Rainer Werner Fassbinder

[zedz]

I think Gringo is dead on with his comments on the oeuvre. The more I've seen over the years, the more I've appreciated even the films that were initially hardest to take (though I'm not sure if I'm yet ready to reevaluate Lili Marleen).

FSimeoni's issues with 'likeability' may be the key issue with approaching Fassbinder, as he is one of those directors that was generally indifferent to conventional audience identification. There are a lot of Fassbinders that pose major challenges to empathy, and in a variety of different ways (the very style of the early films; the grotesqueness of Satan's Brew, the passive victim-heroes of Martha or Fox and his Friends, the marginalisation of the most sympathetic character in Petra - though Irm's silent fuming is always the first thing I remember about that film). But there's so much in his body of work that you can approach these more forbidding films from other routes. I think Effi Briest is a great film, and it positions Fassbinder's project in a recognizable context (the costume drama). Merchant and Veronica Voss are also good entry points, and 13 Moons and Chinese Roulette could be the gateway drugs to the stronger stuff.

I'd also put in a good word for Berlin Alexanderplatz as the ideal plunge in the deep end. It's surely Fassbinder's ultimate exercise in getting into the heads of unpleasant characters. You are Franz Biberkopf.

[blindside8zao]

What really made me fall in love with Fassbinder films wasn't any one film, like I think people are hinting here. I'd seen all the Criterion DVDs and enjoyed them all very much but when I bought tons of those wellsprings and watched them night after night along with the fantomas, that's what really got me involved.

[zedz]

As threatened in the 1970s Discussion thread, I'm recklessly trying to go through the available Fassbinders chronologically. So far I've got through 1969. I'm using the MoMA catalogue for dating, which is tied to year of production rather than release, but it seems to be the most authoritative source I have at hand. First two comments are relocated from the 60s Discussion thread.

Fassbinder 1969

Love Is Colder Than Death

This is such a bizarre movie, but it keeps growing on me. Fassbinder namechecks the New Wave (hey, we even see a waitress named Erika Rohmer eat lead!), and there's a direct line from Band of Outsiders through A Little Chaos to this film, but my current perspective is that Fassbinder's primitive style here is closest to Luc Moullet, with hearty chunks of Warhol and Straub thrown in.

Stylistically, it's so wrong it's right. A lot of the film consists of 'incomplete' compositions: seriously off-balance static frames that, in time, through the movement of characters, attain a fleeting balance. For example, the characters might be squeezed into the far left of the frame, with the right hand side a big white dead space. Ninety seconds into the shot, a character will move in to occupy the dead space and balance the composition. Often the 'completed' composition will represent only a brief section of a much longer shot, but the camera won't reframe to 'correct' the composition.

These static, frontal shots are part of the film's extremely theatrical presentation (the outrageously fake violence is another crucial element), but one of the things I love about the film is how its style seems to evolve before your eyes. After half an hour or so, extremely diagrammatic camera movements start to appear (a long lateral track achieved by placing a camera in the back seat of a car - the Kiarostami shot; a long reverse dolly before advancing characters - the Bela Tarr shot); by the final third of the film, camera movement has become even more ambitious and expressive, including a quarter-turn around Lommel and Schygulla that's a tentative precursor to Fassbinder's signature encircling movement (see Whity, Ali and above all the delirious example in Martha). There's a virtuoso sequence - one of my favourite in all Fassbinder - in which the camera dollies in counterpoint to the characters as they shop(lift) in a supermarket, to the accompaniment of deranged Peer Raben muzak (an electronically fucked-up choral work). Raben lands on Planet Fassbinder fully formed, and many of Fasbinder's stock company are also already present and correct.

Catfucker

I don't think any English-language distributor has ever bothered to translate the title of Fassbinder's second feature. Funny, that. This was the first early Fassbinder I saw, fifteen years ago at least and after having seen about a dozen or so post-Merchant examples of his work. Its austerity came as a real shock then, and it still packs a punch in that respect, even in comparison to Love Is Colder than Death. In many ways, it's considerably less recognisably "Fassbinderian" than that first film: fewer of his core stock company appear (or, conversely, there are more 'minor' or one-off Fassbinder players), Peer Raben's contributions are much less imposing and characteristic (basically some tinkly piano over the 'promenade' shots), and the film is much more stylistically constrained (and Love Is Colder than Death was pretty minimal!). The camera is always static and frontal, with the exception of the back-tracking 'promenade' shots.

It's a great script, though, much more complex and pointed than that of the prior film, exploring three key ideas obsessively - money, sex and gossip - and building up, through a daisy chain of small fragmentary scenes, a withering portrait of a contemporary Germany that uses those three things to express its prejudice, delusion and self-loathing. I suppose the strength of the material accounts for the film's reputation as Fassbinder's first 'classic', though formally I find it much less interesting than that first film.

Gods of the Plague

Fassbinder's Early Style is certainly distinct from his post-Sirk, post-Merchant style, but seeing this film again - the best representation of it so far - I realise just how unstable that Early Style was. As noted, Love Is Colder Than Death and Katzelmacher were stylistically very different, and Fassbinder's third feature is different again: much smoother and more classical. The points of reference this time around are not the New Wave and Straub / Huillet so much as Ophuls (the Lola Montes nightclub), von Sternberg (Hanna's Dietrich act) and film noir (almost everything else). And then his next film would venture into completely new stylistic terrain. It's sobering to realise that all eleven features of this early period were made in the space of about two years.

