FILM SCREENING: ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL & DISCUSSION
National Cinemas Post 1968: Germany, Australia, Canada, Third Cinema
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
The origin of Fear Eats the Soul can be traced to two earlier films. In Fassbinder’s own The American Soldier (1970), a hotel chambermaid (played by Margarethe von Trotta) recounts the story of Emmi, a Hamburg cleaning woman who met Ali, a Turkish immigrant worker, in a bar, married him, and was later found strangled, the imprint of the letter A from a signet ring on her throat.
Shortly after making The American Soldier, Fassbinder encountered the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk—a German-born director who’d emigrated to the United States—and found proof that it was possible to make beautiful, personal films that registered with the public. One film that had a particular impact on Fassbinder was All That Heaven Allows (1955), in which the romance between a well-to-do widow and a younger tree surgeon is opposed by her mortified children and snobbish, envious neighbors.
From the story told by the chambermaid in The American Soldier, Fassbinder took the names and social situations of the two main characters in Fear Eats the Soul, along with the interracial aspect of their relationship (although Ali is now Moroccan, not Turkish), while shifting the story from Hamburg to Munich. Crucially, he also replaced the tragic ending with one in which there remains at least a degree of hope. From All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder took the age gap between the lovers (significantly widening it) and the theme of the hostility of outsiders, which let him use the film to criticize society.
It’s inaccurate, however, to call Fear Eats the Soul a “remake” of All That Heaven Allows, as has sometimes been done. There are a few precise echoes of the earlier film in the later one: Emmi’s tearful confession that, despite her pretended indifference, the hatred of the people around her does, in fact, matter to her recalls lines spoken by Jane Wyman in the Sirk film; and Fassbinder borrows from Sirk the symbol of a TV set as the sterile link between the heroine and her son (without re-creating Sirk’s devastating camera movement toward Wyman’s reflection in the TV screen). But in adapting the story of All That Heaven Allows (which later also inspired Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven), Fassbinder simplifies it, makes its contrasts more extreme, turns it away from melodrama and toward fable, and intensifies its motive forces: the love of the couple and the oppression acting on them. And with his characteristic irony and bitterness, he shows that this oppression is just as necessary to the lovers as the love is.
The visual style of Fear Eats the Soul is both masterly and utterly without flourish. To show the couple’s predicament, Fassbinder uses a complementary pair of expressive figures, the first based on the restriction of the film frame. The doorway to Emmi’s kitchen becomes a variable frame that traps characters in their unhappiness (as when she’s left alone after Ali goes out for couscous) or encloses a moment of intimacy stolen from loneliness (the couple’s first private time, when Emmi gives Ali brandy). In the several scenes set on the staircases of Emmi’s apartment building and the building she cleans, intrusive vertical forms (columns, pipes, window and door frames) divide the characters and make their power relations instantly readable.
The second expressive figure—a wide shot revealing the emptiness around the couple—appears at the moments when Emmi and Ali are most together. As they emerge from the registry office in the rain, the solitude and indifference they’re up against seem to take on visible form: piles of rubble in the middle ground, a lone car that passes in the background. Visiting an outdoor cafe?, the couple find themselves marooned in a sea of yellow tables, across which the camera tracks toward them in an instinctive gesture of sympathy. The scene in the fancy restaurant where they celebrate their wedding unites both expressive figures: an interior doorway ceremoniously frames the couple, while on the camera’s side of the doorway, empty tables testify to the absence of any social context for their happiness and any support for it.
There’s a sense throughout Fear Eats the Soul that the world has become still. Even copulation is static, as in the scene of Ali’s coupling with the bar owner. The sense of timelessness that pervades the film is instilled not just through the long, strange moments of silence and immobility but also through the way the characters constantly generalize about life. “Fear eat soul” (a closer translation of the film’s ungrammatical German title, Angst essen Seele auf). “Time heals all wounds.” “Money spoils a friendship.” “In business you have to hide your aversions.” “Half of life consists of work.” “Germans with Arabs not good.” “Think much, cry much.” “Dark clothes look so sad, don’t they?” “It’s no fun drinking alone.” The sententiousness of these lines adds to the film’s impression of stillness. In them, a way of looking at life has solidified and become accepted as natural and permanent.
The stillness of the film is deeply sad. But in the middle of all this sadness lies the possibility Emmi and Ali create when they find each other. Much of the beauty of Fear Eats the Soul comes from the performances of Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem. All the details of Mira’s Emmi are vivid and affecting: her resignation, her intelligence, the mixture of stubbornness and hesitancy with which she faces her life, the fundamental optimism implied in her graciousness toward other people (as when she chooses to ignore the malice of the neighbor who seizes an inopportune moment to repay a trivial loan) or in the pleasant way she serves Ali brandy. Mira shows us the social role that has been imposed on Emmi, while at the same time showing us her need to give and receive tenderness—a need that this role fails to satisfy. Ben Salem’s freshness and candor make him an ideal partner for Mira. As Mira does with Emmi, ben Salem makes the social attitudes that Ali has adopted instantly clear: his ready impassivity before German racism, his retreat into the haven of the bar.
