Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (29) West German Cinema Part Five

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946-82) was the only child of a broken middle-class family (his father a doctor, his mother a translator). He remembered family life as ‘rather chaotic’, lacking in the rules and regulations of middle-class life. The house contained ‘nothing but literature and art’. After his parent’s divorce in 1951 Fassbinder stayed with his mother. He was left very much to his own devices and his mother sent him off to the cinema so that she could work. This childhood loneliness and longing for love and affection left a mark on the characters in his films. His first feature was titled Love is Colder than Death and was followed by a 1976 feature, I Only Want You to Love Me. From the age of seven he claimed to have spent every day of his childhood at the cinema. Hollywood genres were a benchmark for Fassbinder’s career as a filmmaker. His early education was at the Rudolf Steiner School (Sandford).

In the summer of 1967 Fassbinder joined one of Munich’s fringe theatre groups, where he acted in, directed, then wrote adaptations of various plays. “The ‘action theatre’ was very much of its time, anarchic, subversive and critical, reflecting and reacting to the events of the day” (ibid 64). Fassbinder acted in a play directed by Jean-Marie Straub appearing as one of the underground post-Brechtian theatre group in Straub’s short film The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp (1968). The authorities closed the Action Theatre because it had exceeded the grounds of its original permit being seen to have entered the realm of a ‘political cabaret’ contrary to the ‘predominantly artistic’ activities stipulated in its permit (ibid). Members of the Action Theatre regrouped and finally found a new home the following year. They performed two of their plays in monotone acting style on stage with minimal furniture. Using some of their theatre ideas the group made Fassbinder’s ‘gangster trilogy’ and Katzelmacher plus two other feature films in 14 months,1969-70.

Fassbinder (l)
The Bridegroom, The Actress and the Pimp

In The Bridegroom…, Jean-Marie Straub applied an austere aesthetic on Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play ‘Sickness of Youth’. Straub said that in paring down the film version of the play from two hours to an 8 minutes narration he removed all explanatory psychology, deliberately eliminating all theatricality. Expanded into a 23 min. triptych collage leaving only the relations between elements in the play, was intended as a contribution to the debate on the relationship between theatre and film ( Maureen Turim 342, Phillips ed. ).

Kovacs devotes a whole chapter of ‘Screening Modernism’ to the impact of theatrical style in late modern European art cinema coinciding with the parallel theatrical activities of many modernist directors evidenced in an exaggerated, unnatural, abstract acting style, an artificiality in conjunction with sets and expressive lighting. In the New German Cinema this theatricality was pronounced in films directed by Herzog and especially Syberberg. Fassbinder’s style is hard to define, marked by theatre in many varied ways beginning with an artificial pastiche of the gangster genre in some of his early films. Kovacs notes that Fassbinder first adapted pastiche to some real life experience in Fear Eats the Soul.

Notes on four select features of Fassbinder’s entry into feature filmmaking 1969-71 follow.

Kovács describes as the “peculiar minimalist style” of Fassbinder’s second feature Katzelmacher (1969) - and also his first feature, Love is Colder than Death - a mixture in the former of dispassionate Straubian theatricality and Antonionian long take style with no movement at all of figures in the bleached out empty space of white walls. This is in contrast to his later films in which “theatrical and motivational saturation takes over” (159).

Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla,
Katzelmacher

Katzelmacher is an explicitly social-critical film which deals with the problem of the ‘Gastarbeiter’, the plight of the immigrant worker in Germany for whom Fassbinder had an affinity. The film’s title is a Bavarian colloquialism referring especially to the supposed sexual potency of southern Europeans. The film sets off the experiences of a Greek Gastarbeiter, Jorgos, against the suspicion, intolerance, and antipathy of four young German couples towards him. Katzelmacher is regarded as containing the most sustained deployment of alienation devices in any Fassbinder film. The characters rarely face each other when they speak. The choreography and circularity in repetition of the couples’ movement in the static long takes to a popular Schubert melody, underlines the boredom and one dimensionality in their lives.

Tony Pipolo describes Katzelmacher as “a textbook case of minimalist cinema within the modernist tradition.” As an example of a reflexive narrative film it “epitomizes Fassbinder’s position with respect to traditional narrative and avant garden cinemas.” Its thematics on the futility of hope, the immobility of youth and perpetuation of the status quo also reappear in Fassbinder’s subsequent films (97). “It is precisely the form of the parable/allegory which Katzelmacher offers more directly and with more purity than any other Fassbinder film” (ibid).

