Merchant of Four Seasons

Merchant of Four Seasons
Deine Sehnsucht kann keiner stillen (Your yearning no one can calm
Wenn die Traeume sich auch erfuellen and if your dreams come true
Wenn du viel hast And you have everything
willst du noch mehr You will still want more
O Mama Mia O Mama Mia
Ich denk’ oft an dein Lied: Often I think about your song:
Buona, Buona Buono Notte Bambino mio Buona, Buona, Buona Notte Bambino mio
Alles was man will Everything that one wants
das kann man nicht haben. One can’t have
Buona Buona Notte Buona, Buona Notte
Schlaf ein mein Junge Go to sleep my child
Sehnsucht wirst du immer in Herzen tragen You will always bear this yearning in your heart.)
Buona Notte, a ‘Schlager’ played by Hans Epp
At the University of Minnesota, and, I suppose, at many colleges, films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder were ubiquitous in the decade between 1970 and 1980. For me, Fassbinder’s movies were among the first foreign art films that I saw, an initiation, of sorts, into the austere and demanding world of the European cinema. Ten years earlier, Godard’s movies had provided that sense of initiation, secret wisdom, the dubious and snobbish pleasure of experiencing something that most people would find daunting, unduly astringent, and, even, incomprehensible. By my matriculation in 1972, Godard had vanished into obscurity, the auteur of increasingly enigmatic Maoist-influenced agitprop, films that even the Franco-Swiss director’s admirers couldn’t exactly grasp. But, on campus, Fassbinder seemed to be, more or less, continuously available. Members of film societies and cinephile cognoscenti might mention in passing that they had been to the U Film Society or the Walker to see "the new Fassbinder" – one used the director’s name since the titles of the movies were frequently outrageous and hard to remember. Fassbinder was famously, notoriously, insanely prolific and, it seemed, every couple of weeks a new picture by him from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland was screening somewhere.
Around 1974, I think, I saw Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at the U Film Society, squirming through the picture in the dingy auditorium to the Bell Museum, a few dozen paces away from dioramas where stuffed wolves and bobcats stalked their stuffed prey. The film made no sense to me – it seemed a febrile exercise in decor. Two actresses, both svelte and sophisticated-looking, but too homely for Hollywood, shrieked at one another for two hours, prancing back and forth in front of huge murals of naked men and surrounded by gesticulating denuded fashion dummies. I had no idea what the film meant or why it was significant – others in the crowd seemed enthralled, but I suspected that they were feigning enthusiasm. I walked out into the cold night disheartened: perhaps, there was something wrong with me, perhaps, my critical reflexes were irretrievably middle-class. But I wanted to understand and so, whenever, a Fassbinder film appeared on campus or at the Walker, I attended. Only once, at the Walker, did one of Fassbinder’s films move me – this was a picture called Jailbait, about a dimwitted hoodlum and an underage girl (Fassbinder played the hoodlum, resplendent in an American bomber jacket.) Curiously, that film, perhaps because of its subject, seems never to have been revived, hasn’t appeared on DVD, and seems perpetually unavailable.
In the early eighties, I finally developed an appreciation, although one that was abstract, for Fassbinder’s later films. By that time, the director was dead. In the last fifteen years, I have returned to Fassbinder’s movies and watched many of them again. To my amazement, they have been somehow transformed – I no longer find them harsh and dull and pretentious. Now, many of these films seem to me very warm, emotionally satisfying, and powerful. I can’t account for the change.
Merchant of Four Seasons is significant for two reasons. First, the film is the most deliberate picture that Fassbinder ever made. In 1970, Fassbinder shot six feature films and directed two important Theaterstuecke. In 1972, Fassbinder made three feature films and produced a five-part TV series consisting of 90 minute episodes. But, in 1971, he made only one film. That picture is The Merchant of Four Seasons. It is unique in Fassbinder’s work as a picture on which he lavished his most precious commodity – time. Second, The Merchant of Four Seasons was an important transitional film in Fassbinder’s career. The picture represents the first of Fassbinder’s melodramas influenced by the films made by Douglas Sirk, the German emigre to Hollywood who made many well-known pictures in the fifties. This phase of Fassbinder’s career was considered more accessible than his ten earlier films made to resemble Brecht’s anti-naturalistic theater. Merchant of Four Seasons was an international success and the first film by the director that was widely praised in the United States. It was a particular favorite with Manny Farber and established Fassbinder’s reputation as an ambitious and important director for audiences in this country.
