Fassbinder Stories Over and Over Again
Roger Ebert
Fassbinder films capture a frantic life's desperation
Fassbinder films capture a frantic life's desperation
In the 1970s Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a familiar presence at picture festivals, invariably clad in blackness leather, a cigarette always in his hand, a scraggly mustache drooping over lips that seemed curled in abiding ironic amusement. He traveled with a pack of friends, lovers and associates, and at Cannes, for instance, y'all expected them all to turn up sometime after midnight at Le Petit Carlton, the picayune all-dark bar where the party spilled out into the street.
He was sublimely uninterested in publicity, in press conferences, in interviews. He wasn't awake during the hours when all of that went on. I had dinner with him one time at the Montreal festival, but he was more interested in brandy than chat. At some festivals he would have two or iii films (he fabricated about 40 in 14 years), simply until tardily in his career they were made on small budgets with unknown actors, then he didn't have to play the money game. Even so the screenings for his movies were always packed--critics wanted to see them even if their readers dorsum home didn't--and there was always a feeling of heightened anticipation when the lights went down.
Fassbinder worked quick and loose, but his films weren't sloppy; his visual style was a tight observant mannerism that locked all of those strangely assorted stories into the aforementioned globe view. His typical films were supercharged melodramas in which the eternal themes of honey, jealousy, shame and betrayal were played out in a fashion that valued them at the aforementioned fourth dimension information technology mocked them. You lot felt he had a sure antipathy for the formulas of romance and heartbreak, only that he took the subjects very seriously indeed.
Fassbinder died in 1982, at 37. He was plant on a mattress in a shabby room with a video motorcar, a big amount of cash, and indications he had been doing drugs and drinking. The death came as no surprise to those who had watched him steadily wall himself inside a world of cocaine. But the loss was great, considering Fassbinder was still so young and productive; his tremendous energy had crashed through every bulwark (his unhappy youth, his unimpressive appearance, his homosexuality, his airs, his messy personal life, and the fact that when he started Germany essentially had no moving-picture show manufacture). In a flood of creativity unheard of amid mod directors, he fabricated films like he smoked cigarettes, one after another, no interruption in betwixt.
Information technology is now xv years since Fassbinder'southward expiry. Has his work dated? Does information technology seem less exciting that it did? I've been looking at some of his films once again recently, and I believe Fassbinder'due south work has non merely survived merely grown in stature. At a time of timid commercial projects in the mainstream and copycat coming-of-age dramas on the fringes, he stands as a bold original artist who took universal themes and handled them in a defiantly anti-establishment way. A manager so prolific needs an unusual retrospective to contain all of his piece of work, and starting this weekend the Flick Center of the Art Institute and Facets Multimedia will cooperate in their start joint tribute, a 2-calendar month screening of virtually every picture he e'er made. Some of them films will be playing here for the starting time time. Others were discovered here; Michael Kutza of the Chicago Film Festival was ane of the first Americans to showcase Fassbinder's talent, at a time when the New York Festival was however focused on the French, and such key works as "Merchant of the Four Seasons" (1971) and "The Biting Tears of Petra von Kant" (1973) had their American premieres in Chicago.
Information technology is often said that Fassbinder was influenced by the work of Douglas Sirk, the High german-born manager whose Hollywood melodramas ("Written on the Current of air," "Magnificent Obsession," "Fake of Life," "There'due south Always Tomorrow," "All that Heaven Allows") were a fixture on the Universal-International lot in the 1950s. But what does that mean?
To understand what Fassbinder got from Sirk, it might help to imagine a movie set with invisible walls separating the characters. They can see and hear one some other, only some kind of forcefulness of destiny prevents them from connecting; they are choreographed by fate. The camera isolates them--or groups them--so that they are trapped in their space. Sentry a Fassbinder film, and you lot sense that the characters are following unstated laws. They are doomed to be forever who they are: Heredity, environment, intelligence, appearance, gender and sexuality have written their scripts. When they endeavor to break free, information technology is with anger. bitterness and vast melodramatic gestures.
He used the same actors over and over once again, sometimes in flake parts, sometimes as leads. Information technology was incommunicable to work for him, they said, and impossible not to. Only one became an international star--Hanna Schygulla, whose work in "The Marriage of Maria Braun" is maybe the best performance in a Fassbinder picture show (he bandage her in i of his concluding films as the fabled "Lili Marleen"). But many were able to prove an astonishing range--Irm Hermann, for example, who shares the atomic number 82 in "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant," as the slavish assistant of a self-destructive clothes signer, and then turns up as a housewife in "The Merchant of the Four Seasons," and the unloving daughter of a lonely onetime lady in "Ali: Fearfulness Eats the Soul" (1974--reviewed every bit this week'south Not bad Movie on page 5 of Showcase). All of those titles are amidst Fassbinder'due south best, only consider also "Play a trick on and His Friends" (1975), starring Fassbinder as a lower-course workingman who wins the lottery and find popular in Munich's gay circles. He is flattered to become the lover of a middle-class businessman, footling suspecting that his winnings, not his charms, are the attraction. Other films of its period would have considered the gay theme daring; "Fox" accepts the homosexual milieu in an utterly matter-of-fact fashion, as background for the romantic melodrama that Fassbinder is more interested in.
He moved dorsum and forth between gay and heterosexual sexual practice in his stories, and insiders claimed they could decode some of them: The lesbian triangle in "Petra von Kant," for example, is "actually" about an entanglement in Fassbinder's own life. The dowdy center-anile lady in "Ali," who is astonished to notice herself the lover of a handsome Moroccan, may take "actually" been Fassbinder, too (he bandage his lover of the time as the man). Who knows.
What matters is that the films came from deep inside; nosotros sense the hurt and urgency in many of them. Fassbinder borrowed or refurbished standard Hollywood plots and situations in many cases, but not to remake them--to rethink them, since so many archetype heartbreak situations exercise play out in ordinary lives, as well as in the movies. He demonstrated this approach again in the epic 13-60 minutes miniseries "Berlin Alexanderplatz," which Facets will prove in early on June.
Fassbinder directed his first feature in 1969, and was dead in 1982. Who else has created such a torrent of film, at such a high level of artistry? It'due south tempting to say he hurried because he knew his time was limited. Not at all. He hurried because his life was in his work, and those who knew him all-time wrote afterwards that he feared losing his friends and lovers if he did not e'er keep them around, in a flood of films and plays. If he had lived, and worked at the same rate, he would have made lxxx films past now. Perhaps no one could have kept up that pace. He might have kept up the quality, however; information technology is sobering to recollect how much nosotros lost when he died alone in that sorry locked room.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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