The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Method

 

The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Method : :  A Retrospective

 
10 September 2021 to 6 March 2022
 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) was a director, film producer, actor and author. As one of the key representatives of the New German Cinema, he succeeded in synthesising radical subjectivity and social analysis in his work, capturing the look and feel of the Federal Republic of Germany of his time like few other artists.
 
In his films, Fassbinder always sought to identify and show the general by means of the specific: ‘Precisely because they are so specific and national and because they try to describe the country in which they are made, and in which I live, they also say something about democracies in general.’ The controversies and debates about his work and his person, even during his lifetime, form an integral part of this. His exposed position, his creative non-conformity and artistic radicalism led to now-legendary films, television and stage plays that have become part of the collective visual memory.
 
«I am not interested in anything reasonable.»
Wolfgang Limmer/Fritz Rumler, »Alles Vernünftige interessiert mich nicht« (1980), in: Robert Fischer (Hg.), Fassbinder über Fassbinder. Die ungekürzten Interviews, Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren, 2004, S. 493.
 
 
Fassbinder lived and demanded intensity. His often contrary, critical attitude never got in the way of his profoundly affectionate depiction of people, irrespective of their milieu, and was invariably marked by respect and consistency. From the beginning, he moved between theatre, film/television and documentary styles.
 
A prolific and exceptionally talented filmmaker, Fassbinder died in 1982 at the age of just 37. In the years since 1966 he had made 45 films, among them FEAR EATS THE SOUL and THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN as well as multi-part television series such as EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY and BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ. He produced or co-produced 26 films, appeared as a performer or guest in 21 films by other directors as well as in 19 of his own; he wrote 14 plays, re-edited 6 and directed 25. Moreover, he wrote 4 radio plays and 37 screen plays, and collaborated with other writers on 13 screenplays.
 
The retrospective, chronologically structured exhibition presents Fassbinder’s oeuvre, shown in combination with archive and source material, as an unparalleled social document of its time. The system of film, television and theatre production from the 1960s to the 1980s can be traced through his multifaceted career, and it was thanks to his work that public broadcast productions came to be held to a higher standard.
 
The exhibition seeks to present Fassbinder’s life and work within the overall context of the social system governing the Federal Republic of Germany – and as its mirror. A selection of objects, quotations, photographs and graphics facilitate this contextualisation.
 
Fassbinder, born on 31 May 1945 – soon after the German capitulation – experienced the emotional and material effects of the post-war period. And they found their way – directly and indirectly – into his oeuvre. In his films, particularly in his BRD-Trilogie (‘FRG Trilogy’), Fassbinder sought to record and reveal societal trends with the sensitivity of a seismograph. In GERMANY IN AUTUMN and THE THIRD GENERATION he took a close look at the so-called German Autumn and the RAF (Red Army Faction). In FONTANE EFFI BRIEST, he turned his eye on the Wilhelmine period. The bourgeoisie and its increasingly rigid social norms would also have been addressed in DEBIT AND CREDIT based on the novel by Gustav Freytag – one of many projects that remained unrealised in Fassbinder's short career. His final project was a biography of Rosa Luxemburg – it was cut short by his untimely death in 1982.
 
The exhibition also shines a light on the extended family system of Fassbinder’s ‘collective’. There was a method to the family formation – which will be explored in another section of the exhibition – and artists such as Harry Baer, Ingrid Caven, Irm Hermann, Peer Raben, Hanna Schygulla and Kurt Raab remained close to Fassbinder throughout his career. The retrospective will also take a look at the filmic, literary and musical role models and sources that shaped Fassbinder and his work.
 
The exhibition sets out to trace Fassbinder’s life and work and to introduce him to a wider audience as a multifaceted artist who is inseparably linked to German culture, society and politics. All of his works – some more subtly than others – hold a mirror up to the viewer. ‘I am not interested in anything rational,’ he declared in 1980, and many of his images and themes – for example anti-Semitism, migration, role stereotypes or queerness – are radical, innovative, extraordinary and ground-breaking. At the time, they frequently met with fierce criticism, but they continue to resonate with modern audiences. Fassbinder was able to capture deeply honest interactions and social structures and to visualise them with great intensity as reflections of society. For him it was ‘always important to make films about people, about the way they relate to one another, their dependence on each other and on society.’ All this makes his work deeply intimate, current, relevant and unforgettable. To understand it means to be able to muster understanding and tolerance for ourselves and others.
 
The multimedia exhibition is accompanied by an extensive on- and offline film programme.
 
An exhibition of the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, in co-operation with the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt/Main, and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin.

 

This week, the editors recall Wolfram Schütte’s essay on the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which was published in Artforum in March 1986. “The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Method: A Retrospective” is on view at the Bundestkunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, through March 6, 2022.
 
“Among the many gifted directors in the postwar German cinema, he was the lone genius,” writes Wolfram Schütte in his essay-cum-eulogy about the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of thirty-seven. Love, violence, trauma, guilt, shame, mortality: For Fassbinder, these were the human condition, from which he presented no escape. To do so, according to the writer, would have been to uphold the repressive, murderous facades of civility rather than to uncover the complex, unflattering truths buried beneath. Mourning the filmmaker’s end, which came too soon though he completed an astonishing forty films, Schütte’s celebration of the filmmaker’s life also offers those unfamiliar with his work a place to begin.
 
—The Editors
 
  
At some point films have to stop being films, have to stop being stories and begin to live, make you ask: what’s really going on with me and my life?
—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974
 
Barely four years have passed since Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death, and already it seems as if a short eternity separates us from him. The New German Cinema, whose pulsing heart he was, has fallen apart, disintegrated, and the international success on whose threshold he was the first of his colleagues to stand has scattered those remaining—Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders, and others—to all comers of the earth. The German auteur film, which he took from esoteric, solipsistic isolation to broad public attention, has withdrawn into its shell, or been superseded by large-scale, new-Hollywood-style productions such as Wolfgang Petersen’s Enemy Mine and Roland Emmerich’s Joey, both 1985. No successor has emerged to take his place; among the many gifted directors in the postwar German cinema, he was the lone genius. The gaping hole left by Fassbinder’s death has affected all European film.
 
When Fassbinder died, on the sultry night of June 10, 1982—in front of his TV set—he was in the midst of preparations for his next project, Ich bin das Glück auf dieser Erde (I am the delight of the world—a title taken from a punk-rock song by Joachim Witt). Within a few days, he intended to shoot an episode of a collaboratively directed film about Soviet-American tension, Krieg und Frieden (War and peace). The scene was to show a man and woman in bed; he doesn’t get an erection, they fight, and their mutual frustrations lead to a killing. To take the arms race as a parallel of a domestic murder was typical of Fassbinder’s perspective on the world.
 
And 1982 was to have been the year of his greatest success. With his 14-part opus magnum, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979–80), he was at the height of his international fame; who now could resist the magic of his vitality, or obstruct his feverish productivity? A passionate soccer fan, he was planning his own version of what in sport is called a hat trick: in one year, he hoped to win the prizes of all three major European film festivals. In February, in Berlin, he had won his first Golden Bear award with Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (The desire of Veronica Voss). He intended to submit his adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel Querelle (1947) for Cannes’ Golden Palm prize, and he planned Ich bin das Glück auf dieser Erde for Venice’s Golden Lion. When he died, arresting this projected triumphant road, he was a man of 37 who in just 13 years, from 1969 to 1982, had created a nearly inexhaustible oeuvre of 34 films, along with one 5- and one 14-part television series, seven plays, four radio dramas, and ten theater productions, among other projects. He was moving on to new works with undiminished energy.
 
Shocking as his death was, those who knew Fassbinder were not entirely surprised by it, for he had stood long at the edge of death’s shadow. He lived intensely and excessively, as if he had made a decision to accept the needs of his body, the cravings of his phantasies, and the utopian visions of his creative mind, and to pursue them recklessly. The ascetic life was not for him. Ruthless on both himself and all who came in contact with him, Fassbinder “consumed” himself by digging the jewels of his art out of his own experience—by turning his life into a mine, which he excavated without cease. In 13 years of work he had by no means exhausted the tunnels that he had driven into the bedrock of his unconscious, but his body could not withstand the restless, nervous exhaustion to which he subjected it through alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs, and his heart burst, like the timbers of a mineshaft under the sheer weight of the earth.
 
When Fassbinder decided to film Cocaina, a 1925 novel by the Italian writer Pitigrilli, he explained, "It’s a film that’s supposed to tell us something about the drug, its effects, and about a person who can freely choose either to take or not take the drug, with the clear understanding that a decision for the drug will shorten life, but intensify it. Everyone can decide for himself whether he’d rather live shorter but more intensely, or longer and more conventionally.’’1 This choice was one he had made himself, and the chemicals he took served the sole purpose of making more transparent, more luminous, the one drug experience not only with which but in which he lived: filmmaking. It is no coincidence that one of his favorite films (by Douglas Sirk, one of his favorite directors) is called Imitation of Life (1959); as its title indicates, the subject is the life of society and convention that forces people into leading an imitation of life rather than living it. Today we might speak of the simulation of life, using the language of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. To Fassbinder, film, which simultaneously imitates and anticipates life, was an anamorphic mirror that could unravel and expose these distortions.
 
