Monthly Archives: April 2023

CHINESE ROULETTE/ CHINESISCHES ROULETTE (Rainer Warner Fassbinder, 1976)

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A dazzling work of mise-en-scène. Fassbinder and Michael Ballhaus deploy a gliding camera, shifts in focus, compositions that group alliances or fractures, social and internal, with beauty and precision. Has anyone made more expressive use of a glass drinks cabinet? Doublings, decompositions, reflections, often filmed through glass or on mirrors. Nothing is as it seems in this movie and the process of discovery is brutal: ‘eavesdroppers often hear false truths’.

mirrors and reflections;

 

The setting is the real life Ballhaus family Schloss, but empty and with echoes of recent occupying army ransackings. The film has been compared to an Agatha Christie country house murder narrative such as AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. But there are limits to such a comparison: there are gun shots but no one is killed in this movie; and the wounding, psychic as it is, is also deep, primal and savage, going into areas Christie wouldn’t dream of.

Discovery

The plot revolves around a couple, significantly named Ariane (Margit Carstensen) and Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson). He’s ostensibly going on a trip to Oslo; she to Milan. But in fact both have arranged assignations with their lovers; he with his long-time mistress, Irene (the divine Anna Karina); she with Gerhard’s assistant Kolbe (Ulli Lommel, then Anna Karina’s partner). The problem is that their assignations are to take place in the family schloss, so they end up discovering each other’s adultery. All are sophisticated people of the world and try to behave elegantly. But things become more somber and delicate with the realisation that this has all been organised by the Christ’s daughter Angela (Andrea Schroeber).

Symphonic Opening Scene

Angela believes that her parents blame her for ruining their lives; that her father first took on a lover when she was diagnosed with a crippling disease that hampered the use of her legs; and that her mother took on a lover when Angela’s disability was pronounced incurable. In fact Angela thinks her mother wishes her dead, and the whole weekend has been designed by Angela, with the same precision that she enacts the role play of the dolls that surround her, to drive her mother to murder her. In fact games, strategy, enactments, role-play, through dolls, cards, chess, are running motifs in the film, culminating in Chinese Roulette, played viciously and with murderous intent. In the process the victim will become the victimiser, the Bad Seed,  or as John Mercer more colloquially puts it, The Exorcist’s Linda Blair on crutches.

games

The two couples are in tension with another set of four: Mrs. Kast (Brigitte Mira) who has some kind of underground or criminal relationship with Mr. Christ – ‘Ali Ben Basset has been murdered in Paris. We are the only two left,’ he tells her, a sort of McGuffin as this remains external to the main narrative but adds clouds of narrative possibilities that overhang but are never brought into focus. Just like Mrs. Kast’s son Gabriel (Volker Spengler), boot-boy and plagiarist, at the beginning of the film when he asks the petrol station attendant. ‘Have you ever been to hell?’ ‘Yes’.

dolls

The other two of that outside four are Angela herself and her nanny, Traunitz (Macha Méril). Traunitz has the kind of easy relationship with her charge that Angela wishes she had with her mother. They listen to techno – Kraftwerk: fun, rhythmic, partial —  instead of symphonies (Mahler’s Symphony No.8)  aiming for the totalising and divine. Traunitz herself is conducting a sexual relationship with Gabriel, who reciprocates though he seems himself as more androgynous, sexually more anarchic; and that includes a sexual tension depicted with Angela, who discovered he was a plagiarist years before and has the upper hand.

 

Fassbinder turns the tables here and explores the cruelty and harshness of the small and the weak to show the power and ruthlessness of the victim. That is basically the function of the character of the daughter. The mother is as is usual with Carstensen’s characters for Fassbinder, the target and recipient of much of the film’s sadism.

rhyming shot and another kind of discovery

When the game of Chinese Roulette begins, the verbal rapiers begin to wound, culminating in the question, ‘What Would This Person Have Been in The Third Reich?’ The film ends mysteriously with the sound of a gunshot, a night-time procession and a quotation from Christian wedding vows; a somewhat reductive ending as the film seems to have been about so much more than that.

 

According to wiki, Andrew Sarris devoted a whole university course to CHINESE ROULETTE.  I can understand why.

 

José Arroyo

 

Thinking Aloud About Film: The Bill Douglas Trilogy

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We discuss The Bill Douglas Trilogy: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978). The first with it’s echoes of Maxim Gorky must be one of the greatest films in the history of cinema, and a discovery. My Ain Folk, like My Childhood of medium length, we also claim is a great film. We have greater doubts about the third film, My Own Way Home, the only one that really qualifies as feature length. We compare the films to Turkish films we’ve been seeing recently such as A Dry Summer that describe a way of life that seems centuries old but is in fact very recent. We also compare the works to the novels of Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain; Young Mungo). These are works that subtly hint at the psychic effects of horrific economic conditions, families that are fractured, abusive, exploitative and lacking in love or even common decency, all rendered somewhat understandable. Lastly, we wonder to what extent class bias affected Bill Douglas’ career, a talent as is evident here with such a short filmography…

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

More on the class issue may be found here: “Douglas’s contemporaries remain divided by class and aesthetic (Loach and Leigh versus Jarman and Greenaway) and I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that this division arrested – still arrests – British culture.” https://katewebb.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/bill-douglas-among-the-philistines-cineaste/

 

There also are some interesting background articles on Bill Douglas and the trilogy here:

https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/about/

José Arroyo

SATANS’S BREW/ SATANSBRATEN (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1976)

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Fassbinder continues to surprise, this time with an all-out comedy, a high-pitched farce, dealing with the vulgar, explicit and extreme in a way that’s designed to be offensive and to push as many of the audience’s buttons as possible. How did he get away with it? In the first ten minutes of the film, we get fellatio with gun à la CHANT D’AMOUR, a murder enhanced by poppers during coitus, a dildo-drawer with a gun, a woman slapping down her brother-in-law’s erection in close-up, a prostitute getting her nipples tweaked for a laugh… It’s like a grunge explicit version of boulevardier farce about masochistic power relations, drained of any trace of elegance. I found it discomforting and funny.

