Tag Archives: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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

 

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

 

 

 

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 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

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

 

 

 

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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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

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

José Arroyo