Monthly Archives: April 2023

Prisioneros de la tierra/Prisoners of the Earth (Mario Soffici, Argentina, 1939).

Uncategorized, , ,

Seen as part of The Film Foundation’s ‘Restoration Screening Room’: Prisioneros de la tierra/Prisoners of the Earth (Mario Soffici, Argentina, 1939) is a melodrama that vividly evokes emotions but channels them so the film also acts as a social critique of colonialism, exploitative employment practices, the treatment of indigenous peoples by foreign capital, class and ethnicity. A revelation that encourages revolution or at least warns of uprisings. A film that generally tops the charts of best films ever made in Argentina. We discuss all this and 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

Some of the other Scorsese Foundation Restorations Previously discussed in the podcast include:

Thinking Aloud About Film: Pixote (Hector Babenco, Brazil, 1981)

Thinking Aloud About Film: Soleil Ô/ Oh Sun (Med Hondo, France, 1970)

José Arroyo & Richard Layne on Downpour (Bahram Beyzaie, Iran, 1979), Wales One World

Thinking Aloud About Film: THE LAW OF THE BORDER/ HUDUTLARIN KANUNU ( Lütfi Ömer Akad Turkey, 1966)

Chess of the Wind is discussed here:

Cinema Rediscovered 2022, Bristol Watershed 2022, Final Round-up

Effie Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

 

EFFIE BRIEST is the opposite of a Visconti-like adaptation of a female focussed 19th century novel such as Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina: no sweeping balls, all the action left out of the main-narrative (births, marriages, affairs), even a duel is shot at a distance to minimise tension and excitement. The focus is on repressive ideologies and what they do to people, mainly women. The message is basically the full title: ‘FONTANA EFFIE BRIEST: 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 focus is to render cinematically what the novel signifies. For the first twenty minutes I kept thinking, wouldn’t Visconti have done it better? I wanted violins and violent emotions, swirling skirts under frescoes…then I gave myself over to the film’s form of narration and its rhythms, which ultimately became incantatory and hypnotic.

Effie Briest (Hannah Schygulla) is the only child of landed gentry from the provinces. A lively, spirited 17 year-old, intelligent and unspoiled, with a good heart. Baron von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck), much older at 38, old enough to have once courted her mother (played by Fassbinder’s own mother, under the name of Lilo Pompeit), arrives to ask for her hand in marriage and her parents encourage her to accept. Instetten is wealthy, ambitious, and has excellent prospects. ‘At twenty you’ll be where other girls are at 40 and reach much higher than I ever did,’ her mother tells her. Soon Effie is swept off to a provincial backwater where her husband is stationed. She’s looked after by servants but has no one to talk to. The society around her criticise her for being atheist or deist, for expressing too many thoughts or dressing too well, basically for being too young.

 

Her husband is often away on business and she’s bored, alone, and frightened of a Chinese ghost that her husband tells her is part of the history of the house, but that others will soon tell her is a way for a man to give status to an unremarkable house and for a husband who’s often away to keep a wife under control . When handsome Major Crampus (Ulli Lommell) comes to visit she’s thirsty for company and ripe…for what? It’s clear that they see each other furtively. What’s less clear is whether they actively consummate an affair. This goes on for a while. Then, as Instetten rises higher in government, they move to Berlin, Effie is appointed a Lady in Waiting to the Empress….and then her letters to Crampus are discovered.

The discovery of the letters, which happens almost two thirds into the narrative is a moral turning point. Instetten claims to love his wife, they have a daughter, Annie, the affair happened six years before. What should he do (see clip above)? He asks a friend for advice and as soon as he does so they realise that by the logic of their society, the act of making that information available to another, even a friend, leaves him with no option but to duel for his honour. Instetten wins the duel. Crampus asks to tell him something, maybe that he didn’t have sexual relations with his wife, but dies before he can do so.

The duel makes the papers. Effie is forbidden her home and loses her child. Even her parents, who still love her very much, can’t risk themselves being shunned and forbid her returning to her childhood home, though they do send her a small stipend so she can afford the boarding house she now has to live in. Her only companion is Roswitha, her maid, the daughter of a blacksmith who got pregnant out of wedlock and was beaten out of her house with a red-hot iron by her father. Roswitha’s situation was so terrible, Effie found it unseemly to speak about earlier, and it certainly lends a perspective to what Effie herself will live through later.

Effie doesn’t know if she feels guilty but she does accept the consequences of her actions. Until one day on a tram, she sees her daughter, flees in a panic, and finally begs to be able to see her daughter in a planned and reasoned  way. This eventually takes place but that’s when she realises Instetten has turned her daughter against her and this she can’t bear. She takes ill, her loving parents take her back, and she dies, fully absolving Instetten. What a pity think the parents on her death, they were the perfect couple. Was it their fault? Did they spoil her? Some questions are too vast to answer, says Effie’s father, the last line of the film.

