Auteur List: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

[Sloper]

SPOILERS for Martha, Fear of Fear, and Nora Helmer below…

I shared some of senseabove’s frustration with Martha on a first viewing, and as a huge fan of both versions of Gaslight I couldn’t help enjoying the references to those films while at the same time making unfavourable comparisons. There’s a clarity and emotional weight to the abuse in the 1940 version, and a wealth of incisive detail in the actual portrayal of gaslighting in the 1944 version, that I really missed here. And besides the comparative lack of clarity and detail, the tone of black comedy verging on parody (noted by senseabove and zedz) felt sort of ‘off’ to me, like the Punch-and-Judy scene from the 1940 Gaslight pushed to such an extreme that it becomes tasteless in all the wrong ways.

On the second viewing, I tried to forget about Gaslight and instead see this in relation to other Fassbinder films from around this time – especially Fear of Fear and Nora Helmer – and in that context, for me, it comes together beautifully as another variation in the ‘Margit Carstensen knows something is wrong but no one else does’ series.

There’s something kind of perfect about how ‘off’ the opening scenes are, immediately giving us clues that reality is out of joint. It makes no sense that the film begins with an establishing shot of Rome, the camera tracks back to reveal that we’re looking at this from Martha’s point of view in her hotel room, and then El Hedi ben Salem shows up and wordlessly starts undressing. Is he her lover? Is he about to assault her? No, she has no idea who he is or why he’s here, and he leaves as soon as she instructs him to (in a language other than her own). It turns out the concierge mis-read one of Martha’s gestures as indicating that she wanted this man sent up to her hotel room. We immediately find ourselves in a perverse and unpredictable world governed by unspoken rules, and this perversity and unpredictability continues to haunt Martha in the form of Salem himself, stalking her to the Spanish Steps…and is it supposed to be Salem who steals Martha’s purse?

Anyway, I think the point is to establish a nagging continuity between that opening moment of destabilisation and the father’s death. When Martha cries over the lost purse rather than her father, our instinct may be to read this as indicative of a shallow and materialistic personality, but the point is much weirder and harder to grasp. Her fixation on the purse turns out to be rooted in the father’s own obsession with money. Just as he recoiled from Martha’s attempt at physical contact, he recoils from any emotional connection in the moment of death, urging her to leave him alone. Abandoning him on the steps and lamenting over the lost money is Martha’s way of playing by his rules. Normality seems insane and dysfunctional, but it’s something Martha is trapped in and forced to conform to, despite her own inclination towards affection and communication.

Her mother seems to represent one possible ending to Martha’s story: she accepted the normal, boring marriage that her daughter turns down, and has coped with her stultifying existence by turning to drink and drugs (and presumably by winking at concierges now and then). This kind of marriage involves becoming an interchangeable ‘married woman’ and nothing more – after she rejects him, Martha’s boss instantly proposes to the other woman in the room – but, Martha’s mother seems to be saying, the normal thing to do is to go along with this and find outlets for your real feelings wherever you can. She ridicules Martha for thinking that she can do better, and wilfully declares that she herself can now behave however she wants to, in an overtly childish manner that underlines her state of arrested development.

So why is the mother horrified when Martha gets engaged to Helmut? I think it’s because she realises that this marriage won’t be ‘better’ than her own – it will be something much worse. Giuliana in Red Desert says, ‘There is something terrible in reality, but I don’t know what it is – no one will tell me.’ In Fassbinder’s world, there is something terrible in reality, and it has multiple layers: the mother exists miserably on one of those layers, but Martha is about to dig down to the next level of hell, where the oppressive structures force you to keep up appearances, not only to the world in general, but even in your own home and your own mind. It’s a truly terrifying amplification of the Gaslight experience, and it ends up feeling more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but worse than that because a vestige of your original self will still be down there at the centre of your otherwise thoroughly ‘washed’ brain. Martha’s unbridled screaming towards the end is completely warranted, given that what she is fleeing from is the most profound kind of imprisonment – a living hell.

I don’t agree with zedz that she achieves any kind of victory at the end, even mentally. In the final shot, we see Helmut fully in control not only of Martha’s movements, but also of her environment, which is now as enclosed as it can be: the elevator doors close at the back, blocking out the golden sunlight that was streaming in from the window in the corridor; and then the doors close at the front, and we glimpse Martha’s tiny cell being engulfed in darkness. The end credits play out over an image of those closed metal doors, and I don’t see anything here to mitigate the bleakness of this conclusion. Up to now, Martha always had someone she could talk to, someone who could potentially see what she was going through, even if that was only us, the audience. Now, even the window that this film opened onto Martha’s suffering has been closed. What we’ve seen up to this point has been so weird and unpredictable that we’re left with the chilling realisation that we can’t even imagine what Helmut will now be able to inflict on his prisoner: the closed doors emphasise how unfathomable Martha’s ultimate fate is.

Again, on a first viewing I found this ending so cruel that it seemed almost sadistic, but I guess Fassbinder is just telling it like it is. This kind of thing really happens, it really is hard to explain it to anyone, most people don’t (and don’t want to) understand, and the truth is (and should feel) unpalatable – all the more so because it’s coated in such a thick layer of sugary mawkishness.

Rayon Vert’s comment about Fassbinder’s philosophical stance seems relevant here:

[Fassbinder] isn’t damning the universe or whatever forces are behind nature, like Baudelaire or Schopenhauer, but the socio/political/psychological patterns that condition human life. So that his vision isn’t as absolutely misanthropic or pessimistic as those writers. It’s human society, or how it’s conditioned to have become, that is the nightmare. But practically, in terms of human existence, the results are nevertheless the same since there aren’t really solutions to those problems, and it isn’t really possible to escape, so that again, by this point in Fassbinder’s thought, the only means of survival (or seeing/realizing the good?) is, temporarily, through an expressive, aesthetic transfiguration.

With this in mind, it’s significant that Martha is not allowed to listen to her music or read her books or go anywhere near the library, or even eat and drink what she wants to. This also finds an echo in the way Margot in Fear of Fear tries to escape into music (with headphones on), but is always dragged back to her domestic hell. That film seems to penetrate to an even deeper layer than Martha, with no visible horrors or abusive behaviour this time, but only a haunting sense that there is something wrong with reality.

