VERONIKA VOSS (Die Sehnsucht von..., 1982)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder aspired to be a cinematic Balzac for the Federal Republic of Germany -- better known in America as West Germany and known to its own citizens as the BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland). He had drive and he had youth, but by the time he got busy with the project it was already just about too late. With a huge output already behind him, he made three films that stand as the "BRD Trilogy" following Fassbinder's drug-related death a few months (he was only 37) after the release of Veronika Voss, chronologically the second film of the three. The BRD films portray a Germany on the make as the capitalist part of the divided nation rebuilds under American occupation after World War II. Fassbinder sees corruption in all the deal making and related betrayals attendant on the BRD's "economic miracle," and he sees this quite overtly through the lens of classic cinema, both German and American. In the most obvious case, BRD 3, the second film released, is Lola, Fassbinder's riff on Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, with a new generation of degeneracy breaking the pride of a self-righteous bureaucrat. But BRD 1, The Marriage of Maria Braun, can be seen almost as plausibly as a riff on Gone With the Wind, with the title character as a West German Scarlett O'Hara ruthlessly adapting to a newly commercialized environment. In turn, while Veronika Voss is based partly on the sordid end of an actual German film actress, it's also self-consciously evocative of Sunset Blvd. -- inevitably, given the subject matter. But that's just the tip of the picture's evocative iceberg.

Will Veronika Voss be ready for her close-up? Watch Die Sehnsucht and find out!

Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) is as self-delusional as Norma Desmond, but not as much as a menace in her own right. Popular during the Hitler years, she wasn't exactly purged from the film industry, but she hasn't worked in thee years as our story opens. While most sources date events in 1955, the playing of Johnny Horton's Battle of New Orleans during the movie would be an anachronism unless the story took place in 1959 or after -- but here ends the pedantry. Voss gets caught in the rain returning from a screening of one of her films and finds a samaritan in Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), a sportswriter with an umbrella. He doesn't recognize her initially, while she sees him as a new lover, a mark, or both. At a subsequent lunch meeting, she borrows 300 marks to buy a brooch she simply must have, then returns the brooch to the store and pockets the money. But it's not as if she lacks for money. The problem is that she doesn't have control of it. As an increasingly obsessed Robert learns, Voss is under the control of Dr. Katz (Annemarie Dueringer), the instrument of control being morphine. Katz is a figure out of film noir -- think of malicious female doctors in films like The Uninvited, Nightmare Alley, etc, though her clinic is ironically a white-on-white wonder of production design. One of the few notes of darkness is the archetypal African-American soldier played by Guenther Kaufmann (under different character names) in all three BRD films. In Voss the soldier seems to live in Katz's clinic and goes about his business in blissful, near-total ignorance of the plot, though his presence may be meant to make a point about the American occupation in general. Cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger makes the most of the opportunities this set offers; his work in black-and-white here rivals his lurid color photography of Lola the previous year. The overall art direction adds a layer of expressionism to the story's noir tropes, and as the film evolves into a they-won't-believe-me thriller, with Robert desperately attempting to expose Katz's racket and putting both Voss and his girlfriend (Cornelia Froboess) in mortal peril, the layers of cinema history peel away until at the heart, arguably, you find The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with Katz as the evil keeper of the asylum and Voss the hapless somnambulist, a seductress rather than a killer.

In the white room

On some level, the BRD films seem like an attempted synthesis, or at least a dialectic mashup of Hollywood and Weimar tropes, but when the trilogy is done you're left wondering how Fassbinder's movie-archetype approach enhances our understanding of social and cultural trends that he apparently deplores. On a satirical level he seems to be saying that West Germany was repeating the stories cinema has already told, Lola in particular looking like a tragedy repeated as farce. But what came first? The decision to chronicle the BRD with movie archetypes or the decision that the BDR was reliving them? Fassbinder's strategy could well be dismissed as a too-easy substitute for the novelistic analysis his Balzacian ambition required. But if his intention was no more than satire, the trilogy can stand with the great cinematic satires, even if Veronika Voss draws very few chuckles. The safest approach is to acknowledge that the BRD series never took its intended or naturally evolved form and to respect the surviving building blocks as part of Fassbinder's cinematic monument.

WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? (Warum lauft Herr R..., 1970)

For most of the way, the title may as well be When Will Herr R. Run Amok? That's part of the trick Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fenger -- Fassbinder's role in the production has been disputed -- play on the audience in their provocative little picture. The actual title creates an expectation that the film delays fulfilling until nearly the end. If you become impatient for Herr R. (Kurt Raab) to get running, aren't you in some way a complicit observer when it happens? At the very least, there's a good chance that expectation, if not impatience, will make you sympathetic with what you're steered to see as R's slow burn throughout the picture. You share his own apparent sense of boredom or his failure to connect with his cronies or his wife's friends. A technical draftsman, R. is inarticulate and unambitious. He seems alienated from the dull camaraderie of his co-workers, with them but not of them. He seems disconnected in general. In one excruciating scene he seeks help from record store employees to find a song he heard despite his inability to identify the performer. He seems surrounded by banality wherever he goes, but seems banal himself. He can't stand it, it turns out, but can we?

Fassbinder and/or Fenger take a pictorially opposite approach in portraying alienation and anomie from cinema's reputed master of such portrayals, Michelangelo Antonioni. Where the Italian manipulates space within a widescreen frame and emphasizes emptiness and absence, the Germans smother us with implicitly intolerable banality within a documentary-style frame and seemingly artless handheld camerawork. If R. seems barely capable of responding to people, the suggestion is that there's little worth responding to.

 

Is R. a waste product of a rotten culture or simply defective? His lack of social skills comes out most torturously at an office party as he rises, drunk, to deliver a dead-on-arrival speech about the benefits of a friendly working environment. Does this prove that R. has nothing to say? Has he an internal life, a mental monologue whose interruption by other people he resents to a fatal degree? One of the few clues, in one somewhat overly ominous scene, comes as he helps his son practice his reading with a passage about an eagle. The boy reads haltingly, concentrating on his pronunciation, about how small the world looks to the eagle soaring high above as the father stares ahead. Does R. see himself as an eagle rightfully soaring above the mundane? Does he fell caged when he can't hear the TV over his wife and her friend gossiping? Is he simply oversaturated at last by the culture's pure noise? The film can't help raising questions beyond the one in the title. Does R's amoklauf demonstrate a social critique by the filmmakers, or is it a mere gratuitous act that renders the film one as well? You could go either way, since there's something ultimately gratuitous to a social critique that has murder as its outcome. Herr R. is a fair portrait of alienation but may go too far portraying society from the perspective of alienation as if to justify R's actions or tempt us to justify them, if only from a desire to be entertained finally. Whoever did make the film was a precociously subtle manipulator of audiences, but for what purpose? You can ask why of them as well as their character, and that keeps their film an interesting piece of cinematic history.

WORLD ON A WIRE (Welt am Draht, 1973)

The American novelist Daniel F. Galouye was a contemporary of Phillip K. Dick and shared some of Dick's concerns about the vulnerability of identity amid advancing technology and complex social systems. Galouye's 1960s novel Simulacron-3 is reminiscent of Dick's work not only in its paranoid anxiety but in its appeal to movies. Two films have been made from it so far, Hollywood taking its crack with The Thirteenth Floor in 1999. Rainer Werner Fassbinder took his shot a quarter-century earlier. Welt am Draht is a two-part miniseries stretching over nearly 3.5 hours made for West German television. It may qualify as the first "cyberpunk" movie, and owing to the time it was made and Fassbinder's own aesthetic sense it resembles more closely than overproduced Hollywood adaptations the world Phillip K. Dick himself imagined. Dick, and probably Galouye too, were concerned with the plight of grey-flannel-suit, Organization Man types in an ever more bureaucratized, commercialized and commodified future. By toning down the spectacle, whether from necessity or preference, Fassbinder zeros in on the psychological unease that defines these proto-cyberpunk works.

World on a Wire is almost a generic story of its kind. An unscrupulous corporation and unrestrained scientists have developed a virtual reality environment of artificial intelligences simulating ordinary human social life, to serve as the ultimate focus group for advertising, opinion polls, etc. Mysterious deaths and disappearances lead our hero Fred Stiller (the compactly tense Klaus Loewitsch) to question first his place in reality, then reality's place in reality. You know the drill; someone you know vanishes, but then no one else has ever heard of him. You learn that scientists can enter the virtual world and live the lives of the simulated people, and that the transfer can be a two-way street. Is that woman who claims to love you a real person or a simulation possessing a human shell? Is yours the real world or the simulation, or a little of both? Naturally, Stiller gets a little agitated and the falling trees, plunging shipping palettes and exploding houses don't help things.

