Interpretations, contests
A Piece of Soul — R. W. Fassbinder
(After the viewing of a selection of his films in Zagreb — February)
On the occasion of the 20th
anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death and the
commemorative retrospective the author of this essay evokes
Fassbinders distinctive life and directorial style and
his creative evolution from the earliest phase, when he
cooperated with the ’Aktion-theatre’ in Munich, both as
actor and director, to his last film Querelle and
the eponymous TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz. The
author focuses on Fassbinder’s thematic preoccupations
and the characters of outsiders that create Fassbinder’s
distinctive film world, in an effort to show how Fassbinder’s
subversion of the image of an ideally structured Germany
as a paradigm of the Western democracy, tolerance and economic
welfare is still an actuality.
Fassbinder’s early films were dominated by microcosms inhabited
by pimps, prostitutes and petty criminals... The motif of
xenophobia was also frequently present and it would eventually
become one of the director’s basic thematic preoccupations.
The phantom of animosity and intolerance towards strangers
haunted the whole opus of this unconventional author. It
first appeared in the screen adaptation of Fassbinder’s first
drama Katzelmacher (Stranger), and was present in
many movies from the ’70s. It was expressed explicitly in
the movies Everyone’s Name is Ali and Fear Eats
the Soul (1974).
Omnipresent alienation in a supposedly normal
city life and faceless existences in a dull monotony became
the following motifs that Fassbinder lucidly and meticulously
presented to the viewers. He dissected the alienated civil
consciousness with precision and unsparing, but low profile
criticism in order to show the gradual destruction of his
hero’s psyche. This destruction manifested itself in outbursts
of apparently unexplainable and unmotivated violence (the
best example of this was Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?).
The microcosm created by his hand, Fassbinder striped to
the core of its decay.
The turning point in Fassbinder’s
creative development came with melodrama. Narrative pattern
of melodrama turned out to be the best medium for his analysis
of naïve, fragile, and often helpless characters. Fassbinder
was also a skilful illustrator of female psychology. (Maybe
precisely because he was a homosexual!) In the masterpiece Bitter
Tears of Petra Von Kant, Fontane Effi Briest,
a subtle creation with an almost Bressonian mise-en-scene; Mother
Kuster’s Trip to Heaven, characterized by Brechtian
overtones; and lucidly shot Marriage of Maria Braun, Fassbinder
created a gallery of female characters unrivalled by any
other author. Furthermore, movies Lili Marleen and Lola offered
some spectacular elaborations of intimate worlds of their
heroines, while Veronika Voss presented maybe the
most artful analysis of melancholy and neuralgia on film.
His women were strong and got along in the men’s world,
but only on the surface. The truth was that they were fatally
predetermined by the hopeless lack of love and understanding
around them.
Fassbinder’s storytelling talent that enabled
him to tell simple stories of complex human relations put
him in the group of a small number of storytellers of the
20th century who created an alternative history of their
communities. Wolfram Schutte was quite right when he said
at Fassbinder’s death: ’Our Balzac is dead.’ Indeed, it
could be said that Fassbinder created a distinctive, underground
micro historiography of Germany where he incorporated all
the key social layers into one amazing mosaic. Such socio-psychological
structuring of characters was unknown in the context of
film narration in Germany, moreover it was rare even in
the fictional and essayist prose, not to mention some of
the best works of the national theatre in the second half
of the 20th century.
Marijan Krivak |