Gods of the Plague follows a reasonably generic crime template: Franz, just out of prison (the Berlin Alexanderplatz reference is absolutely deliberate - the character even gives Biberkopf as a false surname at one point), links up with a series of women as he searches for 'The Gorilla' and generally slouches to his doom. Although the content is slight, it's Fassbinder's most formally diverse and ambitious film so far. In the first five minutes we get a diagrammatic lateral tracking shot which picks up the action as it enters from offscreen left, some sinuous tracks that similarly allude to offscreen space, an ambitious stab at deep-focus, a musical number, and an experimental zoom shot outside the nightclub, the zoom synchronised with Franz's feints at the bouncer.

From there we briefly enter a world of glamour, albeit glamour in the scabrous Fassbinder sense, with an encounter framed in a crappy dressing room mirror and a urinal in use immediately behind the roulette wheel. The visual ambition continues - Franz seduces Margarethe von Trotta under a giant face, the climactic supermarket scene involves extended tracks behind mirrored pillars and crafty triangulation of characters. There's even a brace of helicopter shots (I don't know who had to give the pilot his blowjob), an impromptu fight acted in slow-motion and sped up to 'normal' speed, and a wacky back-and-forth track supposed to simulate the POV of a pacing detective. It doesn't work that way at all, but it's arresting.

The thriller plot is tricked up with a ridiculous number of characters - it's hard to think of many future Fassbinder players who don't appear, if only for a moment. You almost feel concern that Irm Hermann, say, or RWF himself, have been left out, until they turn up at the eleventh hour to deliver their respective lines of dialogue. More than any of its predecessors, the film establishes a template for Fassbinder's future work. Although the specific Sirk influence, and the interest in exposing and subverting bourgeois society, has yet to settle in, he's already concerned with classical Hollywood forms, and doing his best to replicate their stylistic allure.

This film also starts to clearly express a gay sensibility. An explicitly gay couple appears early on, camping it up; there's a shock flurry of cock shots as a character leafs through a pornographic magazine; and Gunther Kaufmann's deathwalk is staged as a striptease. Bearish Jan George (also in The American Soldier and Berlin Alexanderplatz, but bugger all else) gets the reverse treatment, with Fassbinder lingering over him getting dressed for the showdown.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?

This film represents the fourth left turn in a row for Fassbinder, and he hasn't ended up where he started. The two Fengler collaborations are quite different from his other works. Although Fassbinder was always fond of extended shots (the high-speed low-budget filmmaker's friend), the ones he executed on his own tended to be either static or, if in motion, more elegant or diagrammatic. In this film and The Niklashausen Journey, the mobile camera tends to be much more exploratory and improvisatory, and, in Herr R., so too is the storytelling and performance.

Although the overarching storyline, with its dark dissection of middle-class 'problems', is the closest yet to Fassbinder's mid-70s melodramas, the style is much looser and the acting less stylised. Scenes such as the one where Kurt and Lilith meet with Hanna near the start are much closer to the curious discursiveness of Cassavetes than the clinical satire of later Fassbinder. The shifting, handheld camerawork (we can even hear the floorboards creaking as the camera operator moves around) has the same documentary immediacy, as does the rough sound, full of background noise and radio or TV broadcasts (anticipating the much more artful sound mix of The Third Generation).

Kurt Raab here nails the loser persona he'd be saddled with for much of the remainder of his on-screen career with Fassbinder (who cruelly allows his character here to be called 'Kurt Raab' - many of the other characters keep their own names, but that's of less consequence as they're less grotesque), and he's magnetically sullen or oblivious. His character is so awkward that he's even dumbstruck during a casual visit from his own parents. Arrested, abashed adolescence is the keynote, and it's superbly expressed in the great scene where he's in a record store, trying to get the shopgirls to identify a song based on his vague description (there's a long introduction full of feeling, there's a chorus that keeps coming back, it was on the radio on Sunday. . .), while they're just openly sniggering at him.

The humour is pitch black here and in other key scenes, such as the office party at which Kurt gives so excruciating a speech that his boss dodges the toast it was leading up to like it was a lobbed grenade.

And the answer to the musical question Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? I reckon it could plausibly be blamed entirely on Irm Hermann's epic account of her skiing holiday. It's pure torture: for Kurt, who's trying to watch television at the same time (this is what the film's messy soundtrack has been leading up to); for us, who share his frustration and also know that something's going to happen, if only Irm would shut up; and, not least, for Irm, who either had to remember all of this stuff or improvise relentlessly until Herrs F and R decide to put a stop to it.

[sidehacker]

Katzelmacher is actually cockmaster as in many people would like Hanna Schygulla to master their cocks.

[zedz]

Katzelmacher is actually cockmaster as in many people would like Hanna Schygulla to master their cocks.

Ah, I was misinformed by the MoMA catalogue. This title would have sold many more tickets than the other two combined.

[zedz]

1970 - Part 1

Rio Das Mortes

Fassbinder's early career is pretty diverse, but he seems to circle back to a particular kind of story (a group of marginal characters plan some kind of caper, generally a crime of some sort), and this falls into that template, although the MacGuffin here is not a heist, but an expedition to Peru to find buried treasure.

The film never gets to Peru, so the film is really concerned with the hapless attempts to find funding for the expedition, and it's really really concerned with the impact of this absurd venture on the characters' relationships. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is the way that we seem to be looking at relationships existing in a heterosexual universe where gravity is queer. Although the driving force of the film's narrative is Hanna Schygulla's desire to marry Michael Konig and cement their relationship, this relationship seems tentative, artificial and fragile, and there's a strong tendency for the film's relationships to resolve themselves into same-sex pairings. Konig and Gunther Kaufmann are the film's actual central couple, and Schygulla also tends to revert back to a lesbian-tinged hook-up with Katrin Schaake. This is all subtextual, but only barely - there's even an extended wrestle between Michael and Gunther, in which the latter splits his pants.

