1.
Poor Fassbinder! Born three weeks after Germany surrendered to the Allies, he was raised amidst rubble and ruins. Fearing that the child would starve or freeze to death in the desperately hungry winter of 1946, the little Rainer Werner was sent to the country where, at least, there were a few animals remaining to be slaughtered. His father, a poetry-writing doctor, sold his services to prostitutes in Munich’s red light district, doing examinations and administering anti-venereal disease injections from the family apartment. Fat, homosexual, and ugly, Fassbinder’s teenage years were a nightmare. Exiled to a boarding school because of conflict at home, he was tormented by the other kids and spent his time attempting escape. When he was 18, Fassbinder studied acting, but, because of his appearance, no one was much interested in hiring him. He applied to film school and was rejected. Married twice and twice divorced, he beat up his first wife on the streets of Bochum, thrashing her so severely that she almost died. Although he was homosexual, he couldn’t function without a woman living with him. His first great love, the African American-German, Guenther Kauffman, mercilessly exploited Fassbinder while carrying on an affair with the director’s composer, Peer Raben. Fassbinder gave Kauffman four Lamborghinis – his boyfriend wrecked one of them and, then, sold the others for drug money. Notwithstanding this abuse, Fassbinder found a way to keep Kauffman on his payroll and cast him in 14 movies. Fassbinder’s next infatuation was El Hedi Ben Saleem, a Berber from Morocco. Fassbinder met him in a gay bathhouse in Paris and carried out a tumultuous three-year love affair with him. Ben Saleem was a violent drunk and frequently beat up Fassbinder, sometimes threatening him with a knife. When the relationship ended, Ben Saleem ran amuck, stabbed three people, and had to spirited out of Munich in the dead of night. He later hanged himself in Tunis. Fassbinder’s third great love was a Munich butcher with no interest in literature or films – he could scarcely read. During the week of Fassbinder’s birthday, he committed suicide, distraught at not being invited to the party. Fassbinder’s prodigious film and theater output was roundly condemned from all sides: right wing critics thought that his work was disloyal to Germany, crypto-communist, and obscene; left wing critics condemned Fassbinder for being insufficiently progressive and claimed that he was a crypto-fascist. Feminists said that his works were misogynistic and abusive. Homosexuals condemned him for self-loathing and found homophobic messages in the works of an openly gay director. Everyone denounced several of Fassbinder’s theater works as anti-Semitic. Although he died at 38, his system full of barbituates and cocaine, it’s apparent that he was really killed by exhaustion, a casualty of overwork.
Fortunate Fassbinder! Rejected by the Munich film school, Fassbinder didn’t study films, but made them. Wim Wenders notes ruefully that while he was learning about movies at school, Fassbinder directed 10 feature films. Film school teaches you about the history of the art form and encourages students to imitate established masters. Fassbinder’s roots were in the theater, specifically Brecht’s works, and so his films represented something new – he wasn’t recycling imagery from Hollywood or the German expressionist cinema. Instead, he was adapting plays and, therefore, focused intensely on screenwriting from the very outset. Without a good script, a movie will fail. Fassbinder was so prodigiously gifted that he could shoot a feature picture in 9 to 20 days. (Fassbinder’s longest period of production shooting was the 58 days he required for the film that he regarded as his masterpiece, his adaptation of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest.) When studying theater, Fassbinder met Hanna Schygulla, the woman who became the face of Germany’s New Wave cinema and who is particularly associated with Fassbinder’s films. (She is still making movies today.) Fassbinder’s Anti-Theater troop provided him with a score of brilliant actors who remained slavishly loyal to the director (despite his relentless bullying) up to the point of his death. Kurosawa once said that creating within an art form that one loves is the greatest joy that anyone can ever hope to experience: in less than 18 years Fassbinder directed more than 40 films, wrote a dozen plays and directed about 24 theater works (his own and others) for the stage; he directed many television programs, including the monumental 16 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz. When Julie Lorenz, his last girlfriend (and the woman that now controls his Stiftung or Foundation), last saw Fassbinder alive it was midnight – he was simultaneously writing notes for film about the Communist organizer Rosa Luxemburg, reading a book, and watching TV. (This was Fassbinder’s characteristic way of working.) He was found dead at 3 in the morning with the TV still turned-on. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a stack of handwritten pages comprising his scenario for the film about Rosa Luxemburg, entitled Rosa S. was on the table next to him. He had a streak of blood below one of his nostrils. It is a legendary death, ein grosser Tod, ein schoener Tod.
2.
