Ali: Fear Eats The Soul.

Following nearly a year spent working on TV series; TV films and theatre Rainer Werner Fassbinder made what is now regarded as one of his most critically acclaimed and best-loved works and one which won the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Fear Eats The Soul (1974) is basically a simple story involving a North African 'gastarbeiter' who gets romantically involved with a much older woman. But what we really get is a study of racial and sexual attitudes that have not really changed much over the years. In fact RWF sets out to prove two things, happiness is not always fun and love gives you the strength to rise above everything - did the director succeed and does happiness lie outside of society? I think that is up to viewers to decide for themselves, and at the same time ask the question: does any generation actually learn from its past sins?

Emmi, the wonderful Brigitte Miral, is a widowed hard working cleaning lady in her sixties who has three grown up children. When she takes shelter from a rainstorm in a local bar frequented by Moroccan immigrants she meets Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem) who is in his thirties. Egged on by his friends Ali asked Emmi to dance and immediately this lonely pair have feelings for one another. Shortly after this first encounter they get married.

 

Will outside pressures spoil the happiness of the couple?

This simple act of companionship leads to outrage from her family, her friends and her work colleagues that RWF brilliantly relates on the screen. The most moving and outrages scene is when Emmi calls for a meeting with her children and son in law (played by Fassbinder) to introduce her new husband. The aggression shown by her family is bigotry displayed at its very worst. We also witness open racism from a local shopkeeper, how she is sent to Coventry by work mates that have known her for years and the ignorant folk she shares her apartment block with. This relentless barrage eventually gets to her and the married couple decide to go away on holiday together hoping that things would have changed by their return. Things do change but not quite in the way that Emmi envisaged.

 

Emmi and ....

.... and Ali.

Allegedly based on the premise of the Douglas Sirk film All That Heaven Allows (1955) which is about a love affair between an affluent widow (Jane Wyman) and her much younger gardener (Rock Hudson) again much to the disgust of her family and friends. Fassbinder used this as the basis of his script but introduced a wider age gap and the racial element making it an all round stronger and more poignant story line.  RWF had previously used a similar story to Fear Eats The Soul in The American Soldier (1970) in which the chambermaid’s story involves our two main characters.

RWF is well known for writing his scripts with a cast in mind adjusting the characters to fit the actor who plays the part, which I suspect is similar to what Ken Loach does when casting his films.  Therefore we get a sense of character realism.  According to Viola Shafiks documentary My Name is Not Ali (2011), that forms part of the Blu-Ray release of the film, El Hedi Ben Salem m'Barek Mohammed Mustafa, actually the actor’s real name virtually plays himself. She also tells us that he first met Fassbinder in a Parisian cafe in 1972 and shortly after become his lover. But as with Fassbinder's relationships did not end well hanging himself in a French prison cell in 1977 after receiving a sentence for stabbing three people in a fit of rage in a Berlin bar shortly after he finished making Fear Eats The Soul. The 1982 film Querelle was dedicated to the director’s former lover.

An interview with DOP Juergen Jurges reveal's that after three weeks of meticulous planning the movie was shot in between13 to 15 weeks on a very limited budget of 260000 DM. Which in no way detracts from the genius of the auteur's direction. The truth of this movie, as I have mentioned previously, is how relevant this film is today. With a kerb on migrants coming to live and work in the UK being the main reason given by the English for wanting the leave the EU. Are we going to improve our attitudes? Its certainly doubtful with the surge in popularity of right wing politics across the world, the election of Donald Trump in America and English media employing openly bigoted people like Nigel Farage on LBC radio and Katie Hopkins a columnist in The Sun newspaper who described migrants as "cockroaches" and "feral humans" and no mankind never learns from its past sins.  

Tenderness of the Wolves (Die Zartlichkeit der Wolfe).