 

The plot revolves around Walter Kranz(Kurt Raab), once the poet of the revolution, now suffering from writer’s block, and in constant need of money. He has a long-suffering wife, several mistresses, a brother who’s not all there (and who seems to be modelled on the fly-eating Renfeld, Dracula’s side-kick). He takes adoration as his due and exploits all his inter-personal relationships, including his long-suffering parents, whom he tricks out of the money they’ve saved for their funeral.

designed to be offensive

After two years when he hasn’t been able to write a word, he finally recites some lines he likes. He’s delighted at the break-through only to be told that the lines are not his but those of Stefan George, the famous symbolist poet. So he decides to become George by performing him, by hiring a coterie of young gay men to worship his poetry readings and by becoming gay himself, something he ends up not being too successful at. Performing identity, performing society’s expectations of identity and finding liberation in madness are key themes in the film.

male full frontal

Like in a good farce, everything is over-turned and comes full-circle in a ‘happy’ ending. Walter, who’s surprised when his brother likes the whipping he gives him, ends up finding his own masochistic side, thereby losing the provincial acolyte he’s been dominating, Andrée (Margit Carstersen) but getting together with Lisa, who previously enjoyed an open marriage with Rolf, who has now gone off with the newly liberated Andrée. He finally ends up writing a novel: NO CELEBRATION FOR THE FÜHRER’S DEAD DOG, a book who’s thesis is that Fascism will triumph, a hit with his publishers.

 

The film is book-ended by a quote from Antonin Artaud: ‘What differentiates the heathens from us is the great resolve underlying all their forms of belief, not to think in human terms. In this way, they are able to retain the link with the whole of Creation, in other words with the Godhead’, ie thinking from a non-hiuman point of view is a way of maintaining contact with the divine. Fassbinder described the film as a ‘comedy about me if I were what I perhaps am but don’t believe I am” Thomas Elsaesser found the film “a rare attempt at comedy from a filmmaker who, as most commentators have noted, is entirely devoid of humour’. A bit harsh I think, though how funny people find it might depend on how far they are willing to be pushed.

José Arroyo

 

 

 

Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1974)

Saw two Burt Lancaster films yesterday, Valdez is Coming and The Conversation Piece. Valdez is one of several anti-racist Westerns Lancaster did in this period. In Valdez he plays a Mexican constabulary on the borderlands trying to get a hundred dollars for the Indigenous wife of a black man wrongly shot at the beginning of the film. It’s Edwin Sherin’s first film, and he doesn’t have a feel for the camera, all the symbolism is externalised (Burt is tied to a cross, but it’s filmed as just him plonking down a forest in mid-shot). It’s a film that’s carried by the screenplay and the performances but that still works.

The other is Visconti’s great The Conversation Piece, where he plays a professor whose life of quiet contemplation is altered when he rents his upstairs apartment to a right-wing countess (Sylvana Mangano) for her gigolo (Helmut Berger). In both, Lancaster’s performance is pared down, acting with his eyes, and in which every gesture counts, such as his very moving and beautiful last one below. One can imagine some of Lancaster’s contemporaries playing Valdez (though hmmm even William Holden would be a stretch in the part) but that someone who so gorgeously embodied the joyous physicality of The Crimson Pirate could then inhabit Visconti’s Professor is truly wondrous. He’s so moving in it.

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Here,  he’s clearly a repressed homosexual, who wakes up one night and finds a bisexual orgy in his library. Full male nudity, frontal, in 1974. I´m keen to find out more about the reception.

 

 

The Masters of Cinema Edition has a wonderful appreciation of Burt, the person and the performer, by all the behind the scenes people who worked on the film.

CHAOS AS USUAL: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER (Applause: New York, 1997), edited by Juliane Lorenz,

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Today’s Fassbinder is on CHAOS AS USUAL: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER (Applause: New York, 1997), edited by Juliane Lorenz, the editor of all of Fassbinder’s films after DESPAIR, and his ‘wife’, in quotation marks only because their marriage was not legally binding. They did live together for the last few years of his life; she’s the one who found his body; and she succeeded Fassbinder’s mother as the head of the Rainer Werner Foundation.

 

After reading it, I wished all my favourite filmmakers would get a book like this, an affectionate but critical account of what working with a director was like, of how the personality impinged on the work, and the various trials and attractions of working with such a compulsive and demanding workaholic. Most of the interviews are conducted by Lorenz herself; and she writes of how in the first interviews she was overly sensitive to perceived slights of Fassbinder and how she learned to loosen up so that people could speak freely. These are interviews by people who knew each other, who all worked with him. Mainly, there’s real affection but interviewer an einterviewee each know the other is all too familiar with the faults as well. In any case, the interviews are about the work, the working together and what that was like and what that produced. Though of course, it’s impossible to leave the man’s personality out of it altogether. And who would want to? Interestingly the only interview that is reproduced from another source is Ingrid Caven’s CAHIERS interview and I did wonder if Caven being Fassbinder’s first wife had anything to do with it.

 

If my first impulse was to wish this type of book for other favourite directors; the second one was for me to undertake a similar project on Almódovar; and then the third was the realisation of its impossibility. This book can exist in its present form, partly because the subject died so young. If one waits until the filmmaker dies to undertake such a project, most of his collaborators would also be six feet under. Indeed ,even though Fassbinder died when he was only 37, key people in his life and in his work had already preceded him (Armin Meier, El Hedi Ben Salem) and others would die before the book was conceived (importantly, Kurt Raab).