Rainer Werner FassbinderAn enfant terrible and sacred monster, Fassbinder’s life was turbulent, marred by violence, and controversial. It is curious that German industriousness and productivity, the cult of Pflicht and Tuechtigkeit, is best exemplified by a fat, slovenly, homosexual drug-addict – Fassbinder’s life was his work. In an active career of 15 years, he managed to make 40 feature films, two lengthy TV series (Berlin Alexanderplatz is 931 minutes long), wrote 21 stage plays and acted in 36 roles in his films and the movies of others. His creative impulse is variously described as "insane" and "berserk". While shooting one movie during the day, Fassbinder would work nights editing his previous picture, and, then, stay up until the wee hours of the morning writing his next film. He maintained a film making pace that was ultimately lethal to him.
Fassbinder was born in Bavaria in 1945 around the time that American tanks rolled into his family’s small village. (Later, his mother changed his birthdate to 1946 so that no possible taint of the Nazi era would affect her son.) Fassbinder’s mother was a refugee from the Free City of Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland – this eastern origin, perhaps, explains Fassbinder’s swarthy complexion and his somewhat Mongolian features. His father was a surgeon who moved the family to Munich a few months after Fassbinder was born. Fassbinders father set up practice near the Red Light district in Munich and the director’s earliest memories involve interacting with prostitutes required to attend monthly health examinations at his father’s clinic. By the time he was six, the family had disintegrated and Fassbinder lived, mostly with his mother and her relatives, in the suburbs of Munich. (Fassbinder remained close to his mother – she appears in about twenty of his films.)
Fassbinder was an indifferent student but interested in theater. He applied to the Berlin University film school but was rejected. This film school was initiated in 1967 with a first class consisting of 20 students – over 800 young people applied. Wenders, who attended that film school, in his commentary on Merchant, observes that "Rainer Werner was fortunate in not being accepted – the film school had only one camera and no footage was exposed until second year. Fassbinder just went out into the world and began making movies." At 18, Fassbinder began acting lessons and attended a two-year program in Munich, completing his training in 1966. Fassbinder’s weight fluctuated dramatically throughout this life and he had saturnine features marked by a permanent scowl – he was hardly leading man material. However, Fassbinder also had a blazing desire to make his mark in the performing arts. He seems to have decided that if the German theater and film industry were not interested in him as an actor, he would create his own film industry. And this is what he did.
World War Two had devastated Germany in many ways. It’s film industry had been not only destroyed but discredited. In the early sixties, West Germany made two kinds of films – Westerns shot in Yugoslavia and Spain based on Karl May novels and soft-core porn. Fassbinder single-handedly revived the German film industry and restored its international credibility. He is probably the most important figure in the history of German films.
Initially, Fassbinder founded an acting troupe called the Munich Anti-Theater. This group applied Brechtian alienation effects to classical works of German theater and garnered some attention, primarily hostile, from local critics. Fassbinder’s Anti-Theater company comprised a surrogate family around the director. This group included Irm Hermann, Fassbinder’s girlfriend, Peter Raben, Harry Baer, Kurt Raab and Hanna Schygulla. Despite enormous abuse, both verbal and physical, this core of actors remained loyal to Fassbinder and appeared with him in more than 20 of his films.