Filmmaker, critic and friend of Fassbinder, Christian Braad Thomsen, identifies Katzelmacher as the first of his ‘bourgeois films’, as Fassbinder called them, in contrast to his ‘cinema films’. “What is ‘bourgeois’ is not the films, but the world they describe and criticise” (78). Katzelmacher ends with “two of the principal characters formulating their ideas about a way out of the milieu that threatens to suffocate them. If one were to define these sketchy dreams in political terms, then one points in a fascist direction. Erich sees the army as a way out and the possibility of change.” The other is anarchistic, “Marie dreams of a country without the concept of property where love is pure and beautiful.” Thomsen suggests that “simply and without moralizing, Fassbinder indicates the two paths we can choose, and in his future films he repeatedly tried to show the necessity and possibility of the second way” (82).

Margarethe von Trotta, The American Soldier

The last of Fassbinder’s gangster trilogy, his sixth feature,The American Soldier (1970), has been described as his “most perfect film” (ibid 71). It brings together more artistically the themes in the preceding two [gangster] films” and “masters the difficult balancing act between pastiche and parody, so that it becomes something quite different, a strangely poetic film with a characteristic austere and brutal tenderness” (ibid 74). Fassbinder is clearly not interested in telling a story but rather setting up a series of iconic situations. “The theme is that violence is an expression of frustrated love.” Another of the themes coming through more clearly is “that police and gangsters belong to the same breed and have the same trade.” Thomsen sums up that The American Soldier is not merely referring to American genre models but “looks forward to the later complete and harmonious works which sprang from Fassbinder’s creative rage and which obstinately stuck to the path already laid out” (ibid).

Wiegand notes that after Katzelmacher, Fassbinder’s style showed little development for several years while he constantly borrowed from different film genres (25). A significant film in the development of his oeuvre is Warnung for miner heilgen Nutte / Beware of a Holy Whore, his ninth feature, one of seven Fassbinder completed in 1970 including four tv productions “marking the end of the obsessively personal style characteristic of Fassbinder’s early films and paving the way for a more objectified treatment of subject matter (Kuhn, Phillips ed. 88). As an actively self-conscious film about filmmaking although it could be said to be more about frustrations, mainly sexual, within the group while waiting for the arrival of the director halfway through so filming could begin.

Eddie Constantine, Hanna Schygulla
Beware of a Holy Whore

Beware of a Holy Whore is one of four such films made by European auteurs beginning with Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), then Truffaut’s La nuit Américaine / Day for Night (1973), and culminating in Wim Wenders’ The State of Things (1981) “a meditation on the state of the art” which ends with an independent German filmmaker being killed on a Hollywood street reflecting Wenders’ state of mind following his legendary difficulties over the completion of his Coppola produced Hammett(1982). Bluntly autobiographical of the breakdown during the filming of his previous film, Whity, Fassbinder’s film, Thomsen suggests, is close to Truffaut’s with “cinema seen as a ‘holy whore’ which stands between the characters involved and the reality beyond the film production” (94).

Fassbinder’s first 11 features were produced under the Action Theatre label “which in its most literal sense was intended to advertise the blatant anti-illusionist, anti-theatrical posture assumed by Fassbinder and his acting company prior to the more commercial enterprise beginning with The Merchant of Four Seasons. The action theatre idea was to create “a sort of commune” in which everyone concerned […] was basically an author.” But Fassbinder himself declared later that this ideal was utopian and that works of art are inevitably created in an authoritarian manner ( Wilfried Wiegand interview quoted Pipolo fn p.95). The deliberately self-conscious gestures in these early films, along with their freewheeling stylistic references to prototypical Hollywood films, were perfectly consistent with the “reflexive posture.” Clearly, Fassbinder’s subsequent desire to reach a large audience necessitated relinquishing such a posture and the adoption of a more mimetic style consistent with the priorities of narrative cinema (ibid). Pipolo notes that "with Katzelmacher and In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) Fassbinder came close to creating alternative forms of narrative” (94).

Fassbinder’s twelfth feature directed (also written) by Fassbinder in 18 months, Der Handler der vier Jahreszeiten / The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) based on a true story from his own family, was his first popular success with German audiences. Fassbinder regarded it a turning point in his career, less self absorbed, more objective story telling. For the first time, Kuhn notes (ibid p.90), psychology plays a part in characterisation and there is character development. Hans Epp, a street vendor, is a typical Fassbinder hero; he meets betrayal and defeat at every turn, from the beginning subject to an oppressive mother. Fassbinder makes Hans something of a modern everyman, “ the story of almost everyone I know has lived himself […] Epp wishes to make something of his life but his education, his environment, his circumstances don’t admit fulfilment of his dream” (Fassbinder). This indicates an important shift in the filmmaker’s perspective. “No longer preeminently the projected working through of his own anxieties, the film with its mimetic orientation, has a broader audience appeal” (ibid 91).