During my last Spring as an undergraduate, I saw Fox and his Friends (1975) at the University Film Society. It was probably April or May 1976. At that time, I was studying German and had read about Fassbinder in international film magazines, particularly the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound. There was a buzz about Fassbinder – I think a retrospective of his earlier films had played at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I didn’t like Fox and his Friends. The subject matter was rebarbative – the persecution and betrayal of working class gay carnival worker. I had trouble following the plot, very intricate by Hollywood standards, and, also, quite recondite – the narrative depends on tax fraud, bankruptcy, and insurance law issues. (Fassbinder, as a Marxist, embeds his stories in an economic matrix.) The homosexuality depicted in the movie made me uncomfortable, although, of course, I would never have admitted to this at the time. Most problematic for me was the film’s pacing – the picture involved long theatrical exchanges, lots of dialogue delivered at Elizabethan speeds, and much bitchy repartee. Fassbinder’s compositions seemed both static and pointlessly ornate – it seemed as if half of the shots featured mirrors and the color scheme had a sort of zinc neon aspect: it was simultaneously sleek and shiny but, also, cheap-looking. I thought the movie was very boring and unpleasant and resolved that I wouldn’t go to any of Fassbinder’s other films – why afflict myself with something that I couldn’t understand and didn’t like?
But the last scene in the movie got under my skin. I can still recall it today. Fox, played by Fassbinder himself, is lying dead on the floor of a Munich subway. Some little kids ransack his body and steal some of his personal items. A few subway passengers approach. Among them are Fox’s boyfriend, who has abandoned him. The former boyfriend glances at the dead body, looks repelled, and hurries by without making any comment to his new lover. The little boys emerge from the subterranean shadows to continue looting the corpse. Metal escalators gleam and whir in the background. It’s just a subway realistically portrayed in bright, vulgar pop-art colors – but we’re also peering into Hades, the Underworld.
In fact, I saw most of Fassbinder’s films when they opened in Minneapolis at the University: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant impressed me with its decor (two Lesbians locked in Strindberg-style Dance of Death are shot against a giant mural of Nicolas Poussin’s Midas and Bacchus, several hundred square of feet of painted lush, naked flesh) but I didn’t understand the emotions so operatically displayed in the film and found the entire exercise fantastically dull; Merchant of Four Seasons had a terrific, if depressing ending, but the rest of the movie baffled me. Effi Briest, probably Fassbinder’s magnum opus from that period, was so incredibly dull that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Why did people in these films have to treat one another so badly? Why did Fassbinder shoot his leading ladies to make them look like haggard, emaciated cancer victims? Everything about these movies seemed needlessly cruel. It was like some kind of perverse modernist opera with a sound track comprised of vintage rock-and-roll – The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, for instance, is scored to the song “The Great Pretender”. Why were mirrors strewn all over the pictorial landscape? It wasn’t until I saw Fassbinder’s Wildwechsel (released in the US as Jailbait) that I grasped that the director, perhaps, was exploring important subjects with stylish and uncompromising integrity. (Ironically, Wildwechsel, which I saw at the Walker Art Center, is one of Fassbinder’s films that remains very hard to see – it was made for German TV and based on a play Franz Xavier Kroetz, another highly provocative and controversial artist; some kind of quarrel has ensued between Kroetz, who is elderly but still alive, and the Fassbinder Stiftung and the movie is locked away pending the outcome of litigation.)
Although I continued to find Fassbinder’s movies distasteful thematically, I faithfully saw many of them when they showed up in Minneapolis. I went to Despair based on the Nabokov novel at the old Cedar-Riverside theater (now the Cedar-Riverside cultural center) – the theater was freezing cold; I think it was going out of business and the owners were economizing on heat. By the time I moved to Austin in 1979, Fassbinder’s work had become Art-House mainstream – in other words, his pictures played at the Lagoon and Uptown Theaters in Minneapolis. It was at the Uptown Theater that I saw Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, which I disliked, Lili Marlene, a terrible picture, and The Yearning of Veronika Voss, a movie that I thought a masterpiece. I saw the decadent Querelle, based on the novel by Jean Genet, and really just gay pornography, also at the Uptown, I think. Then, Fassbinder died and that was the end of it.
A few years later, a West German film called Kamikaze 82 appeared inexplicably in one of Austin’s video rental places. Fassbinder starred in this movie directed by someone else, an inexplicable science fiction film, but funny and perverse. In his last years, he had grown as fat as Orson Welles. Eva Mattes, who played the 13 year old girl in Wildwechsel, the first Fassbinder film that I enjoyed, later donned a beard and convincingly played the middle-aged and portly director in a weird picture called A Man Named Eva. She waddled around the set, abusing everyone and shouting obscenities, apparently mimicking Fassbinder’s characteristic vocal inflections and gestures. It was funny and cruel and, undoubtedly, a nasty gesture of which Fassbinder would have approved. (Fassbinder died in June 1982 and so A Man Named Eva was a sort of last slap in the face.) The 1984 film, also showed up in Austin, in the late ‘80's in an Austin video place – how (and why) these films found their way to Austin is mysterious to me. Perhaps, they were seeking me out. I can’t believe anyone else in Austin wanted to see these pictures.