Fassbinder saw making films (not ju st directing them) as a psychic act of the imagination which, on site, turn ed into a real, p hysical act of creation. During a pre ss conference at the Berlin Film Festival, shortly before his death, he remarked, “I think of all my films as my children and I defend them to the lase.” The Danish director and Fassbinder scholar Christian Braad Thomsen, who transcribed these words, has added, “That’s not surprising . . . because everyone who worked with Fassbinder experienced this collaboration as a kind of lovemaking where he came closest to realizing his utopia.” For Fassbinder, the utopias of life, work, and art came together in filmmaking, and without his yearning for the ideal, a yearning that he believed was present in everyone, the overwhelmingly pessimistic physiognomy of his art would have lacked its subversive, provocative energy, the quality that above all may assure his work’s endurance over time. His utopian longings caused a restlessness in him that drew work out of him like a volcanic eruption; as he himself once said, “when this yearning is driven out of me, I won’t make anything anymore.”
 
Fassbinder was born in the Bavarian town of Bad Wörishofen on May 31, 1945, at the end of World War II. In 1969, when he was 23, and an actor, director, and playwright in Munich’s avant-garde antiteater group, he made his first feature film, Liebe ist Kälter als der Tod (Love is colder than death—a title that crystallized within itself his lifelong flirtation with mortality). It was a year after the May revolt in France, a touchstone, with the events of 1945, for a whole generation of young Germans. In 1968, the children of parents who had participated, whether actively or passively, in one of the worst crimes in human history experienced the failure of their revolt against their fathers, against the society that had perpetuated a patriarchal authoritarianism. “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (There is no right way of life where life is false): the Frankfurt philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s aphoristic assessment of post-Nazi society underlies all Fassbinder’s thinking and imagination.
 
Fassbinder had had no real childhood. His parents separated in 1951, when he was a small boy, and the cold of the wrecked marriage, the sense of homelessness, created in him a feeling of isolation, which intensified as he grew older and became aware of the complexities of his sexuality Married from 1970 to 1972, to Ingrid Caven, an actress and cabaret singer he had discovered, he concluded that matrimony was an antiutopian, erotic/coercive relationship designed to kill love. Earlier on, the antiteater had functioned as a collective of people working and living together, and here Fassbinder had sought some thing like the happiness of the extended family, which he had not experienced in his childhood and adolescence. (In the late ’60s, of course, the commune, in which young adults came together in a free living arrangement, was a common phenomenon.) For Fassbinder, who called himself a “romantic anarchist,” the antiteater ensemble was a kind of island of warmth from which he attacked the coldness of the world, its treachery, violence, and binding systems of dependency. Yet his dominating personality, and the antiauthoritarian rebelliousness of certain of the other members (Kurt Raab, for example, and Hanna Schygulla), ultimately destroyed their utopian ideal, free though it was of many of the social constraints surrounding it. In Wamung var einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a holy whore, 1970), his tenth film (and created just a year after his first one), he summed up the time: “We’d dreamt of something that just doesn’t exist.” To the end, however, like other directors of the European cinema, he continued to work with a fixed team of actors, cameramen, propmen, and musicians, keeping some at a distance, drawing others closer—but now on a strictly professional, collaborative basis

 
Fassbinder’s “early work,” all of it produced within the single year of 1969–70, bears a distinctive artistic signature. In some of these films, as in those of Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Melville, and Raoul Walsh, he found his themes in a kind of suburban gangster milieu, a place of boredom, criminality, and the suppression of minorities. Or, in Die Niklashauser Fart (The Niklashausen journey), he jumped into a tableau of a 15th-century peasant revolt, or tried his hand at a pseudo western in Whity, or entered the hell of a lower-middle class man’s obsession with accumulating material goods in a film that answers its own question, Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? (Why does Herr R. run amok?). These first works were made very quickly and on shoestring budgets, but they are based on Fassbinder’s own scripts, and they already’ express his general ambition in cinema: to create ”films about people and their relationship to each other, their dependency on one another and society.“ They articulate the director’s radical dramaturgy, which describes not only the ways in which people are hurt and damaged, but the scars and defenses that endure long after. In these films he gives clear form to how these wounds are perpetuated by false consciousness and apathy Thus Fassbinder does not celebrate the black slave who finally rises against his white oppressor, but has his ”whitey“ turn ”against the black man, because he hesitates the whole time and doesn’t rebel against inhumanity."
 
Warnung var einer heiligen Nutte, like Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, 1963, is a film about its own director and his process of making movies. It represents a coming-to-terms in another sense as well: before it, Fassbinder said, he’d been making films that were “too elitist and private,” but now he wanted “to create a kind of film art that can unfold without reflections.” The later works were to be “as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films, and still criticize the system.” What differentiates Fassbinder’s cool, spare exercises in style of 1969–70 from the pictures that follow is a change in their emotional temperature. The director comes to show a greater sympathy for the “false” life of his characters, with their “appropriate” feelings. It is as though he projected the sense of community that he had lost in the strife that afflicted the antiteater group onto the people in his films, in the hope that his viewing audience would be able to discover more about its own emotions and desires.

 

Two events led to this warmer current of broader feeling: a psychosomatic illness which forced Fassbinder to confront the idea of death, and the director’s intense experience of Sirk’s Hollywood movies. These films opened a way for him to follow the subcutaneous, unconscious influences and ramifications of society and its potential for violence, to trace the social roots of the depressions, illnesses, and suicides of his everyday heroes. Furthermore, Sirk, as a kind of father figure, gave Fassbinder the courage to stop avoiding a specifically German intellectual taboo, namely triviality and kitsch. Indeed, his decisive turn toward melodrama appeared to other directors in the New German Cinema as the incarnation of what the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch had called “Das Böse im Wertsystem der Kunst” (evil in the value system of art)—the kind of art that works to obscure social reality This reaction was understandable, considering the dangerous use to which sentimental melodrama was put by the Nazi-UFA studios in the ’30s and during the war, and by the postwar West German film industry. But Fassbinder’s transgression opened up powerful material. Breaking the taboo, he could develop his contraband of subversive criticism beneath the appearance of ingratiating naiveté; in addition, the tension between the two extremes provided an angle of attack that was multidirectionally aimed at all forms of societal repression.
 
With sovereign disregard for the political and esthetic break that the New German Cinema had insisted on from the films that preceded it, Fassbinder called nearly forgotten former stars—like Luise Ullrich, Brigitte Mira, Karlheinz Böhm, and Barbara Valentin—back to the screen. Their comebacks were gentle attempts to create a sounding board among audiences of all ages, to apply nostalgia constructively to the movie public that had until then felt excluded from and repelled by the New German Cinema. And in 1972, Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight hours don’t make a day), his five-part television series about everyday life in a factory, did achieve considerable popular success—more, perhaps, than the TV network was comfortable with, given that the risky, socially critical issues Fassbinder was moving into more deeply caused the project’s cancellation.

The most genuine storyteller of the postwar German cinema found in melodrama his medium, the medium through which he could present “just a single theme (like every good director) . . . in ever new variations.” And his theme was “the exploitability of feelings, no matter who’s doing the exploiting. Whether it’s the state exploiting patriotism or one member of a couple destroying the other.” Whether one believes, with Thomsen, that Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) is the palimpsest underlying Fassbinder’s creative output, or, as Wilfried Weigand has remarked, that “the body [is] the site of societal conflicts” in his films, his domain was Herbert Marcuse’s jungle of “eros and civilization,” which he explored as no other director of the postwar period has done—in faces and body language; in exchanges of glances and words; in reflections in mirrors and in glass, transparent but usually impenetrable; and in the signals, overlapping each other like echoes, that are emitted by the everyday objects in the narrow, crowded, mazelike spaces of his sets.
 
With Die bitteren Tränen der Petra van Kant (The bitter tears of Petra von Kant, 1972) and Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (Merchant of the four seasons, 1971), Fassbinder’s work divided into a double strategy On the one hand, with a virtuosic touch and a razor-sharp analytical eye, he investigated the subtlest intellectual dialectics of what Alexander Kluge has called the “emotional generator” that powers the struggles of love, whether hetero-, homo-, or bisexual. The films in this group include Petra van Kant, Martha, 1973, Faustrecht der Freiheit (Freedom’s law of might, 1974; released in English as Fox and His Friends), Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese roulette, 1976), and In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a year of 13 moons, 1978). Parallel to these works, Fassbinder took up the genre of the “folk play,” exemplified by the ’30s dramas of Odön von Horváth. His films in this vein include Händler der vier Jahreszeiten, Acht Stunden sind kein Tag, Angst essen Seele auf (Fear eats the soul, 1973), Ich will doch nur, dass ihr mich liebt (I only want you to love me, 1976), and the two-part Bolwieser, 1976–77, an adaptation of a ’30s novel by Oskar Maria Graf. (Among Fassbinder’s early films, Pioniere in Ingolstadt [Pioneers in Ingolstadt, 1970], based on a play by Benoit Brecht’s companion Marie Luise Fleisser, falls into the folk-play category).
 