 





Can you blame our hero for getting a little upset?

The situation gives Fassbinder opportunities to satirize contemporary culture. The scenes at a cabaret featuring a Marlene Dietrich impersonator are obviously intended to underscore how much of our own pop culture is a simulation. At the same time, Fassbinder takes advantage of the simulated nature of movie genres. Stiller's predicament, the uncertainty over whether his world is real, enables him to be a kind of action hero, fighting, running, escaping, chasing and being chased. The fact is, Stiller's "real" world isn't any more real than the world of the simulations -- it's only a movie, which is worth bearing in mind if you're tempted to wonder what the generically ambiguous ending proves.

 
Is Mascha Rabben (as Welt am Draht's love interest) human?
Who are we to judge?
 

Apart from Fassbinder's literary influences, the shadow of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville doesn't just hover over this movie -- the director invites it in by casting the French film's star, Eddie Constantine, in a cameo role. Fassbinder's film is more immediately enjoyable in a generic way than Godard's, but it echoes Godard's lesson that the key to making a low-budget sci-film is style rather than special-effects. World on a Wire has a "day after tomorrow" aesthetic that's stylized enough to feel alien without really looking alien. It depends on the director's selection of locations, the sensibility of the costumers, and above all on the cinematography of Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz, who give many of the interiors a blue-grey glint that suffices to make things just a little strange, just a little different from now. No flying cars are necessary.

 

The miniseries takes a little while to get going, taking perhaps too much time to establish a mood of almost perfunctory decadence, but by the second half it moves pretty briskly to keep up with its harried hero. With patience it establishes itself convincingly as a sci-fi movie milestone and a prescient piece of pop cinema from an arthouse idol who didn't live to see his concept become commonplace.

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's lesbian drama has a primitive simplicity to it fitting its spartan production. The story takes place in a single location, the apartment of the title character, a fashion designer. Simplicity doesn't mean poverty here; the set has been meticulously dressed and conspicuously decorated with a wall mural reproducing some Renaissance-style painting that ironically wags a constant penis at the feminine goings on. Everything appears to have been staged, lit and edited with intense calculation. Naturalistic long takes are contrasted with shots by ace cinematographer Michael Ballhaus to maximize the glamour of the fashion-plate players as if Petra Von Kant were a pre-Code Hollywood melodrama -- and that seems to be Fassbinder's point. He can, to an extent, reproduce Hollywood on a presumably tiny budget with dedicated, charismatic actresses and a forceful, almost anachronistic fashion sense. It could just as easily be called camp, but it's too self-conscious for that. It's more of a formal exercise in style -- though it can readily be regarded as if it were unconscious camp. By the end, it's hard to tell whether Fassbinder wants us to laugh or not -- or how he wants us to laugh if that's his intention.

Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a rising fashion designer with a long-suffering live-in assistant, Marlene (Irm Hermann) who finishes Petra's design drawings and occasionally makes some changes, fetches refreshments, and dances to The Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" when the mistress is in the mood. Marlene is a model of long-suffering mousiness, though her severe black dress -- she seems to have but one costume for the entire film -- is chic in its own way. She hardly speaks, but we can see resentment building whenever her eyes focus on some distasteful scene. Her intimate codependency is disrupted when the twice-married-but-now-swinging-the-other-way Petra falls hard for a younger model, Karin (New German Cinema queen Hanny Schygula).

The overall plot is a role reversal, as the domineering Petra becomes desperately dependent on an increasingly indifferent Karin. There's a conceptual perversity to the story that makes up a little for the relative lack of eroticism, as all the principle female characters dress in different degrees of vampish chic -- as in vintage seductress, not bloodsucker -- and the main character is sort of a vamp vamped. It's strange to see women playing for each other the archetypal roles men have long imagined for them. The effect is like what I'd expect from those theatrical companies in Japan where women play all the roles, including the male characters. Is it a confirmation of the pejorative view of women as predatory succubi, or a parody of it? Fassbinder directs with a poker face most of the way before possibly betraying himself at the very end. Spoilers follow over the next two paragraphs, so if you want to exit here, let me give the film a moderate thumbs up. The rest of you can keep reading.

