There is no other filmmaker more overwhelming and excessive than Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder Studies could be a whole academic department unto itself. Operating for a span of just thirteen years (1969-1982), the German director made over forty films, as well as TV mini-series’ and stage plays. During this brief time, his work has an early, middle, and late period similar to other filmmakers’ careers that spanned five or six decades. It is daunting to imagine what he could have accomplished if he stayed alive to be in his late-seventies today. Despite the all consuming hazards that filled his lifestyle, he is possibly the most inspirational of all artists because of his perpetual productivity. For about twenty years now I have considered RWF my favorite film director, but I have not spent much time writing about his films, possibly because of their astounding scope.* His career is full of unique and groundbreaking masterpieces, but his flawed work is often just as engaging due to its sheer audacity. This month I’ll be focusing on four specific perspectives on his career, knowing that I will inevitably have to return to other instances later. For right now I am focusing on a few specific titles from his early career, which spanned eleven films over two years, beginning with Love is Colder than Death (1969) and going until Beware of a Holy Whore (1971).
During my second year of college I took a class called New German Cinema, which in retrospect, was life changing. Looking back, the most distinct moment was watching my first Fassbinder film, The American Soldier (1970). I feel like most of my classmates didn’t really know what to think, but from the opening scene I knew I had found the cinema I had been seeking. It starts in a dim, cramped room where three men drink beer, chainsmoke, and play poker with a pornographic card deck, all while a woman lounges in the foreground, painting her toenails. Fassbinder shows us these gangsters who turn out to be policemen, taking a hint from Fritz Lang’s M (1930), one of Germany’s greatest films. It is the kind of setup that we see in only the best film noirs, which are unafraid to critique the amoral politics of the police and the society they answer to.
The titular American soldier is Ricky (Karl Scheydt), although it is clear that he isn’t American at all. It is an example of the artificiality found all over Fassbinder’s work, which presents people and situations to us, as if almost daring us to accept and believe what is before our eyes. Ricky is a loner just drifting through life in Munich after returning from Vietnam--but which post-war life is the film really commenting on? He crosses paths with other gangsters, sex workers, and family members, all while the police slowly close in. Ian Penman quotes Fassbinder in his recent book Thousands of Mirrors: “[T]he gangster environment is a bourgeois setting turned on its head, so to speak. My gangsters do the same things that capitalists do except they do them as criminals. The gangster’s goals are just as bourgeois as the capitalist’s [sic].” (128) Much of RWF’s early work uses the generic gangster template found in films noirs, in order to comment on something much larger--the capitalist corruption of post-World War II Germany. It is a recurring theme that can also be seen in his later films like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). But in The American Soldier it allows for a big theme to go with the barebones budget and plot.
In his early films like Love is Colder than Death (1969), Gods of the Plague (1970), and The American Soldier it is evident that Fassbinder is still learning how to make films. The earliest film has very basic but beautiful long takes. By Gods of the Plague we see that he has learned editing techniques, quickly becoming proficient like a natural filmmaker. By The American Soldier Fassbinder and his dedicated, family-like crew aligned all of the elements to create something that looked like a “real” movie, less than a year after they started. At the time I first saw the movie, I was delighted by the self-aware innovation, but did not realize just how dramatically different it was from the vast majority of movies being made in the early 1970s. These movies are the kind of thing that enthusiastic young film students love.
The early films owe a clear debt to French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who completely upended world cinema with Breathless in 1960. Love is Colder than Death could be considered Fassbinder’s Breathless, although it contains a dedicated bleakness not found in the earlier, more easy going movie. The American Soldier can be likened to something like Band of Outsiders (1964) or even Alphaville (1965). All of these movies have a meta quality of knowing that they are movies, and much like the early French New Wave, Fassbinder was unafraid to reference mainstream and Hollywood cinema. For example, The American Soldier has one scene that is clearly influenced by the fortune teller in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), only in Fassbinder’s film Marlene Deitrich is replaced by Ulli Lommel as the effeminate Tony el Gitano. Other scenes are audacious in their diversion from industry cinema, like in a scene where Ricky has sex with a prostitute. They are quickly obscured behind a maid--played by Margarethe von Trotta, another formidable German film director--who sits at the end of the bed and tells a story directly addressed to the camera. Viewers familiar with Fassbinder’s oeuvre know that her story of Emmy and her gastarbeiter lover becomes the plot for one of his later, best known films, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) Regardless of the content, von Trotta’s delivery is very much akin to the innovation seen in Godard’s work.
That being said, both Godard and Fassbinder owe a huge debt to German playwright Bertholt Brecht, who I seem to continuously return to on this substack. Brecht was a Marxist artist who believed theater had the ability to mobilize and inspire the working class. The two directors present countless examples of what could be considered Brecht’s alienation effect throughout their careers. Known in the original German as verfremdung, the approach stresses an artificial or consciously over-dramatized way of performance. Penman quotes Brecht in Thousands of Mirrors, pinpointing what the playwright specifically means by his approach: “The operation that consists in making things strange.” (89) Verfremdung is generally known for being a technique that compels the audience to take note of the mechanics of theater and cinema that separate it from a naturalistic approach. In doing this, spectators are able to think critically about why the actors make the choices they make. There is something that has been lost in the translation to “alienation”. “Making things strange” could manifest itself in any variety of ways. Fassbinder achieves this strange artifice in the subject matter he chooses, the intentionally non-traditional way of composing shots, editing or lack thereof, and the almost somnambulistic way the actors perform. By the late 70s his films gained a tightness more common in internationally renowned arthouse cinema, but the verfremdung/alienation keeps coming back. His final film Quarelle (1982) was shot entirely on a set, using production design and melodramatic acting to achieve something that is indeed otherworldly.