 

If one undertakes such a project whilst the director is active, producers, actors, dop’s etc will not speak freely if they hope to get work or if they’ve got an axe to grind because they haven’t received work. Thus this remains a unique discussion, a frank discussion by people who knew him well, some who worked with him consistently (Michael Balhauss, Peer Raben, Dietrich Lohman, Peter Märthesheimer); friends from the early days (Daniel Schmid, Hannah Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Ursula Strätz); his actors (Margit Cartensen, Brigitte Mira, Barbara Sukowa, Armin-Müeller-Stahl, Gunther Lamprecht, Gottfried John); his fellow directors (Werner Schroeter, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta), even a relative (Egmont Fassbinder).  And I found it genuinely interesting about a mode of making cinema and insightful about individual films.

 

For those who’ve been watching the Arrow collection of Fassbinder’s work, Julia Lorenz is the warm, clear-eyed, organised and liberal woman who appears in quite a few of the extras, talking about the shoots of individual films, their context, and occasionally brining out a copy or two of contracts for particular films to flesh out memory with concrete detail.

 

José Arroyo

FEAR OF FEAR/ ANGST VON DER ANGST (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1975)

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FEAR OF FEAR is a made-for-tv movie, a ‘woman’s’ film, a chamber piece in which a small set of characters and their inter-relationships are used to evoke a world, a social setting, a condition and an individual’s relationship to that world. As the film begins, Margot (Margit Cartensen), a middle-class housewife, beautiful and competent, happily married to an understanding husband (Ulric Faulhaber), is expecting her second child and understandably anxious. That anxiety turns to full-blown depression once the baby is born. Her in-laws live upstairs and whilst sometimes a help with baby-sitting, her mother in law (Brigitte Mira) criticises her housekeeping, her sister in law (Irm Hermann) is jealous and aspish, and her brother-in-law (Armin Meier), whilst kind and supportive, might also have sexual designs on her. The in-laws here are basically the Küsters but with their worst aspects highlighted and brought into focus: narrow-minded, petty, judgmental; an agent of social control; and heaven protect those that deviate from the narrow constraints they hold to be proper.

Margot is anxious and afraid, tired, and in such a deep funk she thinks she’s going mad. Her husband works during the day; studies at night; and though sympathetic to her, is not quite there for her or the children. Fassbinder shows us Margot, in frames within frames, hemmed in by the doorways of her ugly apartment, filmed at an angle to show her disassociation from her environment. There are lots of shots of her looking at mirrors where she questions the person she sees. Who is she? Who is she to her self? What is her ‘self’? Her inner state is often indicated in point-of-view shots where what she’s seeing is indicated by a blurred, wavy image as if she’s not quite there, and can no longer be objective about what’s out there either. The loss of her grip on reality is often signalled by an electric version of the type of score typical for melodrama.

 

Margot’s husband is concerned and they go to a doctor, who prescribes Valium, which helps, but soon she’s hooked on it and has to supplement the Valium with alcohol. Her sister-in-law catches her drinking in the middle of the day (the slattern!);, her mother in-law finds her dressed up with full on make-up in the daytime (it makes her feel better); her brother-in-law sees her in the swimming pool doing frenzied laps (what’s wrong with her?) and soon the in-law are checking on her constantly: has she fed the children, does she cook, does she need aspirin?: she’s a bad wife and mother who always though she was superior to everyone else. Is Margot mad? Or is this what trying to live up to impossible social norms that make no space for the wishes and dreams of women like Margot do to women like Margot?

 

Soon Margot is a drug-addict and a drunk, whoring herself out to the neighbourhood pharmacist (Adrian Hoven) for Valium. One afternoon, she tells him she wants to leave her family to be with him and he basically tells her she’s wonderful but that’s not an option. When she gets home, she slices a wrist; not to commit suicide, there’s her children, whom she loves. But just to feel something.

 

Kurt Raabe appears as Mr. Bauer, with all the charisma and creepiness of Peter Lorre, as a neighbour; her doppleganger – he’s just come out of an institution —  or her worst fear? He’s the only one who recognises what she’s going through. But every encounter with him on the street brings trauma. At the end of the film, when Margot has gone to a sanatorium, received help, and is back to normal, she looks out her window and sees that Mr. Bauer is in a coffin and hasn’t made it, the image begins to blurr and get wavey again. Is this a spark to regression? It’s ambivalent.

 

A tight, well-made film, like an un-glossy Sirk, that still feels relevant and lingers in the mind.

José Arroyo

 

MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN/ Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1975)

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A film that incited laughter, tears, and, towards the end a palpable sense of sustained dread – ‘please don’t let that happen’. Indeed, there is an alternate ending –gentle and utopian –that was filmed but shown only in the US, where it doesn’t.  As I watch Fassbinder’s work, mainly in chronological order, some films detach themselves from the rest as more beautiful, more meaningful, better; films I want to revisit again: THE MERCHANT OF THE FOUR SEASONS, THE TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, FEAR EATS THE SOUL. And to that I would now add MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN.

The film is set in Frankfurt, then the financial capital of West Germany, and already a site of terrorist actions. What we’re shown first is a close-up of plugs being assembled. Frau Küsters (Brigitte Mira) is a working-class housewife, making extra money by doing piece work from home. Her son Ernst (Armin Meier) is helping out as her daughter-in-law, Helene (Irm Hermann) makes a salad. She’s got a stew in the oven, one that needs more sausages, the way her husband likes it, and she’s multi-tasking with the plugs and the stew and conversation with her children about their upcoming vacation in Finland, the danger of preservatives in meat, the pros and cons and salads, when they overhear a report that some man in a factory got into an argument with a personnel supervisor and killed him before committing suicide himself. That man is Frau Küsters’ husband.

Soon the press descend. Her daughter, Corinna (Ingrid Caven), a cabaret singer returns home to support her mother but also to get press for her career. The whole family is interviewed. Her daughter Corinna starts an affair with the news reporter she trusts the most (Gottfried John) but even he twists all their words and her husband, who she sees as a nice, even-tempered man who never complained, fair and reliable, is headlined as a monster in the press.

