Rainer Werner Fassbinder Remembered at Troia Festival
Twenty years ago, on 10 June 1982, the Feast of Corpus Christi, Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in Munich. The world press was effusive in paying him tribute. Vincent Canby in the New York Times rated him »the first great satirist to work in films.« Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times judged him »a great and irreplaceable cinematic talent ... a cinematic phenomenon ... an innovative and formula-overthrowing director.« Wolfram Knorr in the Zürich Weltwoche compared his productivity to Mozart: »he made movies like Wolfgang Amadeus composed music.« And at the June ceremonies for the German Film Awards in 1982, Gerhard Baum, the German Federal Minister of the Interior, paid perhaps the highest compliment of all: »When Rainer Werner Fassbinder died, the German cinema lost one of its greatest personalities.«
Only 37 when he died, Fassbinder had directed 42 films in the brief span of 18 years. Further, he was planning to direct two more epic features for Regina Ziegler Film in Berlin: Rosa Luxembourg, to be filmed later by Margarethe von Trotta from an entirely different script, and Cocaine, a screen adaptation of the scandalous Pitigrilli classic. RWF was considered the backbone of New German Cinema (NGC) indeed, take away his contribution, and the rest fades somewhat in meaning and depth. He had won six German Film Prizes, the last awarded to Lola (1982) in the year of his death.
As for how his friends and colleagues reacted to his death, this can be felt in Wolf Gremm’s documentary made a few months after his death: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Das letzte Jahr (Rainer Werner Fassbinder The Last Year) (1982). We see Gremm directing Fassbinder as a police inspector in Kamikaze 1989 (1982), Rainer’s last acting role. We are also given intimate close-ups of Fassbinder shooting Querelle (1982), the last film the legendary director directed. It premiered at Venice a few months after his death.
Retracing the full career of RWF has its pitfalls. It’s still a bone of contention as to which one of the several biographies on Fassbinder should be recommended reading for relevance and authenticity. Furthermore, not even his closest friends and collaborators are willing to dispel many of the cherished legends about the Wunderkind and his prolific output. Perhaps the films themselves as presented in the 10-film retrospective on »Rainer Werner Fassbinder Remembered« will offer some clues for critical revaluation as well as impulses for further discussion.
For all practical purposes, the 18-year career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder can be divided into three chronological periods of six years each. The first phase, 1965 to 1970, begins with his first film, Der Stadtstreicher (The City Tramp) (1965), and ends with the last of his »anti-theater« films, Die Niklashauser Fahrt (1970). Four films in the Troia retrospective relate to this period: Rosa von Prauheim’s video documentary Fassbinder’s Women (2001), plus a trio of RWF films made in 1970: Rio das Mortes, Whity, and Die Niklashauser Fahrt.
The second phase, 1971 to 1976, begins with Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of Four Seasons) (1971), his breakthrough film with the international public, and ends with Ich will doch nur, dass Ihr mich liebt (I Only Want You to Love Me) (1976), one of his most personal films. The Troia retrospective is programming Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese Roulette) (1976) from this period, photographed by Michael Ballhaus and edited by Juliane Lorenz, two of his closest collaborators.
The third period, 1977 to 1982, was his most productive period, a time of international fame and an independence verging on intellectual anarchy. It begins with Eine Reise ins Licht (Despair) (1977), starring Dirk Bogarde and his first venture into a big-studio production, and ends with Querelle (1982), his adaptation of a Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest and presented posthumously at the Venice film festival. In the Troia retrospective there are four RWF films from this period: Bolwieser (1977), In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons) (1978), Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation) (1979), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss) (1982). Also, Wolf Gremm’s documentary on Rainer Werner Fassbinder Das letzte Jahr (Rainer Werner Fassbinder The Last Year) (1982) serves as a kind of requiem.
For the Fassbinder neophyte, a good place to start in this retrospective memorial is Rosa von Praunheim’s video documentary: Für mich gab’s nur noch Fassbinder Die glücklichen Opfer des Rainer Werner F. (Fassbinder Was the Only One for Me The Willing Victims of Rainer Werner F.) (2001). For Fassbinder’s Women (its shortened English title) brings to the surface some background facts not found in most RWF biographies. Even more important, Praunheim interviews women who shared his life and passions at an early stage of his career: Irm Hermann, Ursula Strätz, Ingrid Caven, Hanna Schygulla, and (later) Juliane Lorenz, among others. Along the way, colleagues and collaborators Harry Baer, Peer Raben, Michael Ballhaus tell stories about the troubled director’s dreams, his expectations, his homosexuality, and his lost loves.