The story is divided into sections separated by intertitles that narrate (‘Then came their first separation, which lasted almost 12 hours’) comment on the story (‘an artifice calculated to inspire fear’) or the characters: ‘A man in his position has to be cold of course, on what do people founder in life if not on warm human emotions’. The film is shot in black and white (by Dietrich Lohman and Jürgen Jürges), in tableau-like compositions, with a very extensive voice-over narration, often taken directly from Fontana’s novel and read by Fassbinder himself, a superb device that allows an omnisicient narrator to comment on various aspects of the story – the society, the characters, ways of thinking, secret thoughts – occasionally in counterpoint to what we are shown and sometimes appearing mid-scene taking over from what we have seen and lending a perspective to it, and sometimes even what happens next. For those who’d like to see, all the intertitles and voice-overs are compiled above in chronological order.

 

The images are often shot through mirrors —  this is a society in which perception is all, or gauzes —  in scenes that fade to white, like old photographs. Women of all classes are often on their knees before their men. The ending is so moving because it reinforces what the opening title tells us, Effie’s resignation at the end confirms and reinforces the very ideology that brought her down so painfully and unnecessarily.

 

 

The film is hypnotic and ultimately moving, all black and white, and like nothing I’ve ever seen. Tableau-ish, episodic, incantatory. A masterpiece.

 

José Arroyo

Peter von Kant (François Ozon, France, 2022)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

 

PETER VON KANT is too piddly to get mad at. One can understand the temptation in turning the story of Petra von Kant into a story about Fassbinder. Many of his colleagues have spoken of how when Fassbinder wrote Petra, he was working through some of his feelings on past relationships, particularly that with El Hadi Ben Salem. So Ozon (mis) casts the beary and huggable Denis Menochét as filmmaker Peter von Kant, a genius filmmaker, shit of a person, with a penchant for leather jackets and sniffing coke for breakfast. Khalil Ben Gharbia plays what was formerly the Hannah Schygulla part, here named Amir Ben Salem, after two of Fassbinder’s exes, and so on.

This all brings to mind that infamous Stanley Kauffmann article, ‘Homosexual Drama and Its Diguises’ where, without naming them, he pretty much outed Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Edward Albee, claiming their plays were homosexual relationships masquerading as heterosexual ones; as if Ozon thought he now could make the ‘true’ film that Fassbinder couldn’t. Though surely Ozon, as the Fassbinder fan he is, has seen FOX AND HIS FRIENDS and knows better? Whatever the cause, the film has a soupçon of internalised homophobia about it a well as an implied evocation of the superiority of the present over the past: the film is set in the same year THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT was made.

At the beginning of the film Peter is writing a letter to Romy Schneider about possibly starring in a film cannily like Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN. Ozon knows his divas and his camp and the character that was Marlene in PETRA, so potent as embodied by Irm Herrman, is now Karl (Stephan Crepon) and sadly reduced to that. For me the only pleasure in PETER VON KANT is Isabelle Adjani’s marvellous turn as Sidonie, movie star and chanteuse, with more a whiff of Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD about her. Every gesture, every tilt of the head is mannered, false and yet also true to the character and very entertaining. She looks beautiful too, always a thrill in itself with movie stars. Hannah Schygulla, who here appears as Peter’s mother, has a different kind of beauty. Unlike Adjani’s she’s let herself age naturally, and brings an earthiness and tenderness to the part that is perhaps the only moment the film succeeds at depth.

As to the rest, the film uses a similar style of framings, mirros, and camera moves over an interior set to Petra’s. It’s over half an hour shorter than Fassbinder’s and much more lightweight. It’s busier too, where Fassbinder used one painting, precisely and meaningfully, Ozon uses four (the Pousin Midas and Bacchus used by Fassbinder and three St. Sebastians: Rubens’, Caraccciolo’s and Toscan’s) but much less purposefully. The dummies here seem merely decorative, a nod to the original. The film is full of allusions to other works, those of Fassbinder of course, and those which the extra textually of the film stars themselves bring, but also visually – Warhol, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS — aurally — the diva-esque dimension of French chanson — and so on. Why can’t one make different versions of a work like they do in the theatre, asks Ozon? And indeed there is no set rule about it. Certainly Fassbinder and Haynes succeed with their reworkings of ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. But Ozon doesn’t. I like Ozon’s films very much. They’re often fascinating formal exercises and often fun, but they never quite convince. Peter von Kant is a measure of how frivolous and lightweight a filmmaker Ozon is compared to the greats.

José Arroyo

Fear Eats The Soul/ Angst essen Seele auf (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

 

I’ve seen FEAR EATS THE SOUL umpteen times now, and it never ceases to move me. Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a sixtyish charlady, walks out of the rain and into a bar and a new life when she meets Ali (El hedi Ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan ‘guestworker’. They like talking to each other, soon fall  in love and get married. The first third is all about the understanding two lonely people share, the building of a life, and the basking in a particular type of happiness, until now long forgotten,  that they both partake in: They love each other.  Brigitte Mira is so transparent in her needs, her common sense, her understanding of the hurdles to come that she’s heart-breaking to see. We know she will suffer because we know this is a melodrama where individual desires crash against the family and other repressive social forces that won’t allow the existence of an inter-racial coupling of such divergent ages. What is moving in the film is the delicacy of individual feeling against the harshness with which the social opprobrium is expressed.