The Spectre of Marlene still hovers (see above)

Is it significant that all of Mother Küster’s children are played by Fassbinder’s former or current lovers? Mother Küster loves all her children unconditionally. She accepts everything from them. And they love her also. But they’ve got their own lives. The first third of the film reminded me a little bit of Ozu’s TOKYO STORY. Everyone has their reasons. They do love each other and it’s nobody’s fault. But her son and daughter-in-law end up going on their vacation to Finland and missing their father’s funeral. The daughter exploits her father’s tragedy and moves out of her mother’s house and in with the journalist. At the funeral she vows to restore her husband’s name. But how? She’s all alone.

She’s befriended by a couple played by Margit Cartensen and Karlheinz Böhm , journalists, members of the Communist Party, and the wealthiest most bourgeois couple in the film. They offer her warmth and understanding and they’re the only ones who seem interested in clearing her husband’s name. The husband will be turned into a working class martyr murdered on the altar of capital.  Of course they’re using her, her daughter tells her. ‘Everybody’s out for something,’ she replies, ‘once you realise that, things get simpler’. Mother Küster’s simple, unaffected and naïve oration at the Communist Party meeting moved me to tears, partly because it contrasts so strongly with the film’s ironising of power relations, social, institutional and interpersonal.

It’s worth pointing out that all the film’s possibilities for exciting action (the revolt at the beginning, the shoot-out at the end) are left off-screen(see below).

 That’s not what Fassbinder’s interested in. Instead, we get Brigitte Mira’s sensitive, common-sensical and accepting everywoman, so emotionally transparent and so moving. Ingrid Caven as a low grade diva playing cheap dives and making the most of her moment in the spotlight with sub Marlene Dietrich, sub Brecht-Weill cynical chansons; a queerness that seeps through into laughter with the fat man dragged up as a ballerina, shaggy dark chest hair jutting out of his tutu, pirouetting for his life in the nightclub scene; and then that incredible last scene of the occupation of the magazine offices, where Mother Küster thinks she’s just participating in a sit-in to clear her husband’s name but, to her surprise, a gun appears and the whole action descends into tragedy.

Mother Küsters speaks to the Communist Party (above)

A critique of labour relations, of how the press distorts and manipulates, and an interrogation of whether left-wing parties and action groups are really interested in improving the life of a the proletariat. A moving portrait of complex family relations in the process of dissolution. A truly great film.

 

José Arroyo

WORLD ON A WIRE/ WELT AM DRAHT – Part II (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1973)

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In the second part of WORLD ON A WIRE, Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) finds that an ‘identity unit’ called Einstein is the contact person a between his world and the computer program. But it then occurs to him that his own world might itself be a computer program. Is he smoking a cigarette or someone’s idea of a cigarette? Is the coffee he’s drinking brown or has it been programmed to be brown and is really purple? Moreover, someone now has financial skin in the game, the program is not just being used for scientific purposes but also for commercial ones. As soon as he suspects he too might be someone else’s construct, an identity unit like those he’s programmed and overseen, the show takes on the form of the conspiracy thrillers then so in vogue (THE PARALLAX VIEW, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, THE CONVERSATION). Is Fred mad or does someone want to kill him because of what he knows. He keeps getting headaches, losing consciousness; is someone out to erase him?

Michael Ballhaus, who so dazzingly filmed this, was executive producer along with Roland Emmerich, of THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (Josef Rusnak, 1999) an American adaptation of the novel that is also WORLD ON A WIRE’S source material, SIMULACRON-3 by Daniel F. Galoueye. Rusnak’s is a handsome, expensive looking film, but it gets nowhere near the philosophical complexity, social critique or the dazzling play with form that we get in WORLD ON A WIRE. It has some attractive and skilled actors (Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gretchen Mol, Vincent D’Onofrio), a loud score, quick editing, a focus on the individual; an easy nostalgia for the past (the constructed world is 1937 Los Angeles) and a rather naïve optimism about the future. The group, a sense of collective, of politics, of competing economic forces, none of this is to be found in what can feel like an overly individualistic quasi monadic exercise; pretty and banal.

There are so many things I love about this second part of WORLD ON A WIRE: the carnality of what are meant to be identity units. Lowitsch is constantly filmed with his shirt off, his sexual potency winked at through a play of mirrors and statues in the mise-en-scène(see above).

And I love Barbara Valentin as the ur-blowsy bruised blond, madly in love with someone who doesn’t deserve her but happy to play around; she knows the ways of the world all too well but doesn’t quite seem to be fully in it (see above).

I love how the figure of Marlene Dietrich is deployed to bring up ideas of spectres and simulations and how that’s tied to power (see above). There’s a clear sense here that computer programmers begin to think themselves as God, can too easily get to love totalitarian power, and have no moral compass about the effects of their decision on others – something entirely lacking in the THIRTEENTH FLOOR.

I love also the extraordinary long take with Fred on the run (see above), where we see Klaus Löwitsch do extraordinary physical feats jumping through fences, but unlike with someone like Burt Lancaster who does it with such grace, power and ease, here you also see the effort it costs: Fred is tired, he’s fit but these feats cost; and he might not make it.

And always the queerness seeps through; in the filming of Lōwitsch, the use of Marlene, the scenes set in the nightclub with the musclemen cooks, and the grotesque men who appear with bright lipstick like something out of a painting by George Grosz or Otto Dix.

I love Kurt Raab’s design (see the extraordinary take above), which seems to be made of cling film and aluminum foil, shiny, reflective but not quite real, flimsy and on the verge of disintegrating. I love the use of Eddie Constantine (see below), part of what the show tries to achieve by using old movie stars with strong personas to indicate a constructed world, and partly also a nod to ALPHAVILLE.

There are some dazzling 360 degree long takes, and quite astonishing images with guns and mirror, distorted multiple reflections, always expressing a feeling and a point-of-view on the world it’s filming (see a mere sampling, below).

