I like him a lot, too, but he’s very, very hit or miss. As you probably know, he was incredibly prolific and sometimes the muse was with him and sometimes it wasn’t. The critic John Simon, who was not a fan, once said Fassbinder “turns out movies the way other people shed dandruff.” Unless you are totally committed to the beg-borrow-or-steal indie spirit which he represents, or sympathetic to the fact that his passion for filmmaking led to his early death — the result of overwork, cocaine, and God knows what else — you may find some of his movies just downright painful to sit through.
Nonetheless, his best films — “Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?” “Death of a Holy Whore,” “The Merchant of Four Seasons,” “Effi Briest,” “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” the BRD trilogy and his masterpiece “Berlin Alexanderplatz” — are hard to dismiss or forget. All left indelible images of Germany at its most decadent, sad and dirty, as well as Hanna Schygulla in black underwear.
No denying he had a way of working with actors, and an eye for talent. He used stage actors because they were more “docile”, less diva-ish. I think he knew what he was doing every step of the way. He really could put his consciousness directly onto celluloid. Even if it made him look bad. Some of my favorite films of his defy you to like them at all — “Martha,” “In a Year with 13 Moons,” his segment of “Germany in Autumn.” Whether or not one shares his point of view, it is a point of view, an incisive one, and that’s what a lot of filmmakers today seem to lack, in my opinion. I’ll say more later.
“I don’t think you’re very beautiful, and certainly not attractive and charming. You’re too thin, almost skinny. When one looks at you, one can almost feel your bones. And I have this impression your body smells.” — Karlheinz Boehm to Margit Carstenson, in “Martha,” a fascinating and rather sympathetic story about a woman who likes it rough.
“13 Moons” almost made me a vegetarian.
It’s serendipitous that this topic should be created just now as I have just begun my own viewing of Fassbinder films and today finished IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS. I have previously seen ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL and CHINESE ROULETTE. I think these films are all said to fall under Fassbinder’s Sirk-influenced phase in which he reworked the Hollywood melodrama, specifically as made by Douglas Sirk. I certainly see that in ALI, which is probably my favorite so far, as well as 13 MOONS and ROULETTE, though the latter two do still have remnants of anti-theater and are clearly influenced equally by theater as well as melodrama in its staging. CHINESE ROULETTE was probably the least interesting, though still beautiful enough to intrigue me. I plan to watch the BRD TRILOGY next (MARIA BRAUN, VERONIKA VOSS, LOLA) next and BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ over the summer.
I am especially intrigued by Fassbinder because he seems like such an interesting person (how can someone be so prolific?) and because he highly favors Sirk, who I also think is fantastic. Does anybody have a favorite Fassbinder?
One thing that interests me about Fassbinder’s female characters is they have these preconceived ideas about what marriage is supposed to be like, what they are supposed to do for their husbands. Petra von Kant scandalizes her cousin when she mocks her ex-husband and says “he stank like men.” Magdalene Montezuma in Rio das Mortes, an underrated TV film from 1970, says: “The oppression of woman can best be understood by examining women’s behavior.” Later, of course, Fassbinder was to depict the self-hating immigrant (Ali) and the self-hating gay (Fox). A lot of films today have a liberal p.c. agenda where everything works out in the end, the characters bounce back and find their self-esteem, but it doesn’t always work that way, even today. Fassbinder would have much to say about contemporary U.S. society, where we pretend to have no class structure and where we attempt to legislate social tolerance. It’s as hypocritical as anything else, since it demands that the minority figure purge himself or herself of that uniqueness which makes other comfortable.
My favorite moments in Fassbinder films are ones in which someone is making someone else blatantly uncomfortable: the Arab bartender (Barbara Valentin) to Emmi (Birgitte Mira) in Ali, the risque song which Ingrid Caven sings in front of her family to exploit her father’s
infamy as a rampage killer, the way the two middle-aged fans of Veronika Voss corner her in a jewelry store and remind her all too painfully about how she stayed in Germany during the years of the Third Reich. Discomfort leads to catharsis in a Freudian sense, and it also leads to potentially revolutionary change.
