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.  

Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter)

Helma Sanders-Brahms 1980 movie Germany, Pale Mother remains an international success today and is now regarded one of the classics of German cinema. It is a realistic study of the German people seen through the eyes of a typical family within a timespan that runs from just before WW2, through the hardships of war and Germanys defeat and then right up until the 1950’s. 

 

Lene and the young Anna.

Because of its time frame this is no ordinary love story. Hans and Lene are two very average politically uninterested young Germans who fall in love and marry. Shortly after their honeymoon Hans is called up and as WW2 begins is sent to Poland leaving Lene pregnant and at home to raise her newborn daughter Anne. As the war continues circumstances change drastically as the bombings get worse and she decides to leave Berlin.  Carrying the child on her shoulders she makes her way through the snow covered woods barely surviving the hardships, lack of food and a violent rape - but she does learn the hard lesson of how to stay alive. When Hans returns after the war Lene’s newfound independence is curtailed and she now has to revert back to the traditional role of housewife and mother. The reconstruction of Germany runs parallel to the destruction of her small family unit as Lene becomes despondent, ill and worn out.

 

Growing up in a devastated city....

The two main stars are Eva Mattes who plays Lene and Ernst Jacobi as her husband Hans, Mattes appeared in four Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies between 1972 and 1978 but is probable best known in modern Germany for her role in the long running TV police procedural Tatort.

 

....where scavenging becomes a way of life.

I have read reviews that accuse the movie of being overlong, boring and depressing, I could not disagree more. The film mixes archive newsreel footage with art house realism and is based on the directors own childhood, the lives of her parents and her upbringing in the 1950’s.The film did however raise controversy on its release, it was not released in the USA until 1984, because of its handling of Germany’s recent past and raised the unwelcome question of who should bear responsibility for the Nazi regime. The movie I believe states quite clearly that even people who were not involved in voting for Hitler and the Nazi’s, like Sanders-Brahms parents, still bore the responsibility of the atrocities that occurred because they neither protested or resisted. A thought provoking movie on shared responsibility and the beginnings of feminism in the modern era.    

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.

Nekromantik.

Berlin born filmmaker Jorg Buttgereit is best known for a series of controversial films made during the 1980’s and the early 1990’s, films that deal with the relationship between love, sex and death, Nekromantik (1987) deals with all three in a story of a boy and girl and a rotting corpse!    

Rob (Daktari Lorenz) is employed by Joe's Street Cleaning Agency, a company that handles the unenviable task of cleaning up grisly accidents and crime scenes. But Rob has a particular reason for liking his chosen profession, allowing him as it does to indulge in his hobby of choice, collecting body parts, which he keeps preserved in jars around his flat. Tasked with transporting the body of a young man from a murder scene, Rob seizes the opportunity to abscond with the corpse bringing it home, much to the delight of his equally unhinged girlfriend, Betty (Beatrice Manowski). But when Rob gets the sack from the cleaning company Betty is not overjoyed and leaves him, taking the corpse with her. At this point in his life Rob’s only redemption is through a very sharp knife.

Basically the story of a boy and a girl and a rotting corpse!

Banned in a number of countries, the British Board of Film Classification did not pass the film uncut, albeit unsurprisingly with an 18 certificate, until last year (2014). The film involves transgressive subject matter including necrophilia, violence, animal cruelty and some other very skin crawling behaviour along with various unsavoury imagery the worst of which involves our two protagonists making love to the corpse, jamming a length of pipe into it to act as a penis for the sexual gratification of Betty!

 

A job for the Street Cleaning agency.

Made with a ‘non-budget’ its bad acting and dodgy camerawork are synonymous with this filmmaker, but I do not exaggerate when I say every grisly act is fully demonstrated leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination! It’s a film that was made to shock, and shock it does. John Waters proclaimed the film, "the first ever erotic film for necrophiliacs”. I refuse to judge this film or its content on your behalf; you’re an adult - read the synopsis and make up our own mind whether or not to see it?

The End.

Yella

Yella Poster.

Christian Petzold’s debut feature Yella (2007) is a strange moody example of German cinema; described as a romantic thriller it’s neither romantic nor particularly thrilling. It tells the story of a women (Nina Hoss) whose involved in a violent car crash when her crazed ex-husband drives his Range Rover off a road bridge in to a river After crawling out of the river she continues her journey to Hanover to start what has become a non-existent job. She then hooks up with a roving venture capitalist assisting him to scam percentages from his business dealing’s.

There’s a baffling and unnecessary twist at the end of the story that make's nonsense of what went before, who does Petzold think he is David Lynch? An intriguing watch, but a disappointing ending.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex



The insignia of Red Army Faction showing a red star and an MP5

It wasn’t just about killing Americans, and killing pigs, at least not at first. It was about attacking the illegitimate state that these pawns served. It was about scraping the bucolic soil and exposing the fascist, Nazi-tainted bedrock that the modern West German state was propped upon. It was about war on the forces of reaction. It was about Revolution. From the introduction to Richard Huffman’s book ‘The Gun Speaks – The Baader-Meinhoff Gang at the Dawn of Terror’

After watching Carlos the Jackal (2010) I thought it was the right time to revisit The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) it relates the story of the group that would become the most prominent revolutionary movement in post war West Germany The Red Army Faction. Based on a book of the same name by Stefan Aust the film concentrates from its beginnings in 1967, the early years of the German student movement, up to the Stammheim prison suicides in 1977. Directed by Uli Edel and starring Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader, Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhoff and Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin plus a great supporting cast that includes Alexandra Maria Lara and Bruno Ganz. This fascinating movie tells the thrilling story of a segment of German history all be it brutal and somewhat bloodthirsty. As a film it’s a great piece of action drama, as an historical record it’s fascinating and does seem to ring true, like Carlos it would appeal to anyone with the slightest interest in modern European history.



Possession

Poster

Polish director Andrzej Zulawski first English language film is very powerful cinema! Possession (1981) is the surreal story of the break up of a marriage which in turn leads to the breakup of the family. It’s not an easy film to describe or understand but the basic plot involves Mark (Sam Neill) who returns home to Berlin to find his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) leaving him but he’s not sure why. Suspecting she’s having an affair, he engages a private detective who discovers she has an elderly lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), but she is also leaving him!

Isabelle Adjani won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her extraordinary portrayal of a deranged women on the verge of complete insanity who takes a demon lover, which I suspect is a metaphor for evil, an action described by the director as a woman who ‘fucks with an octopus’ This dark, deranged and original film has been described by some critics as a horror film but Zulawsli’s film does not hide behind any genre mask. It subject matter covers politics, love, sex, loneliness and jealousy.

On the verge of complete insanity !

Filmed in the Turkish district of Berlin where it's wall is an important part of the overall atmosphere, as is the use of wide angle lenses and hand held cameras. After an initial release in the UK it was subsequently banned but has now won a deserved cult following. Possession is not necessarily meant to be purely entertainment, love or hate it; it will leave no one untouched. Start with this YouTube clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bDDanNgcgY