Made on a tight budget, for television, an appreciation of its achievements – intellectual, political, aesthetic, as a viewing experience only grows when comparing it to what was remade in THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR. I’s influence on THE MATRIX now seems  unquestionable.

José Arroyo

 

 

Spectres and Simulations in Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, a video ‘essay’.

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Fassbinder’s World on a Wire is a Television Two-parter that makes us think of spectres and simulations, politics and simulacra. Here just playing and having fun with images and some ideas in relation to one aspect of the second part of the show.

 

Fox and His Friends/ Faustrecht der Freiheit (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1985)

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A film that frightened me when I first saw it as a teenager. Richard’s only now seen it. Does it hold up? Made at a time when there was a real dearth of representation, this is a daring work, as queer as a film can be, on many levels. The problem is not homosexuality but bourgeois exploitation, including by gay men. Why hasn’t Fassbinder been canonised by all the young queer boys? We speculate on that and much more in the accompanying podcast.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

WORLD ON A WIRE/ WELT AM DRAHT – PART 1, (RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER, WEST GERMANY, 1973).

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Fassbinder continues to astound, this time essaying science fiction, for television, in a two-parter, each of feature length. What is the world? What is the self? What is real? How do we know? The world of WORLD ON A WIRE is one of simulation and simulacra dramatised a decade before Baudrillard published his book philosophising the concepts. Ideas and situations from WORLD ON A WIRE can be seen in later films like BLADE RUNNER (Ridley Scott, 1982), TOTAL RECALL (Paul Verhoeven, 1990), STRANGE DAYS (Katherine Bigelow, 1995), DARK CITY (Alex Proyas, 1998) and the MATRIX films, amongst many others.

Creating a sci-fi world

Set in the near future, the action revolves around the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Science’s supercomputer, here called the Simulacrum, which hosts a simulation of a world with over 9,000 ‘identity units’, who live as human beings unaware that they and their world are just computer code, a world on a wire. Government, industry, and lobbying groups are in cahoots to use whatever findings they discover from the identity units in that world, indistinguishable from humans, so they can sell more stuff, foretell or rig elections results, etc.

Beautiful design by Kurt Raab, and always with a queer element

As the action begins, Professor Vollmer (Adrian Hoven), the technical director of the program, has made a new discovery that would mean ‘the end of this world’ should it get out. He dies soon after in mysterious circumstances. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), the Professor’s replacement has a discussion with Günther Lause (Ivan Desny), the head of security, about what happened but Lause seems to disappear before his very eyes. Moreover, when Stiller asks others about Lause, no one seems to know of him: he seems to have been erased from the world. Stiller seeks answers by donning an electronic cap that permits him to travel within the simulacra as an ‘identity unit’ where he sees the Lause that non one in his world now seems to know talking to a mysterious figure, Einstein (Gottfried John), who seems to be able to simulate identity across various simulacra. Could it be that Stiller himself is an identity unit and that his world is simply a different level of simulacra?

Sinewy Tracking shots

Fassbinder and cinematographer Micahel Ballhaus use the modernist banlieus and shopping centres then being built outside Paris as a setting. They film in sinewy tracks and dollies, some thrillingly barely an inch above the floor, using mirrors or through windows and glass to create a sense of doubling and doubt, of estrangement. Indeed the first image in the film is shot slightly out of focus with a wobbly quality to indicate that the world is unstable and might dissolve into code at any moment.

A world of screens

Old stars

This feeling of estrangement is also added to by the cast, Fassbinder’s usual repertory (Margit Cartesen, Wolfgang Schenk, Ulli Lomel, Ingrid Caven, El Hedi ben Salem) here deliberately enacting the kind of stiffness they were often accused of, but also in the casting of old movie stars from another era (Adrian Hoven, Ivan Desny, Elma Karlowa) bringing their personas and what they represented into this futuristic pastiche of past, present, and future; of the world being the same but different, now peopled by strange mythic creatures from other eras and thus slightly fantastic and unreal; something also added to by evoking powerful moments of historical memory in new contexts (here a Marlene impersonator, using her voice, in a nightclub setting, singing ‘See What The Boys in The Backroom Will Have’. A thrilling and surprising work, very beautiful to look at, with gorgeous design by Kurt Raab and and unsettling electronic score from Gottfried Hüngsberg. I’m eager for the second part.

Marlene Simulation.

José Arroyo

WHITY (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1971)

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I found WHITY a riveting film to see but a difficult one to process. The first of Fassbinder’s films I’ve seen, and this was his tenth feature, that I found amateurish, no, worse: dilettanteish. It was shot in one of Sergio Leone’s old sets in Almeria and is itself a combination of spaghetti western and half-penny Brecht/Weill imitation, Southern Gothic and Grand Guignol. The film is set in 1878, after emancipation. It was ostensibly inspired by Raoul Walsh’s BAND OF ANGELS where Yvonne De Carlo is a mulatto raised by her white father as an ante-bellum Southern Belle, only to find upon his bankruptcy and death that she’s to be sold off as chattel. The French title – L’ESCLAVE LIBRE is interesting to contemplate as Whity (Günther Kaufmann) is the opposite of that, he too is mixed race and living with his father but he’s been brought up as a slave, and the ideological forces of family and society keep him one longer after the law has freed him.

The film begins with the head of a fish being cut off, pans to a caged bird, clearly a symbol for Whity, who then enters the scene in the red livery of a house servant, and tells the cook that the pudding hasn’t been to their taste. ‘Lots of things aren’t to their taste’, says the cook, who looks like she’s in blackface. ‘You don’t understand me. I want them to like everything we do for them,’ he says. When he later berates the cook for singing black music, she spits in his face and calls him, ‘Whity!’