Beginning in 1969, Fassbinder began directing films. His first feature-length picture was Love is Colder than Death. This was followed by Katzelmacher (the name means something like "Slackers"). Katzelmacher was a critical success and Fassbinder made another seven or eight films, more or less in the same style – these pictures feature non-naturalistic dialogue, static camera placements, and formulaic plots derived from American gangster movies. Very early, Fassbinder developed an exceptionally efficient production style. He used the same cameraman and crew, the same sound technicians and the same actors and actresses. On his sets, people anticipated his requirements and he was able to complete his films quickly and on exceedingly low budgets. He edited the film in his head and usually shot only that footage that would be cut into the final film. If possible, he completed shots in a single take. Fassbinder’s minimal budget requirements allowed him to garner government production grants, an important advantage in the German film industry that is heavily State-subsidized. (Around this time, the big theater sensation in Munich was Peter Handke’s Publikumsbeschimpfung, a name that means something like "Bitching at the Audience." Munich theater-goers would pay to attend a ninety-minute show in which the actors would hurl insults at the audience, culminating in the accusation that the spectators were "all Nazis." German state TV, ZDF, follows this model, commissioning films that are vehemently anti-German. Fassbinder found quickly that any picture said to denounce the West German Wirtschaftswunder was a shoe-in for government funding.)
As Fassbinder became increasingly famous internationally, his style evolved. His films became more intensely emotional, more vividly and operatically dramatic, and more visually elaborate. Fassbinder studied Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas and adapted them to his more acerbic scenarios. Throughout his career, Fassbinder worked in all aspects of film production – he could operate a camera, edited his own films, sometimes composed music for them, and worked on financing and publicity. He often acted in his films and, sometimes, even played the main part – a notable example is his portrayal of the doomed gay man who has won the lottery in Fox and his Friends.
Fassbinder was far and away the most prolific member of the Film Verlag der Autoren, the corporate enterprise that he founded with Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Volker Schloendorff among others. The Film Verlag was located in Munich where all of these directors lived – most of them in close proximity to one another. The role of the Verlag was as a production office, assisting the directors in obtaining financing – most of it from the German government – for their films. Wenders recalls that the members of the Verlag met frequently to discuss film making, although their conversations were entirely oriented toward helping one another procure the necessary resources to make pictures. All of the members of the Film Verlag, a group that also included Alexander Kluge and Werner Schroeter, had different political and ideological associations and made movies that were completely dissimilar in theme and content. Wenders recalls that the subject of content was verboten at meetings of the Verlag – the directors, who had wildly different visions for the medium, didn’t want to clash over the subject matter of their films. Wenders, who seems to be the polar opposite of Fassbinder, recalls those days with great warmth and, in his commentaries on Fassbinder films, always quietly refers to Fassbinder as "Rainer Werner". Wenders has become a Christian, serves on the advisory board for various Christian magazines, and seems laid-back, gentle, and serene – he delivers his commentaries on Fassbinder films in a whisper and seems most interested in recalling the good old days in Munich and the brotherly Verlag that supported their film making.
Beginning in 1976, Fassbinder was able to raise money on an international scale and he worked for major producers, including Hollywood studios. To some extent, Fassbinder’s seduction by International money represented the first signs of the collapse of the Film Verlag and the ultimate demise of German New Cinema. Three of his films were made in English, including his last picture, his controversial and much-derided adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle. Several of these films from Fassbinder’s third period, his so-called "International productions," were big box-office hits, most famously The Marriage of Maria Braun. It ws during this period that Fassbinder also produced the massive Berlin Alexanderplatz for German television – a series that premiered about the time of the director’s death.
Fassbinder’s personal life was chaotic. Although he was actively homosexual, Fassbinder also required the services of a girlfriend. He married the chanteuse Ingrid Caven in 1970 – the marriage lasted two years. (She appears as the producer of Merchant under the name Ingrid Fassbinder and, also, plays the role of the "love of (Hans’) life." For more than a decade, he was involved with Irm Hermann. Hermann, who appears in Merchant of Four Seasons, was a secretary who didn’t want to act and thought she was too homely to appear on screen. She was in love with Fassbinder, however, and he forced her before the camera, notwithstanding the fact that, in fact, she was neither notably attractive nor photogenic. Hermann was obsessed with Fassbinder and would do anything that he demanded. He humiliated her in a number of film roles that seem designed to drive her away from him – although this perverse strategy didn’t work. He beat her frequently and almost killed her on the streets of Bochum. After the marriage to Caven collapsed, Fassbinder returned to Hermann and continued his sadomasochistic affair with her. He married another woman, seemingly to escape Hermann, but that relationship also failed. At the time of his death, he was living with Julianne Lorenz. As his widow, Lorenz curates the Fassbinder estate, an enterprise that holds many of the director’s most well-known films, in the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Trust. Lorenz is also Fassbinder’s chief critical advocate today. Fraulein Lorenz, like all of these women understood that Fassbinder was gay and accepted his relationships with men.