This first phase of RWF’s career is the easiest to fathom. As the only child of divorced parents, he felt himself extremely alone throughout a troubled childhood thus the recurring theme of an outsider (usually named Franz in reference to a favorite novel, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which he filmed as a 13-part tv-series in 1979/80) and his aching desire to find love, understanding, and companionship. It is not by chance or coincidence that Fassbinder’s films are packed with images of love and death (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod / Love Is Colder Than Death, 1969), fear and shyness (Angst essen Seele auf / Fear Eats the Soul, 1973), desire and longing (Eine Reise ins Licht / Desire, 1977), and open confession of guilt or faults (Faustrecht der Freiheit / Fox and His Friends, 1974).
At the same time, he rejects conventional moralizing and pat social solutions, preferring instead complex problems even to the point of espousing anarchy (Die dritte Generation / The Third Generation, 1979) as a means to political purification. The contradictions in his own nature once drove him into exile to Paris, but only briefly. Soon he was back where he belonged: a German director who wanted and needed to make German films for a German audience.
Rainer left school at 18 in 1964, just before taking his Abitur (matriculation) exams, and settled in Munich with his divorced mother, a translator and subsequently an actress in his films under the name Lilo Pempeit. To support his film ambitions, he worked odd jobs that might foster and support a career in this direction. An attempt to enter the newly founded Berlin Film and TV Academy (DFFB) met with a rejection slip.
So RWF learned directorial technique from the back row of a movie theater, modeling his first short Der Stadtstreicher (The City Tramp) (1965) on Eric Rohmer’s Le Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo) (France, 1959). His second short, Das kleine Chaos (The Little Chaos) (1966), was »a little like Godard« (RWF) and a tip of the hat to the latter’s Vivre sa vie (France, 1962). His first feature film, Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), leaned on the American gangster movie. Some of his favorite American directors and films were Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (USA, 1950), John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (USA, 1950), and Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (USA, 1955), in addition to the films of Howard Hawks.
On the technical side, Fassbinder shared an affinity with Rohmer for economic filmmaking. One of the reasons why Rainer’s career got off to a fast running start at the age of 20 was due to their mutual liking for a restrained, all-embracing camera placement, a feeling for space and place influencing behavioral aspects and plot development, and a probing analysis of self delusion. As one critic remarked, the only major difference between Fassbinder and Rohmer in this regard was that Rainer often preferred to bait society with an outsider’s inarticulate ravings.
Foreign critics wonder how RWF could possibly direct four films in 1969 and six in 1970 this, in addition to roughly the same amount of original dramas for theater under his own direction. But German observers have correctly noted that the early 1970s was a period of creative home production at the competitive TV stations in Cologne and Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. Television commissioners devoured original material that could be produced within a month’s time and broadcasted within a year (depending on a possible cinema release). In addition, the New German Cinema movement had caught fire at international film festivals and was being promoted by the heads of Goethe Institutes around the world. Last, but not least, some NGC directors Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were receiving their share of German Film Awards.
Two other influences contributed to Fassbinder’s rapid climb to the top as a filmmaker-celebrity at Cannes and New York: his off-theater experience and a brief association with Jean-Marie Straub. While Rainer was taking acting lessons at the Frida-Leonard-Studio in Munich, he met the nucleus of the short-lived »action-theater« and the subsequent »anti-theater« ensembles that performed in the Schwabing district of Munich during the heady days of the student rebellion: Kurt Raab, Peer Raben, and Hanna Schygulla. With two short features already under his belt, one featuring Irm Hermann and the other his mother (as Lilo Pempeit), he joined the »action-theater« as actor, dramatist, and director.
The story goes that RWF’s first stage production for the »action theater« ensemble, was a shortened version of Ferdinand Bruckner’s Krankheit der Jugend (Sickness of Youth), produced at a »fringe« theater on Müllerstrasse in Munich in April of 1968. When it was closed down by police order a month later, along came Jean-Marie Straub with a proposal to film an even shorter version of Sickness of Youth with the remnants of the »action theater« ensemble now reformed into the »anti-theater« company. The result was not only Straub’s 10-minute short, Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp) (1968), featuring Rainer in one of the key roles, but also a companion play by Fassbinder (his first) to fatten the performance and fill the evening: Katzelmacher. A year later, RWF was to use 65 »shots« to make Katzelmacher (1969) in just three days.