As we enter more deeply into the film, we may be surprised to find that we feel for the other characters too, with all their limitations: they, too, are trapped, vulnerable. It’s crucial for Fassbinder’s portrayal of German society in Fear Eats the Soul that, in the first part of the film, when Emmi and Ali are victimized at every turn, we see three people who don’t condemn the couple, who regard their union if not positively then at least with a certain equivocal indulgence, and who, in Emmi and Ali’s absence, defend them: the shopkeeper’s wife, the landlord’s son, and the bar owner. These three characters effect a transition, or sliding-off, in our sympathies, from the couple toward the outsiders, preparing us to see even the film’s racists as redeemable. (Characteristically, Fassbinder gives himself the role of the most swinish of them, Emmi’s lazy son-in-law.) And even while showing that the turnabouts in the attitudes of Emmi’s neighbors, children, and coworkers are motivated by self-interest, Fassbinder makes us ask: Isn’t that the case with all progress? And if it’s too much to hope that people’s natures change, isn’t it enough, for a start, that their actions do?
Fassbinder praised Sirk as “a man who loves human beings and doesn’t despise them as we do.” As Ali: Fear Eats the Soul shows, he gave himself too little credit.
- Chris Fujiwara, "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: One Love, Two Oppressions," Criterion Collection
In a post of at least 300 words, please answer the following questions pertaining to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and the German New Wave:
Please select a scene from
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and i
identify the detachment and coldness that Mast and Kawin describe in the reading.
Can you trace the performance of the film's ensemble cast to Fassbinder's roots in the theater?
What about how Fassbinder's cinematography contributes to his visual style?
You may wish to describe the politics of Germany and their affect on the New German Cinema.
You also may wish to compare the selected scene from Ali to another clip from the German New Wave. You should embed a still or YouTube clip from Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in your post.
Please choose a scene/film example that someone from your group has not already discussed. Please choose a scene other than the one I posted in Fassbinder's page in this Module.
For your Response Post to one classmate due by Sunday at 11:59pm.
Expand the discussion by replying in 75 words or more to at least one classmate’s post. Responses may include describing your own insight related to the post, providing additional information from assigned or outside content (just be sure to cite or link to sources), disagreeing respectfully by describing your own interpretation, proposing a new idea, or asking a probing question.
My essay
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
Das neue Kino
New German Cinema
(Pre-essay note - i had another picture originally but it was used by someone else so I rewrote my essay to this second choice less cinematic picture)
What can you see from this shot? It goes to meta level irony in that Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the characters mocking his mother-in-law for an unconventional relationship when he himself is in an unconventional relationship with the man playing the mother-in-law’s lover.
It shows idea experimentation in filming as we see as well in the other New German Cinema directors. As in the French New Wave, he is including as one of the characters of his film. He did this also in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) also showing himself as a shifty black-market trader. Different than the French New Wave or other post-war European cinema is that Mast and Kawin note is an overall different tone in German New Wave that is “colder, harder edged, more ironic, and less charming”. Most of the time when people are laughing in this film, is as in this shot, they are mocking or gossiping about another person.
In this second shot we see another ironic statement of Fassbinder saying, ‘I’ll do what I like in my own home’. The film is the home he’s creating and obviously he can do whatever he wants as a director. The décor as Mast and Kawin mention is one of Fassbinder’s styles namely “chicly bare”. It shows his theater background in that it is a small set with only the essential props and he mostly films indoor. Theater sets are, of course, indoors. The sets and props aren’t as important in this film as the narrative. As the characters are in claustrophobic set in very close proximity. The cinematic style provides for close ups of the characters faces and expressions. This style is seen a lot in Emmi’s conversations over her dining table with Ali. We are sitting right in there with them.
I also noticed the extra-large crucifix looming over all of them in the dining room. It looks exaggerated and more menacing than comforting. In a BFI article titled “10 great films that inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder”, Fassbinder was influenced by Charles Laughton who showed “the nightmare from the collective unconscious” and despite a lot of Christian symbolism shows “family and religion as sources of horror”.
Fassbinder’s narrative showed a Brechtian style where the writer shows a detachment where we the focus is not attaching feelings to the characters but to the “political, psychological, or moral intentions of the tale” (Mast and Kawin).
Regarding politics, the New German Cinema directors are filming starting in the 1960's. They are young filmmakers and experienced war when they were young but know more about it more through their parents or grandparents. In both The Marriage of Maria Braun and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul there is recognition of the war but not as a main theme. Maria Braun is looking to what she can accomplish in the post-war time to get ahead in life, not lamenting on the past. Emmi mentions as an aside that her father was in Hitler’s army. She wants to eat at the restaurant Hitler ate regularly out of curiosity. Interestingly, she notes that Hitler ate there between 1929-33. This covers the time period up until Hitler was made Chancellor. The war is not deeply reflected upon in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul , however, it is always there in the German subconscious as are her father’s framed Hitler medals; ever present in the background.