Thanks to the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and the subsequent release on Blu-ray/DVD by Arrow Films in November 2015 we know have a chance to view a beautifully restored version the 1973 RWF produced Tenderness of the Wolves. The movie is based on the true story of Friedrich Haarmann a German serial killer who operated over a seven-year period from 1918 to1924 following World War 1. He was eventually found guilty of the murder of 24 young men but he has alleged that his tally could have been between 50 and 70 men and boys. Following a sexual assault his preferred method of killing was to bite into the neck or Adams apple of his victims. It is said that he disposed of the bodies by extensive mutilation and dismemberment and although never proven in court, sold the minced remains as meat- for this reason he became known as the Butcher or the Vampire of Hanover[1].

 

Kurt Raab as the Butcher of Hanover.

Although directed by Ulli Lommel, a German film director and actor known for his many collaboration’s with Fassbinder as well as working along side Andy Warhol as a creative associate at The Factory, Warhol’s New York City studio, it is unmistakably a Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie. Not only produced and edited by the great man but it also features RWP in a wee cameo as the real life pimp Wittowski and many of his regular company of actors were used in the movie, including Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, El Hedi ben Salem and Brigitte Mira. But the film belongs to Kurt Raab who wrote the screenplay, based closely on the original murder trials transcripts and is totally convincing as the gay serial killer Fritz Haarmann. Raab’s association with RWF goes back to 1967 when Fassbinder took over the Action Theatre in Munich and led to him being involved with 31 of the director’s films.

 

Raab with the good looking Jeff Roden.

Within the tight budgetary controls Lommel and Raab had two months to shoot the film and for the same reason set the films timespan just after the WW2 when the period was cheaper to replicate providing a late 1940’s setting. The movie was shot almost entirely in a small historic town just outside Cologne that remained virtually undamaged after the war. 

 

Haarmann brings home a new young lover.

Raab’s narrative does not hide anything allowing the viewer a complete picture of what went on during the seven-year period in which Haarmann’s murderous and sexually spree wrought havoc amongst the gay community around Hanover. Picking up the young men around the railway station, taking them back to his flat and witnessing the rape and bloody murder. We also observe the intense relationship between himself and his lover Grans (Jeff Roden) who its obvious knew exactly what was going on. The movie makes a show of Haarmann bringing gifts of fresh meat to his friends and acquaintances although we are never told where the meat actually comes from.  A film that has full male nudity and demonstrates murderous sexual passion, a film that is both repulsive and fascinating, which probably means its not a film for the small minded, but it is a film not to be missed for those of us that love the Rainer Werner Fassbinder brand of New German Cinema.   

The great man himself

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[1] The story was also one of the inspirations for Fritz Lang’s 1931 movie M.

Querelle.

This is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, posthumously released just months after his death in June 1982. Based on an obscure book written in 1947 and set in the French Port town of Brest by Jean Genet called Querelle de Brest. It was originally to be filmed by Werner Schroeter the German film director, screenwriter and opera director whom RWF cited as an influence on himself and on German cinema in general, but he was unable to raise the finance. Then the script, written by the wonderfully named Burkhead Driest, was offered to Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci of Last Tango in Paris (1972) fame who refused on the grounds that the cinema going public was not ready for such a film.  Fassbinder had always wanted to film Genet’s novel but by the time he got around to it he did not live long enough to see the première of either the original English language version or the German dubbed version.

The movie did not attempt to transform the novel into what could be conceived as normal cinematic form instead he used spoken commentary, fading out to a blank white screen and allowing a written text, which appears on screen at regular intervals, explain what’s happening. For example this text accompanies a scene where we witness Querelle ass-fucked by another man  ‘for the first time Querelle kissed another man on the mouth. It seemed to him as if he was thrusting his face against a mirror, which reflected his own image, as if his tongue were rooting in the stony interior of a granite head’ another follows an incident where Querelle offers to help an individual that resembles his brother, he dresses him in his brothers clothes, kisses him, declares his love and hands him over to the police. ‘Querelle had entered into a kind of unspoken pact with the devil. He didn’t sign away his soul or his body, but something just as precious: a friend. And the death of this friend sanctifies his crime. It is our task to express what is universal in a particular phenomenon. It’s no longer about a work of art – for the work of art is free’. I think you probable get the idea.

Bred Davis as Georges Querelle.