Although Fassbinder always lived with a woman, he invested his own emotional capital in relationships with men. In the early seventies, he was obsessed with a black Bavarian named Gunther Kaufman, a man who appears (unfortunately because he can’t act) in several of Fassbinder’s films. Kaufman was a drunk and exploited Fassbinder – somehow he managed to wreck four Lamborghini’s in one year. Ultimately, Kaufman abandoned Fassbinder. Fassbinder’s next great love was a Berber named El Hedi ben Salem. (He appears as Ali in Fear is Colder than Death and is the Moroccan soldier torturing Hans Epps in Merchant). El Hedi ben Salem killed himself as did Fassbinder’s next boyfriend, Amin Meier.
Fassbinder was addicted to a variety of drugs and alcoholic. He traveled to New York City frequently where he was a fixture in certain seedy gay bars. Evidence of his deterioration can be seen in the omnibus film Germany in the Autumn, a response by eight German directors to the death of the RAF terrorists in the Stammheim prison. In his section of that film, Fassbinder sprawls on a couch nude, flushes cocaine down the toilet, and talks at length with his mother about the need for Germany to be ruled by a benign dictator.
In 1982, Fassbinder had just completed editing Querelle although the film had not yet been released. He was working in his Munich apartment, using cocaine to fend off exhaustion. Around midnight on June 9, 1982, he went into his bedroom and said that he was going to work on his screenplay for a film about Rosa Luxembourg. Fassbinder wrote his pictures while watching TV and, sometimes, listening to music at the same time. Julianne Lorenz heard the TV but noticed that there were no other sounds coming from the room. Suspecting that something was wrong, she entered Fassbinder’s bedroom, something that was usually verboten when he was working, and found the film maker slumped over his notes, a cigarette still burning in his lips. Fassbinder was dead from a heart attack at 37. The autopsy showed that he was drunk, high on cocaine, and that his belly was also full of sleeping pills. This misadventure was accidental. There is no evidence that Fassbinder was ever suicidal and was, in fact, enthusiastic about his next film project.
Throughout his career, Fassbinder made just about every kind of picture including one misbegotten spaghetti-Western, Whitey. He was attacked for misogyny – I am uncomfortable myself about the way that Fassbinder’s films characteristically portray women. (He is not the kind of homosexual who admires and identifies with women – indeed, he often seems to find women repellent. But, in fairness, one must concede that he seems to have just about everyone repellent.) He was attacked by the German Marxist left for being insufficiently political and for his films implicitly criticizing the excesses of the radicals and terrorists in the Red Army Faction. Right-wing and conservative Germans found his films pornographic. In fact, Franz Xavier Kroetz, a prominent German playwright, sued Fassbinder over Jailbait, based on one Kroetz’s plays, alleging that the movie was "obscene." Curiously enough, every one of his homosexual-themed films was attacked by the German gay community as "homophobic." Fassbinder was also criticized by Jews for alleged "anti-Semitism." He seems to have offended every possible faction over and over again.
Peter Berling, an important impresario to the German New Cinema, has said that Fassbinder’s death devastated the Movement and that it collapsed shortly after he died. Most importantly, Fassbinder’s death destroyed the careers of his ensemble actors, more than 20 men and women who performed in his films and also doubled as his film crew. When Fassbinder died, his coterie couldn’t find work and most of them left the film industry. Berling notes that Werner Herzog "lost his way" after Fassbinder died; Wim Wenders moved to Hollywood where he was unable to control the studio films that he made and, ultimately, failed; Volker Schloendorff also went to Hollywood and, also, failed. Alexander Kluge couldn’t get funding for his pictures. The only German director who stayed in Munich and "stood his ground", according to Berling, was Werner Schroeter, who Fassbinder had acclaimed as a genius, but who never "made a satisfactory film" – at least according to the acerbic Berling. Thus, Fassbinder’s untimely demise ripped out the heart of the German New Wave and, effectively, brought that movement to an end. There has been nothing to replace the vigor and excitement associated with the New German Cinema in the united Deutschland. (Indeed, the only movement of this kind to surface since Fassbinder’s death has been the group of South Korean filmmakers who presently seem to comprise a National school.)