Antinaturalistically, and through the use of a stylized, Brechtian vocabulary and a precise, realistic delineation of milieu, Fassbinder’s folk-play movies found a way back to a sphere that the old German Heimatfilm (provincial romance ) had sentimentally misted over and that the New German Cinema had thus far not even sought, let alone found: the everyday life of the common people. The director neither paternalistically exploited his lower-middle-and working-class characters as case histories in some kind of sociological study, nor pressed them to the middle-class bosom of false compassion. Through a passionate, empathetic sensitivity, in these people who “are lived” he constantly discovered people who desire to live, however much they may have been distorted, oppressed, or diminished by social pressures and lack of opportunities. In the end, Fassbinder, a symphonist of polyphonal emotional strains, united his films on love and his folk-play, works in his monumental but extremely subtle adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s big-city novel of 1929, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
 
In certain ways, Fassbinder can be compared to Honoré de Balzac—not simply because of the obvious similarity between Fassbinder’s voluminous figure and Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of the nude Balzac, nor through the two men’s comparably insatiable intoxication with creativity, a creativity fed in both cases by a polar tension between love and power which streamed out into every conceivable narratively arable field of life. (Whether for Fassbinder this led to polemical social commentary—in Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel [Mother Kuster’s trip to heaven, 1975], Deutschland im Herbst [Germany in Autumn, 1978], or Die dritte Generation [The third generation, 1978–79], in which he “settled his score” with both terrorist- and salon-leftists; or whether it seduced him, in 1972–74, to create a masterful cinematic reading of the German Madame Bovary, Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest [1895], his snapshots and historical panoramas alike are highly personal statements of enormous vibrancy). What truly makes Fassbinder comparable to the 19th-century French novelist is his project of creating a German “comédie humaine.” The tetralogy of Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The marriage of Maria Braun, 1978), Lili Marleen, 1978, Lola, 1981, and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss is but a fragment of what Fassbinder planned as an emotional history of modern German society This history was to be traced into the past through a television series based on Gustav Freytag’s novel Soll und Haben (Debit and credit, 1855), to which Fassbinder intended to add new material in an attempt to present the “history of the German bourgeoisie from the mid 19th century to the outbreak of National Socialism, in ten installments.”

 
Soll und Haben was a kind of bible for the German establishment of the boom years of the 1870s. It is widely considered anti-Semitic, and Fassbinder’s intention to dramatize it was strongly criticized. Yet Fassbinder argued, “precisely for that reason it’s very useful in describing anti-Semitism. . . . The oppression of a minority group can really best be described by showing the mistakes and outrageous acts that members of the minority have been driven to as a consequence of being oppressed.” The same argument may apply to Fassbinder’s play Die Stadt, der Müll und der Tod (The city, garbage, and death, 1976), which was attacked for anti-Semitism on its premier in Frankfurt, three years after Fassbinder’s death. The play had already created a scandal when it appeared in book form, but the Swiss director Daniel Schmid’s word-for-word film version of it (under the title Schatten der Engel [Angels’ shadows, 1976], and with Fassbinder in one of the main roles), proved how off base were the accusations of anti-Semitism. Fassbinder’s desire to portray historical events with such exactitude that they seemed copied, while simultaneously creating contemporary parables of the murderous aberrations of history and of German politics, was so powerful that it induced in the audience the experience of personal trauma that occurs as one is forced to face the buried and repressed. A hardened sense of guilt over anti-Semitic excesses lies concealed behind the facade of some postwar philo-Semitism, which the writer Robert Neumann has called the anti-Semitism of those who “love” Jews. Fassbinder, in his incorruptible morality—the Pier Paolo Pasolini of the contemporaneous Scritti corsari (Pirate writings) alone is comparable—never tried to conceal guilt behind a facade of sentiment. He argued, as always, from a knowledge of the deepseated self-entrapment of the victim, whether an individual or a minority group Using the devices of shock, self-accusation, and confrontation that he had developed from Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, he allowed himself and the viewer no avenue of escape.
 
That the four films of Fassbinder’s Balzacian tetralogy all focus on women is a methodological paradigm for getting under the skin of a culture. In the earthquake atmosphere of German history, women are the seismographs of social conditions dominated, determined, and bequeathed by men, whether in war, in the years directly following the war, or in the period of the economic recovery. In addition, Fassbinder was telling a story of film esthetics, combining social history and a history of the popular media. The complex, contradictory, ambivalent esthetic of his late work, starting with Maria Braun and reaching its peak in the phantasmagoric Querelle, has an ironic mannerism about it reminiscent of Broch’s Die Schlafwandler trilogy (The Somnambulists, 1931–32), whose three parts agree stylistically with the literary style of the time in which each is set (1888, 1903, and 1918). Thus Lili Marleen has the atmosphere of a Nazi-UFA film, Lola is shot in the candy-colored tones of the ’50s, and Veronika Voss is like a black-and-white melodrama. Reconstructing different forms of cinematic art, these films share the secret purpose of creating a record of the audiovisual treasures and propaganda nightmares that have been amassed during the short history of a media which is already being taken over and forgotten; Fassbinder was letting film bloom one last time. At precisely the moment when the cinema and the moviehouse were going into a general decline, these were euphoric works of recollection. Ultimately, Fassbinder’s drama of delicately morbid light and color-inspired by Luchino Visconti’s La Caduta degli dei (The fall of the gods, 1969; released in English as The Damned)—together with his montages of music and overlapping sound, worked to create a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a filmic palimpsest such as James Joyce achieved for modern prose in Ulysses.
 
Fassbinder left behind an oeuvre of memory, synthesis, and restlessness. It tells of love and the failure of love, hope and despair, of life as Sören Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death.” It evokes the craving for something better; sometimes, it enters a state of passion beyond “normal” desires. “There is no right way of life where life is false,” said Adorno. A remark of Fassbinder’s could have been a response to that idea: “Something different can develop only out of the yearnings of each individual for some thing different.”
 
Wolfram Schütte is a film and literature critic for the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, and the editor of the Reihe Film book series. He is a columnist on film for Artforum.
 
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NOTES
 
1. All quotations by or about Fassbinder in the article are from the following books: Wolfram Schotte and Peter W. Jansen, eds., Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Reihe Film #2, fifth edition, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Querelle, Filmbuch, Munich: Schirmer & Mosel, 1982: and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Die Anarchie der Phantasie, ed. Michael Töteberg, Frankfurt: S. Fisherverlag, 1985.
 

  

Rainer Werner Fassbinder. By  Wolfram Schütte.  Art Forum, November 2021.  

From the August, 1983 issue of High Times comes Mike Wilmington’s tribute to filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), the darling of the film festivals; a director of genius who died of a barbiturate/cocaine overdose at age 36. In honor of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s birthday on May 31, we’re republishing Wilmington’s interview with Fassbinder collaborator Dieter Schidor below.

 Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the central German film director of the whole post-Hitler era. He was the greatest in terms of productivity (43 films in barely over a decade), range and impact on his own generation—both in Germany and abroad. The “New German Cinema” revival of the ’70s is unthinkable without him, and among his contemporaries, only Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre) rivals him in world prestige.

 In films like The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen, and Lola—Rainer Werner Fassbinder opened up a peculiar, teeming, madly fertile world: a world of bleak city streets; garish interiors rotting with an over-sumptuous hothouse glamour; middle-class eccentricities and madness; and an erotic, romantic frustration so intense that it seems to beat at the spectator in waves. There is something almost oppressive about his films—they repel as they fascinate. Taken together they present a full and often-damning portrait of German society in the 20th century—its social realities and, perhaps more important, its cultural undertows, dreams and nightmares.

  When I spoke to Dieter Schidor—a deceptively boyish-appearing actor and ex-academic, who produced Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film (Querelle, taken from the Jean Genet novel) and directed The Wizard of Babylon (a documentary on the making of Querelle)—I expected an intimate glimpse of a driven artist.

 I didn’t expect the picture I got: an appalling portrait of a man who was, in many ways, self-destructive, cruel and even monstrous—a man who tyrannized his friends and coworkers mercilessly; who drove some of them (like actress Hanna Schygulla) literally into nervous breakdowns; who manipulated the system with consummate cynicism and cunning to finance his movies; whose appetites for sex, drugs, emotional violence or depravity were immense and uncontrollable; and whose personal life was a pathetic, even sordid, shambles (both his long-term homosexual lovers committed suicide).

 Throughout the interview, Schidor—a lucid, extremely intelligent raconteur who obviously loved Rainer Werner Fassbinder—would occasionally pull back, protest that I was “making” him reveal a catalog of horrors; but seconds later, with little prodding, he would recount some new atrocity, pry open some new festering wound.

 It seems obvious that Fassbinder’s friends and associates may feel almost compelled to strip the veils from his monument. And they perhaps do this, not out of any sense of revenge or account-settling, but, in some weird way, to bring this strong, volatile, “monstrous”—but very human—figure back to life.

 Schidor was open and honest, eloquent beyond any interviewer’s dreams and his remarks and stories speak for themselves. They show Fassbinder, I think, for what he probably was: a great artist and a pitiable, amoral man. They show a person who could be, sometimes almost simultaneously, violent and gentle, revolutionary and bourgeois, passionate and calculating, vicious and humane, idealistic and corrupt; an artist who, perhaps like Richard Wagner, bares the soul of his countrymen by reflecting in his art and his life all the grossness and the beauty, the idealism and the horror of Germany itself.

 And in a peculiar way, these sometimes shocking revelations might be, along with his film work (which, in Querelle, reached its apex), a true monument to Fassbinder—who, as Schidor makes clear, would have wanted, even insisted on, that truth.

 

The Sex, Drugs, Sadism, and Weltschmerz of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

 High Times: How did you first meet Fassbinder?

 Dieter Schidor: I got to know him in 1969: He had just done his first two films: Katzelmacher and Love Is Colder than Death. And then I acted in a couple of his films—and then, in 1975, we had a fight; for a couple of years we didn’t speak to each other anymore—

 High Times: An artistic fight?

 

Schidor: No, it was a mixture… It was a personal fight. We had done a film, Satan’s Brew, and I couldn’t come back for the second shooting. And then it happened (through Querelle, actually) that we started talking again. In the course of working on Querelle, we got very close.
 