We’ll later learn that the cook, Marpessa (Elaine Baker) is his mother. His father is Ben Nicholson, the master of the house and one of the richest, most powerful and most crooked men in Texas. His father has a new young wife Katherine (Katrine  Schaake) who’s eager for him to die so she can collect his money and is already cheating on him. Whity has two half brothers from his father’s previous marriage, Frank (Ulli Lommel) a nasty piece of work who likes wearing garters and women’s lingerie to bed, and Davy (Harry Baer), who’s lacking most of his marbles and looks like Nosferatu’s sidekick. Like the Terence Stamp character in TEOREMA, Whity is happy to serve and service them all, even his father who gets off on whipping Whity. Whity who has selflessly offered to take Davy’s punishment, is clearly getting off on it as well. Whity is the figure upon whom all the other characters social, sexual and racial fantasies converge. His own desire is for Hanna (Hanna Shygulla) the local hooker/ saloon singer, who desires him also and who want to run off with him, something he can’t do until the end. A sexual masochism pervades the whole film.

The film is a work of cinephilia, with shots lifted directly from Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and Josef von Sternberg’s MOROCCO, amongst many others. It also has two dazzling scenes, innovatively filmed by Michael Ballhaus: the reading of the will, and the descent of Hanna (Hannah Schygulla) and Whity into the saloon where Hanna, in good voice, gets to sing two quite forgettable songs in one shot.

Reading of the Will (above)

Descent into saloon (above)

It’s also clear that Fassbinder learned how to use mirrors, frames within frames, etc – how to make images beautiful and expressive through carefully composed mise-en-scène — way before his Damascene encounter with Sirk ‘s work (see above). But much of the rest seems slapdash, amateurish and chaotic (see the scene where Fassbinder as a sadistic cowboy makes a grab for Hannah, below).

What remains startling in the film is the way that it dramatizes and visualises race, links its oppression to sex and the family as well as other socio-economic hierarchies, and goes into areas American cinema still doesn’t dare to, though it would be interesting to compare this to the nearly contemporaneous Sweet Sweetback’s Baadaass Song (Mario Van Peebles, 1971) and Buck and The Preacher (Sidney Poitier/ Joseph Sargeant, 1972). The shoot had so many problems, some of them caused by Fassbinder’s unreciprocated desire for Kaufmann, that it became the source material for BEWARE THE HOLY WHORE. The film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival but remained unreleased and largely unseen until it began to crop up in television in the 80s. It was still quite difficult to get a hold of a copy and I had to order it from the US. It’s a film I’d like to read more on rather than see again.

 

José Arroyo

 

 

 

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY: EPISODE FIVE – IRMGARD UND ROLF (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1973)

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EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY: EPISODE FIVE – IRMGARD UND ROLF.

 

Like Jane Fonda with 9 TO 5 (Colin Higgins, 1980),  Fassbinder ostensibly researched EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY by visiting factories, talking to workers and getting advice from trade unions. He then went on to write the scripts for the eight-part series, sent them to trade unionists for feedback and incorporated the feedback into the final scripts. I’m not too clear on when Westdeutscher Rundfunk decided not to go ahead with the last three episodes. Fassbinder had been paid, the actors had signed contracts, the show was a ratings and popular success. It had also been very controversial in the press. When producer Peter Märthesheimer approached Fassbinder about the project, he described the goal as the ‘occupation of a bourgeois genre.’  Perhaps they had succeeded too well, and Mäthesheimer didn’t want to test an already volatile press on what further, ostensibly bleaker episodes might spark. The fallout of the Munich Olympics Massacre of ‘72 was still being processed in the culture as this show was being released.

The final episode takes place mainly at work. The factory is moving. The workers find out before they’re consulted. It will constitute a major disruption to their lives, adding two hours to a daily commute for some, or incurring costs by requiring them to buy transport they hadn’t previously needed. Newlyweds Jochen (Gottfried John) and Marion (Hannah Schygulla) have only just signed a five-year lease on a flat. What to do? Marion, always the voice of reason and change in this series, suggests they draw up a list of demands and present them to the bosses. The biggest demand is that workers organise their work themselves. Surprisingly, the bosses accept. They set the hours it would normally take to do the job, and if the workers do the job earlier the money saved will be split half-half between workers and bosses. This they do. Should they divide the money equally or according to pay grade? An occasion to bring up all the racist tensions at the factory. But the workers agree to that as well…. And then the ball droops. Why should the bosses get any of the money? Well because they own the means of production.

The organisation, resistance and work at the factory is interspersed with housing problems (Jochen and Marion end up exchanging flats with Jochen’s parents), a misunderstanding when Manfred (Wolfgang Zerlett), madly in love with Monika (Renate Roland) , thinks she’s involved with someone else when in fact she’s being swindled by a bourgeois speculator, something the grandmother quickly, and humorously, sets to right, and Irm’s (Irm Hermann) developing relationship with Rolf(Rudolf Waldemar Brem) . In ‘The Utopian Channel’ a lovely essay that accompanies the Criterion blu-ray, Marion Weigel writes, ‘As an American in 2018, I find it impossible to watch EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY without longing for more stories like, for us, here and now.’ I know what she means.

José Arroyo

 

 

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY: EPISODE FOUR – HARALD AND MONIKA (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1973)

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Fassbinder, like Sturges, Ford, Almodóvar and many other directors, seems to use the same company of actors over and over again, and part of the pleasure of watching their films is in familiarising oneself with the troupe and revelling in their skill and effectiveness as they play different roles over time. There’s no one I look forward to seeing in Fassbinder’s work more than Irm Hermann, so wonderful as the forceful presence that never speaks in THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT. Like Eve Arden she doesn’t need a big role to make her character felt.

This fourth episode has a twinned structure in that as Jochen (Gottfried John) and Marion (Hannah Schygulla) head to marriage, Harald (Kurt Raab) and Jochen’s sister Monica (Renate Roland) head to divorce. The tenderness, uncertainty and discussion of the first couple is juxtaposed with the patriarchal control, physical violence and lack of communication of the other. Luckily for Monica, she has the support of her female network, and though her mother isn’t very understanding, her grandmother, her aunt and Marion, all help devise a plan to get Harald to agree to a divorce and let her keep their daughter. It’s female solidarity in action.