Stylistically, the film is somewhat rough - shot on 16mm and extremely grainy on the Wellspring disc - but its mise-en-scene and content (including long 'documentary' spiels such as the Brazilian politics lecture) shows the clearest Godard influence yet. The title sequence is a dead giveaway. Actually, the style could be considered 'grunge Godard', or Godard / Warhol. It's enjoyable enough, but I find it somewhat nondescript in the midst of Fassbinder's much more individual surrounding work.

Musical note: Fassbinder's soundtrack du jour was Pearls Before Swine's 1967 One Nation Undergound. 'Morning Song' plays over the credits and a later scene is accompanied by 'Another Time', while the Bosch detail used on the album cover (and the whole Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, if I'm not mistaken) appear on the apartment walls.

Whity

I just love this film. It's yet another departure for Fassbinder, and what a departure: a widescreen 'western' with musical numbers. Well, Whity is always described as a western, and it was shot in Almeria's oh-so-familiar western town and set on the American frontier in the 1870s, but it's actually much more a period family melodrama.

The film opens with the sound of buzzing flies as Whity, the black butler of the Nicholson family, interacts with his Mammy the cook. Right away Fassbinder hits the film's signature mood of mannered outrageousness. Whity is Fassbinder staple Gunther Kaufmann, but his mother is a white actress, Elaine Baker, in pitch-blackface. Her make-up is so black, in fact, that for most of the film she's a silhouette with eyeballs. While you're still pondering the implications of that decision, the partial payoff comes in the following scene, in which the decadent Nicholson family appear at the dinner table in whiteface. Later in the film this sometimes shades into greyface. It plays as ridiculously as it sounds, but that's clearly the point.

Actually, the real opening of the film is its credit sequence, accompanied by the stunning "I Kill Them", a skewed 'western ballad' which perfectly anticipates its parent film's bizarre transmogrification of generic forms. It's one of my favourite movie songs, a wannabe sweeping ballad (great mariachi horns) undercut by Gunther's committed but limited vocal (it's crying out for Gene Pitney or Scott Walker) and the kind of schizoid changes in time signature that you'd expect from the Shaggs or King Crimson - with the execution falling somewhere in the middle. This film contains Peer Raben's greatest score to that point. He also contributes five Weimar-ish songs for Hanna (all singing is in English) and a wondrous array of classical and Hollywood pastiches.

Fassbinder's other key collaborators also excel. Kurt Raab's art direction is fulsome - it's the first chance he's had to run away with the look of the film like this - and Michael Ballhaus arrives like an angel with his camera. Suddenly, Fassbinder's visual ambitions are fulfilled and excelled, the camera sinuously gliding through the sets and asserting a unique view of a world we've seen in so many other films. The 'encircling' shot appears fully formed and perfectly executed when Gunther offers to pay Hanna for services rendered. Time freezes as the camera gracefully sweeps around the bed. It's a great Fassbinder moment that visually articulates a change in perspective and power relationships without having to explain anything.

As for the story, it's operatically perverse, far more effectively so than Paul Morrissey's similarly-toned Frankenstein and Dracula films of a few years later. There's practically a checklist of transgressions (let's see - sadism, masochism, miscegenation, voyeurism, homosexuality, incest, transvestism), but none of them are dramatically overburdened. Still, you'll have forgotten the plot points long before you forget the scarlet of Whity's livery, or the tiles on the kitchen wall, or the way the camera moves around a bedroom.

[colinr0380]

Suddenly, Fassbinder's visual ambitions are fulfilled and excelled, the camera sinuously gliding through the sets and asserting a unique view of a world we've seen in so many other films. The ‘encircling' shot appears fully formed and perfectly executed when Gunther offers to pay Hanna for services rendered. Time freezes as the camera gracefully sweeps around the bed. It's a great Fassbinder moment that visually articulates a change in perspective and power relationships without having to explain anything.

That was a fantastic pre-'bullet time' shot! I also agree about the tiles on the kitchen wall! Some of the images that stuck with me were the early shot from Whity's perspective as the cook looks at him as he shines his shoes for what seems to be an uncomfortably long time but is only about five seconds and the three and a half minute Will reading scene which has a pendulous pan and zoom motion between five characters.

My favourite image though is this one.

It reminds me of that moment in The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie where a conversation is occurring in the mid ground and Bulle Ogier's character turns away and surprisingly walks up to the camera, gives a bored look and then turns back and rejoins the group! I like moments like those that seem to show accidents that would never usually be acceptable in a film - but surely if they weren't blocked correctly at some time the actor might get in the way or cause an awkward composition! While that moment makes us aware of watching a film simply because it is something that does not normally occur it also serves a nice dramatic purpose as it makes the characters in the scene equivalent by showing the wife acting through her lover to kill her husband.

[Matt]

The ‘encircling' shot appears fully formed and perfectly executed when Gunther offers to pay Hanna for services rendered. Time freezes as the camera gracefully sweeps around the bed.

That was a fantastic pre-'bullet time' shot!

There are a few of these in Fassbinder's films. There's one in the 2nd episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz and one in Martha (where Martha first sees Helmut).

[zedz]

There are a few of these in Fassbinder's films. There's one in the 2nd episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz and one in Martha (where Martha first sees Helmut).

I think there's one in Fear Eats the Soul as well, but I can't remember where. The Martha example is ultra-virtuosic, incorporating the movement of two characters. Again, it says far more about their (future) relationship (obsession, entrapment, delirious romance) in visual terms than any amount of conventional exposition.