High Times: What was he like?
 
Schidor: That is a very, very difficult question. I’ll try and tell it to you from my point of view. It is a question that I get often asked, and I try to be as concrete as possible—because, for me, he’s the most important person that I’ve met in my life, and will meet. You probably know that he could be very cynical, that he could be very wicked, and that he could be very unjust to people.
 
Everything he did, he did it in excess. He smoked in excess, he drank in excess; he took drugs in excess; he took sleeping pills in excess; and he ate in excess.
To stay on the negative side for a moment, he… he destroyed people. He did that, he really did. Not that he was guilty in the suicide of his one lover, and the hanging of another, but he felt guilty, and it was certainly something to do with him, you know; because people changed when they were around him, totally. They fell totally under his spell.
 
I also fell under his spell. And you let him do things to you that you wouldn’t let anybody else do. And people would ask, “Why, why, do you allow him to do that?” And there was never an answer; people who were not very close to him could never understand that. He had, in the beginning, girls that went into the street as prostitutes for him: actresses—
 
High Times: To keep the theater group going?
 
Schidor: Yeah, to get money, because he liked to drink cognac and champagne. There’s a very famous story—not a secret: He had a flat where he lived with two of his actresses, and he sent them out to fuck with pawnbrokers, with Turks and Greeks; and get twenty marks, thirty marks, for each fuck, and then bring it back to him.
 
And, at the same time—and this is the most important thing—to spend an evening with him was more fascinating than all the humiliations you could get.
 
There was a hypnotical power that made him, for you, not only into an institution of artistic quality, but also—even though he was totally amoral—there could be moments when he would be of such tenderness, and you would feel he would be the only person in your life (more even than your mother) that would understand you, exactly and you would trust him, completely. But then it would happen that, two weeks later, he would totally use that, you know—
 
High Times: What was this fascination based on? The force of his personality?
 
Schidor: Uh-huh. This power of his personality was there, before he ever became a director. He must have had this power when he was fifteen years old—
 
High Times: What about the avant-garde theater troupe in Munich where he started out?
 
Schidor: You see, there was nothing happening in Munich at the time, so the media caught up with them, and people started writing about them. Fassbinder had his first part as an actor there, and he had learned his lines, and he had forgotten them totally.
 
So he was onstage, and he noticed that he couldn’t say the lines, so he just screamed; he changed it all, and made this fifteen-minute speech, and just kept screaming… He could react very quickly. And the media impact of the theater group—AntiTheater—got him the money for his first film.
 
See, what happened to him: when he’d done his first film, Love Is Colder than Death, and that went to the Berlin Film Festival, and it was smashed to pieces—the critics hated it; the people booed. Fassbinder wasn’t interested in that. He wasn’t interested in the booing, and he wasn’t interested in the person who came up and said he liked the film. He knew he was doing the right thing.
 
He had the ability to feel that there was an empty space in the German culture of that time, where he could totally place his feet. And he got money from the subsidies; government money, government grants. He was very good at using the whole system to his best advantage.
 
The industry was nonexistent; you can say that. German cinema, until he came, was really nonexistent.
 
High Times: Was his success the catalyst for other people, like Wenders and Herzog?
 
Schidor: Mmmm-hmmm. Oh, yeah —and they know that. He was the one who—always, up to his death—he was the one who just pushed up his elbows, and went, like a bulldozer. He didn’t care; and he broke it open, also, for all the others. As an example, when he did Third Generation, he was a very distinguished, famous film director already—and, because of the subject matter—terrorism—he didn’t get any money, he was rejected by all the government grants…
 
The actors were already all in Berlin. He’d done already two days of shooting; and he realized there was no money whatsoever. He called the actors together and said, “That’s the situation. You can go home, now. But, if you stay, you won’t get paid.” And then some said yes; some said no—and he did the film. He sent people around to collect money—fifty marks here, a hundred marks there—and he did the film, the credits and finished it. He didn’t wait until he had the film totally financed—he just went ahead.
 
High Times: What were his shooting schedules like?
 
Schidor: Pietra Von Kant, nine days. Hardly any of the earlier films took more than two or three weeks.
 
High Times: How was he able to do this?
 
Schidor: For a long period of time he had the same people. So that was timesaving.
 
High Times: When he started, was he working with crews that were all tyros?
 
Schidor: Yeah, they were all starting out. Nobody knew anything. He was scared; he didn’t know anything, either. And he said he really knew a lot, finally, after the shooting of Berlin Alexanderplatz. So, that was certainly part of the reason why things worked so fast.
 
High Times: What were the dynamics of his film group? Was he able to instill some sort of esprit de corps?
 
Schidor: No. He was a tyrant. He was constantly playing with intrigues between the people. Mind games—all the time. If there would be relationships developing, he would destroy them; or he would start new ones. You know, there was a constant energy that was flowing. People would be humiliated. He would pick on somebody—
 
High Times: Were many of them afraid of him?
 
Schidor: Yes. Yes. And he would interfere totally with their private lives.
 
There was a group of actors that were very close privately, also. His “stock company”: Hanna Schygulla or Günther Kaufmann, Kurt Raab, Harry Baer.
 
Hanna was supposed to play “Lola.” She was at a party at the last day of shooting on Lili Marleen—she had started practicing the songs for Lola already. He told her, “You’re not going to play ‘Lola’.” And she had a nervous breakdown… She really broke up, you know.
 
High Times: She was his biggest star! Did he feel she had to be taken down a peg?
 
Schidor: No. After having done a film like Lili Marleen, his fantasy for her was a bit exhausted. He needed a break. That happened after Effi Brest also. He sent her away. He said, “I can’t see your face anymore.” Then, after Effi Brest, the first thing he did again with her was The Marriage of Maria Braun—which he really did because he had treated her so horribly in the meantime: didn’t answer phone calls, and never called her back.
 
High Times: You’re depicting a very cruel individual. Why was he doing this? For the good of the project?
 
Schidor: I don’t think there was any analysis in what he was doing. He loved playing these games. And he loved intrigues. And he was very childish. And it was very cruel. But then, all these people that he was cruel to, and he was humiliating—they loved him.
 
High Times: He pulled them up?
 
Schidor: He pulled them up, yeah. He really pulled them up. And… I would more than say we were friends; I would say that I—I loved him; which mostly I noticed after he was dead, because… Now there is something missing which… I know I will never meet somebody like that again who will open up things in my head, that nobody else has done before.
 
I realize I’m not being very precise. You see, it’s very, very difficult. Don’t pick on the… When I say all these negative things, you can create a character, and you can say, “Oh, he was horrible.” There was a lot of cynicism and dangerous game-playing. It’s all true, you know, and that was all there. And I’ve seen him do things that were really unbelievable—like hitting people; or, the cutter of Querelle—he came into the cutting room once, because she had made a remark; and he hit her with his leather jacket, and she had a big wound over her face.
 
And then he didn’t speak to her for four weeks. And then he would come and bring her big presents, you know. Or, we would have a fight, and then he would suddenly call up in the middle of the night and say, “Can we go for a walk?” Very sweet and tender, and you would forgive everything.
 
High Times: He sounds like a person who lets everything out.
 
Schidor: Everything. Then, he was completely free.
 
High Times: Isn’t that unusual for German society?
 
Schidor: No, it’s very unusual. He was hated by many, many people—especially in Germany… In the media, he was always loved. He established his place very fast. But with the public—with his TV things, he irritated people a lot.
 
Then there was his appearance: his leather jacket, and torn jeans, and unshaven—that was unusual. Or that he would sit in press conferences, and not be polite. He was never polite. And, at the same time—it’s very complex—with his scruffy dress; it was a false front. He knew that it was effective.
 
High Times: Another interesting thing about his films is their immense catholicity of tastes and interests.
 
Schidor: He could soak a lot of things up without being totally involved. It’s not that he knew a lot about the Third Reich, for example, but if there were certain aspects that interested him, then he would, very fast, learn what he wanted to know. It was not that he read a lot, you know—he read the books that he wanted to read. Alfred Döblin, a German philosopher—he’s one of our classics. And Querelle was one of his favorite books. And Schopenhauer…
 
So, in his bedroom, you would find—with the porno magazines—you would find all of Schopenhauer.
 
High Times: He also had a real flair for cinematic mimicry—
 
Schidor: He had a couple of directors that he knew every film—and one was Douglas Sirk. You can see his influence, especially in Lola and Fear Eats the Soul. Then there were the Michael Curtiz movies—Fassbinder was going to do a book on Curtiz.
 
High Times: How did he work with actors?
 
Schidor: He would never say, “You were good.” Only if something was bad; he would say, “Okay, you have to do that again.” His presence was such that, he made the actor feel—He was very tender; don’t forget that. During shooting, he created an atmosphere of incredible tenderness. Or, if he thought it was needed, he could create an atmosphere of total horror—of really beating, with words and cynicism, the shit out of an actor, to get the performance he wanted.
 
High Times: Fassbinder seemed to have found his financial touch in the last four years.
 
Schidor: But, see, what he did, if you look back, the first films that he’d done—including The Merchant of Four Seasons—were films really treating problems of lower-working-class people—films that the regular cinema audience were not interested in. He changed… He changed, and got his audience’s attention—wider public attention—when he brought in normal middle-class bourgeois subjects.
 
High Times: Why was he working with working-class subjects in the beginning, if that wasn’t actually his background?
 