David Thomson has a good quote about Fassbinder: "Like Godard, he hurled himself at us with such violence that we retreated." The last word belongs to Fassbinder: when his students asked him: "How do you imagine your old age?" he answered: "I don’t plan on getting there."
　
　
A Comparison
In his precociousness and zeal for making movies, Fassbinder resembles, a bit, Steven Spielberg. Both men were able to make many movies with tremendous natural facility. Both were precocious, making several pictures before they were 23.
The differences are significant, however, and probably greater than the similarities. Spielberg’s references are to earlier films. His movies, often, invoke other pictures. Spielberg’s grasp of reality is always mediated through his cinephilia, that is, through his memories of earlier pictures.
Fassbinder, although he adopted the pose of Munich beer-hall thug, was fundamentally a product of the German urban upper middle-class. As such, he is highly literate. Fassbinder views film through the medium of theater and literature. His early films were based on Fassbinder’s understanding of Brecht and adapted the playwright’s notion of the "epic" theater to film. (Brecht’s theater is anti-psychological, relying upon generic characters who enact roles imposed upon them by the class and social systems in which they are embedded. Similarly, Fassbinder’s movies feature characters who are defined by their external circumstances and who can not change or develop. Some critics find this a profound limitation in Fassbinder’s cinema – Wenders, in particular, speaks mournfully of Fassbinder’s "static, immobile, eternally unchanging characters who are always doomed.") Fassbinder’s greatest works may be his adaptations of novels. The movie on which he labored the hardest and that he thought his best film was his version of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1974). Fontane is the German equivalent of Henry James and highly sophisticated – there is no trace of beer-hall hooliganism in his hyper-refined writing. Similarly, Fassbinder’s masterpiece is, often, claimed to be the 931 minutes comprising Berlin Alexanderplatz – an adaptation of Alfred Doeblin’s huge novel that Fassbinder said was "literally (his) salvation."
GermanAlthough I am not competent to comment on this aspect of his films, Fassbinder’s characters in Merchant of Four Seasons speak a highly peculiar and idiosyncratic German. Wenders, in his commentary track to the film, says that Fassbinder developed a particular theatrical kind of German that is midway between a Bavarian dialect and High German. Although the characters speak High German, they use a Bavarian accent. Germans characteristically regard the Bavarian accent as charming, sweet, particularly inflected with diminutives and kitschy proverbs – it is the Deutsch equivalent of a woman speaking with a Georgia accent, all "moonbeams and magnolias." Fassbinder’s practice was to distort the Bavarian accent in a way so as to strip the dialect of any "cuteness" and make it sound alien, foreign, harsh and blunt. He is said to invest Bavarian with the hard tenor of semi-military and official High German. Wenders says that, for a native-speaker, Fassbinder’s German is "a little off," and highly distinctive. It is Brechtian device – Fassbinder’s character’s speak a kind of rough, demotic poetry that would never be mistaken for realistically observed German.
　
Hanna SchygullaHanna Schygulla appeared in 14 of Fassbinder’s films and, sometimes, has been called his "muse." Wenders recalls seeing her the first time that he met Fassbinder. The place was a student hang-out in Munich called The Bungalow. Wenders recalls a sloppy bearded man who was completely taciturn and scowled at everyone. Wenders thought that Fassbinder was retarded, some kind of idiot. At that time, Wenders had just started Film School and had a degree in Philosophy. At the juke box, there was a pretty girl wearing an extremely short mini-skirt dancing by herself to an American record. Wenders asked about the girl and was surprised to learn that she was with the fat, bearded guy. Later, Wenders was even more surprised when he learned that the uncommunicative and rude Fassbinder had already made several feature films.
Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder clashed violently with regard to several films. After working with him on Effi Briest, Schygulla refused to appear in Fassbinder’s films for five years, returning to the director in 1979 for The Marriage of Maria Braun. (She is also in Berlin Alexanderplatz and Lili Marlene.)