In this case reality seems to waver especially when Margot looks into a mirror, perhaps because mirrors – like art itself, arguably – are both a false representation of reality and a uniquely ‘true’ reflection of reality, showing us our ‘true’ self rather than the self we construct and inhabit most of the time. Those ‘wavy’ moments are Margot’s way of glimpsing something true, but unlike in Martha we get no clear understanding of what that truth consists in.

For example, there’s a wonderful moment when Martha and Helmut are on the roller-coaster, and for a split-second we see her face contort into an expression of horror, while Helmut’s is fixed in a demonic grin. It’s a flash of nightmare with a kind of David Lynch quality to it (by the way, Martha looks weirdly like Laura Palmer in that scene where she’s laughing in the car just before the honeymoon), and it tells us very bluntly what is really going on here. It would make for a nice DVD cover.

But what do Margot’s wavy lines tell us? In Fear of Fear, there’s a cut to Margot’s point of view as she looks at her daughter (framed, as in the opening shot, with half her face obscured by a door-frame), and the shot begins with a wavy line distorting the daughter’s eyes so she looks inhuman. It’s like one of the cursed photos in Ring and it gives me the shivers. What does it mean, though? The visual effect is a cinematic cliché that normally denotes dizziness or a flashback: it could mean that the character is losing their balance or their grounding in the present, falling to the ground or lapsing into the past. It also looks a bit like a water effect, as if we (or the scene we’re watching) were submerged in water, or separated from us by a screen with water running down it. All these connotations are relevant, I think. Margot cannot maintain her stability, she cannot focus on the present, she doesn’t know what element(s) she is operating within, and she cannot see or interpret what is in front of her.

It’s particularly interesting that these episodes tend to occur when she is still, when ‘what is in front of her’ is a kind of representative tableau, whether that’s a self-portrait she sees in the mirror, an emblematic moment of domestic life, a portrait of her daughter standing immobile in front of her, or just a still-life of her empty living room.

Sometimes Fassbinder’s play with mirrors, pictures, and frames has the effect of crystallising reality by ‘framing’ it, by turning it into a representation to expose an underlying truth, as in Effi Briest when the parents are talking about unhappy marriages and art, and we see a tiny mirror on the wall framing the husband’s face and portraying the wife from behind as a faceless, marginalised figure.

Early on in Martha, we see Martha framed in a mirror, in the middleground with her mother standing next to (and just behind) it, hinting at the daughter’s potential to mirror and repeat her mother’s life (which is what the mother pushes her to do). Later, we see a similar but significantly different set-up: Helmut is in the foreground, lecturing Martha about what kind of music she should listen to; in the background, in the upper left part of the frame, is a mirror reflecting Martha (looking towards us) and Helmut from behind. In other words, the scene is dominated by a medium close-up of Helmut, while the mirror provides a miniature version of the over-the-shoulder shot Fassbinder never actually cuts to. It makes you think about the sense of balance and space that over-the-shoulder, shot-reverse-shot editing creates, and how what we have instead is one character dominating all perspectives and spaces at once, reducing the other character to a small image whose facial expressions we can’t even see clearly. Martha is looking directly at ‘her’ Helmut in the mirror, while the Helmut we see is looking away from her – it’s as if he has trapped her in the mirror along with his abusive self, while the acceptable face of Helmut Salomon is free to roam elsewhere.

Which brings us back to Fear of Fear. The dolly-zoom during the title sequence adopts the perspective of a space in the apartment hallway, and the reverse-shot of this space shows a mirror on the wall. Later, Margot finds herself caught between this mirror and another on the opposite wall. It’s one of several shots where we may not initially realise we’re looking into a mirror, or realise which mirror we’re looking into, and Margot herself looks frantically from one reflection to another – each one also juxtaposed with another reflection in the other mirror, and so on – before running away to cower, face down, on the sofa.

Her fear of seeing herself in the mirror is mirrored, so to speak, in her fear of encountering Herr Bauer, who also seems to have a bad relationship with his own reflection: when Margot tells Bibi that Bauer is mentally ill, we see him looking into a nearby window, and his reflection is inexplicably surrounded and infused by something bright red. Is the ‘reddened’ reflection Bauer’s equivalent of Margot’s wavy lines? He insists that it’s important to have someone to talk to, someone who understands, but Margot distances herself from him as she later does from the woman in the institution. This latter gesture is, I think, a reference to The Snake Pit, in which Olivia de Havilland’s character has a similar series of interactions with a catatonic fellow patient.

Spoiler for The Snake Pit:

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The distance between the two characters was, in that case, a sign of the heroine’s improving mental health, and her consequent ‘going home’ was treated as an unambiguous happy ending.

In Fear of Fear, Margot’s detachment from her fellow patient is a measure of how well she is now conforming with others’ expectations, and with standards of ‘normal’ behaviour, but the film does not portray this as a healthy and happy conclusion. When Margot learns, at the end, that Bauer is dead and gone, this signals the loss of that disturbing mirror image, but also the loss of anyone she could have talked to or had a real bond with. Her face betrays no emotion whatsoever when she hears the news: she is in the same catatonic state that Martha ends up in, but as in that film we know that something is going on underneath the surface. Nothing untoward will now appear in Martha’s face, or (therefore) in the mirror when she looks into it, but in the final shot as she stares at Bauer’s departing corpse, and at the empty space left behind, those wavy lines return again. It feels as though they will be permanent now: without any possibility of expressing herself or communicating with others, Margot’s fear will be completely internalised and will infuse her whole perspective on the world. We don’t see her – her reflection, or a representation of her on film – at the end because she is now, like Martha, trapped in the mirror.

Nora Helmer arguably goes a step further, showing us a world and a set of quasi-human interactions that are almost unrecognisable as human, or as reality. As zedz mentioned there is some interesting play with mirrors here too, but far more with the apparatus of the set, in particular a large transparent screen with a white pastoral idyll etched onto it. The set itself is largely white or beige, and weirdly, unnaturally so, and there’s something very appropriate about placing a whited-out image of the natural world, floating ethereally on a screen, in the middle of this set. What’s really interesting is how the etching on the screen keeps interfering with the image, whether it’s out of focus in the foreground, obscuring the characters’ faces, or in focus just behind them, cluttering the frame. It’s very distracting, and kind of annoying, partly because like the wavy lines in Fear of Fear it has the effect of blurring the boundaries between people and objects, preventing you from reading those people and objects in the way you’re used to doing.