Schidor: It was not his background, but… When he was living in Cologne, when he was sixteen, seventeen, and he could do what he wanted, he was running around areas where workers were: you know, gay bars. So he was always with that type of people a lot—he liked them. Also, during the shooting of a film, he wouldn’t sit with the staff; he would sit with the lighting people, the electricians. He felt more comfortable there. So that was part of his own personality: he felt very close to them.
 
High Times: Could you talk about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of his lover and his own drug overdose and death? Unless it’s too private—
 
Schidor: No, no. There’s no reason not to do it, because one thing that Fassbinder was always very, very strong about—he always felt that everything private can be made public. There’s no reason not to make anything public.
 
His lover [Armin Maier] was one of these boys that were created in the last year, 1945, in the Action Lebensborn—you know, where the Nazi party put blond men and blond German women together into places—
 
High Times: Breeding grounds?
 
Schidor: Yeah, breeding grounds… They were living together, I think, for five years. He grew up an orphan, and he was adopted by a butcher, in north Bavaria; then came to Munich, and he served as a waiter in a restaurant where we all used to go. And they became lovers, and they moved into one apartment. And then… Fassbinder had written him a letter—(it didn’t work out anymore. He told me that. He said, “The only time when we can understand each other is when we take LSD. That’s the only moment when we can communicate”). It was getting worse and worse between them. Fassbinder had written him a letter that it was all finished.
 
Then, you must know that the lover has acted in a couple of his films— Germany in Autumn and Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven. He introduced him like James Dean in that film: “For the first time on the screen—Armin Maier.” Armin was running around with that letter (Rainer was in Cannes at the time) and showing it to people—because he didn’t understand. It was a very intellectual letter—and then Armin took an overdose of sleeping pills and was found a couple of days later by Fassbinder’s mother, in their flat.
 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder got a real shock out of it; he felt very guilty. And many people blamed him for that—which I believe is wrong. What had happened, of course, the lover had changed a lot. You know, if you live with a very strong personality—he had started copying Fassbinder’s gestures, Fassbinder’s way of speech. And he had lost, sort of, his own identity…
 
And the other lover… You know Ali: Fear Eats the Soul? Remember the Arab guy in it? [El Hedi Ben Salem] He hanged himself in a prison in Marseilles. It was after Fear Eats the Soul, which Fassbinder gave to him as a sort of “goodbye” present. They had been living together a couple of years, also. They even brought up a son from Morocco, the son of Salem, because Fassbinder thought he wanted to start a family—
 
High Times: Was Salem an actor to begin with?
 
Schidor: NO, he was somebody who was working in Paris, hustling in Paris, doing all sorts of things. He had a family with six children in Morocco; and then he met Fassbinder and they lived together in Munich. And then they went down to Morocco and found the family, and took one eight-year-old son up to Germany. And that became impossible, you know—because Fassbinder didn’t take care of the son.
 
The father beat the shit out of the son whenever he got it from Fassbinder. And then the son was given to the girls, you know, to take care of him, and send him to school. And sometimes he was forgotten; forgotten in a flat, and couldn’t get out for three days.
 
Then, after Fear Eats the Soul, they were in Berlin, and they had a fight again, and Salem went out, and he was drunk—he drank a lot—and he stabbed somebody—
 
High Times: And killed them?
 
Schidor: No, he didn’t kill them—but he stabbed somebody in a bar. People got money together, and they sent him off to Paris. And that was the end, you know. He was running around in Paris and saying, “I’m the one. Me, fucking with Fassbinder. Me, star from Fear Eats the Soul.” In Paris he was invited to a couple of parties, and then, some months later, he was caught… I don’t know what he had done—stolen something. And he hanged himself in prison.
 
High Times: Did Fassbinder express any inner torment over all of this?
 
Schidor: Yeah, sure. He didn’t express it outwardly… There was one situation—it was after Querelle, I think—and he had these wonderful dinner parties, Fassbinder. He had this flat in Munich, and he absolutely adored caviar—he would spend thousands of marks on caviar every month; and invite people, and everybody would get a big piece of caviar.
 
He would spend money like mad, buying presents. And then Kurt Raab (who played the lead in The Stationmaster’s Wife and Satan’s Brew, and was the art director on many of the films) finally took care of this son that Fassbinder and the Arab guy had brought over from Algeria—and the son’s in prison now, also, because he got into drugs and drug-dealing. Fassbinder made a remark at that dinner: “Oh, Kurt, when you want to see your friends, you have to visit them in prison.”
 
And then Kurt, who was already a little bit drunk, said: “Oh, Rainer, when you want to visit your friends, you have to go to the cemetery.” And Fassbinder looked—and it really goes like a knife into him. He really… He really suffered from that. He would never speak about it.
 
To come back to your first question: around that time of Armin’s death, he was really depressed, always. But, and I’m damned quite sure about it, it has nothing to do with Fassbinder dying.
 
High Times: The suggestion wasn’t suicide, but that his recurring depressions would drive him to excesses—

 

Schidor: Yeah. Don’t forget: if you say that it was an overdose—certainly, medically, at that moment when he died, it was an overdose—but he didn’t die by accident, through an overdose. He was physically, totally—run down.

 It was a horrible thing for the insurance companies to get him to a doctor. He had the idea that he would be stronger than nature. He would sit there with his fat stomach, eating, drinking; smoking dope the whole time; taking really large amounts of cocaine; and then say, “I’m going to prove it. The energy I have is so strong, I cannot die. What would happen to the energy I have?” He said that to me at Cannes… You know, we all knew it.

 We knew it was not possible, what he was doing. It is really impossible—and he has to die. Everybody knew that, for many years. The excesses were so strong. And then, at one point, you just said, “Well, maybe he is right, maybe this is a miracle. Maybe he’s so strong that he gets away with it…”
 
High Times: If he’d lived through it, do you think he would have changed? Or would he just have gone on to the end?
 
Schidor: Probably. He started his self-destruction many, many years ago.
 
High Times: Why?
 
Schidor: One thing was… When he did not film, he did not know what to do with himself. He went on these erratic trips for three days to the Dominican Republic, or two days to New York—you know, spending huge amounts of money on first-class air tickets; taking somebody along; hating it after three days.
 
The last time I was in New York with him, and we were really alone the whole time, he did not… He went to the sauna one time, but the sex was nothing very positive. That was his last year, you know, the year of Querelle.
 
High Times: So that’s why he kept up this furious activity?
 
Schidor: Yeah, that’s why. I really was so shocked… I didn’t believe—I knew he was really run down, already, in New York; and then we went to Cannes for the film festival. And he wouldn’t go to bed before six o’clock. All the arrangements for the cocaine: there was all sorts of people spending huge amounts of money. And then he would get up at maybe nine or ten. And one night he stayed at my hotel at Cannes because the next morning, at nine o’clock, there was a reception of the German Export Union.
 
So, it was six o’clock in the morning, and he sent his assistant up to the pension to get his white suit to be able to go there; and he slept in my room. And we were reading to each other. And he was taking this very strong sleeping pill called Mandrax, which is like a Quaalude. So he was taking three Quaaludes, three Valium 10, and he was having all these very strong Bloody Marys that he ordered by room service at the same time. Then he said to me: ”See, if that doesn’t work in about fifteen minutes, I’m going to take the same amount again.”…
 
So, fifteen minutes later, he took three again, and three Valium 10 again. And in between, don’t forget, he always had lines of cocaine. So then he said—very proud, like a little child, very proud: “If you would take that, you would be dead already.” But proud, you know—
 
High Times: Did he indulge in anything else?
 
Schidor: LSD, but not so much. Once in a while—twice a month, three times a month.
 
High Times: Would he use these on the set?
 
Schidor: LSD, no. Cocaine… Fassbinder wouldn’t do hallucinogenic drugs on the set, but he would do lots of alcohol—Jim Beam always—full glasses, beer glasses full of Jim Beam. He would finish two bottles of Jim Beam a day, during shooting. He would never be drunk; I’ve never seen him drunk… And there would always be marijuana or hash that he would smoke on the set.
 
High Times: Did anyone ever go to him and say, “Look, you’re killing yourself”?
 
Schidor: Yeah, but then you have to know, to try and talk to him and say, “Listen, Rainer, you know what you’re doing to your body is… Come on, now; you have time now, four weeks—go to the Swiss clinic. It’s wonderful; we’ll come with you…” All this we talked about constantly, that we have to do that—And after his death, of course, there came this guilt thing.
 
Ingrid Caven, who was his wife, was a very good friend of mine, told me that… Don’t forget, he was a real little bourgeois, also. When they were living in this house, and Ingrid Caven came in and he liked her, he asked her to sleep with him.
 
And she said, “I like this guy. I didn’t find him especially attractive—he’s fat, and he has lots of pimples… But I went up to his flat. The weirdest thing was when I came down for breakfast … He had just moved in there, and there were about eight people sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen; and Fassbinder had put on a suit, and he was sitting at the top of the table—and they were all waiting for me to come down. When I came down he allowed them to start breakfast; now, I was his property.”
 
Then they got married and he didn’t want her to work anymore. He said, “My wife doesn’t have to work.” And she said, “I was going crazy. What is this? What have I got myself into?” He was like a real—like a husband.
 
High Times: It seems he’s got this strong bourgeois character matrix; and then, when he doesn’t hold on to that, he just spins out of control.
 
Schidor: Totally. So he punished her for it… She wanted a divorce.
 
High Times: It’s almost as if he’s punishing himself for being a bad boy—
 
Schidor: All the time, all the time.
 