[zedz]

1970 - Part 2

The Niklashausen Journey

The second Fassbinder / Fengler collaboration, and, like Herr R., it's built up of extremely long shots (only 32 over the length of the film). Here they are much less improvisatory, being carefully constructed plans-sequences that seem to be methodically exploring ideas about camera movement (mechanistic movement independent of action, movement in counterpoint to action, movement following action, 'invisible' movement in darkness, movement using tracks, pans, cranes, zooms). Only two of the shots are static, and almost all of them also involve the zoom in some way, be it a glacial, Wavelength-ish zoom in, a jabbing point of emphasis, or an element of more complex choreography (as when the camera tracks mechanically back and forth in a field outside a cottage, zooming in a little more for each pass).

The immediate, obvious influence is, unsurprisingly, Godard (think One Plus One without the Stones), and this is reinforced by the undigested cant, political and religious, of much of the dialogue, but the structural rigour and emotional distanciation of the entire exercise eventually points further afield, to Jancso, particularly in the more ambitiously orchestrated shots. Most impressive is the shot that begins as Margit Carstensen greets Konig, Fassbinder, Schygulla et al. at her door, loiters in the hallway as Carstensen and Konig wander off in the distance, then ambles away to explore the décor of the vestibule, tracking into another room with some of the pilgrims (at which point we get the full-screen shadow of the camera and operator) in time to capture Carstensen and Konig entering through another door, spinning around to establish the master of the house on his sickbed then resolving itself in a beautifully composed 'family portrait' of the pilgrims in another part of the room. There's a slight roughness around the edges, and the kind of zoom-reliance that had been evident in Rio das Mortes, but otherwise it seems as if Dietrich Lohmann has taken up the challenge presented by Michael Ballhaus with Whity (assuming I've got the chronology right, of course) and reinvented himself as a cameraman of vast ambition and no little accomplishment.

The story is slight (shepherd communicates with the Virgin Mary, causing social and political unrest in the region) and overburdened with speechifying and rather obvious deployment of anachronisms, but it's technically fascinating and allows Raben to extend his genius for pastiche to Early Music. The climactic junkyard crucifixion scene (Derek Jarman was surely taking notes) is accompanied by his glorious 'Kyrie eleison'.

Also, for the krautrock-minded, there's a terrific performance by Amon Duul (not to be confused with Amon Duul II) in the middle of the film, shot in a zoom-fragmented manner reminiscent of Warhol's The Velvet Underground and Nico. I have no idea whether Fassbinder had actually seen any of Warhol's films at the time, but there's a very strong family resemblance in much of his early work.

Beware of a Holy Whore

A great Fassbinder film, and, apparently, a Dylan favourite. It gets right down to core values, even if its specific expression is atypical. For example, for a filmmaker famed for his acting ensemble, this is one of the few films I can think of that really is an ensemble piece. Its focus isn't on individuals so much as the fluctuating power network that defines a loose community, with the hotel lobby as the arena (it's a bloodsport). For much of the film, we don't necessarily know what the assigned roles of the characters in the diegetic film production are, and anyway, the level of power or influence they exert or assert is not always proportionate to their place in that production.

The film is ostensibly a response to the making of Whity, which also relocated the filmmaking clique to Spain, though the film being made here is clearly not Whity, and Fassbinder muddies the autobiographical waters further by splitting himself between the figure of the director Jeff, played by Lou Castel, and Sascha, the power behind the throne played by himself. Neither role is an especially flattering portrait. Fassbinder's cruelty and cynicism is in full flight, and it's not all self-directed. The kind of political speechifying presented relatively straight in his previous film is here exposed as a cheesy seduction routine, and regular stooges Raab and Hermann both have to perform in curly frightwigs.

Castel is terrific. In his only Fassbinder role he seems to 'get' the aesthetic completely, and thoroughly insinuates himself into the ensemble. The other big name is Eddie Constantine, who doesn't fit so well, but that's clearly the point: he's Lemmy Caution, trying to keep his head above water in yet another alien environment, surviving on sheer cool.

Stylistically, the film is extremely accomplished and varied. Many of the key group scenes are captured in sinuous mobile shots that track around the lobby or zoom across it. The second-most-important location, a house in which one of the film-within-a-film's scenes is shot, is described in outstandingly fluid swirling crane shots. When Jeff, late in the film, explains the emotion of a scene in terms of its embodiment in camera movement, we should know exactly what he's talking about. The film's power relations are all about information and point-of-view. In this close, artificial environment, everybody - including us - is watching everybody else, so the stalking, circling camera movements and prying zooms are thematically apt.

Fassbinder also punctuates the film with long-held static compositions (e.g. the opening shot in which a character describes in detail a Goofy cartoon to the accompaniment of intrusive camera noise; the balcony gathering during which Hanna grooves ecstatically to Ray Charles' 'Let's Go Get Stoned') or punchy suites of related compositions (e.g. the six tightly composed two-shots that start off the main action of the film; the short fragmentary scenes that help bring the film to its juddering conclusion).

Raben is somewhat subdued this time around (but listen out for a brief recycling of his 'Kyrie' theme), and the soundtrack is dominated by Donizetti and Leonard Cohen (songs are shared with Herzog's Fata Morgana and Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller - now that would be a spaced-out triple feature)

The American Soldier

Maybe best known as the film in which Margarethe von Trotta gets to relate the plot of Fear Eats the Soul, I actually think this is in many ways the apotheosis of Fassbinder's early style. It revisits much of the feel and some of the content of Gods of the Plague, so it's four-square in the 'crime film' mode to which Fassbinder kept returning, and it's by far his most successful early venture into noir territory.

