterical; the men are cruel, distant, and aloof, occasionally erupting in violence. Sex is mechanical and detached (Carla’s pornography, for example, shows only disembodied organs, splayed and engorged, going through the motions, detached from what we might call humanity). There are a few very brief moments of lightness and joy—as when Gunther, Franz, and Margarethe drive to the country (although even that episode is bizarre and ambiguous and ends in a kind of violence)—but they are fleeting and without consequence. This is the world Rainer Werner Fassbinder shows us. My god, it’s depressing.

OK, here we go. This is classic early Fassbinder. Very stylized, theatrical, rhythmically slow, didactic. Gorgeous. Excruciating. Did I say slow? Great stylistic motifs. Lovely music, self-consciously foregrounded (never used invisibly to merely cue emotion). Beautiful flat, frontal framing. Luminous black and white. That fabulous ensemble cast. This would have made a great play (and, who knows, maybe it did?).

I love this movie! In many ways of course it’s a sketch for Ali: Fear Eats the Soul—same basic premise, in which a naïve and oddly virile gastarbeiter (played by Fassbinder himself) is persecuted by xenophobic Germans in the community he moves into (“invades”?)—except for one simple, trusting woman, Marie (Hanna Schygulla) who’s not like the others, who breaks ranks with her nasty, ignorant peers and falls in love with the stranger and endures mockery and rejection as a result. It’s a very simple story, but no less satisfying for that.

This one really works, in ways that Love Is Colder Than Death does not, quite, for me. Whereas the loner gangster story of the (only slightly) earlier movie felt a little forced, or borrowed, here Fassbinder has found a story he seems more comfortable with: the small mindedness and pettiness, selfishness and cruelty of his fellow citizens, Good Germans all, who are galvanized into solidarity against the threat of the Other in their midst. An old story, but one with special resonance, presumably, in a New Germany which had not yet even begun to broach let alone come to terms with its Nazi past. (Resonance too of course in a story told by an openly gay man in a country which had only a generation before interned homosexuals in concentration camps.)

But maybe I’m not putting this in the right terms. Maybe it’s not that Katzelmacher tells a story RWF is “more comfortable with.” Maybe its just an easier story to tell — it relies on already established images and types we’re all familiar with. Whereas RWF has no set of stock images or vocabulary or motifs that an audience could be relied on to connect with to tell the story of Love Is Colder Than Death. Because it’s not just an outsider love story, it’s a gay love story, and how do you tell such a story in Germany in 1969?  Hence the reliance on the gangster theme. To be gay is to be an outlaw, outside of established or sanctioned morality. I haven’t really explored this idea (it just came to me), so I don’t know if it floats yet. But I think it’s worth pursuing. I’m thinking maybe there’s a connection between Love Is Colder Than Death and Querelle maybe?  I don’t know. Anyway we’re still at the beginning of a career here in 1969 here—Querelle comes at the very end.

OK, so back to Katzelmacher. It’s interesting too because, while Jorgos is clearly the sympathetic center of the movie, he isn’t actually all that sympathetic. He is really pretty two-dimensional—there is no hint in the movie of any real depth or complexity of character. He is sympathetic because he is innocent and persecuted—with those big sad eyes in that soft round face he is more like an abused dog than a protaganist. Similarly, Marie is sympathetic only inasmuch as she loves Jorgos. She never really says why she loves him, beyond sensing gentleness and honesty in his eyes, or citing the fact that he is different from the others. Before she loved Jorgos she was in deep, abject love with one of the local thugs (who goes on to goad the other locals into finally attacking Jorgos). She’s really just a fool for love.

Maybe in this respect the movie anticipates not just Fear Eats the Soul but also some of the more extremely melodramatic of Fassbinder’s later movies, such as The Stationmaster’s Wife or In a Year with 13 Moons or The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. These are movies in which pure emotion trumps character, which I venture to say we’re getting a glimpse of already here, in 1969, in a movie about xenophobia and racism.

But maybe there are no characters in Fassbinder movies, only types? I suspect we’ll come back to that.

I’m preparing to launch my blog, In a Year with 44 Films, My Year in Fassbinder. I am looking at this incredibly user-friendly UI and feeling, well, panic. It’s not friendly enough! Do I have the patience to learn it? We’ll see. Right now, the mission is vague and ill-defined, but simple: to watch every feature film directed by the great German melodramatist, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in chronological order, within a single year. The perfect pastime for a woman of a certain age, at a crossroads, nicht wahr? Ja, wirklich! (Don’t worry, that’s pretty much the extent of my German.) So we’ll see if this damn thing actually posts. After that: Love Is Colder Than Death (1969).