Three more things that have always haunted me about Fassbinder’s films. There are disco lights in the office of the sinister Dr. Feelgood in Veronika Voss who hooks her patients on heroin and then steals all their worldly goods before giving them fatal overdoses. This kind of serial touch is one that Fassbinder was developing more and more in his later films, and would have made the unfinished projects Kokaine and Rosa Luxemburg fascinating indeed. Also in Veronika Voss the use of music is calculated to represent psychological warfare of the allied occupational forces; they were de-Nazifying the Germans by flooding the radio waves with truly crappy pap like The Battle of New Orleans and High on a Hillside, what Tony Rayns calls the sound of incipient madness. Finally, it has always been my opinion that Maria Braun becomes psychotic throughout the course of The Marriage of Maria Braun — more and more artificial, detached, disoriented, mirroring a West Germany in hyperproduction and toxic denial. She remains Germany at its sexiest and its smartest, but there’s
something fundamentally missing from her ability to process what is happening to her. A very sad moment when she passes up the collected works of Heinrich von Kleist (peddled on the black market by Fassbinder) in favor of the hooker dress which she needs to support her war-torn family. Early in the film, there’s a news broadcast that suggests that Germany must be disarmed and dissolved as a state; later, in a fancy restaurant, we hear a German broadcast announcing that Konrad Adenauer has re-mobilized the German army, while a drunken Maria stumbles from her table and vomits all over the floor.
Kazu, try to check into Despair. It’s a really cool film that plays with fantasy and reality, flash forwards and flash backs. The final twenty minutes or so of Despair is paced and edited as perfectly as any film I’ve ever seen. And yes I love Sirk too. His work is a never ending fountain of inspiration.
omg Rodney, you’re so right. The slaughterhouse sequence in 13 Moons is the realt litmus test. How much can you stand? What’s behind this industrial complex? Death, pure and simple. A food chain is established whereby Elvira is perhaps higher than the cattle but at the same time much lower than everyone else in the film. Notice how in the unlucky scene where Seitz encounters Red Zora in Elvira’s bed; he actually has a hardon sticking out of his tight white gym shorts. The film insists on literally establishing his sexual tastes — yet he is one more piece of meat offered for consumption. To abdicate one’s phallic power is to drop out of the fascist production-consumption nexus. But is there anything more exciting than when the Mother Superior sadly leaves the apartment at the end and the Connie Francis’ “Handsome Stranger” comes blaring out, only to catch on the word “Wirklichkeit”, “reality.” There is no escaping reality, which Elvira learns in the hardest way possible. Much of Fassbinder’s philosophy comes from a slightly skewed reading of Schopenhauer, who believed that the entire world is reducible to our perception of it and our individual will. Schopenhauer makes a cause that even an inert stone has will, the will to obey gravity. Suicide, Schopenhauer agues, is a act of the will, but should be renounced in favor of spiritual resignation. Fassbinder couldn’t seem to swallow that last part.
sorry, i didn’t mean to overwhelm the thread. I was looking for an open discussion, but that’s how obsessed I am with RWF. Once I get started talking about him I literally can’t stop.
only seen one film, but that film has stuck with me for months after. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is an amazing work and its visual splendor is intoxicating. the acting superb and honest and the camera work you can see was influential to so many young european and american directors from the nineties.
thanks for the suggestion, Justin. i admire your passion. DESPAIR is not on Netflix though.
Kazu, thanks. And I know Despair is m.i.a. I am so waiting for Criterion to bring out a deluxe Despair. They really should do that one next. I acquired a used, good VHS of it on ebay for about $30.