This is in line with Fassbinder’s approach to the material, which is to drain it of almost all emotion and drama, which is a perversely entertaining way to approach A Doll’s House. Significant omissions include Torvald’s dehumanising terms of endearment (I spotted a ‘little Nora’ and a ‘sweet Nora’ but that’s about it) and Nora’s climactic talk of ‘the most wonderful thing’, among many other significant elements in the final conversation. From the beginning, this marriage seems so cold and joyless on both sides that there’s no fun to be had in noticing the unhealthy dynamic between the characters, empathising with Nora’s accumulating distress and panic, or watching her awakening self-awareness. At no point does she seem in the least bit naïve or childlike, in fact she is robotically in control of her every gesture. When she confronts her husband and leaves at the end, there is little sense of her having come to any significant realisation or undergone any real change; she is just giving voice to things she has known for a long time, and even the act of giving voice to them isn’t that much of a strain for her.

It’s therefore impossible (I think) to see this as a liberating ending. On the surface it’s certainly more redemptive than the endings of Martha or Fear of Fear, but because it’s supposed to be the ending of A Doll’s House it has a special kind of bleakness. To end this play with the vague phrase, ‘we would both have to change, so that…’ and not allowing Nora to finish the thought, ‘…so that we would truly become husband and wife’, feels aggressively confrontational.

The problem Ibsen highlighted in 1879 could be described, discussed, and potentially addressed, and the husband and wife could talk to each other with some degree of mutual respect, affection, and at least nascent understanding. Fassbinder’s film seems to be saying that in the century since then, our culture has become even more dysfunctional, to the point that the dysfunction cannot even be portrayed.

The original play’s delineation of an emblematic problem-marriage, when translated into the 1970s context, reveals a much more profound state of alienation. Nora and Torvald talk at each other across those relentless dissolves, often seeming to talk to themselves or into an abyss rather than engaging in real dialogue. Margit Carstensen has a nice line in creepy smiles, and her facial expressions at the end of this film are even more chilling than Petra von Kant’s clenched Babadook-like grinning. It does strike me as a grin of despair: not the sadistic delight of someone exercising their power over another, but the gallows humour of someone who has nothing to gain or lose.

Ibsen’s Nora had a daunting but exhilarating challenge ahead of her, and in describing her ambitions about self-education she seemed to be harnessing a power she didn’t know was there. Saving her husband’s life, fighting tooth and nail to cover up the crime, steeling herself to take the fall for him, and then confronting him about what a lousy husband he’s been, has given her a taste for exercising agency, forming her own opinions and values, and shaping her own destiny.

Fassbinder’s Nora is much more subdued and laconic in her ambitions, and there is no sense of a bright future ahead of her…or any future, really. Her departure at the end feels more like self-annihilation than self-actualisation. Outside this artificial beige prison there is only the pitch-black void. I’d be interested to know if others feel the same way, but to me this ending is in the same family as Margit Carstensen trapped in the elevator (in Martha) or staring hopelessly out of the window (in Fear of Fear).

[senseabove]

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven - Perhaps more interesting now, when the elderly being radicalized by loneliness feels like less of an odd concept after the past five years. It's something of a return to the more restrained, staid early style, emotions demonstrated rather than expressed, though still with the mature style's strong sense of composition—all those door-framed shots of Mother Küsters in the communists' living room, for example, with the foreground plane of the stairwell brightening and darkening as Küster's feelings about them change. Not quite successful, I don't think, but I kinda love that

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the American ending very nearly turns it into a screwball, just one great big misunderstanding that leads to a new marriage, truly a surprise ending for Fassbinder.

[zedz]

Fantastic analyses, Sloper.

I don’t agree with zedz that she achieves any kind of victory at the end, even mentally. In the final shot, we see Helmut fully in control not only of Martha’s movements, but also of her environment, which is now as enclosed as it can be: the elevator doors close at the back, blocking out the golden sunlight that was streaming in from the window in the corridor; and then the doors close at the front, and we glimpse Martha’s tiny cell being engulfed in darkness.

I agree with your reading of the ending. I think that Martha achieves her independence / victory before this point, but then it's cruelly snatched away from her in the final sequence. The mental independence she's gained, however, hasn't gone anywhere, but now it only serves to make her physical imprisonment all the more acute.

It's part of a thread throughout Fassbinder's work of "what good is enlightenment if the system within which it is attained continues to be oppressive?" This is the blunt, personal, film noir version of it, but you also have lush costume drama (Fontane Effi Briest) and science fiction (World on a Wire) takes on the same theme. And the three films you intelligently link together all feature Margit Carstensen in some way attaining self-actualization, but nevertheless failing to free herself from society's trap(s). The catharsis at the end of Nora Helmer all comes from Nora letting her husband know that she knows he's a shit, but as you say, you don't get the sense that her life is going to be much better in practical terms afterwards.

[therewillbeblus]

It's part of a thread throughout Fassbinder's work of "what good is enlightenment if the system within which it is attained continues to be oppressive?"

This is a succinct way of putting what I noticed through my last viewing of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which pushes and pulls against different shades of sobriety and delusion without offering solace in any state along that spectrum

[therewillbeblus]

Fear of Fear

This is a great film, relying heavily on what's probably Margit Carstensen's most sympathetic performance. The portrayal of her anxiety seems very accurate to me, and Fassbinder finds ways of expressing her altered state through camera movement (there's a nice track-zoom over the opening credits which signals that something is wrong right away) and sound. We also get two all-time great Fassbinder needledrops: Leonard Cohen's 'Lover Lover Lover' and the Rolling Stones' 'We Love You', both offering too-brief respite for Margot when she escapes into their respective sound worlds.

I think it's a very accurate depiction of mental health decline, though this is a very idiosyncratic anxiety (as are all of ours, and Fassbinder's deep understanding of the human condition communicates that whatever her 'diagnosis' is, the condition is particular to the subjective principal experiencing it rather than a blanket commonality we can approach with uniform intervention or understanding) that's exacerbated by Margot's social environment in a way that's impossible to unbind and analyze with confidence. You're right that there are no clear triggers or sources for her unbalance, in the immediate family members or providers respectively, but the consuming pressures mixed with some innate prognosis have led her to this place of dysphoric destabilization without the tools to overcome the trauma. The early scene where Margot rocks her crying newborn, whilst verbally expressing helplessness at the foreboding thought that her unhinged state will have negative consequences on her children, directly engages with this reading. Some may think it comes off as an artificial theatre-prone utterance to include the audience, but it's a profoundly realistic moment- the kind of pleading self-talk over impotence to actualize a solution to our fatalistic cognitive-emotional issues- that those who have hit these lows might be able to relate to in their own unique ways.

