Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Germany

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1)Fassbinder was the most prolific director of the New German Cinema,
2)directing 40 features in a dozen years.
3)His work is consciously Brechtian
     meaning his films develop a detached irony that invites their audiences to examine the political,
     psychological, or moral implications of the story rather than to become attached to the feelings of
     characters.
4) In many ways, Fassbinder’s films are moral/political lessons that focus
    on power
   a) social power
   b) economic power
   c) erotic power.
5)Fassbinder’s roots are in the theater and most of his films feature an ensemble cast. 

Mast and Kawin identify three primary Fassbinder visual and social settings:
1) the world of the working class (The Merchant of Four Seasons, 1971),
2) the world of the rich (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972),
3) the elegant world of the past (Effi Briest, 1974).
The visual characteristic that links these three social realms is an unrelenting coldness.

Introduction to the film clip of
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
1)a love story about a middle-aged working class widow (Brigitte Mira) and her young Moroccan lover
   (played by El Hedi ben Salem).
2)The lovers confront social rejection and isolation; they try to deal with the anxiety of the modern
   world.
3)The film is clearly based on Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955).
4) Sirk’s middle-aged widow, Carrie, is upper class and attractive.
5) In contrast, Fassbinder’s widow, Emmi, is a working-class cleaning lady.
6)While Sirk’s film offers Rock Hudson as a white, working-class male love interest for Carrie,
7)Fassbinder’s Ali confronts racism as a Moroccan worker in Germany.
8) El Hedi ben Salem was Fassbinder’s real life partner.
9) One night in Berlin, Salem stabbed three people and was forced to flee to France with Fassbinder’s
    help.
10)Salem was eventually caught and committed suicide while in prison in 1977.

Author Chris Fujiwara recounts the history of Ali:
 "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...

  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:
1)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;
2) 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."

In the following clip,

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
Notice Fassbinder's mise-en-scène and how the composition and set design of the scene communicate the alienation and oppression of Emma and Ali.

In the clip -- Mrs. Kurowoski goes in front of the neighbors - isn't there something to be said as decency - i don't see anything wrong. They're happy. She says don't let it bother you - and the whole restaurant staff is lined up at the doorway staring at them. They're just envious. Why do you cry? Because i'm so happy on the one hand and on the other hand I can't bear it anymore. All this hatred from everyone. Sometimes I wish you and I were alone in the world with no one else around. I always pretend I don't care but I do care -it's killing me. Nobody looks at me in the eye - horrible smirks. Stop staring you horrible swine. This is my husband. I love you. I love you more. This big so much an me from here to Morroco- let's go somewhere - somewhere where no one knows us and no one stares When we get back no one will notice. everyone will be nice to us... they will. 

This is a picture from that scene