Rodney, I’m sure you know that Karlheinz Bohm was the star of Michael Powell’s controversial thriller Peeping Tom, about a different kind of sadist who becomes a kind of metaphor for filmmaking in general. I think they anglicized his name to Karl Bohm. He said when he first met Fassbinder he thought RWF was going out of his way to be rude to him, but Fassbinder was already sizing him up to play the lead in Martha — mainly because of Bohm’s resemblance to Fassbinder’s hated stepfather. He dressed Bohm in the kind of starchy suits that the stepfather always wore. So Martha is kind of an act of exorcism on Fassbinder’s part, and in a very real sense Fassbinder relates to Martha more than to Helmut. Two of my favorite moments: the scene where a confused Martha is trying to confide in her clueless sister while they are sitting on a dinghy in what appears to be the middle of an oil slick; and the absolutely jaw-dropping moment when a hysterical Martha, afraid for her very life, escapes from her husband by running with a herd of cows across a field. Is there any more succint visual metaphor for the indignity to which women are subjected in their striving for liberation? Ah, das Shicksal, das Shicksal.
I think of him as kind of a historian, especially while watching the BRD trilogy and Berlin Alexanderplatz (I’m currently on part 4). They are like a book that illustrates the twentieth century in Germany, but not in a gimmicky way.
Book, I agree. He was really obsessed by German history, the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and this made him somewhat unpopular in Germany during his lifetime. He was acting sort of as a voice of conscience. Veronika Voss is based on Sybille Schmitt, whom he regarded as a great actress but who stayed in Germany during the Nazi years making propaganda films. She only wanted to be a movie star, but she ended up carrying this enormous burden of history.
If he were still alive I’d probably stalk him a little. He’s great.
He is one of the great political filmmakers, some of his films are difficult to appreciate because they are intelectually intense. He always try to subordinate the emotions to the thoughts, and many of his films rather than being simple melodramas are social critics and political statements. Berlin Alexanderplatz is very beautiful in the way he conveys many ideas, always very stimulating and intelligent but never being simple and easy. His plots are simple but his cinematography and ideas are complex. In a Year With 13 Moons is maybe one of the most personal films in the history of cinema, in that film he told us something that is very wrong in the social dynamics that we live, the invisible presence of the fascism and the imposibility to comunicate or being happy. His compositions are stiff and minimalistic, trying always to convey the eternal solitude of the human being and the impossibility of being free of social constraints. He is a great pessimistic filmmaker.
Genaro I agree completely. I wish, for his sake, he had been happier, but if he had been happier he would not have been able to express that melancholy you are speaking of. And that melancholy is a very real thing.
Justin, your unflinching love for RWF made me push BRD Trilogy and In a year with 13 moons to the top of my netflix queue.
So far I have only seen his BerlinAlexandrePlatz and Ali. Your insights into his movies are eye-openers, keep going.
Thanks Andy. I tried posting here earlier but the site was down and the board ate my comment. Yeah, all I can say is watching Berlin Alexanderplatz recently was such a treat, to see how there is a very clean and precise arc through each episode, but also an overarching one over the course of the whole 15 and a half hour story. I think he must have been very organized in his head. There’s also an early episode where the background music is so hypnotic, it’s that otherworldly chanting sound that Raben did sometimes, and it keeps up through scene after scene, tying everything together and creating this subliminal anxiousness. Toward the end I think Fassbinder was very interested in a cinema of sensory distortion, through lighting, through editing, through sound, through costuming and staging.
Oh, Fassbinder is by far my favorite german director of all times. Although I haven’t completed the whole collection (he has a lot of movies) I have seen around 70% of his films. My favorite fassbinder flicks are: Chinese Roulette, A Year With 13 Moons, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Ali, Fear eats the Soul and The Marriage of Maria Braun.
A convulted and over creative life, Fassbinder died the way he lived, working. And he has left so many masterpieces, I’m so grateful for his existence.
And Hanna Shygulla is everything.
Justin Biberkopf
Fassbinder is my favorite director, and I was wondering if anyone wanted to discuss his films. I’m looking for fellow fans, but the comments can be negative if that’s how you feel.