High Times: What was his family life like?
 
Schidor: His father was a doctor, and he built apartment houses which he rented to foreign workers from Greece and Turkey, where he put eight people in one room, and got lots of them—really exploited them. And Fassbinder, as a boy, was sent around to the flats to collect the money. And his mother was always sick, and she was translating; and he was given money to go to the cinema.
 
He saw… Since he was six (he didn’t go to school much), he saw five films a day for years. Then he left home—he didn’t do his high-school graduation—and he applied to go to the Berlin Film Institute. He made his application, he made his test—and he failed it. They didn’t accept him.
 
High Times: How old was he?
 
Schidor: Eighteen. Then he started acting classes, when he was very young. He never heard anything from his parents, and only after his name was in the papers, suddenly his mother called him. And since then, he casts his mother also—his mother is in his films. It remained a very strong relationship… She was in Lili Marleen (as Mel Ferrer’s wife).
 
That’s the type of family he came from. He always accused her of trying to kill him. That was his pleasure—he would accuse her of giving him sour apples when he was a child, so he would eat the sour apples and die. And she would start crying and say, “Maybe I gave you once a sour apple, but I didn’t want to—” “Yes! You wanted to kill me!”
 
…You know, I’m telling you… You make me tell you all these things…
 
High Times: Listen, I admire Fassbinder’s films so much that it doesn’t—
 
Schidor: That’s what I hope! I hope you get that straight, you know—
 
High Times: It’s also sort of a corrective, you know, because I was so shocked at his death. It seemed such an immense loss…
 
Schidor: It is! It is!
 
High Times: …to have this torrent of creativity cut off when he was at his greatest…
 
Schidor: Yes. You will see it in Querelle! He was at his greatest…
 
High Times: …so, you’re not blackening his name—
 
Schidor: No. That it is the last thing I would want, because I think he’s the greatest—not only film—I think he’s one of the greatest artists that Germany has had after the war. And for me, personally, he was the most lovable and exciting and haunting and despicable and wonderful person I have ever known in my life.
 
High Times: If you have someone who doesn’t repress anything, who lets everything out, you get the bad as well as the good. No one has a pure soul…
 
Schidor: Mmm-hmmm. I think you feel that—you see that in The Wizard. You see both sides in The Wizard. You see this incredible tenderness, and the great artist. And you see also the cynicism. And in Querelle, it is a big-budget movie—and, at the same time, it is like… this very private film…
 
He didn’t film the novel; he made his own subjective meditation on Genet’s novel. When you see Querelle, you see that there is really somebody who—after the ”woman” films—started something totally new—
 
High Times: So you think he was going through a great new period?
 
Schidor: Yes.
 
High Times: What, for you, were the high points of his career?
 
Schidor: My favorite films are The Merchant of Four Seasons, In a Year of 13 Moons. I do like Satan’s Brew a lot. And Querelle. Those four.
 
High Times: Could you talk about Querelle?
 
Schidor: Well, I tell you one thing which I think is incredible about the film which has provoked a lot of scandal and irritation and aggressiveness—in Italy it is still forbidden—They wanted to have twenty-five minutes cut out of the film. There are three specific scenes they want to cut out.
 
There are two sex scenes, where you don’t see anything, really. The provocation, the pornography, happens in the mind of the viewer (if you want it, it’s there). But Fassbinder did something… He did two very, very erotic scenes in Querelle, although you don’t see a cock or an ass, but everything is there. And those scenes they wanted to cut out—
 
High Times: It would seem that the censors are distressed more at the mixture of sexuality and politics than explicit sex—
 
Schidor: Yes, Querelle is a very political film. Without being anything openly political; but it’s political in the sense that… What Fassbinder wanted was certainly not a film about homosexuality. After Fox and His Friends he wasn’t really that interested in homosexuality.
 
High Times: Well, Fox and His Friends isn’t really about homosexuality—
 
Schidor: No, it’s about exploitation and power relationships among men. Okay—and in Querelle there is a strong homosexual aspect in the film that did not interest him in the least. What interested him in the film was—and he says that in the interview, very clearly—what he wanted to show is that if you want to be free and be happy, you have to find your own identity.
 
So, to find your own identity, he believed, with Genet, this fact: that you have to invent yourself once more. And how better can you invent yourself once more than in a brother or in somebody that you love? In Querelle, the brother and the person that Querelle thinks he loves (and then, when he realizes that, he murders) are played by the same actor (Hanno Pöschl).
 
High Times: It’s likely that Querelle will eventually become a cult film in the States—in fact, you might even pray for a few violent denunciations—
 
Schidor: Yeah, yeah! At first I was really disturbed; now I like it when people get really: “Aaagh! This is horrible!” And you know what? Many gays hate the film.
 
High Times: What was your relationship with him like during the shooting?
 
Schidor: I’ll tell you an example and you can see. He had insisted that he get paid every day in cash. He loved cash; he hated checks. He got paid in cash every morning before shooting. He started shooting the film at eight—
 
High Times: Did he always do this?
 
Schidor: No, not on his own films that he produced. (And he had lots of money trouble.) So I had to give him, every morning, between six and seven thousand dollars in cash. And then there was a morning when I didn’t have the money. (We had money problems because the financing, when we started, was not totally set; I had only part of the money, but we had to start.) Then he said, “You know, I can lend you the money. I can give you thirty or forty thousand marks.”
 
High Times: He wanted the ritual?
 
Schidor: He wanted the ritual, yeah. And I must say, without him, the film would have been impossible. The financial problems were really so horrible.
 
High Times: Is that generally a problem with German films?
 
Schidor: No, with this film it was especially tough. We had an oral promise from the Berlin government that they would give a grant of five hundred thousand dollars. And then the Christian Democratic Government—they thought they could make a profile in front of their Conservative-party base and say, “We are not going to support this dirty movie, even though it’s Fassbinder.”
 
He had just gotten the Golden Bear in Berlin for Veronika Voss. And then it became a total political situation: the Liberal party then fought against the Christian Democrats. They were a coalition, and they threatened to break up the government.
 
High Times: Over Querelle?
 
Schidor: Over Querelle. It was a question that was raised in the Berlin senate. Fassbinder had to sign things that he would make the film so eighteen-and sixteen-year-olds could go to see it— that he would not do any explicit sex. He signed everything, he didn’t give a shit. And then once they called him up and said, “We don’t believe that this is his signature.”
 
And I was sitting in his room. I said, “Rainer, they don’t believe that you signed this thing: that you were going to do the film for sixteen-year-olds.” He took the receiver and he screamed at the director for Economic Relations at the senate: “I’m coming over there with my passport to prove to you that it’s my signature!”
 
You know, he did all these things to make the movie possible. We got rejected from most of government grants. It was privately financed and it had cost over two and a half million dollars—which, for a German film, is a lot of money… Nobody gets normal salaries: neither Brad Davis nor Jeanne Moureau nor Franco Nero… And also, for The Wizard, he helped me.
 
High Times: Do you think there’s any chance that the same kind of unfortunate thing will happen that happened to Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams: that critics will say the documentary is superior to its subject?
 
Schidor: That happened with The Wizard also. People have called me and said, “I like the film much better than Querelle“—which is a stupid thing to say. These are people that can’t do anything with Querelle… You can’t compare the two things. What is nice about The Wizard is the Fassbinder interview; but I had a lot of problems with his mother. She wanted me to cut it.
 
High Times: Why?
 
Schidor: I don’t know, it was a combination of reasons. First of all, he had just died. He looks… In the last months of his life, he was not very attractive in the normal sense. I never thought Fassbinder was ugly, because he had these wonderful eyes, you know—these eyes that made up for everything. It was never… “ugliness” is the wrong word to describe it. But he was not attractive in the normal sense like a mother would like to see her son. Then the mother has had this horror, and she has decided that, now, after the death, “My son was never a homosexual.”
 
High Times: She’s decided that it’s some huge lie?
 
Schidor: Yeah—It’s a typical “mother” thing to try to put her son—to “rebourgeois” him. And I try to explain to her—I said, “You’re doing the wrong thing. You are trying to put Rainer on a pure pedestal. He doesn’t belong there. You make him smaller in doing that. Don’t you understand that if you don’t leave this big mountain that he was, you know—this big, powerful mountain—all the facets a personality can have… That is part of the greatness of him. And if you try to smooth him out into a bourgeois person that actually wanted nothing more than having a happy life with children, then you’re destroying your own son.”
 
High Times: How did the rest of his “company” react to his death?
 
Schidor: Total shock. Shock and… a mixture of shock and relief. Which might seem strange to you. When I say “relief,” I don’t mean they were not sad, but a burden was taken off their backs at the same time that there was a very, very big loss…
 
High Times: What did he think of his German contemporaries?
 
Schidor: Fassbinder? He didn’t have any contact with anyone. I asked him that in the interview, and he had a very good answer. He looks. And he smiles: “We’re all good friends. All friends.”
 
High Times: It’s interesting—Herzog and Fassbinder are sort of the antithesis of each other.
 
Schidor: Yeah, Fitzcarraldo and Querelle, both films about ships. You know, there’s a funny scene, when Fassbinder and I were at Cannes, and Fitzcarraldo was in official competition. And at the night of the film we were just walking on the street by the beach near the Hotel Carlton. We were going across by the hotel and we see maybe thirty, forty photographers walking backwards; and then Werner Herzog in a black suit, and Claudia Cardinale coming over to the screening.
 