There is an amusing interview between Hanna Schygulla and Susan Sontag, conducted at the time of the big Fassbinder retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1993. Sontag admired Fassbinder to the point of idolatry and attempts to develop her hagiography through Schygulla. Schygulla, who had working class roots in Silesia, opposes Sontag at every point and seems to have heartily disliked her interlocutor. When asked about her work on Effi Briest, she refuses to acknowledge any pleasure in working with Fassbinder. Sontag tries to draw her out on artistic differences with the director. Instead, Schygulla says that the basis of her conflict with Fassbinder was his predilection for paying far less than union scale for his actors. Schygulla accuses Fassbinder of being ridiculously cheap and greedy. And, in fact, Schygulla led a revolt on the set of Effi Briest, demanding much higher wages for the actors and technicians. Reluctantly, Fassbinder acquiesced and paid slightly more to his crew and actors. When the film was done, Fassbinder confronted Schygulla, and said: "I hate the sight of your face. You bust my balls." They didn’t speak for almost five years after that confrontation.
Fassbinder couldn’t bully Schygulla. He was accustomed to using the threat of physical violence to get his way. With Schygulla, you get the impression that if he punched her, she would punch back and, probably, harder.
　
The "Hollywood Family Drama"Although Fassbinder approaches film through theater and literature, Merchant of Four Seasons arose, in part, from the director’s close study of the American films made by Douglas Sirk. In 1971, Fassbinder attended a Sirk retrospective in Munich and, then, wrote an essay on the six films that he had seen. According to Wenders, Fassbinder was "the opposite of an intellectual" and his essay on Sirk is not particularly probing. Nonetheless, this writing shows Fassbinder’s fascination with the director and his admiration for his films. And, indeed, Fassbinder’s often expressed admiration for Sirk has been instrumental in restoring interest in that director as one of the most atmospheric and accomplished Hollywood film makers in the fifties.
Hans Detlef Sierck was born in Hamburg in 1896 and emigrated to the United States during the Hitler era. Before coming to America, Sierck had made a number of excellent films in the thirties, both in Germany and France. In the late forties, he re-established himself under an Americanized version of his name in Hollywood and directed a series of melodramas, many of them starring Rock Hudson, that were immensely successful. These films include Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind, and All that Heaven Allows. (Recently, these films have been revived and, indeed, Todd Haynes recently re-made All that Heaven Allows.) Sirk’s American films are "family melodramas" – they form a particular genre and typically involve an emotionally dominant character who imposes sadistic demands on the weaker hero or heroine. These films are constructed to invoke the audience’s antipathy toward the dominant character, but, then, typically involve a reversal, the revelation that the cruel character is, in fact, well-meaning or acting under duress – the vicious scheming woman turns out to be conniving to protect her daughter or acting under compulsions based on previous trauma. Sirk developed an elaborate style with baroque, expressionistic lighting effects and, often, stylized dialogue. Fassbinder felt that Sirk’s pictures were effective because intense emotions were portrayed "under the sign of inauthenticity" – that is, conveyed in an alienating, highly theatrical mise-en-scene.
Thomas Elsaesser, probably the most incisive critic on Fassbinder, observes that Merchant of Four Seasons adapts Sirk to Germany, "operating on the razor’s edge between sentimental tragedy and Wirtschaftswunder-kitsch." Elsaesser observes that in Fassbinder’s melodrama, the principal character’s "failure will also be the moment of his most intense self-affirmation." In Merchant, Fassbinder depicts a counter-cultural phenomenon – a young man whose striving is downwardly mobile. Hans Epp comes from a middle-class, even upper middle-class, Catholic milieu, the kind of Munich people with which Heinrich Boll would have been comfortable. Epp, who longs to be a soldier and a cop – that is, who embodies Germany’s quasi-fascist male authoritarian Weltanschauung – seems to strive against the current of the upwardly mobile and ambitious Wirtschaftswunder; with his slatternly wife, he aspires to become a successful street vendor. He is member of the middle class who has become a member of the working class. Of course, German society is shown to be intolerant of someone whose aspiration is work below his education and below his class – this is an aspect of the cruelty shown to Hans Epp but everyone in his family but his sister as played by Hanna Schygulla. Epp’s failure is also his self-affirmation: he wants to be a street vendor of fruits and vegetables, a career choice that is ultimately destructive to him.