But there was one other in person in Austin who had an interest in Fassbinder. This was Russ Robinson, the DFL activist and director of the Austin Businessman’s Credit Association. The public library acquired a copy of Fassbinder’s 16 hour TV show, Berlin Alexanderplatz on Criterion DVD – this was probably about 1995. Russ watched the whole thing, much to the dismay of his wife, Marianne – she was appalled that he wasted his time on the thing.
In the first decade of the 21st century, I began to revisit Fassbinder’s films on DVD and found that my early, callow opinions of them were mistaken. Several of the director’s films are, indeed, now very great in my estimation. And the most majestic of those pictures, I think, are the three movies comprising the BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland – that is, West Germany) trilogy. Those pictures, in order of their release, are The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), and The Yearning of Veronika Voss (1982)
3.
Fassbinder’s name is invoked periodically as an example of an uncompromising, relentlessly authentic, provocateur director. (In the popular imagination, he has replaced Jean-Luc Godard in this role – Godard’s famous movies of the sixties have now acquired the status of either “classic” or museum-piece, depending on your perspective.) Most folks who invoke Fasssbinder in this capacity, of course, weren’t alive when he died in 1982. In the Amazon TV series, The Boys, a moviemaker pitches a trendy lesbian-themed action movie (Girls get it done) to the money-men in a big corrupt corruption. The moviemaker wears a black tee-shirt with the name Fassbinder emblazoned across his chest. The picture that he is pitching is, of course, salacious comic-book garbage – intentionally ironic because The Boys is also salacious, if very witty and ingenious, comic book garbage. Fassbinder’s name is invoked as a touchstone for a kind of mythical integrity in the film-making.
4.
Fassbinder’s nihilistic cynicism is tiring. But cynicism is the inverse side of a romantic, yearning idealism. Many people accept that the world is cruel, corrupt, and heartless. Why should it be any other way? But Fassbinder’s cynicism is wounded idealism. This is what makes his films so powerful. At the heart of his movies, there is a sense that things could somehow have been better and that the future still, perhaps, might redeem the past.
Fassbinder looked around West Germany at the end of the seventies and saw a morally vacuous, greedy, materialistic, and soul-less society, a country with its upper echelon business and political leaders compromised by their Fascist past. Everywhere he looked, Fassbinder saw ex-Nazis. How had things become so corrupt? Fassbinder is always a moralist. So he set about creating a trilogy of films about the foundation the Bundesrepublik, about the beginnings of West Germany, in an attempt to discover what had gone wrong.
5.
An admirer of Hollywood melodramas, particularly the work of the expatriate German Douglas Sirk (Detlev Sierck in the old country), Fassbinder chooses the vehicle of the “woman’s film”, the histrionic two-hanky “weepie,” for the movies in the BRD trilogy. Fassbinder felt that women made better protagonists in films than their male counterparts. He said that women were “unpredictable” while men generally “just acted as society expected them to.” Fassbinder seems to have felt that women were more free to express their emotions. Men, by contrast, were emotionally inexpressive and repressed. Therefore, each of the movies comprising the BRD trilogy are keyed to the story of a particular woman – Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola. Although the trilogy doesn’t include battle scenes or public spectacle, it is, nonetheless, epic in scope, nothing less than an attempt to display the historical forces and socioeconomic pressures that were instrumental in the formation of the Federal Republic. If Virgil’s Aeniad depicts the foundation of the Roman Empire, Fassbinder’s ambition is to show how the BRD came to exist in the form that he experienced during his lifetime.
The first film in the sequence, The Marriage of Maria Braun was shot beginning in January 1978. Probably, Fassbinder didn’t imagine the picture to be part of a trilogy. That notion arises with Veronika Voss which is labeled “BRD 2" in its title sequence, thus signifying the group of films are related thematically. The Marriage of Maria Braun was an enormous international success and established Fassbinder as a director of world importance. (Similarly, the film made its star, Hanna Schygulla, into a world-wide sensation.) The movie begins with a literal bang. We see a picture of Hitler on a wall. The wall dissolves in a shower of smashed bricks as a bomb hits the building where the image is posted. Inside the building, a city hall, Maria is marrying a soldier. The movie’s script is brilliant. Maria Braun’s marriage consists of just one night, part of a day, and an afternoon. After she is married and their one-night honeymoon, Maria’s husband is sent to the Russian Front where he is captured and vanishes. After the war, Maria and her mother are starving. Maria uses her last few dollars to buy a slinky evening gown (from a vicious black marketeer played by Fassbinder) and becomes a prostitute. After the manner of German women in the immediate post-war period, she uses her cool sex appeal to recruit a protector, a kindly Black GI. While she is having sex with her guardian, Maria’s soldier-husband unexpectedly returns. There’s a fight and Maria kills the American soldier. Her husband accepts blame for the homicide and goes to prison in her stead. Maria establishes herself as a successful entrepreneur, makes a lot of money, and buys a nice villa. After spending some years in jail, her husband is released. He and Maria don’t have a lot to say to one another. She is distraught, possibly at her lack of interest in the man to whom she has devoted her life (of course, while sleeping with others and making a fortune). She forgets to turn off the gas on her stove after lighting a cigarette and the film ends with another bang – the gas ignites and she and her husband and her fine new home are blown to bits. The film is two hours long but feels massive and encyclopedic. Hanna Schygulla’s performance as Maria is astonishing. The picture is shot in moody technicolor, in fact, in a noir register. The obvious Hollywood source for the film the Joan Crawford picture Mildred Pierce, a movie that has a similar high-strung narrative involving sex and a successful (if unhappy) business woman. Fassbinder takes pain to tether the film to history – during the last scene, while explosive gas is infiltrating the house, we hear the 1954 World Cup on a radio broadcast. Fassbinder dates the founding of the BRD to Germany’s victory at Wankdorf Stadium in Bern in that soccer competition.