In the second third of the film, her co-workers shun her; the shop-owner refuses to serve her; her own children are outraged, kick-in the television and call her a whore. It gets to the point Emmi can’t take it anymore. She’s so happy to be with Ali but breaks down at how punitive society has been and they decide to go away.

When they return from vacation in the last third of the film, social need reasserts itself and alters the mode and intensity of opprobrium. Her children need a babysitter; her neighbours need her cellar space; her co-workers need an ally. As Emmi re-gains her previous place in society, she becomes more like the people who oppressed her and soon she’s refusing to make cous-cous for Ali, berating him for not integrating better into German Society, and reducing him to a prized fetish she can show off to her friends. The more she does this, the more he strays. They become cruel to each other.

All seems about to be lost again, but in an end that almost responds to the beginning, Emmi walks back into that bar once more, they dance again and re-assert their understanding with fresh wisdom. In a typical Fassbinder twist on melodrama, this is just before Ali’s ulcer kicks in and an ambulance has to be called. Life will not be rosy; these attacks might recur every six months; it’s the stresses of an immigrant life says the doctor. But Emmi asserts that they will face these challenges together.

The film is shot very simply and elegantly, in frames within frames, so that we sometimes get a partial view, or it is indicated that the neighbours are spying, society is intruding, or that their little bit of happiness is just an illuminated part of a much harsher much colder world. Elements are repeated in the same way to quickly indicate changing circumstances; so for example when Emmi is shunned she is framed alone through a staircase; later in the film she does the same to a Yugoslavian immigrant; or earlier in the film when, in private, she sees Ali’s body in the mirror and tell him ‘You are so beautiful,’ in the last third of the film becomes the scene where she is asking him to show off his muscles to her co-workers: public, self-involved and demeaning. I love the way Fassbinder leaves a shot hanging rather than quickly cutting to the next scene, which underlines the filming of frames within frames in depth, conveying a feeling of danger, alienation and sadness, even when the occasion is meant to be a happy one, like the wedding meal at what was Hitler’s favourite restaurant.

Fassbinder had clearly been  thinking on this material as early as THE AMERICAN SOLDIER where we’re told a slightly different version of it. And one of the fascinating things about this film is how it’s similar to but also so different from ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, a film which clearly inspired it, and Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN, a film that was in turn influenced by both the Sirk and the Fassbinder. All great film, all great in different ways. FEAR EATS THE SOUL is the only one in which this story is told in an unapologetic working class setting, and very powerful for it.

The Arrow blu-ray contains a fascinating documentary on El hedi Ben Salem, an interview with Jürgen Jürges and much more. It’s a beautiful restoration by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation as well.

José Arroyo

THE TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES/ Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (Ulli Lommel, West Germany, 1973)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

THE TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES / Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973), is a film directed by Ulli Lommel but produced by Fassbinder, written by and starring  Fassbinder stalwart Kurt Raab, and peopled by everyone who seems to have appeared in previous Fassbinder films, including his lover (El Hedi ben Salem), his current and future wives (Irm Hermann and Ingrid Caven), the stars of THE MERCHANT OF THE FOUR SEASONS (Hans Hirschmüller) and ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Brigitte Mira); and many others. There is a real sense of Fassbinderlandia about this film and a reminder of the influence of Warhol’s factory on his style of filmmaking. Fassbinder’s own appearance in this film as a fat pimp and small-time crook, sexually and physically confident in spite of his size, crotch thrust out, is a signifier of how confrontational Fassbinder liked to be.

And confrontational this film certainly is. It’s inspired by the same ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’ that was the basis for Fritz Lang’s M (and there’s an homage to it here, the bit with the young girl in the playground) but set in the aftermath of WWII rather than the interwar years after WW1. Kurt Raab’s look is a combination of Peter Lorre in M and Max Schreck’s in Murnau’s NOSFERATU. THE TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES brings out the homosexual dimension to the fore. Here the serial killer is gay, in love with a no-good pimp (Jeff Roden), living in an underworld of petty theft, black marketeering and prostitution (both men and women) that brings to mind John Henry Mackay’s THE HUSTLER: THE STORY OF A NAMELESS LOVE FROM FRIEDRICHSTRASSE. Lommell’s film also brings out the vampiric dimension to the fore as Raab’s serial killer, though with no special super-natural powers, likes to bite his victims in the neck and suck their blood before dismembering their bodies and selling their flesh to restaurants through the black market where the customers adore the ‘pork’.

THE TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES is a very impolitic film, one that I doubt could be made now. Jack Babuscio began his review in Gay News (Gay News No 06, June 3-16th, 1976) by asking: ‘Ulli Lommel’s TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES (1973) is a film that will certainly set the blood of many Screen Gay readers boiling. Does this mean you?’ (See below and thanks to Andrew Moore for the images).