His caustic attitude is intact from the earlier films, but (barely a year later) he's got much greater technical chops. The plot is flimsy (a killer is on the loose; the cops are closing in), but it's a short film and has plenty of nifty set-pieces to keep things chugging along: the opening card game, with ultra-noir single-source lighting and pornographic playing cards (Hark Bohm can hardly focus on his game); Ingrid Caven doing Hanna's act from Whity (complete with piano / clarinet accompaniment), with mirrors in the darkness providing improvised split-screen effects; various killings; the final showdown, with glorious / ridiculous slow-motion capper (Kurt Raab indulges in a protracted, presumably grief-driven, wrestling match with his dying brother) accompanied by the superb Raben / Fassbinder / Kauffmann collaboration 'So Much Tenderness'. This closing song made such an impression on me that I'd persuaded myself that Gunther K had appeared in the film itself, but no, he just gets in the mournful last words.

[sevenarts]

I just came across this interview with Hanna Schygulla, conducted by Susan Sontag in 2003. It's very interesting as a whole, but in particular I was somewhat surprised by this offhand revelation:

SS: That's the deepest level of so many of his films, like Herr R. Run Amok ...

HS: By the way, that's not a film done by him.

SS: What do you mean?

HS: The idea was his, but it was realized by his assistant. It was almost totally improvised also, which was never his way of shooting.

SS: Was it because he lost interest or had another project?

HS: Maybe he wanted to give a chance to people in the group. It was done by Michael Fengler, his assistant. In the beginning there was some hope that others could have been ... maybe like at the Warhol Factory, where they would get into doing things too. But he was such a creative bomb that nobody co-existed.

Has anybody ever heard anything like that before? I had always assumed that Herr R. and Niklashausen Journey were true collaborative projects, definitely with a distinct aesthetic as compared to Fassbinder's other films of this era, but not so distinct that I would've thought Fassbinder was barely involved. In fact, if anything, the Godardian Niklashausen is the one I'd maybe peg as all-Fengler, while Herr R. is so concerned with Fassbinder's signature themes and ideas that it really feels like his film.

[zedz]

Has anybody ever heard anything like that before? I had always assumed that Herr R. and Niklashausen Journey were true collaborative projects, definitely with a distinct aesthetic as compared to Fassbinder's other films of this era, but not so distinct that I would've thought Fassbinder was barely involved. In fact, if anything, the Godardian Niklashausen is the one I'd maybe peg as all-Fengler, while Herr R. is so concerned with Fassbinder's signature themes and ideas that it really feels like his film.

Fascinating find. I'd always assumed that Fengler's contribution to these two films was conclusive, since they're stylistically so distinct from his other work of the time (and the improvisation is very un-RWF), but not to the extent that Fassbinder was comparatively uninvolved in their realization.

The thematic issue you identify with Herr R is particularly interesting, especially since those themes sort of emerge with this film and are more thoroughly elaborated in subsequent works. Maybe Fassbinder's contribution consisted of the 'architecture' of the film - here are the relationships, here's the narrative trajectory (even, quite plausibly in the case of this film, here are the scenes / shots), now go away and shoot the thing.

I'm suddenly much more interested in Michael Fengler. Has anybody seen any of his post-collaboration films (Weg vom Fenster, Output, Eierdiebe)?

[sevenarts]

The thematic issue you identify with Herr R is particularly interesting, especially since those themes sort of emerge with this film and are more thoroughly elaborated in subsequent works. Maybe Fassbinder's contribution consisted of the 'architecture' of the film - here are the relationships, here's the narrative trajectory (even, quite plausibly in the case of this film, here are the scenes / shots), now go away and shoot the thing.

It sounds like this is exactly what Schygulla is saying happened, that Fassbinder contributed the basic story (which, let's face it, is minimal as hell) and then Fengler went off and shot it, with the cast mostly improvising all that banal dialogue. It's a very interesting thought. It also makes me wonder if Fassbinder was even on-hand for the shooting -- obviously he was there, in front of the camera at least, for Niklashausen, which is much more structurally complicated and less improvised than Herr R., and is also quite possibly the least Fassbinder-like of any of his films.

I'm suddenly much more interested in Michael Fengler. Has anybody seen any of his post-collaboration films (Weg vom Fenster, Output, Eierdiebe)?

Ditto on this. I'm also surprised, if this is true, that it's never turned up in anything else I've read on Fassbinder.

[jesus the mexican boi]

Maybe Fassbinder's contribution consisted of the 'architecture' of the film - here are the relationships, here's the narrative trajectory (even, quite plausibly in the case of this film, here are the scenes / shots), now go away and shoot the thing.

It sounds like this is exactly what Schygulla is saying happened, that Fassbinder contributed the basic story (which, let's face it, is minimal as hell) and then Fengler went off and shot it, with the cast mostly improvising all that banal dialogue.

Jim Clark, who has a near-exhaustive site on Fassbinder's films and other LGBT films, describes this as "Fassbinder's vision" in his essay on Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (The essay, in slightly altered form, serves as the liner notes to Fantoma's R1 disc).

This is one of Fassbinder's most powerful and original works. Although he gave a co-writing and co-directing credit to his friend, Michael Fengler, its vision is pure Fassbinder. It grew directly out of his experimental theatre work and earlier films. It raises themes – about the problematic connections of the individual to society and himself – which he'll explore from many angles in his later features. In a way, it's an extension of his minimalist classic Katzelmacher, about a group of aimless young people whose lives alternate between stasis and violence (Herr R. could be one of them, ten years on and with a white-collar job). It also connects to an exceptional later film, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, about the effects on a family when the father goes on a killing rampage at work. But in style and feeling, this film, like Herr R. himself, stands alone.

Interesting analysis, and perhaps if it doesn't quite shoehorn with Schygulla's insight, it's not anathema.

