A Delirious Use of Camera Movement in the Hollywood - Essay Example

Hollywood Mellodrama module The range of matter that could be enhanced by such stylistics seems to have been itself a fascinating question for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Could the subtly orchestrated mise-en-scène so poignantly deployed in Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (1973)--the Sirkian pedigree of which is beautifully elucidated by director Todd Haynes in one of the extras on the DVD--be as earnestly expressive in a political satire like Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) or an absurdist farce like Satans Brew (1976)? For example, contrasting the domestic space of the factory workers widow with that of the bourgeois Communist couple in the former is more redundant than revealing; and the somewhat strained antic behavior of the characters in the latter virtually demolishes any sense of form. While that form keeps pretending that the film is melodrama, the action and acting often border on The Three Stooges. Still, Margit Carstensens remarkable incarnation of the ultimate, twisted groupie--to Kurt Raabs impotent poet who "only murders those he loves"--resonates with perverse gusto within the dynamics of the Fassbinder troupe. In yet another sense, style almost supplants content altogether in Chinese Roulette (1976), as a delirious use of camera movement and eccentrically composed shots become ends in themselves. If there is a point to the upper-class shenanigans in the film, it may be that the venalities to which parents expose their children will be visited upon them in turn. At the center of the film there is a "truth" game conducted by a crippled child (Andrea Schober) who seeks to humiliate her parents, particularly her mother (Carstensen), by associating her behavior with that of a commandant of a concentration camp. The films excessive stylization barely disguises its similarity to Fassbinders interrogation of his own mother in Germany in Autumn. Mise-en-scène aside, Mother Küsters provides an important clue to Fassbinders politics, which were hardly either left or right. In the silent German film Mother Krausens Journey to Happiness (d. Piel Jutzin, 1929), on which Fassbinders is based, the mother bemoans her miserable life in the slums, and after her son is arrested, turns on the gas and escapes into the fantasized "happiness" of the title--although the film ends with a strong socialist message as her daughter marches with the masses to the "Internationale." Living in a time that has absorbed the failures of one ideology after another, Fassbinder debunks such idealized solutions and implies that the only way social improvement is possible is if people recognize the self-pitying illusions that paralyze them, none more injurious than their failure to see how their everyday dealings with others enact on a small scale the same indifferences and injustices that occur on the socio-political level. In the film Mother Küsters is both exploited by the typical machinery of capitalist society--with its emphasis on media and meaningless sentiment--and is the plaything of leftist ideologues of both the activist and armchair Marxist variety. Although one could say that her gradual awareness of how she has been used is the beginning of enlightenment, Fassbinder, in his ambivalence, shot two endings. In the original, the activist and Mother Küsters are shot by the police. In the alternative ending, the activist and everyone else give up their pointless sit-in while Mother Küsters is eventually persuaded to leave with a kind, elderly night porter--not unlike the husband she has lost, one suspects. If it is true that Fassbinder shot this ending for American audiences, it is, nevertheless, consistent with his skepticism concerning political agendas. He once said that revolution did not belong on the screen and that how a film ended mattered less than showing the mechanisms of social behavior. More subtly political in content, Ali, Fear Eats the Soul forcefully conveys the message that the only way society can function is if people understand that they need each other. The very shape of the narrative is instructive in illustrating this lesson, something Sirks beautiful model does not do. In All That Heaven Allows (1955), it is enough that the widow finally chooses personal happiness and forfeits what she has come to see are false comforts. In Fassbinders film the heroine (Brigitte Mira, who also played Mother Küsters) intuitively understands that the failure of her family, fellow workers, neighbors, and local merchants to accept her marriage to Ali--an immigrant Arab worker with more outsider status than the character in Sirk--is a failure of the social contract. As everyone mellows in time, partly out of their own needs, and comes to accept--if not respect--her choice, she reassures the more naive Ali that this is the only way society can function. Or, as an earlier Fassbinder character--the world-weary Petra van Kant of another class entirely--expresses it: "People are made to need each other, but they havent learned to live together." Neither disillusioned idealist nor self-righteous victim, Emmi is a model of the ordinary working-class person with the courage of her convictions, whose behavior has a direct and ultimately enlightening impact on everyone around her--which is not to say that Emmi is self-consciously political. As Todd Haynes reminds us, for a film to have an emotional impact, "characters must be in the dark; they must not be the articulators of the message of the film." Despite Emmis practical ethics, one wonders if Fassbinder was sufficiently free of a tragic vision to believe in anything more than creeping social progress. If one compares Effi Briest and The Marriage of Maria Braun, for example, from the standpoint of the relative liberation of their female protagonists (both played by Schygulla), one sees more continuity than contrast. While the helplessness of the former at the mercy of the social forces around her might seem a product of the nineteenth-century cultural myopia scrutinized in Fontanes novel, Maria Braun, "the Mata Hari of the economic miracle," who discovers her formidable business talents and how to use her charisma, is ultimately driven by her devotion to the man she marries at the beginning of the film. Their relationship--suspended first because of the war, then by news of his death, then by his imprisonment--is not resumed until the final scene, at which point