I haven't seen this film in the better part of a decade, so this watch I couldn't help but notice many parallels with Safe, a film I probably caught a year or so later for the first time. Todd Haynes replicated this enigmatic relationship between the lead actress and her environment, and also presented a family as partially unsupportive and potentially reinforcing stressors, but who are also right to be confused and unprepared for the symptoms, and definitely not the key oppressors igniting the illness. Just like that film's ending, where Moore can find comfort in self-love alone in her cocoon of delusion, Margot can only achieve fleeting solace within introverted spaces of tuning out the world with music. I related to Margot's strategy on a personal level (especially the late-act demonstration of isolating surrender under the influence of substances!), and I'm glad Fassbinder includes this in a manner that appreciates the behavior as an empowering tool without judgment, despite its obvious limitations in adaptivity, and even if he's firm in disseminating the elusivity of any one thing as a 'cure', which in its own pessimistic way is the ultimate pronouncement of empathic validation.

If we're looking for a Big Explanation, we're going to be disappointed (which is one way in which this most TV-movie-ish of Fassbinder's TV movies doesn't conform to the disease of the week template), but if we can accept a small explanation, there's a clue in the one scene of the film where Margot seems to be genuinely happy: when she has to organize her trip to hospital to give birth to her second child. What she has in this scene that she lacks elsewhere is agency. She's at the mercy of biology, and an institutionalized medical establishment, but in a very modest way, she's calling the shots.

Going off the abstract idea that biology can be an 'answer' to discomfort from thwarted agency or relentless feelings of exhausting detachment, there is an indication that Margot has some trust that this could be a safe avenue of connection, through inherent relatedness that can resist- to some extent- the oppressive forces of one's alienating social environment. This comes when her daughter is painting her nails and mentions that Margot used to get mad about this in the past (following a scene where she asks, expecting chastisement, and Margot gleefully responds that her daughter can "do anything you want"), to which Margot responds, "Everything's changed... My God, if you were older and we could talk..." Margot appears to believe that her daughter- a product of herself- could be a safe person to disclose her angst with, which is incredibly hopeful as a pathway to evade the ubiquitous threats to such a haven.

However, given the daughter's information that Margot previously put up walls between herself and her daughter, there is an acidic irony here: that only because Margot is hurting can she be sober to this opportunity and humble herself to engage deeply with her daughter. The will to be lenient and remove barriers towards empathy is motivated by a selfish drive in Margot's circumstances, and so her aloof and inaccessible demeanor existing in the elisions prior to our introduction to the character was already cemented in complacent rhythm- certainly a byproduct of her social conditioning, and perhaps the natural state of narcissism human beings possess as well. Only once blatantly segregated from society and in pain does Margot possess the vision to forge intimacy, and while maybe this is how we all work (there's a reason we use the term "the gift of desperation" in recovery circles as a necessary impetus to do the deep, uncomfortable work requiring unconditional vulnerability to result in self-betterment) and maybe there is hope for Margot's future self being able to sustain this humility and desire to connect with her child once she's older, it's also another example of a psychosocial trap presented earnestly by Fassbinder.

Margot and the film lurch from crisis to crisis, but the end of the film offers the hope of a happy ending that's fraught with omens of disaster. It's beautifully done, and the understated nature of the entire film is what allows Fassbinder to pull it off. Margot, having ended up in an institution after her big breakdown, is informed by the kindly doctor that she's not schizophrenic after all, and that her depression can be easily managed with medication. She's free to go. Her roommmate, the sometimes catatonic Edda, asks her to come back and visit her sometime, but Margot is already making her excuses (if there's one social disease to blame in this film, it's a general lack of empathy). When she returns home to her normal life, her brother-in-law (Armin Meier again playing an isolated bastion of sweetness and decency) informs her that their 'troubled' neighbour Mr Bauer (who has been set up throughout the film as Margot's despised mirror image) has hanged himself, and the film ends with her watching through the window as his body is taken away. And then, during the closing credits, a little thing happens that signals the ending of the happy ending. Pay attention.

While some could discern the prescription of medication as another form of imprisonment, there's an authentic glow around Margot exclaiming with conviction that she needs her pills to come out of a depression- authentic because it seems to come from Margot to Margot herself looking in the mirror, rather than to the doctor as a comatose sheep following orders. This may not 'resolve' her core issues, but there is an optimistic consolation that Margot now has a tangible action to take to offer her reprieve from her symptoms- the kind of palpable solution neither she nor Julianna Moore in Haynes' film has been able to decipher or have provided for them throughout their respective narratives, but that Moore also finds in the ending to her film. That empowerment may have inauthentic roots, but it's subjectively 'true' to each character insularly, and thus authentic in its own right.

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If I'm understanding your reading of a happy ending signifier during the credits, zedz, it's the visual rippling effect distorting reality as we enter Margot's POV watching through the window- indicating that she still possesses her illness but can now observe and take in information with stability, and without the camera moving to elicit chaotic psychological unease (and without the POV centered around staring at herself in the mirror shaken and disturbed). It does strike me as a subtly-planted triumph, speaking volumes in bestowing the long-sought adaptability Margot needs to function in unison with her surroundings, as the first step in escaping her prison of 'self'.

[zedz]

Actually, I didn't think that ending was happy at all. I can't see that we're intended to read it any differently than the earlier iterations.