Everything was filmed in a studio with the use of ‘lurid expressionist colour’ it’s obvious that the sets are nothing more than cardboard cut outs, which make the whole film seem like a theatrical production. The film stars Brad Davis as Querelle, Franco Nero as Lieutenant Seblon, Jeanne Moreau, who had lost none of her sexual allure at the age of 54, plays Lysiane and RWF regular Gunter Kaufmann as Nono. The story is about a sailor Georges Querelle whose ship the Vengeur arrives in Brest. Going onshore with a quantity of opium he makes a deal to sell it to Nono the landlord of the Feria brothel.  Subsequently he murders his accomplice to keep all the profit. Nono’s wife Lysiane is the lover of Querelle brother Robert with whom he has a love hate relationship. He also wants to sleep with Nono’s wife but to do so has to enter into a game of dice, if Nono loses Querelle will be allowed to make love to Lysiane, if Nono wins he will have to submit to anal sex with the bar owner first, allowing Nono to proclaim ‘That way, I can say my wife only sleeps with assholes’ Continuing with a life style of murder, thieving and sex Querelle embarks on a journey of self discovery. It’s not until the end of the film that Lieutenant Seblon reveals his love for our main protagonist.’[1]

The sexually alluring Jeanne Moreau.

In his last interview Fassbinder stated ‘Someone who wants to liberate himself for a new society must go down to the deepest depths of this society. Someone who does that, in whatever way, is fascinating. That’s obvious’ a statement that the Danish author Christian Braad Thomsen claims has to do with living out all your repressed desires, something RWF describes as ‘doubling one self’ which is, I believe, the core component of the directors film, is it a coincidence that the final shot in RWF’s final film is a mirror image? He also sets out to prove that all human relationships are artificial and that life is just an extension of a three-act play: he does have a point. As normal with his films, violence and murder are interchangeable with sex although sex is temporary and death is the final release with Braad Thomsen opining that the whole film can be understood as Querelle’s journey into the realm of the dead! He also offers the opinion that our sailor is a Jesus substitute but without seeing the film again and watching from that point of view I would not presume to agree. Subject of much controversy, not least because of its free and provocative depiction of homosexuality and criminality, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final movie is a return to the early avant-garde films and one that the viewer would benefit from multiple viewings.

The final embrace.

Epitaph

In the thirteen years during which he made films, he changed the face of cinematic art and our idea of what film can be. Until one day he disappeared as suddenly as he had come.[2]

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[1] Interview with Dieter Schidor from the film Der Bauer von Babylon

[2] The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius Christian Braad Thomson

Despair: A Journey into the Light .

This was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first of three films in English, a language he was not fluent in, the other two were Lili Marleen (1980) and his final film Querelle (1982). It was the first time that Fassbinder had not written the screenplay, instead it was written by the British playwright Tom Stoppard who, by his own admission, was not a screenwriter and did not find the task very easy transcribing it from a novel by the Russian Vladimir Nabokov.  Also this was the directors first large scale international production with a budget larger than the combined budget for his first fifteen movies. Michael Ballhous the films director of photography was quoted as saying “It was of a standard and a budget that we had never done before, a great experience for all of us (the crew) involved being able to make the film under Hollywood conditions” Unlike previous Rainer Werner Fassbinder films he had a decent amount of time allocated to shoot the film.

Andrea Ferreol.

Fassbinder, was at the pinnacle of his creativity and his ability, found himself working along side international stars the caliber of Dirk Bogarde, enticed out of semi-retirement to work with the German New Wave director, and French actress Andrea Ferreol, whose debut film La Grande bouffe (1973) had coursed quite a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. Un-be-known to the director this beautiful voluptuous actress had to learn English to play the part of Lydia!

Dirk Bogarde.

The chocolate manufacturer Herman Herman (Bogarde) an exiled Russian, is having a mid-life crisis. His wife Lydia (Ferreol), a child woman, is in a strange relationship with her ‘cousin’, his business is on the verge of bankruptcy and the National Socialists are gaining ground. But worse still Herman is addicted to out of body experiences to the extent that he can watch himself make love to his not to bright but absolutely desirable wife. He would love to perfect this ability to double himself; in the process he meets a tramp on one of his business trips and is convinced that the man is his doppelgänger. For what he sees’s as ‘his journey towards the light’ he hatches an insane plan.