Hans Hirschmuller, Irm Hermann
The Merchant of Four Seasons

Fassbinder’s first film after his encounter with Douglas Sirk’s films is replete with stock melodramatic figures and plot developments but without pushing the melodrama to the point of parody instead “redefining melodrama as social parable […] finding ways to convert them into sophisticated, witty, and elegant entertainments” (Pipolo 126). Merchant succeeds, in good part, because of its melodrama allowing Fassbinder to introduce strong emotions into his films with a resonance missing in his previous work, creating sympathy for Hans rather then empathy. Following a Brechtian legacy of distancing he embeds Hans Epps’ story archetypically in the sociopolitical context of Germany in the 50s (Kuhn 92). Fassbinder’s second deployment of Sirkian melodrama followed in Angst essen Seele auf / Ali : Fear Eats the Soul (1973) in which he applies stylisation for heightened emotionalism inspired by Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows to the story of a real life relationship he found in a newspaper - that between a Turkish immigrant worker and an older woman.

Feature Films by Fassbinder 1969-73 following John Sandford’s groupings with month of film premiere included; * indicates cinema release.

1. Echoes of Hollywood: The Gangster Trilogy Love is Colder than Death (June 69)*, Gods of the Plague (July 70)*, The American Soldier (Nov 70)*

2. Stylisation & Realism Katzelmacher (Nov 69)* Why Does Herr R Run Amok? (Feb 71)*

3. !970 the Year of Experiment The Coffee House (May 70 tv), The Journey to Niklahausen (Oct 70 tv), Rio das Mortes (Feb 71 tv), Pioneers of the Ingolstadt (May 71 tv ), Whity (July 71), Beware of a Holy Whore ( Aug 71)

4. Breakthrough with the German Public The Merchant of Four Seasons (Mar 72)*, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Oct 72)*. Fassbinder’s international breakthrough was with Fear Eats the Soul (March 74)*

Concerning Fassbinder’s project of stretching the notion of German history beyond 1933-45, as Thomas Elsaesser points out (268), if one considers 7 feature films and a tv series he made in the decade 1971-81 “not in the order they were made but in the chronology of the periods they depict, the scope and wealth of characters and situations, of stories, types and people is astounding.“ Beginning with the Prussian aristocracy in the 1890s in Effi Briest; proletarian life in the growing capital of the Reich, Berlin, 1922-29, in Berlin Alexanderplatz; the rise of Fascism amongst the wealthy middle class, 1932-5, in Despair ; the career of a nightclub singer among upper echelons of the Nazi Party between several cities in Lilli Marleen; the economic miracle in the Cologne area, 1945-53, in The Marriage of Maria Braun; the Adenauer years and local politics,1955-8, in Lola ; show business, drugs and Munich high-life in the mid-50s in Veronica Voss; petty bourgeois family life in the Munich suburbs around 1960 in The Merchant of Four Seasons. Other films, such as The Third Generation and In the Year of Thirteen Moons, continue this history up to the mid- and late 70s.

Elsaesser concludes that Fassbinder, in contrast to Kluge and Syberberg, “made a decision to use narrative to tell stories in his reckoning with German history: to opt, in other words, for the illusion of realism, heightened by stylisation and artifice, and to go for this version of history to the cinema itself” (269). Fassbinder (as quoted by Mark Cousins in ‘The Story of Film’) puts it succinctly : “The ideal is to make films as beautiful as America’s but to move the content to other areas.”

Werner Herzog

While Fassbinder was making his move from writing and directing for fringe theatre and low budget features, Werner Herzog had, at the Berlin Film Festival, received the Silver Bear for his first feature - Lebenszeichen / Signs of Life (1967) gently focused on a stunted Romantic visionary - a German soldier with two others guarding a useless ammunition dump on a Greek island during World War II - who hears voices in the ground. Herzog subsequently authored the startlingly original put-downs of human aspiration marked by ascendingly ironic chapter headings in the visionary non-narrative, Fata Morgana (1968), filmed in the Sahara, full of ideas quoted in subsequent films. Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) is a grotesque ‘Bunuelian’ tale of a revolt by dwarfs “in an institution whose director is absent, like Pascal’s God” (Brigette Peucker, Philips ed.).

Wim Wenders directed six short films and a diploma feature, Summer in the City (1970) centred on a man newly released from prison on a failed search for former friends travelling from one wintry city to the next, “locomotion and music [the film is dedicated to the Kinks] shown as the only possible source of human contact.” Wenders called it “a film about depression.“ His critical breakthrough came out of his friendship with writer Peter Handke who wrote the script for The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick (1971) based on his novel.