Ida, I very much appreciated your insight that Fassbinder's home is indeed the film and he could do as he pleased. I found it interesting that he played one of the most hard to like and spiteful characters in the film, perhaps it was cathartic for him to release what was generally on the receiving end of the judgment and reckless emotion.
Also awesome observation about the Hitler frequenting the restaurant, there were some deep seated beliefs that she wasn't even aware of, and though was progressive in some ways, in others so deeply indoctrinated that she couldn't see how twisted some of what she did was. My essay was about the ending and betrayals of one another, but you picked up on some very good supporting points.
Response from Floyd Tangeman:
Agreed with the comment about fassbinder. After learning more about him after watching the film, it seems like his film is somewhat of a bitter diatribe against German society. I also wanted to comment on the idea of Hitler; its pretty strange that she keeps bringing him up, no? And the way in which she poses it as a question to Ali - you know hitler? It's so off. It seems strange to me that germans still didn't have complete disdain for hitler and his morals at the time.
Robert Keitel's essay:
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
From 1932 with the rise of Nazi Germany to 1967, Germany did not produce internationally significant films (Mast (2008) p528). During the Nazi period the most talented filmmakers fled to the USA. Then, in the late 1960s, a young group of filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders) received government support to produce New Cinema German films. The young directors were all born at the end of WWII and had viewed international films at German Art Houses. They were free to explore issues facing Germany without the baggage of the past but within the context of the German culture. (Retrieved https://thefilmstage.com/watch-30-minute-bbc-special-tracks-the-rise-of-new-german-cinema-with-herzog-fassbinder-wenders-more/)
By the 1970’s Germany was quickly developing as an economic powerhouse. Foreign workers were imported to fuel the economic growth, but not be assimilated into German society. Rainer Werner Fassbinder Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) explores racism and reveals “unrelenting hardness and coldness” (Mast (2008) p531). The near Nazi past of the older generation of Brigitte Mira, Immi, were imprinted with racism and resented foreigners’ presence in Germany.
Fassbinder’s roots were in the theater with staged settings and an ensemble of actors used his productions. “Fassbinder films are almost exclusively indoor films, claustrophobically enclosed by the rooms his characters are forced to inhabit.” German Expressionism and the films of Sirk depicted similarly claustrophobic worlds (Mast (2008) p531).
Fassbinder's cinematography contributes to his visual style through settings, visually boxing and uneasy moments of silence. The apartments, bars and shops were Fassbinder visual and social settings (Mast (2008) p530). His film were made in 2 weeks reusing the same casts and locations (Retrieved https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/movies/film-dvd-s-further-from-heaven.html).
In the scene from Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Immi is distanced from her workmates. She sits alone reflecting on her isolation and cruel treatment. She is boxed in with the camera shot. No action. The coldness and inhuman society punish her for wanting happiness.
In All That Heaven Allows, Sirk also defines what women can have in life. Her heaven is her house and grown children, nothing more. She lives prison. Society denies her happiness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsyNSYx_FV0
Fassbinder casted his lover, El Hedi ben Salem, as Ali and the 60-ish Brigitte Mira as the romantic interest” (Retrieved https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/movies/film-dvd-s-further-from-heaven.html). Fassbinder draws on Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955) which has a similar theme of the older woman seeking happiness with the romance of a younger man but denied by society. Power relations are common themes in Fassbinder’s work. Sirk had immigrated from Germany to Hollywood in 1940. Fassbinder and Sirk became friends like in a-father -son relationship. Sirk’ Rock Hudson, the star of All That Heaven Allows was an open Hollywood gay during this era. Was Sirk’s relationship with Fassbinder almost sexual? Like the two films, was their romance between generations prohibited by society? This notion would be interesting to pursue with more research.
Both films explore the power of society over the aspirations of women for happiness. Some critics say these are “women’s films”. However, both autors also struggle with their real life societal prohibitions to achieve happiness. Fassbinder love affair with El Hedi ben Salem, Ali, ends violently. El Hedi ben Salem is smuggled out of Germany. He is murdered in France. Fassbinder through a drug overdose commits suicide. Both in film and in life there may not be happy endings. The New German Cinema struggles with real life dramas. Life is not a fairy tale.
My response to Robert:
Hello Robert,
You beat me to the shot of Emmi sitting alone in the staircase. It looked to with the bars of the staircase that she was in a prison. Society has imprisoned her as a misfit and outsider due to her going against their conventions.
He also picked an excellent spot within the staircase where there are pipes are framing the shot vertically. I especially like the choice or that he found a two bright red pipe that highlight the framing and the shot.
I liked your comment about "Both films explore the power of society over the aspirations of women for happiness. Some critics say these are “women’s films”." I found a quote by Fassbinder says, "i find women more interesting.
They don't interest me just because they're oppressed, it's not that simple
The societal conflict in women are more interesting because on the one hand, women are oppressed but in my opinion they also provoke this oppression
as their position in society and in turn use it as a terror tactic."
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