Bogarde gave one of his best performances for the German enfant terrible responding to the young genius, who he respected greatly, by making the affected mad man Herman Herman a totally believable character. The objective behind the film, according to RWF, was that a person could go voluntarily insane ‘’A film that ask the question what does madness actually mean and does it still leave the opportunity for life in ones own fantasies and in ones own world, which is also independent and free. Because madness is not portrayed here in a personalized way, in other words, specific to Herman Herman that’s not what I wanted”

Herman Hermam, his wife Lydia and her 'cousin'

Filmed in Germany at the Bavaria Studios, except the final scenes that were filmed in Switzerland, this was Fassbinder’s 31^st movie one for each year of his life, having his 31^st birthday during the filming. Originally over 3 hours long it was cut by 30 minutes but the studio insisted that the film be reduced even more. Again the RWF trademarks were there, reflections with the use of mirrors and glass influenced on this occasion by the final scenes of Orson Welles The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the zoom and the tracking all imitated by the soundtrack that in it self formed an important part of this work.

One of the reflective shots that Fassbinder's work is known for.

Although the film was compared to the work of Visconti and Berman it was not a great success at Cannes, with the general public and the critics denying Fassbinder his big international break through, which he was eventually to achieve with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), his greatest success.

Despair (1978) is available for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray, although not the original cut; but a stunning restoration by Bavaria Media all the same.  

The Marriage of Maria Braun.

Fassbinder.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder died prematurely in 1982 at the age of 37. The official reason was heart failure resulting from a dangerous mix of sleeping pills and cocaine. Up until his untimely demise he was recognised as the leading light in the New German Cinema, a period of German film making that lasted from the late 1960’s into the 1980’s, which also included, amongst others, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders and like similar movements in other countries still has a lasting influence to this day. Fassbinder was a workaholic and in his 15 year career completed more than 40 feature length films, two television film series, three short plays, four video productions; twenty-four stage plays, four radio plays and in his spare time took part in some 36 acting roles. He was quoted as saying that in his opinion work alleviates loneliness.  He was a controversial figure and his desire to provoke and disturb was reflected in both his private life and his film work.

Poster.

My first experience of Fassbinder’s body of work was his 15-hour masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) the longest single narrative feature film, made up of 13 parts plus an epilogue based on the Alfred Doblin novel of the same name. It’s an in depth study of a character called Franz Biberkopf, the area of Berlin where he resides and the characters that inhabit his world. I have promised myself to revisit this wonderful piece of work one day, but in the mean time I have managed to catch another of this directors oeuvre, 1978’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. This social melodrama is a story of sexuality, passion and women’s power over men set in post war Germany. It focuses on the attractive Maria Braun who during an allied bombing raid marries a soldier. Maria and her new husband manage to spend half a day and one night in each other’s company before Hermann has to return to the front line. When the war ends Maria is informed that her husband is missing presumed dead. Realising that she will have to make her own way in the austere post war world starts work in a bar that is frequented by American soldiers. Lonely and sexually frustrated she has an affair with a kind, good-looking black sergeant that ends with her falling pregnant. Hermann, alive and well, returns home to find his wife in the arms of her American lover. A ruckus takes place which ends with Maria killing her black lover and Hermann taking the blame, for which he is found guilty of murder and sent to prison for a crime he did not commit. Being along again Maria, ever resourceful, embarks on a long-term affair with her new boss, the rich and successful industrialist Karl Oswald, with the honest belief that she is working to provide a home for Hermann when he is finally released from prison.

Hanna Schygulla.

Maria Braun is portrayed by one of the most prominent New Wave German actress’s Hanna Schygulla, who won the Best Actress Award at the 29^th Berlin International Film Festival. She has worked with Fassbinder on a number of occasions but her role in this remarkable movie oozes passion and sexuality and made her a German screen icon.  This is one of those films where the director, his crew and the cast are all on top form. It turned out to be Fassbinder’s most successful film both critically and commercially.

 The ever resourceful Maria Braun.