Fassbinder said: "I want to make Hollywood movies, movies as wonderful and universal as Hollywood movies but not so hypocritical."

And in this context, Fassbinder said: "I want the audience to have the emotions but I don’t want to show those emotions to them."
　
CommentaryMerchant of Four Seasons
reveals its essential elements in its astounding first shot. Someone is knocking on a door and an old woman goes to open it. This is Hans Epp’s mother. She is palpably disappointed to see Epp standing outside and, only reluctantly lets him into the house. Then, she expresses disappointment that he has survived the war. Epp wears a ridiculous-looking backpack and looks like a surly dwarf. Together, Epp and his mother advance into the house, moving toward the camera. The sequence is shot so that Epp and his mother seem frozen in space – although they are walking toward us, they don’t ever increase in size and can’t seem to approach the camera. The scene is overtly dream-like – we have a sense of paralysis and arrested motion, of running in place. Two important aspects of the film are announced by this opening: Hans Epp is the man draussen vor der Tuer – to quote the title of an influential post-war theater-piece by Wolfgang Borchert. He is the soldier returned from the war but excluded from society. (This is an ongoing theme in Fassbinder and realized most effectively in his The Marriage of Maria Braun in the motif of the prisoner of war returning to a prosperous amnesiac Germany that is uninterested in accepting him.) The second aspect of the film materialized in this sequence is the sense of the characters as embedded in their milieu like flies trapped in amber – no one can really move or progress. Fassbinder’s identification with Hans Epp provides an alarming frisson to the film. Clearly, the director devised Hans Epp as a reflection to himself. The pudgy, sweaty Epp is frequently violent. Like Fassbinder, he is cheap, cruel, lavishly sentimental, a conniving money-grubber. The scene in which Epp beats Irm Hermann, just as Fassbinder himself abused her, has an almost unbearable intimacy. Fassbinder casts his wife Ingrid Cavin as the "love of (Epp’s) life" – she is the red-haired woman that we see sprawled on the bed naked in one scene and standing aloof from Epp’s funeral at the end of the picture. And Fassbinder’s emotional investment in the flashback scene involving Epp’s flogging by the Berber is also uncomfortably palpable.
I vividly recall that flashback scene from my first encounter with Merchant of Four Seasons at the Bell Museum in 1974. The movie is static and claustrophobic – it is shot indoors and within the looming confines of the apartment Hofs or courtyards, some of them nested at as many as four removes from the street. The courtyards signify as prisons and Fassbinder’s interiors are tight and airless. And, then, suddenly, near the end of the film, we are shown an inscrutable sequence commencing with one of the film’s few long-shots – the image of the Berber flogging Epp who is tied to a lone tree in what appears to be a vast meadow. Appearing in context, this long shot, designed as a luminous landscape, is like a breath of fresh air, like a moment of jubilant liberation, notwithstanding the dire subject matter. It is as if all the hypocrisy of the film, the subtle, restrained sadism, has erupted into a liberating display of cruelty. For some reason, the viewer feels invigorated, enthusiastic, even joyful – instead of cruel sotto voce remarks and social oppression, we are shown actual torture and a real threat of death and, paradoxically, this overt savagery somehow seems to invigorate the film. Fassbinder seems to have been masochistic – at least, he cruised heavy SM bars in New York City – and, in this episode in the film, he shows his surrogate Hans Epp being whipped by the love of Fassbinder’s life, the Moroccan Berber E Hedi ben Salem, the director’s real-life lover. The sequence seems to suggest that Epp’s highest aspiration is fundamentally masochistic – to die ecstatically at the hands of someone that he loves. The weird emotional intensity of this sequence is indelible and makes the audience uncomfortable. Long after I had forgotten the rest of the picture, I remembered this sequence and, also, remembered that I didn’t understand it all but that the imagery and staging had a peculiar incandescent power. The flogging of Hans Epp is the film’s climax and "happy ending" – as opposed to the morose denouement in the over-lit Munich bar. It is the orgiastic embodiment of the death instinct that afflicts our poor bloodied hero.