The next film shot in the series, made while Fassbinder was simultaneously working on Berlin Alexanderplatz and Despair (with Dirk Bogarde), is Lola. Again, Fassbinder carefully locates the movie in history – once more there is a broadcast of a soccer game in the World Cup tournament: this establishes the year as 1958 (BRD v. Sweden). In terms of the trilogy’s chronology, Lola, is BRD 3 – that is, the last in time in the sequence. (Lola was released in 1981 that is before BRD 2 Veronika Voss was made.) Fassbinder devised a different color scheme and editing style for each film in the series. Lola is shot in garish, “candy” colors and resembles Written on the Wind, Sirk’s masterpiece with Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone). The period of time between 1956 and 1960 was the “most amoral in German history” Fassbinder has declared and the movie reflects this conviction. Lola is set in Coburg, a small city in Franconia between Cologne and Munich. Coburg is famous for Luther lodging there for a time, a street battle between Hitler’s storm troopers and local Communists, and the fact that Queen Victoria of England met her husband, Prince Albert in that place (Albert was born there, a scion of the family Saxe-Coburg). The city wasn’t bombed in World War Two and so its historic center with many ancient buildings remains intact. After the War, the town was flooded with displaced persons from the East, more than 15,000 arriving in a town with a population of about 35,000 – Von Bohm, the new Building Inspector, is one of these refugees.
The second film in the trilogy, BRD 2, Veronika Voss was the second to last movie that Fassbinder completed. (His last picture was the Genet adaptation, Querelle.) Veronika Voss is shot in exquisite black and white and has the form of a horror movie. The picture chronicles the last days of its heroine, the doomed morphine addict and former UFA movie star, Veronika Voss. Featuring another astonishing performance – this by Rosel Zech – the picture was originally entitled Sybille Schmitz, the name of a movie star who flourished in the decades of the thirties and early forties in the German film industry. In interviews, Fassbinder said Sybille Schmitz with Joan Crawford and Vivien Leigh were his all-time favorite actresses. Schmitz first appeared in Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and, then, was famous for a series of UFA Hitlerzeit melodramas. (She was reputed to be Dr. Josef Goebbels’ mistress). After the war, Schmitz was tainted and couldn’t find work. She fell under the influence of Dr. Ursula Moritz who prescribed heavy doses of cocaine and morphine for her. Schmitz became addicted and signed over what was left of her fortune to Dr. Moritz. She was found dead on April 13, 1955, the victim of a drug overdose. (Fassbinder wanted to cast her in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and was surprised to learn that she was dead.) Subsequently, there was a celebrated trial in which the sinister Dr. Moritz was accused of murdering her patients to misappropriate their assets. Moritz was convicted of some irregularities with respect to her prescriptions but the murder charges didn’t stick – she served only four months in prison. Fassbinder follows this gruesome story in The Yearning of Veronika Voss. In his film, a sports writer encounters the hapless Veronika Voss during a rainstorm and walks her home. The sports writer suspects that something is amiss and gradually uncovers the faded movie star’s relationship with the exploitative Dr. Moritz. The sports writer investigates and tries to rescue Veronika but fails. Dr. Moritz hosts a farewell party for Veronika in which she sings the Dean Martin song “Memories are made of this” in a low, baritone voice that sounds like Marlene Dietrich. She is locked in a white room with morphine and several syringes and, while Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” plays on the soundtrack in an eerie loop, overdoses. I recall seeing the film at the Uptown Theater at Hennepin and Lagoon. I admired the movie greatly and remember thinking that Fassbinder was on the verge of becoming one of the most important directors in the world. But he was dead a few months later. Maria Braun was too cynical for me and I didn’t fully understand that film – in fact, I didn’t like it. I didn’t see Lola. But Veronika Voss, which had the simple form of a horror movie, that is, a morality play in which good and evil are in conflict, made a deep impression on me.
Although Veronika Voss was made when Fassbinder’s funding for a film called Kokain (“Cocaine”) fell through, he recognized that his three movies named after women formed a trilogy and labeled Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss as “BRD 2" – thus, recognizing that Maria Braun was BRD 1 and Lola BRD 3.
6.