Amok was actually my introduction to Fassbinder, for better or worse. I was probably still in my late teens, either in high school or just out, and intrigued by the legend of RWF I found this in my local video store. I was lulled by its banality then snapped to attention by its ending, forcing myself to re-evaluate all that had come before. It certainly has thematic and aesthetic links to RWF's other films, so whether you classify it as "story," "architecture" or "vision," his imprimatur is on it.

[zedz]

I've got a backlog of Fassbinders to comment on as I continue my trawl (hey, I've finished the first year of the decade!), so here's the first batch:

1970 - Part 3

Pioneers in Ingolstadt

I see this adaptation, the last film Fassbinder made before the post-Sirk Merchant of Four Seasons, as the last Antiteater film. Although his early work is far more diverse than it's normally given credit for, this film does see the end of some common elements, such as static, frontal, 'theatrical' staging (the way Fassbinder blocks the climactic beating in this film seems rather weak after the more 'filmic' showdown that concluded The American Soldier, and the scene in which Pioneers pace around the car in which Karl and Berta are having a conversation seems straight from the stage), Gunther-croaked theme songs, and impassive or 'Brechtian' performance.

Performances are a real issue with the film for me, as there's an unproductive rift that has by this time developed between the 'old-Fassbinder' distanced, uninflected (or else declamatory) stiffness of several of the actors (such as Carla Aulaulu and Rudolf Brem) and the equally stylised but more slyly modulated 'new-Fassbinder' emotional irony that Hanna Schygulla, Harry Baer and Irm Herrmann have developed with their director. Klaus Lowitsch, in his first Fassbinder film, manages to slip into that latter mode beautifully. Hanna needs all the irony she can get for the role of Alma, who's supposed to be sexually naive. This arch but nuanced performance mode would dominate future films, with rare exceptions like Brigitte Mira, who seems to me boldly without irony in Ali.

The film employs some of the simple, rigorously formalised camera movements Fassbinder would soon abandon (in favour of much more elaborate, rigorously formalised movements, it's true), as in the back-and-forth tracking during a conversation, but even in a largely familiar mode, he's still moving tentatively into new territory. The scenes set in and around the bridge, which are shot on location and are montage- rather than dialogue-driven, aren't really like anything else in his cinema up to this point, capturing real activity rather than dramatic action.

Overall, the self-selected constraints of Fassbinder's early style seem like real limitations for the first time, and the film itself is a stylistic step back from the likes of Beware of a Holy Whore. At the end of his second year of feature filmmaking, Fassbinder had had what many other filmmakers would count as a full career: time for some reinvention.

1971

The Merchant of Four Seasons

This was Fassbinder's first film after his Road-to-Damascus discovery of Sirk, and it's a major watershed in his career, though less clearly Sirk-indebted than later films like Fear Eats the Soul or Martha. He'd drawn heavily on Hollywood genre conventions in the past, but what I see really coming into focus in this film are: a greater precision and subtlety with framing; more subdued, if still stylised, performances; the expressive, even narrative, use of decor (something we also saw in Whity, but much more fully developed from here on) and colour (Hans and his working class milieu tends to be associated with the colour blue - jeans, shirt, pub, van; his family and their middle-class aspirations with red and brown).

Irm is great as the incipient entrepreneuse. She has a run of almost-leading roles during this period (Pioneers, this film and Petra von Kant) that shows an impressive range after having being consigned to glorified walk-ons in so many other films. In the leading role, Hans Hirschmuller is a little more problematic - somewhat broad but still effective.

His character is basically a shit, and this is one of those films that shows just how limiting it is to judge the emotional impact of works of art in terms of 'identifying with characters'. Fassbinder creates a social matrix in which nobody is particularly sympathetic, least of all the terminally ill protagonist, but in the last ten minutes an amazing complexity of emotion is evoked as we are hurtled from one brief scene to the next, each with its own wildly different tone. The grim satire of the family gathering gives way to the artificial tragedy of Hans' death (I say artificial because the tragedy is more situational - we feel we should feel for him - than actual), which is then turned upside down (as is, to some extent, our understanding of Hans' character) by the bizarre Morroccan flashback. We aren't given any time to assimilate the implications of that flashback for our reading of the character and his social relationships before we're standing alongside Irmgard at her husband's funeral (another scene ripe for evoking conventional emotion, but this time, almost mysteriously, we're much closer to that emotion). Then, on the brink of empathy, Fassbinder pulls the rug out from under us again (the third time in a space of minutes) by the pragmatic erasure of Hans in the icy final shot. And, bang, we're out of the film, trying to reconcile the conflicting emotional states we've been rapidly dragged through.

[zedz]

1972

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Did I speak to soon in heralding the end of Fassbinder's 'Antiteater' period with Pioneers in Ingolstadt? On paper, this film sound completely theatrical: a single set, a small cast of characters (only six, all women), dialogue-driven action, a rigid four act structure adapted from a play Fassbinder had just staged, long takes favoured over montage. On the screen, however, it's superbly cinematic, thanks in large part to the genius of Michael Ballhaus' camerawork. Theatrical, perhaps, but there's no sense of a proscenium, as the camera, in long takes, gently prowls around the three-dimensional space, creating an extremely fluid, but no less carefully controlled mise-en-scene. The reframing is sometimes very subtle, and often has the effect of revealing Marlene, Petra's silent secretary / slave, in the composition. Ballhaus' work here in keeping a single set constantly fresh and visually intriguing seems to me far more resourceful and inspired than Chris Doyle's similar stunt in Motel Cactus, primarily because it's in the service of meaningful content, not just a technical challenge.

In Sirk fashion, the decor carries a huge metaphoric and narrative weight (sometimes with obvious comic relish, as with the posed mannequins that share the space), and the subtraction of elements from the room marks the passage from scene to scene as much as the extravagant costume changes. An enormous mural dominates one wall of the room, and provides a backdrop for some of the most striking tableaux. Mirrors are used to vary the space and fragment characters' gazes.

