Films by Rainer Werner
As skeptical as I often was in the 70s about Fassbinder as a role model, I’ve been more than a little disconcerted by the speed with which he’s vanished from mainstream consciousness. Having now seen two dozen of his 37 features, one of his four short films, and one of his four TV series–though I haven’t seen many of them since they came out–I find much of his work, for all its deliberate topicality, as fresh now as when it first appeared.
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Sirk’s stylistic hallmarks included theatrical uses of lighting, color, and mirrors, and his thematic hallmarks included blindness; in the most general terms, one could say his movies were all about ways of seeing and not seeing. Fassbinder’s self-conscious and low-budget appropriation of these hallmarks made them at once more overt and more overtly campy, so that contemporary readings of Fassbinder films were fully in tune with these attitudes in a way that contemporary readings of Sirk films were not. I’ll never forget a late-70s lecture on Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul given at the University of California-San Diego by Jean-Pierre Gorin, a former collaborator of Godard’s (and a closet intellectual in a southern California setting, much as Sirk was). Like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kibitzer, Gorin offered plenty of irreverent and often hilarious wisecracks about the Sirk film while it was playing, but he didn’t dare submit Ali to the same jaundiced treatment. (People who make fun of old movies nearly always have the self-serving presumption that folks back then were naive and corny, not sophisticated as they are today.)
Openly bisexual, tyrannical on his sets, and habitually dressed in a leather jacket, Fassbinder cut a starlike figure in the firmament of New German Cinema, though in this respect he was hardly alone. If the French New Wave of the 60s was mainly about films, the New German Cinema of the 70s was mainly about filmmakers, and each of the best-known directors had a claim to fame that was mainly a matter of public image: eccentric exhibitionism crossed with German romanticism (Werner Herzog), existentialist hip crossed with black attire and rock ‘n’ roll (Wim Wenders), Wagnerian pronouncements (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg), a dandy’s stupefied worship of shrines and divas (Werner Schroeter), and so on. When it came to Fassbinder, who improbably evoked both John Belushi and Andy Warhol, one was made to feel that the real drama in film after film wasn’t in the makeshift characters or the fruity images but in the offscreen intrigues of a baby Caligula manipulating his players and technicians.
A similar note of fatality is rung in Effi Briest–a much more impressive film (showing at the Film Center this Sunday)–when Fassbinder repeatedly uses lap dissolves between a pivotal dialogue two men are having and their subsequent journey by train and carriage to fight a duel, which infects the present moment so fully with future events that any notion of will or freedom within the film’s space-time continuum becomes purely academic. It’s a chilling sequence, though here, at least, it seems dramatically earned.
Another pair that captures the best of Fassbinder’s early social commentaries, where his formal method of portraiture is trained on working-class misery, is The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (both playing first at Facets on May 16). It’s worth adding that just before he made Berlin Alexanderplatz–a work that sums up for me what is most impressive and most objectionable about his defeatist work–he made two of his most moving and personal commentaries on the modern world, In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) and The Third Generation (1979) (both surfacing later this month and on June 21).