In Lola, Armin Mueller-Stahl plays the apparently incorruptible building official Von Bohm. The most difficult assignment for an actor is to play a man of simple good faith and virtue – by comparison, villains are easy to impersonate. Mueller-Stahl with his piercing blue eyes and perfect Aryan good looks makes a remarkable impression in this film, one of his first pictures after fleeing East Germany. (On the strength of his performance in this film, Mueller-Stahl became a full-fledged international star.)
In effect, Mueller-Stahl plays a person with a biography very similar to his own. The actor was born in 1930 on the marches of East Prussia in Tilsit, a city now located well within the Russian Republic (Sovetsk, Oblast of Kaliningrad). In High School, Mueller-Stahl was a violin child prodigy and, when we see him playing the fiddle in Lola, he is performing himself. After the war, Mueller-Stahl’s homeland ceased to exist and he ended up in East Berlin. He studied acting there, beginning in 1952, and was cast in East German films beginning in the mid-fifties. He played many different roles and was well-regarded for his versatility and skill. Between 1973 and 1979, Mueller-Stahl was a household name in East Germany, famous for playing a flamboyant spy modeled on James Bond in the TV show Der Unsichtbare Visier (“The Invisible Vizier”). Of course, Mueller-Stahl’s exploits in the show were supervised by the Stasi (the East German State Security Police) – the spy was a defender of East German communism. In 1979, Mueller-Stahl supported Wolf Biermann, the East German protest singer, in his dissent against the State. Mueller-Stahl probably gambled that he was too famous and well-liked to be persecuted in the East German’s crusade against Biermann. He lost the wager and was blacklisted. Mueller-Stahl emigrated to West Germany in 1980. One of his very first roles in the West was the part of Von Bohm in Lola. In the film, Von Bohm has come from the East to the small city ruled by the corrupt Schuckert and his girlfriend, Lola. Indeed, he is quintessentially an East German – that is, a representative of the old civic virtues of duty and loyalty largely eroded in the West. (In East German propaganda, the West Germans were portrayed as sex-hungry, money-mad pseudo-Americans and, indeed, no longer German at all; what remained of German Tugend – that is, “virtue” – had taken up habitation on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.) Mueller-Stahl as Von Bohm arrives in town cloaked in naivety and rectitude. The film is the story of his ultimate corruption.
Mueller-Stahl is still alive and has appeared in dozens of films. He worked with Jim Jarmusch in Life on Earth, appeared with Jessica Lange in The Music Box, played a menacing gangster in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007) and, in 2015, acted in Terrance Malick’s The Knight of Cups. In German films, he has played the part of Thomas Mann for a mini-series on TV, and, inevitably, one supposes. acted the part of Hitler, that role in a movie that he directed himself, Gespraech mit dem Biest (“Dialogue with a Beast”). After appearing in Lola, Mueller-Stahl worked again with Fassbinder the next year in Veronika Voss. Mueller-Stahl was fifty when he played the part of Von Bohm in Lola.
Mueller-Stahl recalled that the shoot on Lola was conducted at “lightning speed.” He said that the sets were brilliant with patches of deeply saturated blue and red lighting, divided by zones of yellow. Speaking metaphorically, Mueller-Stahl said that Fassbinder continuously drove his actors to excess, outrageous performances – “he made us act,” he complained, “always in the red zone.”
7.
Although he terrorized them, Fassbinder successfully maintained relationships with a group of actors who worked with him loyally until he died. Indeed, many of these performers have said that Fassbinder spoiled them for other directors – he was too brilliant, too intuitive, and worked with lightning speed so that inspiration on the set never flagged. (For instance, Armin Mueller Stahl has recently said that Fassbinder was the greatest director with whom he ever worked.) Fassbinder’s method was idiosyncratic. He refused to discuss his interpretation of the script with his actors and gave them little in the way of cues. When queried about how to play a role, Fassbinder’s default mode was to discuss soccer. (In good weather, the crew always knocked-off at 4:00 pm so that they could play football with the crew on another film shooting at the Bavarian Studios facility where the movie was made. Everyone knew that no meetings or production could be scheduled for Saturday afternoon, a time Fassbinder devoted to watching soccer on TV.) People who worked with Fassbinder marveled at his decisiveness and said that he directed “as if by telepathy”, scarcely saying a word on the set.
