The Happy World of Fassbinder

My first exposure to the world of Fassbinder was seeing BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE about 8 years ago, and I didn't think too much of it at the time other than it was on of the bleakest films I ever saw, exposing the naked truth of dark side of human existence. But at that time, I wasn't so much into foreign films or art-house type films. But since then, my perception of film has changed greatly and only just recently have I found a new found appreciation for the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It's a wondrous world he created, but not an easy one to follow.

As some of you may be aware, Fassbinder died very young at age 37 from a drug overdose, but managed to direct over 40 films in his career from 1969 to 1982, mostly feature films, a few TV specials and his towering achievement, the 940-minute TV mini-series BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1979-80), told in 13 parts, plus a 2 hour epilogue, which I recently finished watching. Nearly all his films were written or adapted for the screen by Fassbinder himself. He was also art director on most of the early films, editor or co-editor on a lot of them, and he acted in nine of his own films as well as for other directors. On top of this, he occasionally performed many other roles such as cinematographer and producer on a small number of them. In other words, he was pretty much a workaholic.

His films tackle a wide variety of themes and they give a pretty distorted picture of post-war Germany with a distinct political edge. But many of his films remain relevant to contemporary urban times and delve deeply into the dark side of human relationships with a very very black sense of humor. A great deal of his films were character studies of "misfits" unwanted by society for reasons beyond their control. His work was extremely personal, inspired by his own feelings of self-torture, rejection and alienation was never unwilling to tackle difficult subjects such as terrorism, racial tension, alienation, class exploitation (on the political left as well as right), trans-sexuality and masochism in a provocative but non-sensationalist manner. It was no secret that he had compassion for both victims and victimizers so many of his most monstrous creations are self-portraits, a peak example of this being the relationship between the characters Franz Biberkopf and Reinholdt in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ. He was notorious for being a difficult person to work with, and deliberately created his own image of being a rather dislikable figure, but at the same time garnering the upmost respect from those close to him.

I've seen about 1/3 of Fassbinder's works a this point. I haven't seen many of his early works yet, but they seem to be shot with an almost always static camera and with very unnatural dialogue. The second phase is the one that brought him international attention, with films exploring how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientation, politics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday fascism of family life and friendship. The final phase of his career, from around 1977 until his death, were more varied, with international actors sometimes used and the stock company disbanded (although the casts of some films were still filled with Fassbinder regulars). He became increasingly more idiosyncratic in terms of plot, form and subject matter in movies like SATAN'S BREW (1976), IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS (1978), The Third Generation (1979) and Querelle (1982). His masterpiece BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ was also made in this period.

I'm just going to give a brief rundown of a few of the best Fassbinder films I've seen. They're all good in their own way though. The most recent film I have digested is his 16-hour masterpiece, BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, finally re-mastered and preserved for generations to come in a decent version on DVD. The 1st version was a Europe-region only version that came out in 2006, but Criterion took that re-master, and re-mastered it even further, adding some nice extras not available on the previous version. This is a very faithful and natural adaptation of Alfred Doblin's novel. It shows how a man through his personal faults and a corrupt, unfriendly society is unable to still remain happy. Filming the book was Fassbinder's lifelong inspiration, and addition to the 13 part film, there is a 2-hour personal epilogue about his feelings about the protagonist. I finished this film just a week ago, but I am already missing the characters like they are people close to me.

Franz Biberkopf is not smart of a guy, but his heart is very big indeed and he would never rat on his friends and is one of those people who is ready to do anything he is asked to do by the people he considers his friends at the moment of the request. He suffers many trials and tribulations as the result of his "friends". There's one scene where Reindholdt throws him out of a moving car and he gets run over by another car and loses his left arm, but Franz is not mad about it, much to Reinholdt's surprise (and everyone else's) At times he may be taken over by a fit of rage that makes him blind and murderous, though he can easily be calmed. He is very dependent on women but at the same time very particular about them and actually loves only very few. Eva of course, his permanent love who lives with a rich Herbert and carries his child for a few months. Ida, who he kills out of rage one morning, resulting in his subsequent 4-year prison term. His other longest lasting love in the film is Mieze, who will be killed by Reinhold. Franz does what he has to do to survive in Germany: at first selling newspapers, including a nazi newspaper, selling erotic literature, selling shoelaces, being part of a gang of thieves, and being a pimp. It's basically an extremely well done character study of a sad life, so densely detailed that I didn't even notice the length of the film. Highly recommended and easily one of the 10 best films I've ever seen. Great score by Peer Raben, who has collaborated with Fassbinder on every film, excluding a few from his early period.

BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE is the very first Fassbinder film I ever saw, and is a black comedy about the difficulties involved in movie making and sexual frustration, no doubt based on a personal experience, like so many Fassbinder movies. All the usual Fassbinder shit's here, violence, humiliation, slappin' women around, etc etc.

THE MERCHANT OF 4 SEASONS (1971) is a pretty dark, but morbidly entertaining film about a drunk who starts a fruit vending business, tries to stay sober and lead a good life, but that doesn't last long. He publicly humiliates his wife, beats her up in a drunken rage at home, tells her family off, drinks himself to death at the end of the film, all the usual Fassbinder stamps. After that came the brilliantly desolate and alienating THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), which was based on one of Fassbinder's plays. The film is a claustrophobic melodrama set in the apartment of the fashion designer of the title. Petra (Margit Carstensen) wallows in her own grief at being brushed off by a young wife she fell for while treating her devoted and subservient assistant Marlene (Fassbinder regular, Irm Herrmann) like shit. It's basically a story about letting ourselves being abused by others in the hope of gaining their love, or out of fear of being alone. This movie was shot is 10 days.

Fassbinder's recurrent theme of reckless abandon and excess reached its most tragic variation with IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS. This film tells the story of a transsexual Elvira / Erwin (Volker Spengler), who on a love-interest's whim goes to Casablanca to get his dick cut off. However, when s/he is later rejected, s/he admits s/he has ruined his/her life. Later, s/he confronts her old boss, now a wealthy capitalist pig named Anton Saitz (played to perfection by Gottfried John) in the hopes of gaining his love. Anton's image is built up throughout more than the first half of the film, so when he finally does make his first appearance wearing tennis shorts and shirt impersonating Jerry Lewis on television, the effect is quite powerful and humorous at the same time. Fassbinder certainly has his own brand of black humor. There's some pretty strange lighting effects and some of the music is very dark and experimental. This is one of his most sincere and honest investigations of minority urban life, making it one of his most explicitly personal films. He wrote, directed, shot, designed and edited it. This is one of Fassbinder's best.

Before 13 Moons came his biggest international success, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978). The other 2 films in this "trilogy" are LOLA (1981) and VERONIKA VOSS (1982). They all focus on women in WW2 and its aftermath - a wife looking for her missing husband, a cabaret artist caught between two powerful men and a washed up Third Reich film star. These films are excellent studies of the changing and unchanging nature of Germany through that particular period. Stylistically these films are more confident and in your face than previous films, especially the amazing colors and textures throughout Maria Braun and LOLA. Then the stark contrasting b/w of Veronika Voss. These are all excellent films during Fassbinder's peak just a few years before his death in 1982.

THE THIRD GENERATION is Fassbinder's response to the Baader-Meinhof deaths which scandalized both the left and right. Revolving around the concept that the state could invent left-wing terrorists to conceal its own growing totalitarianism, The Third Generation has some pretty fucked up imagery throughout. The script and story are pretty scattered but the the excellent performances mark it as a major work.

Another one of Fassbinder's most personal statements was GERMANY IN AUTUMN (1978). The first 40 minutes or so, it cuts back and forth between Fassbinder arguing with his mother trying to coax her into making some reactionary statements against his boyfriend Armin Meier, with scenes of him and Fassbinder in a house usually fighting over trivial issues. It's one of the most personal and self-revealing pieces of film that Fassbinder ever made.

QUERELLE, the last film Fassbinder made, was based on Jean Genet's novel, Querelle de Brest, a very fractured fractured and difficult story. Although Dieter Schidor approached him to make the film, he rewrote the script with Burkhard Driest (who also plays Mario) and got regular production designer Rolf Zehetbauer onto the project. Zehetbauer's work on Querelle is quite remarkable, the studio set of the ports of Brest is bathed in a decadent orange glow like the town is in heat (complete with unsubtle phallic architecture, sketchy sailors and perverse bars and brothels). This is not one of my favorite Fassbinder movies, nor was it for critics who called it "laughable and "a bore". I've never read the novel, but apparently it totally captures Genet's style, which isn't easy to do.


Shortly after finishing Querelle, Fassbinder was found dead in his Munich apartment. His suicidal lifestyle had finally caught up with him - cocaine and alcohol-use in particular had caused his heart to fail after only 37 years. It's interesting to wonder what Fassbinder would have done if he has been still alive all these years - would he have sold out? I don't think so. Would he have embraced and gone along with digital technology? We'll simply never know. His next film was to be I'm the Happiness of This Earth, a drama about three failed detectives set in a discotheque.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's productivity was such that some movies are almost impossible to see. And even though most of his films are available, some are not, and those re mostly his early works, like Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972) and World on a Wire (1973) There is also no decent DVD version of Effi Briest (1974) or Bolweiser (1977). I'm hoping Criterion's sister company ECLIPSE will fill the void with some of his lesser known early works in box set.