A creepy gay man luring adolescent runaways to his home with promises of money and employment, then having his way with them (in this film before or after he kills them, with their naked bodies splayed out) must have fed into all kinds of prejudices of homosexual men as predatory paedophiles. It’s a film that would have been a gift to people like Anita Bryant had she been aware of it then. And I wonder to what extent Fassbinder, Lommell or Raab took this into account or whether the social impact of any of these particular narratives and representations on already vulnerable queer communities still living under the repressive Paragraph is something that would have entered their minds. Was it freedom or thoughtlessness?

Frank Noack tells me that, ‘TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES was attacked in West Germany, by gay activists and gay-friendly straight reviewers, for its sinister portrayal of the gay world, but Fassbinder couldn’t care less. His point, more explicit in PETRA VON KANT and FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, was that gays and lesbians exploit one another as much as straight people do. Neither Fassbinder nor Raab, who has written a deliciously lurid tell-all book right after the maestro’s death, expressed any interest in or sympathy for the gay movement. Because of its explicit male nudity, the film nevertheless won a gay cult following’.

The film’s perspective is that an oppressive world creates its own monsters. Raab’s character (Fritz Haarmann) is arrested by the police under paragraph 175 and made to be a police informant. But his compulsion for young male flesh is his own. I suppose the achievement of this handsome-looking film (Jürgen Jürges first job as dop, deploying a whole arsenal of expressionist devices) is in so well evoking a particular underworld of petty criminals, cheap taverns, dark railways, and dangerous attic flats; in shocking and frightening like a good horror film should, and in arousing sympathy for a queer serial killer.

I suspect Raab’s appearance here had a role in inspiring the skin-head look that would become so prevalent a decade later in London and Berlin.

From the handsomely produced Arrow Box Set of Fassbinder films (vol 1.) chock-a-block with great extras, including interviews with the director, actors, cinematographer.

José Arroyo

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1972)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

 

I hadn’t seen THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT for forty years and I remember finding it stagey and alienating then. This weekend I found it so great I saw it twice, and it will probably take me a long time to think through its complexities.

The beauty of it is immediate. It’s filmed by Michael Ballhaus, in one set, in mainly autumnal colours with a painting of Poussin’s MIDAS AND BACCHUS often dominating the background and symbolically commenting on the characters’ situation, just as the dressmaker’s dummies that are carefully arranged in the background, often through room partitions and book-cases in clearly Sirkian frames-within-frames or the symbolic use of dolls or even the design of that dress Marlene is undertaking on Petra’s behalf.. The mise-en-scène is a marvel of slithering long-takes landing with precision on extraordinary compositions, and often more than one within a shot. The dialogue is constant, as in a play, but with this type of mise-en-scène bears less of the weight of communicating meaning and feeling. It’s a film that makes one re-think or think some more or think in better and more complicated ways about the theatrical in film (which I know some of you have already done so).

 

There are only six characters in the film; Petra von Kant (Marget Cartensen), a celebrated dress designer, once widowed, currently divorcing her second husband; Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), he best friend; her mother (Gisela Fackelday); her daughter (Eva Mattes); her secretary Marlene (the great Irm Herrmann) who we never hear throughout the film but is always in the background; her presence always felt, even when it’s only through us hearing her typing. She sees everything, hears everything, does all the work, is clearly totally besotted with Petra and it is more than suggested that she gets off on Petra treating her abominably; and finally Karin, a married woman, like Marlene of a lower class, with whom Petra will fall madly in love, losing all her bearings and upturning her life.

The film’s five acts go with five different wigs as Petra tries on different identities, philosophises about gender and power and exploitation in different ways until love floors her. Fassbinder’s view of relationships is that it’s all power games with different partners having different degrees of power, in which gender, money and class figure,  but is mainly on how much they’re in love; and that love itself is something that leads to a total loss of control and complete vulnerability. It’s a hyper-romantic view of love and a super-cynical view of relationships. It did make me wonder how lesbians – who flocked to this film in the 70s; there was a real dearth of representation – responded to this film then. And perhaps some of you remember and will tell me.

Aside from the theatrical, the film, like with MERCHANTS OF THE FOUR SEASONS makes me think about the representation of period, but for almost different reasons. The film is clearly set in contemporary times (all the references to air travel) but it looks as if it was set in the late twenties or thirties, perhaps because of the costumes and hairdos, and because they bear so much more weight of signification since the action all takes place indoors. It again seems to be set in a no-time that bears the weight of history (the costumes, the painting), in this case with a particular accent on the patriarchal (the use of dolls, the constant dressing) and the relationships women have had to enact within that order. A truly great film. Now that I’ve seen it twice, I want to see it again.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1971)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

 

I’ve been watching all the Fassbinder films I can get my hands on in chronological order and find this the culmination of his early works, a great film about filmmaking to rank alongside Minnelli’s TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN (1962) Godard’s CONTEMPT (1963) or Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT (1973). Richard hasn’t seen a Fassbinder film for two decades and finds it harder to get into. We discuss the structure, the marvellous visual and dramatic handling of a very large cast, the gorgeous glossy look –surprising in Fassbinder films to this point — and snake-like long takes (Michael Ballhaus is the cinematographer), the psycho-sexual power dynamics in the narrative and we admire Hannah Schygulla. A main take-away from this conversation with Richard is how Fassbinder’s early work points to a type of cinema and a type of queer representation that the AIDS pandemic brought an end to and of which QUERELLE might be a nodal point. BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE is ostensibly based on Fassbinder’s experience of filming WHITY (1971) but it is a difficult film to see at this point and that aspect has largely been left out of the discussion.