The other story-lines are a bit clichéi-sh here: will Marion’s mother (Brigitte Mira) approve of Jochen, will they move in to the mother’s apartment or get their own place. Marion and Jochen fight over the wedding itself. He doesn’t want Irmgard (Irm Hermann) to be maid of honour. She’s too stuck up, certain, disapproves of Marion’s marrying a blue-collar worker who gets her hand dirty. Needless to say, and after many. Tears, Marion gets her way. Irmgard’s haughty condescension, her certainty, and the way her convictions melt with liquor and desire at the wedding itself are the episodes’ high point.

The wedding party takes up the last 30 minutes of the 95 minute episode and is a tour de force of staging, keeping up all the various relationships in play, dramatizing their alterations, and playing off social structures against individual desires and circumstances in ways that are easily legible to the viewer. Another marvellous episode, this one with a superb closing shot.

Irm Hermann in action

 

José Arroyo

Manon (Henri-Georges Clouzot, France, 1949)

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What a wonderful movie this is. The story of Manon Lescaut but now with a dual setting, ordered through flashbacks: the immediate post-war Paris of black-market profiteering (of all kinds) and Jewish boat people bribing their way into Palestine, the latter having a particular resonance today. The film is very frank about what Manon (Cécile Aubrey) does to get the finer things she can’t live without. It’s super-romantic about how Manon and Robert (Michel Auclair), the man she loves and one who can’t stop loving her no matter what she does, deal with the effects of her actions.

She’s a tramp, he rescues her; she lies, he suffers. He’s jailed, she sells herself so she can touch him. The ending is a delirium of sentiment..Beautifully directed with compositions in depth that feel original and striking. A rather atypical film for Clouzot though one finds echoes of Manon in the character played by Brigitte Bardot in La Verité. Serge Regianni is suitably callow and slimy as Manon’s brother, Léon. A gorgeous blu-ray production from Arrow.

José Arroyo

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY – EPISODE 3 – FRANZ UND ERNST (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1973)

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The Daily Fassbinder: EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY – EPISODE 3 – FRANZ UND ERNST.

If this were released today, it’s easy to imagine a cycle of twitter responses: ‘It’s Marxist; It’s too Marxist; It’s not Marxist enough; It’s progressive but not left wing; Does the show condescend to working people?; I love the show; I hate the show; the show is redeemable’. And in all that critical noise, where one can’t see the forest for the trees, the importance and originality of the work is lost sight of. What’s still striking about this episode is that the main narrative through line takes place at work. A big chunk of our lives takes place at work, and yet how rare to see the problems of work dramatized. Drama sometimes takes place at work but is rarely related to work itself, and when it is, it tends to be be middle-class work and up. Here the drama takes place in a factory. The foreman has died. The workforce is agreed that Franz (Wolfgang Schenck) should get it. The supervisor agrees to wait to see whether he succeeds in passing the exam necessary for the certificate before he advertises the job but lies. Soon the workforce has to deal with a new  outside foreman, Ernst (Peter Gauhe), a very nice man, who luckily for all, doesn’t really want the job, and helps Franz pass the Maths exam he’s found such a hurdle in the past. Communication and co-operation turn out to be the key, at work as in the family. Another brilliant episode.

The closing credits, with the marvellously hummable theme tune and over a rather grim factory setting:

José Arroyo

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY – OMA AND GREGOR (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1973)

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There are various subplots threaded through the second episode: Jochen (Gottfried John) and Marion (Hannah Schygulla) go to a striptease; Monika (Renate Roland) decides to put her child in kindergarten and start working against her husband’s wishes – buying an expensive hat is her first act of rebellion; Franz (Wolfgang Schenck) decides to apply for the job of foreman.

However, the main plot of the second episode revolves around Oma (Luise Ulrich) and Gregor (Werner Finck).

Oma and Gregor have fallen in love and want to move in together. She’s resolved that they won’t pay a penny more than the standard expectation, which is 20% of net income (can you imagine?). Her pension is 356 marks a month; his is 760; so 217 is her budget and she’s sticking to it. Of course they can’t find a suitable flat for that amount. Oma comes up with various ruses (run down the flat, run down the neighbourhood etc) but none of them work. She believes that learning is alright but thinking is better; and thinking resulting in action is better than that.

In their search for a flat, they see that the council is closing down a library and have no plans to use the space. All this whilst children are in the street risking death because the council doesn’t have enough kindergarten places. She gets her grandson and his work mates work  to come to the space, do an overnight make-over and invites the children into the space. She gets the neighbourhood ladies on side and they’re a success. Of course, the council swoops down – criminals run free but there are enough policemen to jail pensioners and children! – but even though Gregor keeps saying ‘Well, that’s just the way things are’, Oma doesn’t accept it. They form a neighbourhood committee, get the press on side and at the end the neighbourhood has a kindergarten, they have new jobs and a flat, and the viewer has learned something about rents and squatters rights in Cologne in the early 70s.

This civic lesson is conveyed with zest, charm and energy through the madcap antics of the very endearing Oma, played with edge and intelligence and a bit of an edge by Louise Ulrich, and via the endearing earnestness with which the elderly couple’s developing relationship is depicted. Politics, drama, charm. It’s quite a combination.

 

José Arroyo

When is a Lighthouse a Phallic Symbol

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When is a Lighthouse a Phallic symbol? I took dialogue from one part of Jean Gremillon’s Poul L’amour d’une femme/ The Love of a Woman (1953) and put it under the image of the moment Micheline Presle as Doctor Marie Prieur puts on some lipstick and goes save a life. She’s having to choose between the man she loves and her profession, or rather he’s making her choose. Is it a man’s job? Will she have to give it up. Will she ever again feel as when she’s with him if she does?Context is everything. This rhymes with a moment later in the film where André Lorenzi (Massimo Girotti), the man she loves, deliberately leaves a lighter in her room. Will she give up her profession and return it to him? Will he be more understanding and go get it. Or will she face her future without him?