Fassbinder was able to explore the disappointments and cruelties of urban life using different variations on themes. His work portrayed the horrifyingly empty and mechanical reality of family and working life of society when it allows materialism to become more important than its inhabitants. Underneath everything else, I think he was trying to teach us not to be afraid of ourselves and what we believe in.

FILMOGRAPHY

The City Tramp (Der Stadtstreicher) (1965, WGer, 10 mins)
The Little Chaos (Das Kleine Chaos) (1966, WGer, 9 mins)
Love is Colder Than Death (Liebe ist Kälter als der Tod) (1969, WGer, 88 mins)
Katzelmacher (Cock Artist) (1969, WGer, 88 mins)
Gods of the Plague (Götter der Pest) (1969, WGer, 91 mins)
Why does Herr R. Run Amok? (Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?) (1969, WGer, 88 mins. Co-directed with Michael Fengler. Script improvised)
Rios Das Mortes (1970, WGer, 84 mins)
The Coffee House (Das Kaffeehaus) (1970, WGer, 105 mins)
Whitey (1970, WGer, 95 mins)
The Nicklashausen Journey (Die Niklashauser Fahrt) (1970, WGer, 86 mins. Co-directed with Michael Fengler)
Beware of a Holy Whore (Warnung vor einer Heiligen Nutte) (1970, WGer/Italy, 103 mins)
The American Soldier (Der Amerikanische Soldat) (1970, WGer, 77 mins)
Pioneers in Ingolstadt (Pioniere in Ingolstadt) (1970, WGer, 84 mins)
The Merchant of Four Seasons (Der Händler der vie Jahreszeiten) (1971, WGer, 89 mins)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant) (1972, WGer, 124 mins)
Wild Game (Wildwechsel) (1972, WGer, 102 mins)
"Eight Hours Are Not a Day" ("Acht Stunden sind kein Tag") (1972, WGer. Five episodes for television: 101 mins, 100 mins, 92 mins, 89 mins and 89 mins)
Bremen Coffee (Bremer Freiheit) (1972, WGer, 87 mins)
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) (1973, WGer. Two parts for television screening: 99 and 106 mins)
Nora Helmer (1973, WGer, 101 mins)
Martha (1973, WGer, 112 mins)
Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1973, WGer, 92 mins)
Effi Briest (1974, WGer, 141 mins)
Fox and his Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit) (1974, WGer, 123 mins)
Like a Bird on the Wire (Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht) (1974, WGer, 44 mins. Co-directed with Christian Hohoff)
Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven (Mutter Küsters fahrt zum Himmel) (1975, WGer, 120 mins)
Fear of Fear (Angst vor der Angst) (1975, WGer, 88 mins)
I Only Want You to Love Me (Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt) (1976, WGer, 104 mins)
Satan's Brew (Satansbraten) (1976, WGer, 112 mins)
Chinese Roulette (Chinesisches Roulette) (1976, WGer, 86 mins)
Bolweiser (1977, WGer. Two parts for television screening: 104 mins and 96 mins. Feature film version approved by Fassbinder, 112 mins)
Women in New York (Frauen im New York) (1977, WGer, 111mins)
Despair (Despair - Eine Reise ins Licht) (1977, WGer/France, 119 mins. Script by Tom Stoppard)
Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst) (1978, WGer. Fassbinder episode 26 mins. Script improvised)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun) (1978, WGer, 120 mins. Script by Peter Marthesheimer & Pea Frohlich)
In a Year with 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden) (1978, WGer, 124 mins)
The Third Generation (Die Dritte Generation) (1979, WGer, 110 mins)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979-80, WGer. Originally screened for television in 13 parts: 81 mins, 58 mins, 59 mins, 59 mins, 59 mins, 58 mins, 58 mins, 58 mins, 59 mins, 59 mins, 59 mins, 59 mins and 111 mins. Also screened for the cinema over a number of nights.)
Lili Marleen (1980, WGer/Italy, 120 mins)
Lola (1981, WGer, 113 mins)
Theatre in a Trance (1981, WGer, 91 mins)
Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronkia Voss) (1982, WGer, 104 mins. Script by Peter Marthesheimer & Pea Frohlich)
Querelle (1982, WGer/France, 106 mins)