As an example of the telling mise-en-scene, there's a great shot in the first act in which starts with a match-cut from a close-up of Sidonie (Petra's friend) to Petra herself, then slowly zooms out to reveal Petra's close-up as the reflection in a hand mirror, ultimately resolving in a balanced composition with Petra, seen obliquely over the shoulder, in the left foreground; her reflected face in the centre of the frame; and Sidonie in the middle background on the right-hand-side of the frame. This arrangement presents a conversation in which, from the viewer's perspective, Petra is looking away from Sidonie and in which, in real terms, she's looking at / talking to herself (about her marriage, the idea of fidelity and her feelings of contempt). At the end of the shot, the mirror is lowered to reveal Marlene in the centre of the image, in the background. We zoom in on her, perhaps the true 'subject' of the foregoing scene (and the movie?) This is really smart, economical storytelling.

Shots like this also set us up for the ambiguous climax of the film, in which the mysterious relationship between Petra and Marlene finally takes centre stage. Irm milks the thankless silent role for all it's worth, and this scene is her supernova payoff. Margit Carstensen, after a couple of dry runs in two previous films (I haven't seen The Coffeehouse, but I assume she's more part of an ensemble there), takes up her central position in Fassbinder's early seventies period as the embodiment of (barely) controlled hysteria, and she's utterly artificial and utterly cinematic, giving the film a ferocious, self-destructive energy. Hanna is the third lead, and she gets to do the Hanna dance (cf. Beware of a Holy Whore) to The Walker Brothers' gloriously melodramatic 'In My Room' (other key musical cues are supplied by the Platters and Verdi). Although once again we're not asked to do anything so vulgar as 'identify' with the characters, the cannibalistic relationships on display are fascinating and often uncomfortably recognisable. A friend of mine used to say that this film offers the most accurate film portrayal of gay male relationships he'd ever seen, and you really do get the sense that Fassbinder is exorcising some personal demons, or at the least scratching a private itch.

1972 Continued

And here the trail goes cold. The immediate post-Petra period is the poorest served on DVD, with the five projects that followed – Jail Bait, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day, Bremen Freedom, World on a Wire and Nora Helmer - all unavailable for various reasons. There are other notable gaps in availability of Fassbinder's filmography, but no hole as big as this, and it comes at a crucial point in his career, between key works, right after a stylistic watershed.

The two works that I've seen out of those five are superb, if not quite as great as the major works that bracket the lacuna (Petra and Ali). Jail Bait is a great, solid Fassbinder movie. It doesn't have the visual extravagance of Petra von Kant (he's back with Lohmann for this one), but it's another exercise in Hollywood revisionism. Here, the target is the couple-on-the-run film (e.g. They Live by Night, Gun Crazy), and my fuzzy recollection is that Harry Baer and Eva Mattes (stepping up from her supporting turn in Petra) are effective and even moving as the central couple. It's also one of his earliest couple- / individual-versus-society subjects.

Bremen Freedom is transmogrified theatre in a very different vein from Petra von Kant (these are the last two film adaptations he made of his own plays). It's a filmed play, with bare, stylized theatrical sets, but Fassbinder uses early video technology to 'back-project' surreal backdrops (e.g. a blood-red sunset, crashing waves) behind the drawing-room action. Margit Carstensen performs as if in a trance, and her embodiment of a serial poisoner (more coffee, vicar?) is probably the best thing I've seen her do.

[jesus the mexican boi]

Curious how you saw WILDWECHSEL... I have an unsubtitled VHS boot that's very poor.

[zedz]

Curious how you saw WILDWECHSEL... I have an unsubtitled VHS boot that's very poor.

Pretty good old 16mm print, projected at home. Now, if only I still had a 16mm projector!

[David Ehrenstein]

An examination of Berlin Alexanderplatz going on Here.

I had heard that Herr R. was Spengler's film many years ago.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Does anyone know much government aid RWF got for his films? I don't think he's a hypocrite for taking it, but it's a subject I'm looking into now.

[thethirdman]

Does anyone know much government aid RWF got for his films? I don't think he's a hypocrite for taking it, but it's a subject I'm looking into now.

Jane Shattuc provides a few numbers in the appendix of Television Tabloid and Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture.

Katzelmacher
State Award: 250,000 DM Film Cost: 80,000 DM
Warum läuft Herr R. amok
State Award: 250,000 DM Film Cost: 135,000 DM
Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
State Award: 450,000 DM Film Cost: 178,000 DM
Effi Briest
State Award: 260,000 DM Film Cost: 750,000 DM
Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant
State Award: 200,000 DM Film Cost: 325,000 DM

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Thanks, thirdman! I'll check that book out, too. Were these the only films of his that got funding?

[zedz]

1973

Ali:Fear Eats the Soul

This is a landmark Fassbinder film, if only in terms of its reception, and I've always enjoyed it, but it doesn't yield a lot more on a fourth viewing than I got on a first. Partly, that's a factor of the film's powerful thematic clarity. It's the first film that really embodies Fassbinder's 'schematic' narrative structures (I wish I could think of a less loaded term for this): those films that have a kind of scientific experimental logic to them, as in, let us now see how Community X responds to Aberration Y, like Fox and his Friends, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, Fear of Fear. Fassbinder's thesis in this film is nuanced, even ambiguous (e.g. the various possible explanations for what motivates the changes in heart of those around Emmi and Ali in the final act), but it's presented in an extremely direct and lucid way.

