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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Dvds @ amazon.com (direct link)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Books @ amazon.com (direct link)
Although in the eyes of posterity he may not
prove to have been the most gifted of a generation which also includes Herzog, Wenders,
Schlondorff, Kluge and Straub, Rainer Werner
Fassbinder undeniably made the biggest
splash. It would have been difficult to guess at
this from his obscure beginnings. When his
first feature film Uebe ist kalter als der Tod (1969,
Love Is Colder Than Death) was shown at the
Berlin Film Festival in 1969, it left public and
jurors alike non-plussed. Being a weird and
pretentious combination of Maoist politics and
static silences made it almost impossible to
judge whether its maker actually had any
talent which might possibly emerge once he
had shed his two obsessive influences - Godard
and Straub. But, it must also be admitted, the
film had in full measure that ability to stick in
the throat and irritate those who are normally
peaceable to fury, and it was this which subsequently turned out to be one of Fassbinder's
hallmarks.
Knowledgeable Germans said that this
young man (23 at the time) had already done
interesting work in the theatre as a writer,
director, actor and general 'animator'. He was
born in 1946 and was brought up largely by his
mother after his parents' divorce. She had been
a translator before becoming an actress, and
she appeared as Lilo Pempeit in many of her
son's films.
When he was 18 he entered a drama school
where he met the first of his longtime associates, the actress Hanna Schygulla. In 1965
he made a ten-minute short - Der Stadtstreicher
- the cast of which included another off hiis
regular collaborators, Irm Hermann, and in
1967 he moved, with a group of friends, to a
Munich fringe theatre called Action Theater,
where he began directing productions and
then writing his own texts. In 1968 the theatre
was closed by the police, but Fassbinder and
nine others (including Hanna Schygulla, Peer
Raben, Kurt Raab and Irm Hermann) set up
another group - Anti-Theater - also in
Munich.
Thus, by the time Fassbinder began making
feature films, he had not only experience, but,
crucial to his methods of working, a sort of
stock company of actors round him who were
used to his ways, able to take his lightning
changes of direction in their stride, and work
as complete collaborators in the evolution of
new works, whether on stage, screen or - later
on - television. It was through them that
Fassbinder's legendary productivity was
possible: where other, more conventionally
minded film-makers would labour for months
to set up, cast and shoot a film, he could, and
frequently did, knock one off in a matter of
days.
Hence the alarming statistic that once
Fassbinder had embarked on a career in films,
he made in the first two years (1969-70) no
fewer than ten features. Most of them had a
wild, improvisatory quality which Fassbinder
never wholly shook off, and indeed, when he
tried to, he seemed to be in danger of falling into the opposite trap of mandarin
pretentiousness. The products of this period
inclined towards Godard as the primary influence, both in their rough-and-ready shooting style and in their general commitment to a
critique of bourgeois society.
A typical early Fassbinder film in these
respects would be Warum lauft Herr R. amok?
(1970, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?), written
and directed with Michael Fengler, in which
an apparently happily married technical designer with a child, a lovely home and all the
comforts of established middle-class life suddenly, for no stated reason, kills his wife, his
son and a neighbour, then calmly goes to the
office the next morning and there kills himself.
What might have begun as a Marxist critique
slips over into a refusal to comment that might
be interpreted as Absurdist, anarchic or merely
cool . . . according to taste.
Fassbinder's own cinematic passions have
embraced many other things besides recent
political cinema. He had a passion for the
Western and for overheated Hollywood melodrama, particularly when directed by Douglas
Sirk. He had also been known to approve of
Rossellini's brand of neo-realism. Thus it
should have come as no surprise to find him,
amidst his tributes to Godard, suddenly veering towards Samuel Fuller in Der amerikanische
Soldat (1970, The American Soldier). In the more
than usually bizarre Whity (1971) he is to be
found pastiching a whole range of American
Westerns and steamy tales of the Old South,
with the mulatto hero darkly brooding on
vengeance against the white master-race,
represented here by a bunch of sadists and
dribbling half-wits.
In 1971 Fassbinder began on the series of
films which were to make him an important
international figure. These were interspersed
from 1972 with films and series intended
wholly or partly for television, some of which —
Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (1972-73, Eight
Hours Don't Make a Day) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) - are very extensive. The first of the
theatrical movies was Der Handler der vier
fahreszeiten (1972, The Merchant of Four Seasons), chronicling the economic rise and
personal decline of a greengrocer in a sober
style illuminated from time to time with flashes
of bravura melodrama.