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself
Fassbinder was caught in a vicious circle. A homosexual who despised the nuclear family, Fassbinder nonetheless was the paterfamilias of a large clan: more than twenty actors, actresses and technicians depended upon him for their livelihood for about a dozen years. He kept his crew on payroll, although he was stingy about wages, and, wrote specific parts for his players. If one actor had a small role in a current film, Fassbinder would write a larger role for that performer in his upcoming picture – thus, keeping his ensemble together by perpetually varying the size and importance of the parts that he doled out to his players. This juggling act required incessant writing by Fassbinder – he was always working on a new script.
Similarly, Fassbinder’s first films have a primitive archaic feeling – the camera never moves and the actors are framed in tableaux. We can see some of this technique in the bar scenes involving Hans Epp and his cronies. But as Fassbinder educated himself in the craft of cinema, he developed an increasingly elaborate style. Fassbinder’s later films are dense with complicated lighting effects and intricate tracking shots. As he developed these techniques, his film grammar became more sophisticated. But Fassbinder did not slow down his pace of film production. Thus, as his movies became bigger budget and more complex, he continued making movies at a rate of three or more per year. This pace was necessitated by Fassbinder’s sense that he was obligated to keep his family of actors and technicians working. Adding to Fassbinder’s work load was his ability to shoot, edit, musically score, and produce (with concomitant fundraising responsibilities) his films this imposed literally lethal demands on the director.
TruemmerliteraturAfter World War II, in Germany, there flourished (if that is the right word) a genre of writing called "Truemmerliteratur" – or "rubble literture". This was fiction and theater committed to representing the catastrophic effects of the war on all aspects of German life. By the late fifties, Truemmerliteratur was passe and thought anachronistic. Germany was prosperous and most people in that country wanted to simply forget the terrible things that had happened during the War and its immediate aftermath. For Fassbinder’s generation of artists, Truemmerliteratur was an embarrassing and disturbing artifact of events that no one wanted to remember. The extent of this self-imposed amnesia was revealed a decade ago when W. G. Sebald began to write about the aerial bombing of German cities in his book The Natural History of Destruction. Although the book was hailed as important and powerfully written, Germans found it almost unbearably troubling. Sebald’s narratives about the destruction of Germany under allied bombs probably could not have been written by a German living in his native country – Sebald spent his adult life in the United Kingdom.
In many respects, however, The Merchant of Four Seasons is an example of a film grounded in Truemmerliteratur. Fassbinder’s hero is a soldier who has returned from a war only to be immediately rejected by his family. Hans Epp’s wartime trauma haunts the picture. Fassbinder’s great innovation was to devise a way to revive many of the conventions of Truemmerliteratur in the context of self-satisfied West Germany enjoying a booming economy and great prosperity. Merchant of Four Seasons reminds us that there are winners and losers in wars other than those that waged on the battlefield. The Wirtschaftswunder of the West German economic recovery had casualties and there are Stalingrads fought in the bedrooms and kitchens of small, airless apartments every day. I think Merchant of Four Seasons is important because it invokes aspects of Truemmerliteratur that had become inaccessible to West German audiences in 1971. (Fassbinder’s overt example of Truemmerliteratur is The Marriage of Maria Braun, the story of a soldier whose marriage to his wife is interrupted by bombardment and who returns many years after the War from captivity in the Soviet Union to find his wife happily married and a member of the rising German middle-class.)
A QuoteFassbinder said: "Every decent director has only one subject and makes the same film over and over again. My theme is the exploitability of emotion. People’s emotions are always exploited in order to dominate others. Either the State exploits our emotions to make us do its bidding or members of a couple do this so that one can control, and destroy, the other. This is what my films are about."
　
QUIZ - Cameos1. Fassbinder’s mother appears in the film. Name the scene.
2. Fassbinder himself appears in the movie. In what scene?
3. How do his lines relate to his practice as a film maker?