And Fassbinder and I were standing in the middle, by some palm trees… They were passing us, and he was out of his mind. He kept… The first thing he’d tell me, “You should have seen them in Venice! There were at least three times as many photographers! What a ridiculous thing, to go to a film about a ship. It’s enough to make you sick…” And really going on and on, really furious that Herzog got all this attention.
 
They hardly said “Hello” to each other, you know. Herzog would come— we were sitting in a bar—and Herzog would come in. They would sort of look, and look away: Herzog and Fassbinder. There was no relationship at all.
 
High Times: It’s too bad—they’re both great directors.
 
Schidor: Yes… Fassbinder thought so, too.
 
High Times: I understand you know Leni Riefenstahl. What is she like?
 
Schidor: For a year we have been in contact—through Querelle, by the way. Fassbinder and I wanted her to do the still photography on Querelle, and she wanted to do it, also. And then she couldn’t, because she had a contract to film sharks underwater. And then Fassbinder died; and she wrote a wonderful letter.
 
She admired him a lot; she loved his films. And then about three weeks ago I went to see her for the first time. I came to the house on the south of Munich. I expected an old woman—she’s eighty. And there was this creature running down the stairs like a teenaged girl. Of course, she had the old face, but there was a vitality.
 
That Sunday afternoon that I was there… She’s very old; you know, old people—they lose barriers. Something happens, I think it’s a chemical reaction. They become… They talk freely about sex, and they talk freely about things they wouldn’t normally mention.
 
And she said, “You know, what Susan Sontag writes about me—that I always portray the athletes as gods because I keep shooting from low angles? You know what the reason was? In the Olympic stadium, in 1936, the walls were covered with German cognac advertisements; and I didn’t want that on the picture—so I had to put the cameras into the ground and shoot up. That was the only way to avoid them!”
 
High Times: How does Riefenstahl look on the Nazi period?
 
Schidor: Well, I tell you one thing. She said, “Schidor, I tell you—I said this to Albert Speer after his book came out. You know, I like Albert, and I said, ‘How could you write these stupid things? How could you portray it so negative?’ …As for me, I was under his spell. In March 1945, I would have had my hands cut off to get a smile from Hitler.” And she says that out, totally openly—
 
High Times: How does she feel about Hitler now?
 
Schidor: Oh, I think she’s changed. Don’t forget that that was the greatest time in her life. And he was the most fascinating person to her.
 
The older I get and the more I know about it, the more I keep asking my relatives and my parents and everybody I can get ahold of—the less explicable it becomes to me: this whole era of those twelve years. The thing that really troubles me—also when I speak to my parents, who come from a little village in Eastern Prussia—when I say, “Well, what did you think when Herr and Frau Lubenstein were not there anymore?” They say, “We don’t know…” And I say, “Well, didn’t you think it was strange that Jews were not allowed to sit on benches anymore?”
 
The same with Leni Riefenstahl, when she goes on about, “I didn’t know anything about concentration camps…” Bullshit! That’s not the point: What was going on was going on since 1933. If there’s a sign that JEWS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER THIS BUS and Jews go and go and go and don’t come back, you don’t have to know about concentration camps.
 
High Times: What’s inexplicable is that the whole humanistic German tradition of art and philosophy and music seems to have somehow evaporated during this period. Where did it go? What happened?
 
Schidor: Where did it go? Right. Good question.
 
 
High Times Greats: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Interviewed by Dieter Schidor (1983).   High Times, May 28, 2021
 
 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a filmmaker prolific to the point of being a workaholic. From 1969 to 1982 he directed over 40 productions, most of them feature films, a few TV specials and one huge 931-minute TV mini-series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979-80). More remarkable than this perhaps is that these films were nearly all written or adapted for the screen by Fassbinder himself. He was also art director on most of the early films, editor or co-editor on a lot of them (often credited as Franz Walsh), and he acted in nine of his own films as well as for other directors. On top of this, he occasionally performed many other roles such as cinematographer and producer on a small number of them. His films tackle a wide variety of topics and, to be frank, range from the astounding to the amateur. They give an incisive picture of post-war Germany, at first through ironic and nearly plotless deconstructions/pastiches of Hollywood genre cinema with a formally experimental and astute provocative political edge, yet they remain relevant to urban life in contemporary times and human relationships. Some of the films (especially the ones centring on a group rather than a single victim figure) are also endowed with a decidedly dark and sardonic sense of humour.

 

Though his films were often very compassionate studies of outsiders unwanted by society for reasons beyond their control, he was publicly notorious for being a difficult man, and deliberately cultivated an image of being a rather dislikeable figure. If his work displays a deep understanding of the bitter power struggles of those apparently in love it is because he practised those cruel games himself, not just in his relationships but also in the stock company of actors that clung to him (although to be fair it does seem that his closest associates were weak people with a penchant for masochism and backstabbing). However, a self-awareness of his own torturous personality is also the source of his undeniable genius. Fassbinder made no bones about the fact that he was an oppressor and had compassion for both victims and victimisers (often one and the same). In this light, his work is both a unique personal catharsis and a break from the crude moralising of directors who look down on the fiends they create for dramatic purpose (many of his most monstrous creations are self-portraits). His work, inspired by his own feelings of rejection and alienation as left-leaning and overweight bi-sexual in the repressive new ‘economic miracle’ of West Germany, was forever willing to tackle difficult subject matter such as terrorism, racial tension, alienation, class exploitation (on the political left as well as right), trans-sexuality and masochism in a provocative but non-sensationalist manner. As Gilbert Adair has noted, Fassbinder was also one of the most personal filmmakers in the history of the medium, particularly exploring his sexuality with unmatched candour.

 

There are three distinct phases to his career. The first ten or so movies (1969 -1971) were an extension of his work in the theatre, shot with an almost always static camera and with deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue. The second phase is the one that brought him international attention, with films modelled, to ironic effect, on the melodramas Douglas Sirk made for Universal in the 1950s, films which use (usually working class) victims to explore how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientation, politics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday fascism of family life and friendship. The final batch of films, from around 1977 until his death, were more varied, with international actors sometimes used and the stock company disbanded (although the casts of some films were still filled with Fassbinder regulars). He became increasingly more idiosyncratic in terms of plot, form and subject matter in movies like Satan’s Brew (1976), In a Year with 13 Moons (1978), The Third Generation (1979) and Querelle (1982). He also refined his ‘victim cycle’ in more cinematic terms and articulated his themes in the bourgeois milieu with his trilogy about women in post-fascist Germany (see below). His masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz was also made in this period. Obviously to go into detail about all these films would take a book so therefore I have decided to look at some films from each of these cycles and some of the more idiosyncratic ones mentioned above.

 

Katzelmacher

 

Produced by his ‘Antiteater’ company (the theatre group in which he cut his teeth as a writer), Fassbinder’s first feature length film Love is Colder Than Death (1969) already showed that he had Godardian talent by deconstructing the gangster film genre. However, unlike Godard, its desolate and lonely worldview made the film’s content more than just a celebration of cinephilia. Katzelmacher (Cock Artist, 1969) went much further in its social critique with the unsurprising story (of a Greek immigrant) given a stylistically bare and stage-bound treatment which only enhanced its sad poetry.

 

Two of the best works of this period are Beware of a Holy Whore and The American Soldier (both 1970), the former a black comedy of difficult movie making and sexual frustration, the latter quite possibly the best of his gangster films. Holy Whore, based like so many Fassbinder movies on a personal experience – the shooting of his earlier Whitey (1970) – shows a film crew beset by production problems, waiting for the director and star to show up, and they slowly try to destroy each other. The pet subjects of (lack of) self-expression, masochism, cruelty, unresponsive and obsessive love-interests all crop up. And it ends with typical Fassbinder-esque brutal irony (never the subtlest of directors) as the crew – working on a film about state-sanctioned violence – gang up on the director. The American Soldier is pretty much a remake of his partly botched Gods of the Plague (1969), the minimal and unrealistic plot and stylistic poverty heightening the mood of depressed urban life as the eponymous hit man of the title (actually a German, played by Karl Scheydt) goes about wiping out half the Munich underworld for the corrupt police. An assured genre mood piece and document of suppressed emotion (it plays like an Aki Kaurismäki blueprint), like many Fassbinder films it is littered with great characters and lines, and an absolutely killer ending.

 

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

 

In 1971 Fassbinder helped organise a Douglas Sirk retrospective and got to meet the great man who had by now returned to Germany. This must have surely been the spark that set the second cycle of his work off – to make “Germany Hollywood films”. After The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) came The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), which was based, like Katzelmacher, on a Fassbinder play. The film is a claustrophobic hothouse melodrama set in the apartment of the fashion designer of the title, both a provocative comment on the representation of ‘love’ in Hollywood women’s weepies and a tribute to the garish genre itself. At the time The Bitter Tears. must have marked the arrival of an important new artist. Petra (Margit Carstensen) wallows in her own grief at being jilted by a young wife she fell for whilst mistreating her devoted and subservient assistant Marlene (Irm Herrmann). The film works remarkably well as an expose of the lies that relationships (parent / child, master / servant, lovers, etc.) can be founded on, especially the lies in those idealised cinematic representations of relationships we often consume and take for truth. It also says a lot about the way we can let ourselves be abused by others in the hope of gaining their love, or out of fear of being alone. Only the obvious ending of Marlene walking out when Petra promises to be better to her and Michael Ballhaus’ sometimes imprecise camera movements (probably due to Fassbinder wanting to shoot it in 10 days, a usual feat even on location for him) are sour points.