When the Munich authorities closed down »action-theater« altogether on the flimsy grounds that the stage had no license to do political Kabarett, a new troupe was formed, called »anti-theater«. Fassbinder later recalled how »we withdrew to the now almost legendary backroom of Widow Bolte’s, a bar in Schwabing.« At the same time, the fruitful collaboration with Straub did not go unnoticed: it taught Rainer a valuable lesson about handling actors before a camera, and it inspired the group to make films. Within two years, 1969 - 1970, no less than ten »anti-theater&lasquo; film productions were completed. Volker Schloendorff is credited with the idea for Rio das Mortes (1970), about a pair of school chum dreaming of going to Peru to hunt for treasure. Whity (1970), a melodrama drawn from the Western genre, was dedicated to writer-actor-collaborator Peter Berling, who later wrote a perceptive RWF biography. And Die Niklashauser Fahrt (1970) was suggested by a 15th-century legend: the story of Hans Böhm, mystic and reformer, receiving an apparition from the Virgin Mary.
Hanna Schygulla, in an interview, stated that »Fassbinder would stage plays like they were movies, and his first movies like they were plays.« And this method of working carried over for a while into the second phase of RWF’s career until he realized that film festival audiences were more interested in him than his theatrical life. Most critics and historians mark Fassbinder’s breakthrough on the international scene with his 13th film, Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of Four Seasons) (1971). A few others prefer Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) (1972), a successful screen adaptation of his own play. And some hold out for Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul) (1973), the film that won him an important FIPRESCI (International Critics) Award at the 1974 Cannes film festival.
In any case, the early 1970s were fruitful years for Rainer, marking a kind of unwilling hiatus between two professional loves: the theater and the cinema, the stage and the screen. It was also the time when he paid a visit to Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck) in retirement in Ascona, whose Hollywood melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955) inspired the making of Fear Eats the Soul. »Sirk’s is a kind of fairy tale mine is too, but cut from everyday life,« said Fassbinder. »I’d been wanting to do it for years.« One notes the same fascination with the Hollywood melodrama in Rainer’s Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese Roulette) (1976), the story of a handicapped daughter tricking her parents into facing the truth about their ex-marital affairs by playing with them a revealing game of »Chinese roulette«. And the theme of infidelity was reworked again in Bolwieser (1977), set in the 1920s and adapted from a novel by Oskar Maria Graf.
The best guide to the RWF oeuvre is the string of statements made by the director himself in various printed and televised interviews. Fassbinder admitted to making very personal films, and he often took pleasure in claiming that every key figure in his films was a part of himself. On this score his admiring critics like to trace lines of development from one film to another. Thematically and stylistically, he was a born filmmaker, one of the few contemporary directors who with the gift, or talent, to »think in images«. In the realm of the »shot« or »frame« Rainer Werner Fassbinder had few equals on the contemporary cinematic scene. And by his own admission, he learned simply by cranking out one film after another on themes drawn from his own personal experiences or the improvisations of individuals in his production collective.
If there was a singular weakness in his character, then it was a longing to become an international personality. Looking back, however, he is mostly remembered for his eccentricities, his obsession with work, his addiction to drugs. As a result, one either likes Fassbinder or he doesn’t, without wasting much time discussing the lasting merits of any particular film.
A personal film that expressed Rainer’s eccentricities more than any of the others was In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons) (1978), the story of a man who lives the last five days of his life in an intense encounter with himself, his friends, and his environment. By the same token, a personal political film that spoke his mind on the rampant »terrorist hysteria« in Germany was Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation) (1979), a completely independent production that he produced, directed, scripted, and photographed himself. »I’m a romantic anarchist,« Rainer Werner Fassbinder said in an interview when asked to characterize himself.
Shortly before his death, Fassbinder was interviewed about the making of Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss) (1982) and his plans for Querelle (1982). The third feature in his »women’s trilogy« following Lili Marleen (1980) and Lola (1981) the reference in the »VV« title is to »SS« or Sybille Schmitz (1909 - 1955). The talented actress Sybille Schmitz, like Veronika Voss in the film, is addicted to drugs and commits suicide. But there was also a parallel to the director himself.
»I really have a drive that’s hard to explain,« he once confessed in a moment of truth. »It makes me have to do things, and I’m actually only happy when I’m doing things. That’s my drug, if you will.«
Ronald Holloway