 

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

 

José Arroyo

Video Essay: Hans Epp, An Easily Replaceable Man

Uncategorized, , ,

A video essay demonstrating Hans Epp’s descent into nothingness in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of the Four Seasons (1972):

José Arroyo

THE MERCHANT OF THE FOUR SEASONS/ HÄNDLER DER VIER JAHRESZEITEN (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1972).

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

After PIONEERS IN INGOLSTADT Fassbinder took an eight-month break, saw Sirk’s 50s melodramas (ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, WRITTEN ON THE WIND, IMITATION OF LIFE, etc) and was so excited by what he saw that he travelled to Switzerland to meet with Sirk personally and discuss his work.

The effects are evident in THE MERCHANT OF THE FOUR SEASONS, Fassbinder’s first popular box-office success. Though the film was still shot very quickly (11 days), one can see signature Sirkian compositions in his use of frames within frames created by doorways, arches, and staircases; or in his expressive use of mirrors to communicate tensions in what is being shown.

For the first time (that I at least can detect), he also uses colour deliberately and expressively, in relation to character and then changing situations. It’s a colour coding of drama. Thus, for example, Hans (Hans Hirschmūller)is often shown in various shades of blue, that meld best into the table and background of the tavern where he is most at home. His wife Irmgard (Irm Hermann) is shown in or next to earthy reddish browns, which often match the curtains of her kitchen. As Hans loses his place in his world to Harry (Klaus Löwitzch), his old legion friend, Hans begins to be associated with blue as Hans begins to be associated in the white and black of the funeral that awaits him. It’s a 1950s big studio style of expressive colour coding, brilliantly deployed here.

 

 

 

THE MERCHANT OF THE FOUR SEASONS is that story of an ordinary man in 1950s Munich, Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmūller), thwarted at every turn. He wanted to go to a trade school and work with his hands but his mother had loftier ambitions and denied him. He got a job as a policeman but lost it when caught with a prostitute trading sex for favours. He went to the foreign legion only to be caught and tortured, a turn-on to his comrades, who waited much too long to rescue him in order to watch. When he returns from the foreign legion, which we’re shown in the very first scene, his mother tells him: ‘It’s always the same. The good die young and people like you come back….Once a no-good, always a no-good!’ Even the love of his life, who loves him back, reduces him to a bit on the side as her family has forbidden her to marry a fruit peddler, which is how he earns his living as the film begins.

Hans’ life is such a misery that he drinks himself into a stupor,  and then takes his failures out on his wife, physically, and in front of the daughter. This leads to a threat of divorce, which precipitates a heart attack and changes in his life. After the first 30 minutes or so, it’s his wife who takes care of the family and the business, who gains in strength, power and say. There’s a lovely moment (see above) after Hans’ heart-attack where we see her coming out of the hospital, her life in ruins, pictured in front of a wedding dress in a department store, walking past the dream living room it now seems she’ll never have, and propositioned as a prostitute by a man driving through the dark streets. It’s a heart-breaking moment. But as soon as she begins to take charge, we begin to see how easily replaceable Hans is. He’s replaced in his job by Anzell (Karl Scheydt) a new employee who happens to have had a sexual adventure with his wife whilst he was in hospital, and highlighted by both of them being shot peddling their fruit in the same way (from below as they turn and look up at the apartments below).

Anzell also replaces Hans in his bed;

 

and then Harry will replace Hans as head of the table, the family and as father:

 

Hans’s whole life will be taken over by Harry:

 

Part of the reason why the film is so great is because it’s so spare yet so complex and rich. Everyone has their reasons in the film, everyone is understandable if not necessarily nice. Hans’ mother is bringing up her children alone and sees Hans, her sole male child, as having particular obligations he is not fulfilling. His wife has to keep her child protected, a roof over their head and income rolling in. Irmgard is at least as interesting a character as Hans and probably even more so. Structurally, flashbacks add layers of understanding and complexity to the minimal narrative so that we see all those aspects of class, gender, adding socio-economic relations adding dimensions to the narrative. Fassbinder brings out the sexual power dynamics in a more vivid manner than most. And colour and composition are used to bring out a superbly expressive use of the visual in a way that I had yet to see in Fassbinder’s work. There is no attempt (or perhaps budget) to visually periodise the film so that it creates a peculiar sense of time and history in the film, so that the film’s fifties does not quite convince as then but is yet somehow also now, the then in the now. It’s a truly great film.

José Arroyo

The Niklashausen Journey (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Fengler).