 

Fox and his Friends

 

Following Martha (1973), his Sirkian abstraction on the cruelty of a bourgeois marriage, and the justly famous immigrant drama (extended from an anecdote in The American Soldier) Fear Eats the Soul (1973), came Fox and his Friends (1974). Fassbinder, in his only self-directed starring role, plays Fox, a recently unemployed former fairground worker. Again working within the limits of Hollywood melodrama (though the film is partially based on the plight of his then lover Armin Meier, to whom the film is dedicated), the unlikely event of a lottery win proves to be Fox’s downfall when he is picked up and systematically exploited by a group of middle class homosexuals in financial trouble. The film is notable for its then controversial but now revelatory presentation of gay relationships to be not that different from straight ones, and also Fassbinder’s remarkably believable performance as the unlucky Fox. However, Fassbinder himself was aware that he was repeating himself, and Fox is one of the most obvious of the victim cycle. He would rarely tackle the subject of victimised innocence again, and never again so plainly and naturalistically.

 

Chinese Roulette

 

For many years Fassbinder had been saying he would try to stop interfering with others’ lives and maybe this is a reason for the Fassbinder stock company’s demise around the time of Satan’s Brew and Chinese Roulette (1976). These films both explore group behaviour in an extremely critical way. The first is a grotesque and surely autobiographical melodrama that turns the victim formula on its head when it is revealed that the plagiarist, self-obsessed protagonist (Kurt Raab) enjoys his torture. The intentionally unrealistic satire Chinese Roulette takes a scalpel to marriage with a definite intent, however only the final guessing game, which gives the film its name, hits the right note of cruelty, irony and truthfulness. It is worth mentioning that it was around this time that Fassbinder came to use drugs more and more, which finally resulted in an incredible daily intake of alcohol, sleeping pills and cocaine. However, it seems his general impatience and argumentative nature was as much to blame as his substance abuse for any unevenness in the later films (this problem was apparent in the earlier films too when he was, according to Hanna Schygulla, weary of drugs). (1)

 

Working for the first time for television since Nora Helmer in 1973, I Only Want You to Love Me (1976) has been seen as a key text in relation to the director’s lonely childhood (a severe lack of maternal love, few friends and no father-figure marked him for life). The protagonist Peter (Vitus Zeplichal) seeks to buy love but this only leads to accusations of stealing and total ingratitude from his mother who blames him for her miserable life. Peter eventually becomes a murderer (making an interesting comparison with L’Argent [Robert Bresson, 1983]) but it would seem that the film’s painful scenes of its protagonist trying to buy love are autobiographical.

 

In a Year with 13 Moons

 

Fassbinder spent recklessly on friends and the little family he had (famously, lover Gunter Kaufman smashed up four Lamborghinis in a year) and this was a recurrent theme in his work which reached its most tragic variation with In a Year with 13 Moons. This film combines irony with a great deal of heartfelt feeling as it tells the story of transsexual Elvira / Erwin (Volker Spengler), who on a love-interest’s whim goes to Casablanca for the operation. However, when s/he is later rejected, s/he admits s/he has ruined his/her life. The character of the recently wealthy ‘capitalist bloodsucker’ Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), who Elvira had the operation in hope of love from, is unseen for more than half the film’s length, making it all the more powerful when he is revealed in tennis shorts and shirt impersonating Jerry Lewis on television. The strange lighting effects and often fragmented and dark compositions place this among Fassbinder’s most experimental films and one of his most harsh and sincere investigations of minority urban life. Indeed the film was explicitly personal, a reaction to Armin Meier’s suicide. He wrote, directed, shot, designed and edited it. Like in the earlier films where the space for personal monologue and storytelling is expanded for even very minor characters, Elvira’s brutally honest tape-recorded interview in the final moments combines with the image for one of Fassbinder’s most moving and penetrating moments in one of his best films.

 

Slightly before 13 Moons came the first part of his trilogy on ‘the entire history of the Federal German Republic’ (a worthy title for his entire oeuvre) and his biggest international success The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). It is probably best to look at this film with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982) as they all centre on women in WW2 and its aftermath – a wife looking for her missing husband, a cabaret artist caught between two powerful men and a washed up Third Reich film star. These films offer careful analysis of the social make-up of those years in terms of dissidence and the changing and unchanging nature of Germany through that period. Fassbinder’s greatest achievement is perhaps his ability to put everyday life onto screen in short sagacious parables. Stylistically these films are more assured than before (not least because of bigger budgets) as Xaver Schwarzenberger’s masterly camerawork and Rolf Zehetbauer’s production design for Veronika Voss attest.

 

The Third Generation

 

Fassbinder’s seething politics was never far from view in all his films and, like Buñuel, but unlike so many other ‘political filmmakers’, he hated liberal compromises. Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven (1975) is a provocative attack on left-wing exploitation, while The Third Generation, a response to the Baader-Meinhof deaths, scandalised both the left and right. Revolving around the concept that the state could invent left-wing terrorists to conceal its own growing totalitarianism and returning to the tradition of Satan’s Brew, The Third Generation revels in visual grotesquery. The script’s intelligent provocations, the cluttered form (shades of 13 Moons) and the excellent performances mark it as a major work. One of Fassbinder’s most personal statements was his segment for the compilation film by the New German Cinema about the aforementioned terrorist crisis, Germany in Autumn (1978). Fassbinder is shown arguing with his mother, who he coaxes into making some reactionary statements, and mistreating the soon-to-be-dead Armin. This segment remains one of the most personal and self-revealing pieces of film that Fassbinder ever made, and therefore one of the most revealing confessional statements by a director in the history of the medium.

 

Berlin Alexanderplatz

 

Although films like Despair (1977) and Lili Marleen (1980) became increasingly garish, Fassbinder’s masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz was a naturalistic adaptation of Doblin’s novel. It shows, through unanimously great performances, cinematography and direction, how a man through his personal faults and an unmerciful society is unable to fulfil himself. An obvious subject one might say, but given its length (931 minutes) and director’s incredible incisive understanding of its themes (the book was Fassbinder’s lifelong inspiration, the epilogue is an astounding personal meditation on his feelings about the protagonist), it is in Tony Rayns’ words “the work of a genuine master with nothing left to lose or hide”. (2)

 

The last film Fassbinder made was also from an esteemed literary source, however whereas before the book/play adaptations he had made were from writers with a certain classicism and narrative clarity (Ibsen, Graf and Nabokov, for instance), Jean Genet’s novels, especially Querelle de Brest, are deliberately fractured and difficult. Although Dieter Schidor approached him to make the film, he rewrote the script with Burkhard Driest (who also plays Mario) and got regular production designer Rolf Zehetbauer onto the project. Zehetbauer’s work on Querelle is quite remarkable, the studio set of the ports of Brest is bathed in a decadent orange glow like the town is on heat (complete with unsubtle phallic architecture, seamy sailors and perverse bars and brothels). Fassbinder never matches the provocative intellectual vision of Genet’s remarkable novel but captures the mood of his writing through the stylised presentation. Whereas a number of the novel’s most brilliant scenes had to, understandably, be cut from the film version, the narrator’s grating American accent works quite beautifully to suggest the characters’ suppressed emotion and sexuality and the fade-to-white quotations device also works well with the dream-like presentation. Querelle is not one of Fassbinder’s best movies, however the critics who have suggested that is laughable and a bore had best check out Genet’s writings (which I doubt they have) as it captures his bizarre and morally ambivalent world with some force. As Genet biographer and celebrated author Edmund White has written, film is a medium that often has difficulty in translating writers like Genet “unless the director establishes from the first shot that everything, from lighting to sets to action, is to be stylised – which is precisely what Fassbinder does with his magisterial adaption of Querelle“. (3)

 

Querelle

 

Shortly after finishing that film Fassbinder was found dead in his Munich apartment. It wasn’t, as had been reported, suicide, but his suicidal lifestyle had finally caught up with him – cocaine and alcohol-use in particular had caused his heart to fail after only 37 years. Unlike the case of Jean Vigo, for instance, it is hard to call his early demise a tragedy, for he made some 30-odd feature films. But it is interesting to wonder about what the ’80s and ’90s Fassbinder would have done – it’s hard to imagine him ever settling down to direct mainstream fare or classical European art movies. His next film was to be I’m the Happiness of This Earth, a drama about three failed detectives set in a discotheque. It is intriguing to wonder if the strange stylisation of Querelle would have been extended to say something about demoralised contemporary times. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s productivity was such that some movies are almost impossible to see; personally I am still yearning to see Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972) and World on a Wire (1973) amongst others. And I haven’t been able to mention in this essay such works as Effi Briest (1974) or Bolweiser (1977).

 

If, finally, Fassbinder is not one of the most endearing directors, he remains a remarkable figure for both his unwavering commitment to a socially aware cinema and his rare capacity to use the packaging, the form and, to some degree, the content of Hollywood cinema to produce passionate artistic and political statements. There is no other director whose work constitutes the history of a (now defunct) country, West Germany, in personal everyday terms. Through a series of variations on the themes of (lack of) liberty, freedom and individuality, he was able to explore the disappointments and cruelties of urban life. His work shows the horrifyingly bare and mechanical reality of family and working life of society if it allows materialism to become more important than its inhabitants. This had (and has) lessons for us all, and not just regarding ’70s Germany. Fassbinder was that rarity – a truly (and repeatedly) dangerous director.

 

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. By  Joe Ruffell. Senses of Cinema,   May 2002  (Great Directors Issue 20)