Maria, either deliberately or unconsciously, fails to properly close a gas jet on the stove and blows them both to smithereens. According to Schygulla in an interview included on the disc, the original ending had Maria driving a car off the road, while the ambiguous ending was a result of a conversation she had with Fassbinder. Its hard to ignore the ironies here. Maria has achieved great success under the most difficult of circumstances, her financial future with Hermann further secured through the late Oswalds--her boss and lover--generous will. She has everything, it would seem, including Hermann. So what is wrong? Again, autobiographical echoes are compelling. Fassbinders now secured international reputation was marred by personal failures, the latest of which would be Armin Meiers suicide in 1978, the year the film was released. Yet this does not explain the force of Marias act and the tragic irony of an ending at the very moment Germany wins the world soccer championship. While we might say that Effi more literally enacts the sentiment expressed in the Fontane quote that precedes the film--to wit, "Many people aware of their own capabilities and needs yet acquiesce to the prevailing system in their thoughts and deeds, thereby confirm[ing] and reinforc[ing] it"--Maria, because she has had the opportunity, owing to the fortunes of war, to act on those "capabilities and needs," can only resort to pathological behavior when circumstances return to "normal." Has her independence been mocked by the con tract Oswald has made with Hermann behind her back? Effi eventually capitulates to the social codes that, her husband and her parents endorse. When her father wonders if the "love of parents for their children" is not, after all, the most important thing, her mother (Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinders mother) responds, "Then that is the end of catechism, morality, and the claims of society. It is hard to get along without society." In an interview on the Maria Braun disc, scholar Eric Rentschler places the film, which he sees as perhaps Fassbinders most important, in historical perspective. Just as Maria looks to the future when her ideal will be fulfilled (the return of her husband and presumably living happily ever after) and not to the past and what it means, so the Federal Republic of Germany, rebuilding with allied help during the economic miracle--as the frequent sounds of jackhammers amid the ruins remind us--never reflected on Hitler or the Holocaust. Rentschler suggests that with the sound of a baby crying in the first scene, Fassbinder--born in 1945, the year the narrative begins--may have inscribed himself into the film. Possibly. According to Ronald Hayman, in his book on Fassbinder, 1945 was also the year that Meiers parents participated in the Nazi program to create model Aryan specimens, of whom Meier, a James Dean look-alike and Fassbinders new lover, was one. Rentschler also notes--along with Kent Jones--the films affinity with Mildred Pierce, a Hollywood movie about a self-made woman who builds an empire but in the end is subordinate to a man. Released in the already triply significant year 1945, it was directed by Michael Curtiz, about whom Fassbinder planned to write a monograph. Between Maria and Veronika comes Lola (1981)--a comic fable of a seductress and her naive, moralistic victim in the vein of von Sternbergs The Blue Angel (1930)--a far more cynical picture of the reconstruction years in which every form of capitalist corruption is in full swing. Arguably the least satisfying film in the BRD trilogy--partly because of the bluntness of its satire, too literally embodied in Barbara Sukowas over-the-top performance--the film is, nevertheless, an interesting foil for the eloquent tragedy of the other two. Unlike Maria and Veronika, both suffering from ideals to which they cling, Lola is decidedly not too good for this world. If Maria is the Mata Hari of the economic miracle, balancing its contradictions while foolishly believing she can preserve her love untainted, Lola is its Whore of Babylon, her bordello a microcosm of the "real" city. As in Maria Braun, we hear the sounds of rebuilding outdoors, given extra pertinence here since the story concerns how the new, conscientious building commissioner von Bohm, through his involvement with Lola, eventually sinks into the same swamp as those who run everything. A rather pathetic, ineffective group of Socialist protesters, relegated to the sidelines, merely confirms the triumph of capitalism. According to Marthesheimer (in an interview included on the Lola disc), the label "BRD trilogy" was provided by Wolfram Schutte, critic for the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, but that Fassbinder embraced it because it accorded with his desire to cover German history in a long series of films. One of these, on the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg, was planned with Jane Fonda in mind, and, says Marthesheimer, "would have been Fassbinders first conscious step toward Hollywood." Apparently, Fassbinder died while reading Marthesheimers first detailed treatment, on page twelve of which, he sadly recalls, a drop of blood had fallen. If it was Fassbinders intention to work in a more Hollywoodlike vein, however, it is curious that his next and last film, the calculatedly artificial Querelle (1982), based on the novel by Jean Genet, would go so far in the other direction. It is almost as if he needed, intermittently, to refuel that other, maverick side of his sensibility, perhaps even to punish himself for his attraction to Hollywood. Bibliography Dick, Jeff T., Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Library Journal, 10/15/2003, Vol. 128 Issue 17, p112-112 Gemunden, Gerd., Re-fusing Brecht: The cultural politics of Fassbinders German Hollywood. New German Critique, Fall94 Issue 63, p54, 22p LaValley, Al., The gay liberation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Male subjectivity, male bodies, male lovers. New German Critique, Fall94 Issue 63, p108, 30p Reimer, Robert C., Comparison of Douglas Sirks "All That Heaven Allows" and R.W. Fassbinders "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul;" Or, How Hollywoods New England Dropouts Became Germanys Marginalized Other. Literature Film Quarterly, 1996, Vol. 24 Issue 3, p281, 7p von Moltke, Johannes., Camping in the art closet: The politics of camp and nation in German film. New German Critique, Fall94 Issue 63, p76, 31p Read More