Uncategorized, , , , ,

Who was Fassbinder making films for in 1970 and what did he hope they’d get out of them? THE NIKLASHAUSEN JOURNEY begins with a group of people circling around the room asking: ‘Who is the revolution for? The people. And who makes the revolution? The people. And who prepares the ground for it? The party. And if there is no party but only a cell of three or four people? Three or four people can form the vanguard of a party. Can three or four people start a revolution? They must try to create the basis for it’. It could be dialogue lifted directly from any student Marxist-Leninist group of the period and almost certainly ideas discussed at the  Anti-Theatre Collective. .

The film is based on a historical account of a failed peasant revolt against the church in the Middle Ages. Michael Köning is Hans Boehm, the charismatic shepherd who claims the virgin speaks through him and directs his actions. This claim to be a voice of the divine gains even more traction when a group of friends ‘direct’ Johanna’s (Hanna Schygulla) appearance as the Virgin herself, with Fassbinder himself giving line readings. They gain celebrity and sponsorship, lots of followers who are willing to engage in violent action, the church retaliates and it all ends in carnage.

Fassbinder was influenced by Brecht and though the film is set in the Middle Ages, it’s a Middle-Ages where Fassbinder himself appears with sunglasses, jeans and a leather jacket, through carriageways and in ‘car cemeteries’. Verfremdung is the intended effect. ‘Plans sequence’ is the technique, with most scenes shot in one long take, whizzed with zooms for emphasis, and with minimal additional sound work. There are songs interspersed throughout (religious & revolutionary, with a rock number thrown in to spice things up). The Black Panthers are mentioned by name, May ‘68 is clearly an inspiration as is the figure of Camilo Torres and Liberation Theology, the cinema of Glauber Rocha (ANTONIO DAS MORTES) and that of Godard (WEEKEND in particular).

I found it hard-going until the very last sequence, where the peasants are betrayed, crucified and burned, all with the very camp Bishop’s blessing. It’s extraordinary directing in large scale, with lots of figures, over a wide space with startling imagery and to great dramatic effect. It’s dazzling, and that that’s where the whole film leads, makes one in turn re-think the beginning, forgive that whole scene where König utters a whole scene as his whole face is rendered invisible (see below, top left) through careless lighting, and ask were the earlier bits amateurish? Was there some grander purpose missed? Can amateurishness be a virtue?

It’s certainly a striking film, one which reminds me of Claude Jutra’s WOW (1970), and feels daring and powerful. Would it matter if Fassbinder made the film only for himself and with state money? I resisted, resisted some more…and then surrendered.

 

José Arroyo

 

Broken Lullaby (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

Last night’s viewing was the new Indicator release of Lubitsch’s BROKEN LULLABY, which I found intensely moving.

The opening sequence is extraordinary: a victory parade in Paris on the first anniversary of the Armistice, swords glistening in a row in Church, shiny boots marching, the Parade again, now seen between the legs of an amputee, a detour through a hospital to show veterans howling in pain, the church services finishes and as all the forces officials leave, there’s a young man remaining, Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes) praying in anguish, the camera dollies to a figure of Christ, more of the young boy suffering, then the priest comes out of the confessional, the camera quickly dollies to the priest, and the young man runs to him to confess he’s killed a man. This all culminates in a close-up of the French veteran dissolving into the face of the man he killed, a boy just like him.

Totally melodramatic and totally thrilling mise-en-scène (see above). After this the young man sets off to a small village in Germany to apologise to the other boy’s family, the Holderlins, expiate his guilt and find a reason for living, which he does in the most difficult way possible: by falling in love with Elsa (Nancy Carroll) the fiancée of the man he’s killed.  The film deals with prejudice, guilt, remorse, the way small communities support but also discipline and punish, the futility of war. The vehicle is melodrama and Lubitsch wrings every ounce of feeling from the mode without sacrificing complexity, whilst also getting a few laughs along the way.

The only creaks are the dated style of performing: Phillips Holmes looks beautiful and intense but overdoes the gestures; Nancy Carroll who can be so lively and magnetic is here overly subdued whilst also over-gilding the lily in her big moments; as to Lionel Barrymore as the father, I’m fascinated by him; he’s so imitable, I dislike all his loveable curmudgeon schtick, and yet here he is playing all his old tricks and being extremely effective with them. The great Zasu Pitt brings spark as the Honderlin maid, and the famous Lubitsch touch is still in evidence (see below).

François Ozon remade this as FRANZ and changed the ‘who knows what when’ form to put more emphasis on the fiancée in the second half of the film. I remember liking it then but now can’t remember much else. The script is by the great Samson Raphaelson and is  based on Marcel Ronstadt’s novella and subsequent play, THE MAN I KILLED, part of a cycle of international interwar anti-war works that include JOURNEY’S END and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

Josè Arroyo

The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1970)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

 

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER is not so much a pastiche of noir as a noirish dream incurred by watching American gangster films of the fifties and sixties.