[therewillbeblus]

Interesting, I think it works for me within the parochial logic that tranquility within a subjective reality can be optimistic even if it's still objectively the same symptomatology. We leave Margot seemingly at peace and divorced from the severe symptoms of her psychology, before indulging in the same illusory visions- and without that return of the camera back onto her to show anxious distress, I find some compromised comfort in her ability to alleviate the consequential psychological deterioration from the mere presence of symptoms by remaining in place, without the impulsive strategy of impermanent escapism into music. Sure, she needs medication and isn't cured, but having personally experienced- and worked with plenty of people who continue to experience- symptoms, and learn to manage their lives in more stable states, the ending seems true to life in a pretty 'happy' way. I suppose one's reading depends on how you view the fatalism- but leaning into one's condition vs. being doomed by it is left unknown, and inform drastically different endings regardless of the existence of a symptom (the feeling/reaction associated with this visual cue is deliberately omitted, which defines a happy vs unhappy ending; i.e. I experience anxious and depressive symptoms every day, but my response to them is what measures progress rather than the existence of anxiety or depression in isolation). Of course we won't know what comes next, but that seems deliberately ambiguous, and if Fassbinder intended to insinuate that simply the persistence of a symptom signified a cynical outcome, that wouldn't jive with his attention to emotion and personal resiliences within that context. Why make these movies at all if you negate that anything matters other than the objective existence of inexorable conditions that are repressive; for they are both but they are not (*always) inexorably repressive in absolute terms, dependent on our psychological acclimation or adaptability to these oppressive forces.

Edit: Now that I've read Sloper's reading, I agree with the majority of his alternative perspetive:

In Fear of Fear, Margot’s detachment from her fellow patient is a measure of how well she is now conforming with others’ expectations, and with standards of ‘normal’ behaviour, but the film does not portray this as a healthy and happy conclusion. When Margot learns, at the end, that Bauer is dead and gone, this signals the loss of that disturbing mirror image, but also the loss of anyone she could have talked to or had a real bond with. Her face betrays no emotion whatsoever when she hears the news: she is in the same catatonic state that Martha ends up in, but as in that film we know that something is going on underneath the surface. Nothing untoward will now appear in Martha’s face, or (therefore) in the mirror when she looks into it, but in the final shot as she stares at Bauer’s departing corpse, and at the empty space left behind, those wavy lines return again. It feels as though they will be permanent now: without any possibility of expressing herself or communicating with others, Margot’s fear will be completely internalised and will infuse her whole perspective on the world. We don’t see her – her reflection, or a representation of her on film – at the end because she is now, like Martha, trapped in the mirror.

This fits with the aforementioned condition of being disturbed and desperate to achieve any real willingness for connection or empathy in my initial writeup. However, I'm not sure she's internalizing the fear, so much as in a delusional myopia of sedation. I still think there's room to read this as happy within a subjective reality of escaping some aspects of her oppressive triggers by any means necessary, but the consequences of disconnect remain, and are particularly devastating after the potential we saw in Margot's relationship with her daughter.

[therewillbeblus]

I don't know how to praise Martha following Sloper's excellent post, but after a forgettable first viewing forever ago, this time around it actually works for me far better than either version of Gaslight. The near-campy levels of melodramatic accentuation are relentlessly undercut with an acuity of ruthlessness, and I can't help but see this as a very personal confession from Fassbinder himself, as a man who was both cruelly dominant and meekly submissive in various relationships throughout his life- partially conditioned by society/his social environment, perhaps, but also from innate desires surfacing as enigmatic forms of reactiveness, shooting in polarized extremes with detrimental psychological consequences to all. And yet he doesn't slight the absolutely debilitating moment of connection that authentically ignite these fatal dynamics- and all he needs to do is show that incredible shot zedz mentioned upthread to sell us on it. Whether or not this is sourced in a developmentally-delayed psychosocial malady in Martha's case, or predatory malice in Helmut hardly matters in a vacuum when it's an ineffable linkage of energy between respective individualized desires. The momentary validation meets the determinist poison eventually, but it's still acknowledged as true.

[therewillbeblus]

The City Tramp (1966) - Fassbinder's first two shorts are very much indebted to the French New Wave, and are much more naturalistic than his early features. This one has a faint whiff of picaresque Polanskian absurdism, with our protagonist lugging around not a wardrobe, but a gun. It's resolutely minor, but it's heartening to see that, at the very beginning of his film career, Irm Herrmann was already there.

This otherwise trivial short was elevated by the punchline:

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That the two suspicious men following the main character served a function outside of any sensible oppressive motive engrained in society, and only to prevent his suicide through juvenile games in stealing the gun and tossing it back and forth, mocking him.

It's a deliciously cruel forging of farce and melodrama, the latter only working because Fassbinder understands and transmits the feeling of being 'low', weighted by the delusory perspective that the world is against us. Here the tragedy is in robbing us of a way out of the film, and the protagonist's attempt to 'play along' by shooting back with his hand-imitating-gun leaves him no satisfaction or connectivity with his foes.

[therewillbeblus]

Great thoughts already written in this thread on Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, though my greatest takeaway on a revisit wasn't the jabs toward slacktivist politics or general human indecency in self-serving motives posing as genuine engagement (which, of course, are omnipresent and clearly a prominent focus of the film), but how in processing loss without support, one helplessly and frantically turns towards tangible spaces to achieve said catharsis, a futile effort via this route. In a sense, Emma Küsters springs to life by the death of her husband, to participate more thoroughly through paying attention to the sociopolitical world around her, and there's a vitalizing interpretation of this low mark of abandonment prompting strength via DYI empowerment. However, the pattern Emma takes in making calls and reaching out to groups to initiate actionable steps towards resolving the nebulous (the circumstances of her husband's murder-suicide demise leave an impression of destined anticatharsis) are subtly impulsive, desperate, and misinformed.

As others have mentioned, Fassbinder formulates this picture in an incredibly mature approach; he's always been the great empathizer, but here he meditates in a responsible and shrewd manner on just how sensible every action Emma takes is, within the confines of her position, knowledge, and in response to environmental variables. The latter often present as conflicts with other people, but while Sirk's melodramas are a clear influence, these scenes are frequently directed in an understated style, as characters move slowly, state their perspectives in a non-hostile nor exaggerated bluntness of banality, and Emma leaves the scene bewildered at seemingly both the lack of humane willingness to communicate with a shred of reciprocity and the lack of excitement as the conversations fizzle out into uninspiring monotony. Emma is a woman not only trapped by her impotence to achieve satisfaction, or from a lack of aid from her social environment or societal systems, but she's imprisoned in the static complacency of non-action that directly challenges her awakened drive to do, to know, to engage in life, communicated through mundane (anti-)stimuli. So what's a person to do, when they can't actualize anything because of dullness? Be a terrorist (and continue the fated baffled state all the way to your death), or escape into a silly rom-com?

