Reseñas de la crítica

It has the distinction of being Fassbinder’s most optimistic work, touchingly hopeful regarding man’s capacity for betterment.

What is so striking about the version we see in Eight Hours is how hopeful it feels. “The figures in [old photographs] seem so vulnerable, so unknowing of what we know about them, of the knowledge in store for them,” Cavell reflected. The characters in this series give me a similar sense of tenderness. Here are people striving to build a modest utopia. For once in Fassbinder, they get it.

Not only is it a major work from the trailblazing German filmmaker—indeed, his most ambitious project prior to Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1980—it also showcases a side of Fassbinder revealed only fleetingly in his films. Generous and humane, the series may be the only Fassbinder work whose characters are, for the most part, well-adjusted and happy.

As always, the polish of Mr. Fassbinder's direction is a marvel; none of his 1970s contemporaries ever used zooms to better comic effect. And for a man who found time to make more than 40 features in his 37 years, the fluidity of his camera and blocking is miraculous — particularly in a nearly half-hour wedding-party sequence at the end of Episode 4. For sheer joy per minute of film, there's nothing playing now that comes close.

Seeing Eight Hours Don't Make a Day now — in a discerning new restoration by ARRI — is a shock. We have all the ingredients here for one of Fassbinder's savage, grimly comic studies of exploitation among the West German working and middle classes. . . . So it is all the more startling that, in this case, Fassbinder flipped the tables. He gave the characters in Eight Hours all the freedom, satisfaction, and powers of self-determination he would, in his other movies, carefully withhold.

Fassbinder examines the fruits of potential revolution as well as the overriding ecosystem that breeds a mindset for change. Fassbinder offers a left-wing vision of conservatives who gradually embrace liberal ethos by coming to see how political stances viscerally affect their livelihoods. . . . Eight Hours Don't Make a Day debuts in America at an imperiled time to remind audiences what real political filmmaking is.

Speaking not only as a Fassbinder fan but as someone who recently served as a representative of a unionized work force locked in a brutal struggle with management, I found Fassbinder's call for solidarity, however sanguine, an absolute tonic. . . . The eight hours . . . untether us, as all great art does, from any linear sense of time. They are a portal to another side of a pessimistic genius—and to another idea of what our wrecked labor practices could have been, and maybe still could be.

It's one of Fassbinder's most unusual and self-revealing projects, and it defies political shibboleths of the artistic milieu of the time. . . . With grand cinematic flourishes—a gyrating camera on a factory floor and at a café table, rapturously colorful visions of romance, and hair-trigger comedy of pratfalls and narrow escapes—Fassbinder exalts the exploits of the hidden heroes of daily life.

Commissioned by the channel Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), it was envisioned by its producers as an eight-episode working-class drama focusing on themes of civic progress. However, against their expectations for a socialist-realist portrait of Cologne, Fassbinder delivered a brilliantly layered chamber drama about an eccentric family and their economic and cultural environment, which functions as both trenchant social critique and populist entertainment.

To do justice to Eight Hours Don't Make a Day in this space would be impossible, so it will have to suffice to say that its emergence represents nothing less than the discovery of a vital missing link in the director's filmography, one that may represent Fassbinder's clearest vision of an achievably, incrementally better world.