The plot is basic: Ricky (Karl Scheydt), a German-American Vietnam Vet returns to Munich and is hired as a contract killer by three policemen. The whodunnit element is negligible. There is no suspense.

Graphic but inchoate

The psycho-sexual elements are heightened. It’s all songs and smoke, fedoras and phone booths, a romance of futility, of dark forbidden desires, laced with whiskey and ennui, that lead to death.

Your future’s all used up.

There are innumerable references to crime films, of which my favourite is the Dietrich ‘your future’s all used up’ scene from TOUCH OF EVIL (Orson Welles, 1958). It’s full of personal references, not, I suspect, meant for a general audience: the prostitute who falls for Ricky played by Elga Sorbas is called Rosa von Praunheim, after the director who would soon release IT IS NOT THE HOMOSEXUAL WHO IS PERVERSE, BUT THE SOCIETY IN WHICH HE LIVES (1971). The film is self -referential. The nightclub the characters go to is the ‘Lola Montes’, just as in GODS OF THE PLAGUE(1970); Ricky goes to visit his old home, in front of which are railings exactly like the ones the characters of KATZLEMACHER sit on throughout much of that film.

Revisiting Katzelmacher

Like in Almodóvar’s work, where a scene in one film is developed into the main plot of a later one, here we get a chambermaid (played by Margarethe von Trotta, the celebrated director) who comes into Ricky’s hotel room as he’s making love to Rosa, sits by the bed, and tells us the story of what will become ALI, FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974) .

There’s luminous black and white cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann that adds to the incantatory quality in the film, and seen to advantage in this very beautiful restoration. The acting seems posey and theatrical, though that too adds a symbolic dream-like dimension to the drama. There are moments that seem awkward and amateurish. Some of the compositions seem well thought-through, others merely grabbed, but this too adds to the film’s dream logic. It’s less a pastiche than a dramatic rendering of personal fantasies and desires that are rendered vividly, sometimes even graphically,  but remain inchoate. Murnau, Clark Gable and Batman are referenced. I loved it, though I don’t know if I would have had I not already been immersed in Fassbinder’s world.

Incestuous brotherly love and Clark Gable

 

José Arroyo

 

Rio das Mortes (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1971)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

RIO DAS MORTES is my least favourite Fassbinder film so far, though still with lots to enjoy. Based on an idea from Volker Schlöndorff, it’s a rambly film about an apprentice tile-layer Michael (Michael König),  with a beautiful girlfriend Hannah(Hannah Schygulla),  who dreams of going to Rio das Mortes, which they think is in Peru, leave the grind of life in Munich behind and maybe set-up a farm or find some lost treasure….whatever. Hannah hopes to be married to Michael, he resents her seeming to shut down all his dreams with practicalities. When Michael’s childhood friend Günther (Günther Kaufmann) returns from his military service, they decide to pursue that dream together. Their bonding increases in spite of their many failures and Hannah is left behind. The film would make an interesting case study on the relationship between  homosociality and repressed homosexuality. Michael and Günther both sleep with Hannah but are clearly each other’s primary object of affection. The film is interspersed with feminist agitprop, lectures on underdevelopment, extremely long-take tracking shots of dialogue, and a memorable dance numbers between Schygulla and Fassbinder. There’s pop music of the period (I recognise Elvis and Leonard Cohen), filmic references (Buster Keaton to Lana Turner) and a very beautiful and sensual Hannah Schygulla, wearing a fox stole, with a Dietrich veil, first full of love and lastly contemplating murder. What is it with Lana Turner and gay culture in this moment? The film includes references to the Frank O’Hara poem first, and then as its picked up by Alan Ginsburg; all of that as read by Schygulla and pictured by Fassbinder, a whole prismatic and layered set of queer references. RIO DAS MORTES was made for TV, filmed in 16mm and blown up to 35mm.

Gods of the Plague/ Götter der Pest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1970)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

A mood piece disguised as a crime film, about futility and anomie set in a marginal underworld of pornography, crime, prostitution, seedy nightclubs, and lowdown cafes and restaurants.

Franz Walsch (Harry Baer) is released from prison but is slowly drawn back to a life of crime. He’s loved by two women (Hanna Schygulla and Margarethe von Trotta). The first is obsessed with and will betray him, the latter he shares with Günther (Günther Kaufman), a criminal colleague, with whom he seems to share an affection that does not seem purely platonic.

This one of a series of nine films Fassbinder would direct between Nov. 69 and Nov. 70: prodigious. And one sees and equally prodigious advancement in Fassbinder’s audio-visual skills; the camera is more mobile; the shots more interestingly framed and composed; there are zooms; action now takes place on different planes.

The queerness is still ever-present (a barman tells a gay couple, ‘you still fooling around with that nonsense?’: they seem the only happy people in the film). The presence of Günther adds a racial dimension to the film’s depiction of class and criminality. I was struck once again by the supermarkets, bursts of light in this otherwise dark film, and particularly notable in the scene where the wounded Günther trawls the dark streets where the shops seem to glow with light and goods, but the doors are closed to people like him. The only way in for people like them is to rob, which is of course also their way out. Those who loved Franz will weep at his funeral, even as that love hurried him on to his death. I liked it very much.