The second, Die bitteren Trdnen der Petra von
Kant (1972, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), is
a very literal but at the same time wholly
cinematic transposition of a play by Fassbinder, who had continued throughout to work
extensively in the theatre as well. It is the story
of a spoilt fashion designer who has a brief
lesbian affair, and in the course of a series of
highly-charged meetings with her mother, her
daughter, her best friend and most of the
important people in her life, is finally deserted
by them all and left alone.
The next to appear was Angst essen Seek auf
(1974, Fear Eats the Soul) - an unexpectedly
cheering view of a marriage between an
elderly, widowed German char and a Moroccan immigrant worker younger than herself. For once, Fassbinder had told the subject in
a minutely realistic manner which made it
readily approachable by general audiences.
With hindsight one may see that in the fourth,
Fontane Effi Briest (1974, Effi Briest), a conspicuously well-upholstered adaptation of
Theodor Fontane's famous turn-of-the-century novel about a dissatisfied wife and a
fatal liaison, Fassbinder was already moving
over, through a concern for surface polish and
'style', towards affectation and stuffiness.
Finally, however, in Faustrecht der Freiheit
(1975, Fox), the relatively sensational - or at
any rate unfamiliar - subject-matter (homosexuality) helped to obscure this tendency for
the moment. Though married briefly to the
actress Ingrid Caven, Fassbinder had never
sought to disguise his own homosexuality,
and, in his episode of Deutschland im Herbst
(1978, Germany in Autumn), he offered a scarifying picture of his own home life with a lover
who later killed himself. In Fox he plays a
rough, homosexual fairground-worker who
wins a lottery, is taken up by supposedly grand
homosexuals and then eventually cast aside by
his elegant businessman-lover once his money
has run out. The picture the film presents of a certain stratum of German society is quite
appalling, though Fassbinder stoutly denied
that the story was necessarily homosexual in
its context. However its significance is read, it
was seen as a gay movie by millions who had
never seen such a thing before, and finally
made Fassbinder a name outside the limited
art-house circuit.
Its success seems to have had a slightly
disorienting effect on Fassbinder or perhaps merely confirmed him in a direction he was
already going. Mutter Kusters Fahrt zum
Himmel (1975, Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven)
resumed the theme of Fox - the betrayal of the
proletariat by the bourgeoisie - in another
form, with the ruthless exploitation of a
working-class heroine by perfidious middle-
class politicos. But Chinesisches Roulette (1976,
Chinese Roulette), Satansbraten (1976, Satan's
Brew) and particularly Despair (1978), pursued
an extravagant aestheticism to the exclusion
of much else: Chinese Roulette, a melodramatic
family tragedy exploring emotional sterility
among the promiscuous rich, is at least foolish
but fun. But Despair, though enlivened by a
fine study in suppressed hysteria by Dirk
Bogarde as a chocolate manufacturer slowly
going mad, suffers from Fassbinder's relative
insecurity directing in English. Neither is this
helped by an excess of gloss applied to a film
already overloaded with a subject from a
Nabokov novel and an elaborately over-
literate script by Tom Stoppard.
In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978, In the Year of Thirteen Moons) managed the remarkable feat
of making its weird subject - the last agonized
days of a transsexual who cannot co-exist with
either his/her male lover or ex-wife and teenage
daughter - quite stodgy and dull.
Die Eheder Maria Braun (1979, The Marriage of
Maria Braun) whipped through thirty years of
German history wrapped round the vaguely
symbolic figure of a separated wife who uses sex
to become a business tycoon, all for love of her
absent husband. In Lili Marleen (1981) Hanna
Schygulla sings the song about eighteen times
for an ambiguous trip down memory lane in the
good old bad old days. Lola (1981) combines
elements from both films in the person of a
cabaret singer who highlights provincial corruption in vamping a civic official and ends up
owning the town brothel. Die Sehnsucht der
Veronika Voss (1982, Veronika Voss) concerns a
faded film star addicted to drugs and death.
After these studies of women, Fassbinder returned to homosexual themes in his far from
erotic Querelle (1982), adapted from a novel by
Jean Genet, with a sailor (played by Brad Davis)
as the vamp. He died in 1982 - aged only 36 -
from a mixture of drink and drugs.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Dvds @ amazon.com (direct link)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Books @ amazon.com (direct link)
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