With The American Friend and the other two films making up this early gangster trilogy, Fassbinder uses these techniques to comment on past eras of cinema, and how they portrayed cultural issues. These early films have been criticized for presenting a generally misogynistic world, with very basic and reductive portrayals of women. This is a legitimate observation, in that the films contain seemingly random violence towards the women portrayed, as well as an attitude equating femininity with betrayal. Fassbinder is clearly commenting on how film noir and other preceding genres presented femmes fatales. To generalize, gangster films tend to have a brotherly nature in their misogyny in which men bond while othering women as whores. In this early portion of his career Fassbinder has a supreme ambivalence towards women and queer people. The American Soldier shines a dingy flashlight on the homoerotic qualities of the loner male frequently seen in films noir and westerns. When Ricky goes to talk to Tony le Gitano, there is a moment when it seems they may end up having sex, which is abruptly nixed when Ricky shoots Tony. Seeing as how Fassbinder and many other actors and crew members were queer, this kind of brutality is there to amplify the absurdity of how homophobia is so normalized in mainstream industry cinema. The brutal way actresses like Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann are treated on screen also appears to be an exaggeration of brutal masculinity seen in cinema up to that point. It is the sort of approach seen in other meta-noirs like Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966). That being said, this analysis may not ring true seeing as how Fassbinder emotionally manipulated and physically abused many of the performers he worked with.
The 1971 production of Whity has become infamous as an example of Fassbinder’s maniacal control issues. Kurt Raab, who acted in over twenty Fassbinder films, describes the production in Spain: “We experienced a perpetually drunken, insufferable, berserk, foaming-at-the-mouth Fassbinder, who made life miserable for all of us. If he had a fight with Günther, he would then pick a fight with us. His moods were as good or as bad as the relationship between the two was at any given moment, and thus he was soon hated by the whole cast and crew.” (Katz, 48) In Robert Katz’ book Love is Colder than Death, Raab goes on to describe how he and most of the crew continued on with Fassbinder despite the toxic atmosphere, because it guaranteed them a paycheck and involvement with the cult-like Antitheater group.
One astounding aspect of the situation is that Fassbinder did nothing to hide his ill behavior, instead adapting it and immortalizing it in the meta film Beware of a Holy Whore (1971). Katz notes that it is the film that delineates “early” Fassbinder from the larger, middle section, and this is partially because it is a conscious retrospective consideration of the Antitheater groups profession and personal activities up until that point. It is about a young, countercultural cast and crew hanging out in a Spanish hotel, waiting for the film stock to arrive in order to start shooting. All of the actors are mixed around, playing representations of other people in the group. For example, Lou Castel plays Jeff, the director, who is clearly representative of Fassbinder, while RWF himself plays Sascha the production manager (who I think is supposed to be Harry Bär?). Beware of a Holy Whore is kind of like a party film for people who have worked on movie sets, showing the wild moments as well as the immensely unpleasant ones that have to do with emotional manipulation and abuse. Katz writes, “The film they are supposed to shoot is about state-sanctioned violence, but the troupe itself cannot rise above the petty everyday violence that welds or shatters human relationships.” This explanation summarizes the irreconcilable contradiction of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his work. He is an artist who made some of the most powerful and inspirational films about human autonomy ever put on screen, which dealt with the complexities of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Yet how could the director responsible for films like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), In a Year with 13 Moons (1978), and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) be so brutal and authoritarian when conducting his personal relationships?
It is impossible to cover all of Fassbinder’s career in only one month of weekly writing on here, so for now I will concentrate on a few specifics. Next week will be dedicated to Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972-3), a five part mini-series made for German television. It is a refreshing change from the gangsters found in the early period, focusing on the familial relations of a working class neighborhood. More than just a TV series, it is five feature-length films with characters and plots interweaving among them. That will be followed by a week dedicated to the queerness of Fassbinder’s films, although that is a subject that could span multiple dissertations. His career included movies specifically about gay men like Fox and his Friends (1975) and Quarelle, as well as others that portrayed lesbian relationships like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1974). In a Year with 13 Moons is an incredibly bleak and brilliant picture about gender fluidity. The director’s oeuvre is full of queer characters both behind and in front of the camera. I will close out the month focusing on some of his most well known films in the BRD trilogy--The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola (1981), and Veronika Voss (1982). These are all unique representations of the “women’s film” genre of the 1940s and 50s. They show the ways in which his portrayals of women became far more complex as his career continued, in contrast to the stock femme fatales of his early career. Later on in the year I will return to RWF’s career with more of a concentration on his lesser known work.
*I did write about Despair a couple months back https://lefthandpath.substack.com/p/personas-of-despair
*I also wrote about Satan’s Brew and RWF’s relation to The Marquis de Sade six years ago for Diabolique https://diaboliquemagazine.com/legacies-of-sade-the-passion-of-rainer-werner-fassbinder/
Katz, Robert. Love is Colder than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. New York: Random House, 1987.
Penman, Ian. Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors. London: Fitzcorraldo Editions, 2023.