PS: Camp is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Fassbinder, but the two musical numbers here (Schygulla doing Dietrich’s Mein Blonde Babe; and Carla Egerer singing the theme tune from HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE just before she’s killed) suggest a re-think might be necessary. It’s camp that doesn’t feel campy, and used more as used as dour acceptance of inevitable nothingness rather than as joyful queer survival

As surprising as the queerness is the male full frontal nudity  in mainstream feature cinema so early on:

Fassbinder’s Cinema continues to be loaded with film references. This one below was one of the most striking:

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: De Cierta Manera/ One Way or Another (Sara Gomez, Cuba, 1974)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

Thinking Aloud About Film talks Sara Gomez’ debut feature, DE CIERTA MANERA/ ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, a model of Marxist dialectical filmmaking, mixing fiction and documentary; a dramatic auto-critique of class and race that puts gender at the centre: an extraordinary film, currently on MUBI.

 

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

If you want to see the excerpt from Agnès Varda referenced in the film, it may be seen here:

https://notesonfilm1.com/2019/05/10/benny-more-in-agnes-vardas-salut-les-cubains/

José Arroyo

Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1969)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

 

It’s hard to imagine that Fassbinder was only 23 when KATZELMACHER was released in 1969; That it was his second feature; and that he’d made it in spite of his first – LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH – being greeted with opprobrium and shouts of ‘Narcissist’ at the Berlin Film Festival. By then, Fassbinder had also written, acted, and produced many plays, including KATZELMACHER, staged at Munich to accompany Jean-Marie Straub’s condensation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s three-act SICKNESS OF YOUTH.

 

In KATZELMACHER, a gang of young people sit on a railing outside an apartment and shoot the shit; they talk about sex and money, not always truthfully. Sometimes they continue the chat in a park bench, or they move to a tavern. These mainly static scenes are punctuated by mobile shots of two people, usually women, taking short walks towards the camera as the camera pulls back, and talking about their lives as Schubert’s German Dance, Op. 33. No. 7 plays over the soundtrack.

The youth are disaffected, trying to find love, sometimes selling themselves for money, including the men, but mainly judging each other. Halfway through the film, their bored sullenness is pierced to action when a Greek immigrant enters the scene. Soon they begin to whisper that he’s filthy, sex-crazed, one of the women claims to have been molested by him, moreover he’s a communist. All the group’s not-so-latent fascist tendencies are brought to the fore and it all erupts in violence.

KATZELMACHER was filmed in only nine days and remains potent. I was struck by the kiss between men and wondered what seeing that might have meant in 1969. I was also struck by the gendered structures of feeling expressed in the film. Women are constantly slapped around, causally, as if the men had a right to; and the women also take it nonchalantly, as if the men did indeed have a right to exert that violence on them. The Greek guest worker, played by Fassbinder, though indeed a victim, is, as a man, no better than the German ones, starting an affair whilst denying he has a family and children back home. Part of Fassbinder’s success is that the characters work as both social types and as flesh and blood people.

 

It’s going to be interesting watching these films in order.

 

For a more extended discussion of the film you may want to look at Jonathan Rosenbaum’s excellent piece: https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2022/10/the-example-of-katzelmacher/

José Arroyo

Love Is Colder Than Death/ Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1969)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH is Fassbinder’s first feature and in it are present elements that would reappear later on and help constitute what we’ve come to recognise as his style. The film begins with an image of him, shoft left of center, with the rest of the frame empty, smoking, reading the newspaper, legs crossed, overweight, menacing and sensual.

Soon we’ll see a shirtless black man, an object of desire, and when we see the head of a syndicate place his hand on his knee, the queerness will come to the fore.

There will be a Turk on the loose who must be got rid of. Hannah Schygulla is the love interest/whore, one of the great presences in film history, here so young, sensual, with a face that seems to communicate everything and yet remains inscrutable.

Fassbinder is not afraid to hold a close-up so that the eye can wonder all over Ulli Lommell’s handsome face,

Lommell clearly dressed to evoke Delon in LE SAMOURAI.

And Fassbinder knows how to compose a shot dramatically so whilst the film is clearly based on a play (and with bare sets, minimal furniture etc), it never feels stagebound, and indeed the setting is opened up (tellingly, to freeways and supermarkets).

It’s a cinephile’s film, dedicated to Chabrol, Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub and Linio and Cuncho, the characters from Damiano Damiani’s A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL. I love the moment where they go steal sunglasses in a department store and he tells the saleswoman he wants glasses like Janet Leigh wore in PSYCHO. The film seems all tone – alienated, distanced, sensual — and attitude. Personal bonds are valued but deceive, the world is merely out to get you so maintain what you can of your freedom at all cost. All this in a world that’s exploitative and murderous but where numerous people are killed without once drawing blood. A distinctive first feature which I enjoyed very much. The frame grabs are from the Arrow release.

 

Film is currently playing on MUBI

José Arroyo