[senseabove]

Effie Briest or, outrageously beautiful blocking will only get you so far. I very nearly gasped at the moment that zedz highlights with Rozwitha, and the use of mirrors throughout is so pervasive, poignant, and insistent, it's brilliance is almost—only almost, I bemoan—self-parodic. An early two-shot that goes from Effi's mother, to her father, to a mirror behind her mother's head showing the back of her mother's head and her father's face—a composition echoed a few other times—is similarly jarring in its forceful brilliance. The whole movie abounds in Fassbinder's astonishing composition and blocking, their precision and muffled grace doubly astonishing as, today, I was reading in the BFI book on Fear Eats the Soul about how Fassbinder very rarely did retakes and quite often sneered at actors or crewmembers who asked for them because of flubbed lines or encroaching equipment, so profound was his disdain for chasing perfection. The first thirty minutes and the last thirty minutes of this are peak work, but I found the middle 4—was it four?—hours just a tortuously plodding journey, tree after tree after tree after tree, nary a forrest in sight. Basically from the arrival of Krampus until the fatal discovery, the development is neither severe enough, seductive enough, nor complex enough; everyone's motivations are, like Martha's, told not shown, or shown not told, and for Fassbinder's peculiar severity to truly succeed for me, I guess I just need those to be blended, as they are so often elsewhere, in, say, the divorce threat in Merchant or the salary explanation in Fox, when the prescribed chess move and the turn of the thumbscrew are bound together. Here, it's all so belabored, à la Innstetten's extended, didactic monologue about why he must now do what he must now do—yes, got it, he's a "schoolmaster," but it's all already there in the subtitle, thanks—or Effi's belabored marbleization in Kessin, haunted by the whispering skirts of her social brilliance being etherized by her husband's podunk assignment.

I'm nearly beginning to worry I'm just in an un-Fassbinderian phase right now. I abandoned my chronological plans due to diminishing returns, and while these, for me, less successful works are giving me a deeper appreciation of his variations and experimentation and development, I've yet to find a new-to-me Fassbinder, out of eight so far, that really sings. I repeatedly find myself mesmerized for twenty or thirty minutes, and then checking my watch every five—except that my revisits have all affirmed or deepened my admiration, as that deeper appreciation makes his successful work seem even more astonishingly successful! Here's hoping that, like sloper with Martha, I come around to these on some future revisit, I guess.

[therewillbeblus]

Theatre in Trance (1981) - This gets my vote for least essential Fassbinder film. It's a documentary about the 1981 Theater der Welt festival in Cologne wherein Fassbinder shows us samples of fourteen different performances and delivers extracts from Artaud over the top. It's rather blandly compiled and a lot of the performances are, to be kind, iffy. The dance works fare the best, and the film briefly comes to life in the middle solely thanks to Pina Bausch, so you can safely skip forward to that then skip away to something more rewarding. The biggest problem with the film is that there's not much Fassbinder there.* You don't get any great sense of personal investment and it's a lot more interesting engaging with his own radical theatrical innovations in something like The Coffeehouse than in looking on at these performances over his disengaged shoulder. The only section with a bit of a Fassbinder spark is the long opening credits sequence which is like surveillance footage of a festival function set to Kraftwerk. It plays a little like an outtake from The Third Generation.

* Not the biggest problem with the film, but one of the most annoying things about it is the way Fassbinder uses pop music. At a couple of points he does the same trick of playing five or six seconds of a familiar track (e.g. Janis Joplin's 'Me and Bobby McGee', Marianne Faithfull's 'Guilt'), then returns to the wild performance sound before - five or six seconds later - playing exactly the same brief extract again. And again. And again. It's like an OCD toddler is continually dropping the needle on exactly the same spot of an album every ten seconds.

I'm not surprised you didn't like this, as it's the closest Fassbinder has come to emulating Godard's post-'67 period, though I admit it's not very good and doesn't scratch the surface at what makes the Godard films so special. It's not particularly intellectually stimulating or insightful, and seems like the very kind of film Godard-detractors might accuse him of making. However, I do think there's some slight investment from Fassbinder in his implementation of the voiceover cues, especially early on when discussing how our infestation of confusion determining social discord stems from our difficulty assigning tangible signifiers to things, a breakdown of communication inherent in the dissonance between the thing itself and our tools to engage with them. This could be a mirrored allegory for our inability to breach barriers in social engagement as well, though he doesn't ever run with this or any of the blips of (over)stated ideas in any direction to amplify its value. So yeah, this was pretty bad, and a bit more frustrating since there was potential for it to lift off that never took place.

[therewillbeblus]

I Only Want You To Love Me (1976) - This film is prime example of the push and pull between cynicism and empathy that I remarked upon earlier. It's yet another film in which the protagonist finds himself in an economic and psychological death trap, and his hapless, irresponsible behaviour only sinks him deeper. Normally, that's the kind of character that would causes me to roll my eyes right out of the picture (see any number of Ken Loach films where you can feel the director's thumb on the scale of social injustice), but here it works for me, because the character is both a genuine, plausible character and an element in a lucid Marxist algorithm. Or maybe I was just taken in by Vitus Zeplechal's puppy dog eyes. The economics are brutal, but I think the film works because they're not cartoonishly demonised, and the real forces of exploitation and oppression in the film are personal and parental. It's a realist social drama, but it has a strong edge of noir fatalism.

Couldn't have said it any better- I was immediately sucked into this film and kept there by Vitus Zeplechal's introverted and affable protagonist, who feels like an incredibly authentic human being, someone we've known personally or maybe reflecting the way we see ourselves facing the world. It's a classic case where casting is everything- which is not to say that Fassbinder's economic editing and the creative camerawork aren't essential variables (particularly the framing of actors from various vantage points in understated chaos, and then inspired subtle camera movements pushing in claustrophobically just as the characters' impulsive actions cause discord, such as in the department store) -but the casting of the lead is the central condition to determine whether or not I'm going to buy into this social problem pic, and breaks the familiar mold independently, making room for Fassbinder's compassionate yet ruthlessly intricate detailing of the derailment in step with a man we see ourselves in.

[zedz]

Hey, therewillbeblus, it looks like Berlin Alexanderplatz really broke your dry spell! Great to have your perspectives on these films.