The director of photography on Lola was Xaver Schwartzenberger, an Austrian cameraman who has said that he “had nothing in common with Fassbinder.” However, he had worked with the director on the immensely long and ambitious Berlin Alexanderplatz and, in fact, developed a camera style famous for using very dim lighting in improvised sets without the heavy concentration of close-ups characteristic to TV – it was an entirely new way of conceiving of television photography. (Berlin Alexanderplatz was made as a mini-series for ZDF, German TV.) Lola was Schwartzenberger’s second project with Fassbinder (and his first feature film) but he had already spent hundreds of hours on-set with the director and understood, intuitively, what he wanted. Swartzenberger shot all of Fassbinder’s last films – Michael Ballhaus, his earlier DP, had gone to Hollywood and was working with Scorsese among others. Before beginning work on Lola, Fassbinder and the other members of the crew were told to screen three American films: Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray); The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph Mankiewicz) and, of course, Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk). Fassbinder controlled compositions and was very precisely and dictatorial about what he wanted in the frame. But he left lighting entirely to Schwartzenberger. Based on his study of the Hollywood pictures, Schwartzenberger understood that Fassbinder wanted what he calls “bonbon” or confectionary colors – that is, the colors of jelly beans. This was accomplished by use of filters and scrupulously color coding the action: Von Bohm is coded blue; Lola is red or hot pink – this can be seen spectacularly in the dialogue between the two protagonists in the car at the filling station, each character is lit with his or her characteristic color but rim-lit with the tint of the other. In the scene in which Esslin walks past the male prostitutes playing soccer in the brothel, he moves literally through a rainbow of hues. Fassbinder urged Schwartzenberger to “not be a coward” and to push the extravagant lighting to “the limit.”
Many of Fassbinder’s cronies and customary character actors appear in the film: Hark Bohm and Udo Kier can be seen in the picture; Barbara Sukowa, who plays Lola, was renowned for her work as the doomed prostitute in Berlin Alexanderplatz. The reporter who shows no interest in Schuckert’s corrupt business deals was Fassbinder’s publicist. Mario Adorf, who plays Schuckert, was a well-known performer on German TV and films – he was also modestly famous for playing homicidal outlaws in Italian spaghetti Westerns. In Fassbinder’s view, Germany was “unhoused” and in ruins. The country had to rebuilt and the indefatigable Schuckert displays in the director’s words “admirable vitality.” Indeed, this villain comes close to being the hero of the film. (Schuckert’s “vitality” is contrasted with the radical Esslin’s admiration for the anarchist Bakunin – Esslin is an intellectual but he’s already been coopted by Schuckert since he works in the contractor’s whorehouse and, if the reconstruction of Germany were left to theorists like him, nothing at all would have been accomplished.)
8.
At the time that Lola was made, Fassbinder was a controversial figure in the BRD. Screenings of his films were sometimes accompanied by violent protests and bomb threats. Fassbinder somehow managed to be offensive to everyone. The Left despised him as insufficiently radical, a kind of “ameliorist”; of course, he was anathema to the Right as well. Women accused him of misogyny. The Gay community was angry that he depicted them in an unflattering light.
Of course, Fassbinder was impossibly difficult. After being rejected from the Munich film school twice (he was poor speller and had trouble with conventional German grammar), he applied to the Aktion Theater, a far Left enterprise in which Andreas Baader (later famous for the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang) was a marginal member. Fassbinder’s talent as an actor was immediately recognized. When the leader of the theater broke his leg and was hospitalized, Fassbinder took the opportunity to seduce the man’s wife. The theater boss returned in a rage and tore the entire studio apart, effectively destroying it for good. (He claimed that he had wrecked his own theater as a gesture aimed at oppressive Capitalism.) Fassbinder, then, founded his own group, the Antitheater – the members of the Antitheater, including Hanna Schygulla, became the director’s repertory company.
Fassbinder had the tendency to wreck everything he touched. He married the Berlin cabaret singer, Ingrid Caven (who appears in a number of his films), but spent his honeymoon night in bed with Gunter Kauffman, the half-Black actor who plays the American GI in the films comprising the BRD trilogy. The mayhem created by Fassbinder continued long after his death – he never bothered to divorce Caven and, later, litigation ensued over the rights to his Estate: Ingrid Caven and Fassbinder’s last girlfriend, Julie Lorenz, spent two decades in court fighting over the director’s Nachlass. Lorenz, ultimately, prevailed. The litigious war between two world class and glamorous divas certainly would have enthralled and amused the director.
9.
Esslin, the would-be anarchist, recites a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke to Lola. This is the film’s first scene:
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr / Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben...
(He who has no house will never build one / He who is now alone, will remain alone for a long time)
The name of the poem, famous in German, is Herbsttag (“Autumn Day”).
The poem concludes:
“And (he) will not be able to sleep, will read and write long letters / And will wander here and there in the alleys / Restless, when the wind blows in the fallen leaves.”
Esslin isn’t going to rebuild Germany. He is lost in romantic reverie. Schuckert, and, perhaps, Von Bohm, are the men of the hour.
10.
Dirk Bogarde appeared in Fassbinder’s Despair, a couple years earlier. (This was a big budget Italian-German production based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written by Tom Stoppard). Bogarde was ailing and didn’t want to make any more movies after this production. But he was willing to work with Fassbinder on one last project, an adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat. Fassbinder expressed interest.