 

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY – JOCHEN AND MARION (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1972)

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Fassbinder’s work continues to surprise and delight. Yesterday I saw the first episode of EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY – JOCHEN AND MARION – in what must surely be one of the very earliest mini-series for television (5 episodes, aired 1972 through ‘73)? Each episode is as long as a feature-length film, with JOCHEN AND MARION being 107 minutes. The series is sub-titled ‘A Family Series’ and what one sees is Marxism with a pulse, dressed in warmth and with a heart. The episode begins with a birthday party for Oma (a delightful Louise Ulrich) where we’re introduced to the whole family, their various problems and the tensions between them, that are also part of the love they share and the mutual support they offer each other. The rest of the episode focuses on the developing relationship between Jochen (Jochen Epp) and Marion (Hannah Schygulla), conflicts at work in the factory, and Oma’s own search for independence.

I’ve yet to see Fassbinder depict a heterosexual relationship as tender, loving and mutually supportive as that between Jochen and Marion here. There was clearly an attempt to make it palatable for a family audience, but the film doesn’t eschew complexities. Jochen and Marion meet at an all night grocery dispenser. He picks her up and brings her to Oma’s party. She loves the family and loves him. She’s got a boyfriend but by the next day he’s gone: she knows what she wants. She’s honest as well as smart and sensitive. When Jochen sees her with a young boy, he thinks it might be hers. Would it matter if it was she asks? It’s a test. It clearly does matter but he loves her too much to let it. Luckily for him because it just turns out to be her younger brother.

It’s also quite rare to see a show take place at a factory.  It’s not just the canteen. Here we do see the men actually working . It’s wonderful to see all of the Fassbinder ensemble in a working-class context here. The drama at work is that they’ve been promised a bonus if they meet a deadline that’s almost impossible. Jochen develops a mechanism so they can meet the deadline and get the bonus but then the bosses withdraw the bonus because it’s now too easy to achieve. His mates blame Jochen, and Marion helps him resolve the problem: How does the factory make money? By selling the pieces. Who makes the pieces? Jochen and his team do. They must fight back. They do, and work slowdowns make the bosses re-offer the bonus, though this time in writing.

If the show starts with a birthday party in which Jochen and Marion meet, it ends after the foreman’s funeral – he didn’t survive the tensions at work — where Jochen and Marion’s relationship is now solidified. It’s beautifully filmed, through flowers, chairs, factory machinery, always purposefully. It’s got a lovely gentle rhythm too, beautifully realised emotion, and all this is punctured with moments of comedy that border on the slapstick, get their laughs and help create the piece’s gorgeous emotional rhythms. Smart, hard-working, loving working people that won’t be stepped on. I can’t wait for the next episode.

José Arroyo

Martha (Rainer Warner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974)

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MARTHA is Fassbinder in full Sirk mode, developing the 1940s ‘woman’s film’ film to the brutal ends inherent in the material but usually more tactfully conveyed. Martha (Margit Cartensen) is a chic librarian from a bourgeois background but a close-up at the beginning lets us know everything is not quite right: she’s on Valium. What’s making her anxious? Is it that she’s still a virgin at thirty? That her friends are all married? That she loves her father too much?

She has high ideals of marriage and social proprieties and is a bit sniffy about sex. Yet the men around her treat her as she’s constantly up for it, sending up unwanted gigolos to her room in Rome, sticking their tongues out at her suggestively in parks. Mostly she doesn’t notice and acts as she’s above it all when she does. Yet, when she turns down a marriage proposal from her boss, he immediately asks someone else to marry him. Is she just a body and a function, easily replaceable?

Everything changes when her father dies of a heart attack in the Roman Steps in Rome. Her purse gets stolen and when she goes to the German Embassy she meets a man and they both have a coup de foudre. The camera does a 360 degree shot, where each of the characters in the frame also turn around completely, but in different directions, thus practically condensing the film into one shot.

They meet again at a wedding where Fassbinder turns a typical meet cute into an ominously sharp series of insults. The man is Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Böhm), a well-to-do businessman who tells her she’s too thin and is not as beautiful nor as charming as she thinks. She loves it. They continue to see each other and he finally proposes after she’s been sick in an aerial amusement park ride. Her gratitude for the proposal is excessive. On their honeymoon he chides her for wearing sun-tan lotion so she doesn’t use it, gets completely burned up as a result, and we’re shown his relish at her pain as he squeezes every burn.

She’s married a sadist, doesn’t yet know it, rationalises each of his actions through romantic ideas of love, and is overly grateful for every crumb of affection.

Soon, he resigns her from the job she loved and, in full GASLIGHT mode, he’s convincing her of things that aren’t; he cuts her from her house and furniture, her mother, her friends and he even cuts off the telephone so she can be thinking only of him, appreciating the music he buys, and reading the technical tomes related to his work that he’d like to discuss with her. She puts up with all of this rationalising that it’s all proof of how much he loves her….until he kills her cat.

When Martha can stand it no longer she calls a friend but she’s in such hysterics to get away she clutches the steering wheel and causes an accident that leaves her friend dead and herself paralysed, sentenced to a lifetime of control by her sadistic husband. The iron door of a lift closing on her in a wheelchair and her husband towering over her in control of the chair and her life is an extraordinary ending.

Another extraordinary film from Fassbinder which partly gets its power from the precision of the mise-en-scene —  the use of décor and mirrors to signify, the way characters ominously appear at the end of sequences to signify another option – in combination with an in your face punk attitude about showing. Nothing is sugar-coated or watered down. Sirk and punk is a potent combination.

Michael Ballhaus was the dop and claims it’s his favourite of Fassbinder’s films.

 

José Arroyo