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks zedz, I'm still keeping an eye on my compulsions so time will determine how great it is, but I've committed to finishing off the remaining eight Fassbinders I have left to see and revisiting a pile of works I hardly remember over the next two weeks before surgery leaves me in a state of likely wanting to just binge Veronica Mars again. However, the compulsions have led me to make that laundry list just about everything he's made outside of his Eclipse set early films, that I have little desire to revisit, so it's gonna be a long two weeks..

[swo17]

And with this film, I've watched thirty-six Fassbinder films and have eight left to go. The reason this doesn't add up is that I relented and watched the shortened version of Bolweiser on YouTube, unsubbed. So I've technically seen it, and can aver that it seems to be a good film, but am not equipped to do a write up or rank it until I get to see the integral version.

Are people not aware that this got a New Yorker DVD back in the day (as The Stationmaster's Wife)? It's not the full-length version, nor is it great looking (the transfer I mean--the visuals are fantastic, making a lot out of a presumably small budget through judicious use of close-ups) but it is watchable and subbed, and my understanding is that this is a theatrical vs. TV cut situation, so while the unavailable longer version may very well offer a richer experience, it's a cohesive work as is and very much worth watching. OOP of course, but I was able to find a copy on eBay for under $25

[therewillbeblus]

I coincidentally just found this out yesterday when I searched my library system on a whim, saw they had a copy and immediately put it on reserve- FYI there are two physical copies available in the greater Boston area for anyone else participating with access to the minuteman system

Edit: swo, Rayon Vert was aware and alerted us at the start of the list project

[zedz]

And with this film, I've watched thirty-six Fassbinder films and have eight left to go. The reason this doesn't add up is that I relented and watched the shortened version of Bolweiser on YouTube, unsubbed. So I've technically seen it, and can aver that it seems to be a good film, but am not equipped to do a write up or rank it until I get to see the integral version.

Are people not aware that this got a New Yorker DVD back in the day (as The Stationmaster's Wife)? It's not the full-length version, nor is it great looking (the transfer I mean--the visuals are fantastic, making a lot out of a presumably small budget through judicious use of close-ups) but it is watchable and subbed, and my understanding is that this is a theatrical vs. TV cut situation, so while the unavailable longer version may very well offer a richer experience, it's a cohesive work as is and very much worth watching. OOP of course, but I was able to find a copy on eBay for under $25

Since I wrote that, I did watch the short version unsubbed (and it does indeed look handsome), but I'm not going to rank it until I've seen the integral version.

Forget it! I thought you were responding to my first mention way at the top of the thread.

[swo17]

swo, Rayon Vert was aware and alerted us at the start of the list project

Ha, we even both used the phrase "back in the day" to describe it! I didn't see that discussion when I searched before making my post. As a sidenote, it should be "Bolwieser" as opposed to "Bolweiser." You can remember this with the old saying "i before e, even in German"

I'm not going to rank it until I've seen the integral version.

Forget it! I thought you were responding to my first mention way at the top of the thread.

Nope, had I seen that first post today I would've realized you were at least aware of it. Was the unsubbed version you saw about 1 hr 50 like the New Yorker DVD? IMDb says that's the version that screened in German theaters. In any case, I can understand not feeling equipped to rank it, but I'll be making room for it myself. For what it's worth, the TV version isn't even available on backchannels

[Rayon Vert]

There's a version on youtube that's 1h50. (Unfortunately just in German and no English subs.)

Edit: A comment below says this is the "theatrical cut" (see zedz after this post) - not the original TV version.

[zedz]

my understanding is that this is a theatrical vs. TV cut situation

The online information on this is a bit murky, and sometimes incorrect (some reviews claim that only half an hour was cut from the original version, when it's more like an hour and a half), but as far as I can ascertain, no theatrical cut was made (or intended) when Fassbinder shot the film in 1977, and the shortened cut only appeared five years later, when it surfaced in various film festivals desperate for some 'new' product in the immediate aftermath of Fassbinder's death (and before Querelle, which was promised to Venice, was available). Fassbinder might at some point have signed a piece of paper allowing the rightsholders to cut the film down for overseas sales, but the likelihood that he was actually involved in re-editing an old film in his last months, when he was busy promoting Veronika Voss and completing the edit on Querelle (and setting up the production of I'm the Happiness of This World, which was scheduled to start shooting less than a fortnight after he died), is faint.

[therewillbeblus]

Germany in Autumn segment (1978) - This is a crucial Fassbinder film and the most successful of the scripted sections of Germany in Autumn. It's a brutally frank exploration of the impact of the horrendous German political events of the mid-seventies on Fassbinder and his nearest and dearest. Fassbinder relishes making himself as unappealing as possible, fighting with his partner Armin Meier and mother over what he perceives as their political cluelessness and incipient fascism (which sounds a lot more hysterical on the page than it does on the screen, where Fassbinder's brow-beating and bad behaviour puts their positions in the most positive light). I don't know if it's just the surrounding circumstances, but I find the portrait of Fassbinder and Meier's relationship in this film unbearably poignant. They seem to be living at cross-purposes, Fassbinder is a petty dictator, but the strongest impression I get is just how deeply Meier cares for him, which makes his suicide just after the release of this film all the more explicable and all the more tragic.

Wow, you weren't kidding. I didn't care for the film as a whole, but this chapter is a riveting suicide note- and Fassbinder's early explanation on his films' service regarding sobriety to marriage's artificial diseases carries polarized tones of cheeky amusement and succinct urgency. It's especially interesting to view this in the context of Fassbinder's state researching/preparing Berlin Alexanderplatz... but I've already written thousands of words on that and don't feel compelled to explain in depth. I'm getting chills though, thinking of Fassbinder bringing his own subjective perceptions of self-and-externally-inflicted traps into that script, written in the spaces we see in this segment. The gift of retrospection tints the mood heavily, with added weight of emotional baggage born from subsequent irredeemable consequences. It's a bit like watching the prequel to a ghost story, squeamishly triggered by our powerlessness to alter the elusive fate of the director with hindsight, but further devastating because he himself seems to know his fate in real time here, and also feel the same impotence to do anything about it.

[swo17]

There's a version on youtube that's 1h50. (Unfortunately just in German and no English subs.)

I think I just found it and it looks about the same as the New Yorker DVD, which at least remedies the subtitling issue

my understanding is that this is a theatrical vs. TV cut situation

as far as I can ascertain, no theatrical cut was made (or intended) when Fassbinder shot the film in 1977, and the shortened cut only appeared five years later, when it surfaced in various film festivals desperate for some 'new' product in the immediate aftermath of Fassbinder's death (and before Querelle, which was promised to Venice, was available).