Heinrich Mann, the brother of the formidable Thomas, was part of the emigre generation of German artists and intellectuals, refugees from Hitler. He was most famous for Professor Unrat, a book that had been previously made into a classic movie, The Blue Angel, starring Emil Janning and the picture that made Marlene Dietrich into an international star. Josef von Sternberg, who directed Der Blaue Engel, was, in fact, an American director but German-speaking and he made the picture as a vehicle for Janning, then, one of the world’s most important movie stars, in Berlin in 1930 – as was the custom at the time, scenes in the movie were alternatively shot in German, English, Spanish and French. Peter Maerthesheimer, Fassbinder’s primary scriptwriter, was hired to make an adaptation of the novel with the intent that Bogarde would play the primary part. Professor Unrat is set in Germany before World War One, a period that didn’t interest Fassbinder, and so he demanded that the picture be set in his favorite period, the era of his youth, the Adenauer years in West Germany. This made a number of the plot features in Professor Unrat (and Der Blaue Engel) untenable. Furthermore, Fassbinder regarded von Sternberg’s version of the novel as a masterpiece and didn’t think there was any compelling reason to compete with the earlier film. Accordingly, Maerthesheimer’s adaptation was very free indeed. Unfortunately, press releases had been issued suggesting that Lola was an adaptation of Professor Unrat and Fassbinder’s producers were concerned about litigation with the Estate of Heinrich Mann (his wife Lolie). Ultimately, a preemptive settlement was made with Lolie Mann and a lawsuit was averted. Except for the title character, Lola – whose name refers to Dietrich’s character, Lola Lola, in The Blue Angel – there are no real allusions to the Mann novel or Von Sternberg’s adaptation.
Premature press releases can cause trouble. Hanna Schygulla, who was now world-renowned after Maria Braun, told an interviewer that she expected to play the part of Lola Lola, as the character is named in The Blue Angel remake. Fassbinder was enraged since the script wasn’t finished yet and refused to cast Schygulla in the part. As the film was finally conceived, there was no role for Dirk Bogarde and, in any event, he was too weak to appear in the picture.
11.
Some critics call the BRD trilogy, the “Adenauer films”. This is a reference to Konrad Adenauer whose voice recordings appear in each of the movies. Adenauer is the fellow listening intently to an old-style tape recorder in the opening credits. The film posits that he is listening to the Austrian crooner, Freddy Quinn, singing “A white ship sails for Hong Kong...” (Quinn’s song establishes the film’s tone of Sehnsucht – that is, romantic yearning integral to Fassbinder’s trilogy, the counter-balance to the films’ cynicism.)
Adenauer was born in 1876 and was a pious Catholic. From Cologne, he opposed Hitler albeit ineffectively. He was arrested and detained for two days during the purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives”, but released. During the Hitlerzeit, he worked as a bureaucrat and, again, was arrested in 1944 suspected of being complicit in von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler. (The City Fathers in Coburg erect a monument to von Stauffenberg in Lola – this is where Lola wins her bet with Schuckert by getting Von Bohm to kiss her hand in public.) Barely surviving World War II, Adenauer was installed in 1947 as Mayor of Cologne by the Allied Occupying Forces. He became West Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, a position that he held from 1949 to 1963. Adenauer was a centrist, the leader of the Christian Democrat Party (CDU). He became controversial in West Germany for restoring the German army, the Bundeswehr, in 1955 – in Lola, protesters stand near the downtown Church demonstrating against German rearmament. Adenauer thought that the BDR needed nuclear weapons as a deterrent to Soviet power. Ultimately, the United States opposed Germany’s request as to these armaments. Protesters in Lola also refer to the controversial issue of placing American nuclear weapons in Germany. At one point, the soundtrack plays Adenauer speaking in thinly veiled terms about the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet Union – this was in 1956 and 1957.
Adenauer’s lieutenant was Ludwig Erhard, the CDU politician, also a Cologne Catholic, who became Germany’s second chancellor (1963 to 1967). Erhard engaged in secret negotiations with the Soviet Union directed toward reunification of Germany, although Fassbinder probably would not have known about these discussions. Erhard was the country’s economic minister under Adenauer and presided over the Wirtschaftswunder – that is, Germany’s miraculous economic recovery from World War Two. Posters showing Erhard are also visible in the film. Erhard famously traveled to Texas’ hill country where he attended a big BBQ with Lyndon Johnson. Erhard’s support for Johnson’s adventures in Vietnam, ultimately, cost him the support of the increasingly liberal West Germans and he lost power in 1967.
12.
Lola's gaudy colors signify a nation that has turned from war-time (and post-war) austerity to the pursuit of happiness. Fassbinder's technicolor in the picture has the appearance of advertising, publicity and product promotion. Von Bohm buys a TV set, the symbol par excellence of middle class prosperity. West Germany has evolved from "Year Zero" with people skirmishing over scraps of garbage in ruined cities to a prosperous, consumer-driven society. The title sequence is underscored by a Schlager (a hit pop-tune) suggesting that the Germans will again have an international presence -- not as soldiers, but as tourists. However, the paradise of lurid colors in Lola also suggests an inferno -- pink isn't that far on the spectrum from blood-red, the color of hell.