Wim Wenders

Bloch, a goalkeeper feeling his age, walks out on a game in Vienna then hanging around, commits an arbitrary murder, and in a vague attempt to flee Bloch ends up in an Austrian border village “sustained only by his love for American movies and rock music.” What appears to be shaping as a murder-thriller works against all expectations. Tony Rayns in ‘Time Out’ noted the sense in which “everything shown is at once subjective and objective,” in this respect outdoing even the first of Wenders’ road movie trilogy, Alice in the Cities (1974), thematically involving a burnt out journalist’s loss of faith in words. Jan Dawson notes a further achievement of Wenders in his films “using dialogue as form rather than content.”

Both the above observations deserve more elaboration in relation to Dawson’s further reference to Wenders’ films as “totally lacking in aggression.” In their pacing and perspective, is “the vision of an incongruous universe in which the human characters [free of psychological explanation] are seldom the most interesting item on the screen, the emphasis on the language of gesture rather than on dialogue - all these leave Wenders through the 70s closer to Ozu than the convention of Hollywood narrative,” the action film facade of The American Friend (1977) notwithstanding.

Wenders in an interview with Jan Dawson spoke of having Goalkeeper “completely rejected any idea of […] psychological explanation of anything[…] already […] a very important break from American cinema,” something which he appreciated when he later saw Ozu films sensing a soulmate who earlier in his career had also been strongly influenced by American films while nevertheless retaining and developing his own style. Wenders debt to Ozu, it is suggested, was not a particular style or method - he had been using Ozu-like techniques before ever seeing an Ozu film- but rather “learning to trust his own vision” (Kathe Geist essay, Phillips ed. 387). Wenders said that he found that his own ideas of cinema were the same as Ozu’s : “his way of telling stories was so absolutely representational.”

Hans-Jurgen Syberberg

In 1968, after a decade of making mainly short documentaries for Bavarian television, for want of any opportunities in the film industry, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg made his first feature film, How Much Earth Does a Man Need? (1968), based on a Tolstoy short story in which Syberberg pays more attention to a series of images with mythic associations than to a coherent plot. The three main films prior to Syberberg’s magnum opus are built around key figures in modern German consciousness: King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the popular author Karl May, and Adolf Hitler. Hitler : a Film for Germany (1977) is “a bewildering symphony of ideas, impressions, sights, sounds, and emotions” running 7 hours. In again creating the film’s own form through a series of images with mythic connections and operatic theatricality to replace a coherent plot, Syberberg marked his final rejection of Hollywood cinema still dominant in Germany (ibid 364).

Ula Stockl

The Cat has Nine Lives (1968), the first feature by Ula Stockl, was funded by a grant from the Kuratorium after she had made shorts as a student of Kluge (she was his assistant on Yesterday Girl) and Reitz at the newly formed Ulm Film institute. Cat was ahead of the times as a harbinger for the full emergence of women’s filmmaking in Germany in the early to mid 70s in which Stockl participated with a series of medium length dramas for tv thematically linked around issues connected with affective relationships culminating with Erika’s Passions (1976) and A Woman with Responsibility (1977).

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Geoffrey Nowell-Smith ed. History of World Cinema “The New German Cinema” (Anton Kaes)

Anton Kaes From Hitler to Heimat 1989

John Sandford The New German Cinema 1981

Peter C Lutze Alexander Kluge The Last Modernist 1998

Karyn Kay “Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave” review Film Quarterly Fall 1975

Timothy Corrigan New German Film 1983; essay New German Critique Winter 1990 Klaus Phillips ed. New German Filmmakers 1984 : essays on 26 filmmakers incl. Reitz by Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart & Ruth McCormick, Schlondorff & von Trotta by Christian-Albrecht Gollub

Thomas Elsaesser New German Cinema A History 1989

Stuart Liebman “Why Kluge?” October 46 Fall 1988 issue devoted to Kluge

Heide Schlussmann “Women and Femininity in the Films of Alexander Kluge

Tony Rayns ed. Fassbinder BFI 1976 essays by Elsaesser (“Vicious Circles”), Rayns (“Syntax”)

Christian Braad Thomsen Fassbinder Life and Work of a Provocative Genius 1991

Wilfried Wiegand “Interview with Rainer Werner Fassbinder” in Fassbinder 1981

Tony Pipolo “Bewitched by the Holy Whore” October 21 Summer 1982

Jan Dawson Entry on Wim Wenders in Cinema a Critical Dictionary vol.2 ed.R. Roud 1980 ; interview with Wenders, New York Zoetrope 1976

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more