El Hedi Ben Salem and Brigitte Mira are similarly straightforward, two of the most open leads in any of his films, their stiffness a part of the characters (Ali's language difficulties and Emmi's formality) rather than an alienation effect. It's also expressive - for instance, Ali's stiff bow when he meets Emmi's family speaks volumes of their implied social relationship, and Ali's response to it. Ali necessarily remains somewhat unknowable - he's trapped and alienated in every context in which we see him - but our efforts to imagine his outlook on a given situation (rather than conventionally 'empathise'), as when Emmi shows off his muscles to her workmates, is an important part of the intellectual work we need to do to get the most out of the film.

Despite the film's surface us-against-them dynamic (as in Katzelmacher, gossip and racism are society's motors), Fassbinder keeps the central relationship complex through pointed details. Emmi's refusal to cook couscous crystallises the power disparity between them, and her nostalgia for an implicitly Fascist 'old Germany' adds a nasty historical edge to the film's exposure of Germany's (and Emmi's) ingrained racism. And yet, this is a film that does offer a glimmer of hope that 'love can conquer all' - Emmi and Ali remain together: love may be possible without complete understanding; happiness is not always fun. For me, this is embodied in a matched pair of wonderfully counter-intuitive camera moves in the garden restaurant scene. When Emmi breaks down under the relentless societal pressure, the camera moves in on the moment, but it moves in on Ali, not Emmi; then, when Ali comforts her, we have an opposite move in on Emmi. It's a great example of how Fassbinder at his best can sublimate the emotion of a moment into his mise en scene, so that we're swept up in the characters' emotion while still distanced from it.

Jurgen Jurges is the cinematographer here, his first completed film with Fassbinder (some of Fontane Effi Briest may have come first), and he's got the elegant moves of Michael Ballhaus down, particularly the gliding tracks in. The similarity of camera movement strongly suggests that this opulent style of camerawork had long been Fassbinder's preference, at least back to its first appearance in Whity, and the relevant constraint was the technical capacity of his DoP. Thus the rapid evolution in Lohmann's work over those first few years may not be so much a development of his ideas about the camera as a catching up with Fassbinder's ideas.

Martha

The first thing that pops into my mind whenever I think about this film is that ultimate Fassbinder shot when Margit Carstensen and Karl Bohm first enter one another's gravitational field, and the camera spins around them as they freeze and turn and continue moving forward all at once. It's a movement that speaks of entrapment and intoxication, even though the characters show no sign of mutual acknowledgement, and it will be a half-hour or so before their fates are intertwined. Camera movement in the film is crucial, but it tends to fulfil an editorial rather than narrative role. Movement is not motivated by the need to follow action, for example; it's more likely to provide punctuation (a short, quick track in on a character standing in for Fassbinder's raised eyebrow, say, or a swift lateral jerk of the camera registering Martha's surprise at one of the many outrages perpetrated against her).

The shot is a beautiful embodiment of the film's tone and themes, but there's more to the film than fancy cinematography. For one thing, for much of its length Martha is extremely funny, the blackest comedy imaginable, with Margit taking her 'distilled hysteria' persona to outrageous extremes. On these terms it's much more successful than Fassbinder's later and shriller Satan's Brew. The film's ultimate power, however, derives from the way in which the humour gradually bleeds out of the film, and we're left with a domestic horror film. Marriage = patriarchal power, and in Fassbinder's world power is always there to be abused. Bohm is perfectly cast, taking his already chilly Peeping Tom character and amputating everything redeemable from it.

When I first saw this film, during its 90s rediscovery, I saw Martha as being much more complicit in her victimhood: a closet masochist finally getting her secret fulfilment in the gruesome denouement. This time around I'm not so sure: her passivity in the nightmare relationship is much less clear-cut than I thought, and might well be deer-in-the-headlights terror. What was darkly comical in the first half (e.g. torture through tanning neglect), is much more troubling and plausible in the second. A very nasty and efficient film, once again showing how Fassbinder can get his audience engaged with emotions and ideas without relying on simplistic audience identification.

[David Ehrenstein]

Well Fassbinder loved to play it both ways. Being a sadist he identified with masochists.

Salem was of course one of Fassbinder's great loves. The problem was he was a murderous psychotic thug. He hung himself in prison where he was serving time for murder. (Querelle is dedicated to his memory) Fox and his Friends is plainly about Armin Meir -- with Fassbinder playing Armin and Peter Chatel a very spiffed-up version of RWF.

Amin was also a suicide. He and RWF play themselves in his utra-honest segment of Germany in Autumn.

Fassbinder was a great filmmaker but a truly terrible human being.

[denti alligator]

Catfucker

I don't think any English-language distributor has ever bothered to translate the title of Fassbinder's second feature

Katzelmacher is actually cockmaster as in many people would like Hanna Schygulla to master their cocks.

Ah, I was misinformed by the MoMA catalogue. This title would have sold many more tickets than the other two combined.

I think you're both wrong.
"Macher" is simply "he who does/makes" (from "machen"= to do/make, etc.)

"Katzel" is not cat (that's "Katze"), and it's not (so far I know) cock either.

I did some looking and found that "Katzel" is not really a German word, though "Katzelmacher" is, and it means:

an Italian

Basically: it's an abusive slang word for any foreign worker.

I quote the German Wahrig dictionary:
"(abwertend) Italiener [zu ital. cazza, Pl. cazze "Tiegel", da die eingewanderten ital. Handwerker frueher haeufig Geschirrhersteller waren]"

"Katzel" thus comes from the Italian for pot or pan (cazza; plural=cazze), so that "Katzelmacher" is "he who makes pots and pans," since, according to Wahrig, Italian immigrants in Germany had often been makers of dishes/crockery.

Maybe some native speakers can chime in and confirm/elaborate.

Just for fun: "catfucker" would be "Katzenficker" and "cockmaster" would be "Schwanzmeister."