Fassbinder's great gift was to construct compelling melodramatic narratives that have the force of allegory. His characters are rarely two-dimensional and, generally, have a presence that makes them full-fledged and credible figures in his films; his protagonists have back-stories, ambivalent relationships, and are, often, confused about their desires. Sometimes, they act contrary to their best interests and fear their own yearnings and instincts. But these fully realized characters, at least in Fassbinder's most impressive films, also can be read as allegorical representations of political and historical movements. Maria Braun and Lola are not just women striving to find a place in the world but also manifestation of Germania, the female figure symbolizing the nation. Thus, Fassbinder's figures can be read as embodying German ethical and moral values, as well as the destiny of the German Volk. Maria Braun represents the indefatigable will that drove German women to restore their country to bourgeois affluence and respectability. A starving whore at the beginning of the film, Maria Braun ends as a successful, if doomed, entrepreneur living in a mansion in the suburbs. As demonstrated in the plot of The Marriage of Maria Braun, these enterprising women succeeded against the odds and without the help of men -- German men were either dead or missing or useless as a result of psychological trauma from the war; they couldn't be counted on with respect to the Herculean task of rebuilding the shattered country. This is literally true in Maria Braun -- the heroine devotes herself to participation in the economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) while her husband languishes either in a Russian POW camp or German prison. Lola represents Germania at the crossroads -- the Germans can either cleave to their old virtues of Tugend and Pflicht (righteousness and duty) or they can follow an amoral path that is hedonistic and focused on pleasure. Von Bohm and Schuckert embody these two values between which Lola must choose. As always with Fassbinder, her choice turns out to difficult and complex -- she may pay lip-service to bourgeois values but will simultaneously lead another amoral life devoted to pleasure. At worst, the end of the film suggests a fatal division in the soul, a radical split between the "inner" and "outer" lives posited by dialogue in the film. (Coburg's inner life is the brothel, a place that conspicuously has no outside at all -- it's all a pink womb-like interior; the town's exterior life is reflected in the church facade in the town square, which has no inside at all -- no shots are staged within that place.) At best, the film's denouement implies a compromise between systems of values -- one can be respectable and, yet, deeply corrupt at the same time. For Fassbinder's generation, their parents (as shown in the BRD trilogy) were profoundly compromised -- while giving lip-service to the old virtues, dishonored by Nazi ideology that had exploited those values, these men and women also pursued pleasure and economic wealth in a casually negligent, selfish, and destructive way. It is from this Kulturkampf that West Germany arose and it is within these conflicts that the society existed. (The situation that Fassbinder allegorically suggests became literal in 1989 and thereafter -- the austere ideologically pure East German enterprise, which was, of course, also vicious, was reunited with the consumer-driven hedonism of the West. It's a great tragedy that Fassbinder didn't live to document in his films that remarkable and improbable reunification of the two Germanies, reflected in Lola as the East Prussian bureaucrat Von Bohm yearning for the West German prostitute, the whore of Babylon and the corrupter of men) The little girl Maria will come of age about the time Fassbinder made his first films -- she will be prosperous and wealthy but her income will based on her ownership of a whorehouse. Schuckert has prepared a trust agreement in which the brothel is held by Lola until Maria reaches her 21st birthday, at which time, she will become the proud proprietor of the place -- this seems to be a symbol for how Fassbinder viewed the legacy of the generation of his parents: they paid lip-service to virtue, but have bequeathed to us a society that is, in effect, a bordello.
Consideration of Fassbinder's allegorical themes in the BRD trilogy, of course, must not blind us to the very real pleasures implicit in the colorful melodramas that he stages. Fassbinder repeatedly said that he wanted to recreate in Germany but Hollywood movies that he admired, films that he said were the most wonderful, beautiful, and moving in the world. But Fassbinder insisted that he was going to reproduce those pictures in a manner that would be ideologically and politically aware, that is, true to the social and economic forces that drive people's actions. Fassbinder never loses sight of the melodrama that compels our interest in his narratives. As in the great Hollywood melodramas, women's success always comes at a price -- the successful Mildred Pierce in the film of that name becomes a prominent business woman but at the cost of her romantic relationships with men and her own daughter who ultimately despises her. The same scenario plays out in Sirk's Imitation of Life doubled in the failed relationships between the heroine and her daughter and the heroine's African-American servant whose daughter, to the dismay of her mother, tries to pass as White. Assimilation into the middle-class comes at a price. Fassbinder's great strength was in devising ways to give political heft to what might otherwise seem to be raucous remakes of American melodramas.
13.
Fassbinder's favorite film is 1971's Beware of a Holy Whore (Warnung von eine Heilige Nutte). The "holy whore" was Fassbinder's nickname for the movie camera.
14.
“I like women because they convert their oppression into terrorism.”
“Love is colder than death.”
“Love is the best, the most perfidious, and most effective instrument of social oppression.”
All quotes by Fassbinder.
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