Ah, got it. I also just saw on that YouTube link the claim that it was only screened theatrically in 1983, after his death. In any case, I still feel like I can vote for Greed even though I haven't seen the 8-hour cut, and I'd say the same here

[Rayon Vert]

The info for Bolwieser (I think I got it right this time) at the end of the Thomsen book says it was a 2-part film: first part 104 minutes 20 seconds, second part 96 minutes 23 seconds. And he writes: "For legal reasons, a cinema version authorized by Fassbinder has only been available since 1983".

[therewillbeblus]

Wildwechsel (1973
It's a bleak film with no plausible happy ending, but the subdued denouement goes even darker than I remembered. It lacks much in the way of typical Fassbinderian visual panache (the closest we get it probably the long tracking shot showing us a chicken processing plant where Franz works), but it's a quietly effective piece at the more naturalistic end of his output and I like it a lot. The sensationalistic American title Jail Bait was designed to get the raincoat brigade in under false pretences. The original German title literally means "wild animal crossing" (see above) and I don't believe it has any prurient connotations.

I've been waiting patiently to see this film for almost a decade (for some reason, after I had seen most Fassbinders, this was the standout remainder that seemed the most interesting, and that I was the most frustrated not to have access to), so after all this time I figured it was probably destined to disappoint on some level. However, I was surprised just how much I liked this film, and less for its modeling of all the movies zedz so aptly compared this to that I adore. Rather, Fassbinder's flexible application of ideological dissonance between generational principals is boiled down into generously capacious narrative strands, seemingly in service of diagnosing the supreme utility of the young lovers' coveted intimacy, which in turn allows the final act's twists to disturb us with stronger degrees of lucid destabilization.

The depiction of young love, despite the problematic age gap, is given a genuine sense of affirmation by Fassbinder- in that he believes that both parties are consenting and reciprocally inviting the other into their worlds, whilst also evading 'reality' through the bedroom (or wherever they choose to make love). But these invitations are into a fantastical shared space where laws don't apply- namely the laws of order and oppression enforced by conservative values (i.e. the father's idyllic Nazism zedz discussed, but this is a microcosm of the suffocating constructs of sociopoltical variables, stigmatizing and obstructing each of these individuals from finding and holding onto this safe pockets of impermanent bliss). The juxtaposition between the ethereal tone of youthful romanticism and the austere texture of strident judgment by the father is drastically conveyed. This doesn't pertain only to content, but the way Fassbinder chooses to shoot the scenes with technical strategy. Especially in the first act, the young lovers are shot with elastic camera movement, issued soft-spoken delivery of dialog, in the backdrop of whimsical music, directly contrasting the often-fixed camera with sharp movements or cuts around the father, emphasizing his static position. When the characters collide, it's on the terms of the father's agenda- the camera and music stop and the dialog becomes more hostile, using the depths of the medium's possibilities to trap the daughter right before our eyes- or, more significantly, to invite us to feel her suffocation by proxy through swinging states of spirited potentials.

Outside of form, planted in terms of content, the lovers are granted room to breathe with long-winded scenes together that thoroughly flesh out their harmonic energy with evolving conversation and experience in open spaces (perhaps most blatantly in physical adventures like going to the beach, but even in smaller rooms these meetings are framed as novel, exciting moments for each of them), as well as paint their union in a euphoric atmosphere where time stops, cementing this as a dynamic worth preserving at all costs. This is again placed in friction with the father's banal routine of sitting around the same claustrophobic rooms of his home -eating at the dinner table, sitting in the den, and lying in bed- projecting unvarying solipsistic rants of morality in isolation from empathy. One late scene finds the father lying in bed, telling his wife how this feeling between the two younger principals can't be love, but merely "sexuality," and must be contained by him, which says all he's been trying to state throughout the film within a succinct sentence. The very fact that Fassbinder has bifurcated his film to allot equitable temporal grace to the father pondering these stagnant, repetitive ideas is an amusing disparity, and a relentless condemnation of the conservative attitude via discrediting his time spent on a comparative basis.

The film's greatest strength lies in how Fassbinder chooses to approach his subjects and structure the rhythms of diverse energies with ample room for segregation, which only informs the value and stakes of losing that priceless asset. Fassbinder's particular implementation of oscillating tones differs from something like Pretty Poison or Badlands, which choose to layer the infected human darkness within the romanticism, or vice versa, twisting them around. Here they are separated with sober distinctiveness, brewing to the point of envelopment, and when we finally reach the inevitable scene of violence, well, it's more bone-chilling than any of those other films because the actions and reactions of the young lovers are jarringly out of step with the innocence of their experiences and muted symptoms of aggressiveness. Perhaps they need to acclimate to the reality of the cold, harsh world to be set free, or they are predestined to unlock their own hedonistic natures (the kind that have the potential to lead anyone to Nazism, perhaps...) and the cheers of joy are a release from that part of them that has been hidden away. Maybe the titular translation of "wild animal crossing" alludes to this climax, as she screams out with hysterical elation against the grain of the nature of her character we've had the pleasure of engaging with for ninety minutes. Whatever the impetus for the responses is, it's a nearly-unbearably unsettling whiplash.

SpoilerShow

The denouement is indeed brutal, not because the murder actually caused a karmic fate of abortion like the doctor says, or severed their love, or fulfilled her father's conservative prognosis, but because the lovers accept this so easily. The apathetic deviation to conservatism leaves nothing left to show for their actions, rendering their love meaningless and each individual existentially bankrupt. It's as if only in the hidden rooms and beaches and cafes of their fantasy world were the lovers able to achieve a sustained authentic affection, immediately spoiled once inside the spaces of the law, order, and sweeping conservative ideologies- ubiquitous systems of imprisonment that quarantine us from one another. The measurement of weakness for us to clutch self-actualization is nakedly demonstrated, and it's so frail that the core principals are oblivious to what they've lost, as if they never really 'had' anything to begin with- 1984 brainwashing induced without the need for forced tactics... magnetized to the norm independently with minimal direct influence. The worst part is that this is actually how life goes in a broad sense- the 'built-in forgetter' part of our brains unable to identify the elusive feelings that were real once a new path is presented for us to take, and we see it as the only option; the only truth that ever was.