Karin finally breaks up with Petra to rejoin her own husband, but not before a nasty scene in which Petra viciously insults her lover, only to be asked for money in callous fashion. The once masterful Petra descends into alcoholic longing, desperately hoping that Karin will be on the other line whenever the phone rings. She loses it completely at her own birthday party, raging at her mother, her daughter, her best friend and Marlene before breaking down at last. She's calmer the morning after, realizing the error of her ways and answering calmly and dismissively when Karin finally calls. Finally, she's alone with Marlene, and in a moment of insight she vows to be a more equal partner in the future. To restart things on the right foot, she asks her long-suffering assistant, "Tell me about yourself." Marlene responds as if she'd just drawn the queen of diamonds. As "The Great Pretender" plays on the phonograph, she storms in and out of the frame in either direction, gathering her belongings and stuffing them into a suitcase before grabbing the baby doll Petra had gotten as a present and walking out of the film. Petra has watched this with absolute passivity, and when it's over she simply turns out the light and goes to bed.

The Wikipedia synopsis suggests that Marlene leaves because she's already "satisfied her personal masochistic desire in submitting to Petra," and doesn't need to remain anymore.  But it seems that the trigger is "Tell me about yourself," and the provocation is Marlene's realization that, after who knows how long, Petra knows nothing meaningful about her. As for Petra, her passivity may mean that she's given up or is now past caring, or it could even signify some confidence that Marlene will be back. However you read it, this coda is very much modern Hollywood in its soundtrackiness, and the effect of the music and Marlene's sudden rushing about seems comic, as if Petra's tragedy is ending in farce. I don't know if Fassbinder meant it to be as funny as it feels to a modern American viewer, and the film could be thought of as comedy only in a camp or meta way. But he probably did mean the finish to be ambiguous, since Marlene has been inscrutable to this point, and amid such ambiguity laughter is a valid option. The fact that you could leave the theater debating Marlene and Petra's behavior is probably proof of the film's psychological effectiveness even as it arguably succeeds simultaneously as a work of chamber surrealism. Petra Von Kant gets you thinking about a lot of things, and if you consider that a good thing, then this is a good film.

THE THIRD GENERATION (Die dritte Generation, 1979)

The title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's satirical political thriller refers both to the three generations of the Gast family we see onscreen -- a retired grandfather with aristocratic longings, a police inspector and a terrorist -- and to what Fassbinder elsewhere identified as three generations of German terrorism. The terrorist gang we see here are presumably decadent heirs of the heritage of the Red Army Faction, aka the Baader-Meinhof gang, West Germany's counterpart to Italy's Red Brigades. I'm not sure what the second generation of terrorists was supposed to be like, unless we're meant to take the family as a metaphor for terrorism. What's definitely clear is that the third generation in either case is pretty screwed up.

After an ominous opening in which Fassbinder oh-so-slowly pulls his camera back to reveal Hanna Schygulla watching TV in an upper-floor office, we're introduced to the motley crew who make up a terrorist cell as the trigger phrase "The World as Will and Idea" compels them to converge on Rudolf Mann's spacious apartment. The trigger tips us off a little to Fassbinder's agenda. It's the title of a famous book by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a writer Grandfather Gast dismisses as one popular with people who feel they have nothing to live for. But it'd be going to far to say that our terrorists are motivated by Schopenhauer or any philosophy. They're polar opposites (perhaps intentionally so) from the devoted young ideologues of Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise in that Fassbinder's terrorists spend virtually no time discussing theory. In fact, the only character who seems engaged in ideological reading is a latecomer to the story whose reading of Bakunin makes him the subject of childish teasing. Whether that's because Bakunin was the arch-anarchist of the 19th century, or because the terrorists simply find intellectual aspirations contemptible is hard for me to say. But it leaves you wondering what cause they're fighting for, or if they're out for violence for its own sake.

Rudolf Mann shares his apartment with his girlfriend Ilse (Y Sa Lo), a heroin addict who seems oblivious to the allegedly revolutionary activities being plotted around her. It says something about Fassbinder's social vision that the wretched Ilse is the terrorists' link to the wider, "real" world. We're invited to see the cell through the eyes of Ilse's friend Franz Walsch (Guenther Kauffmann), a half-American ex-soldier who's having trouble joining the civilian workforce, and Franz's sidekick Bernhard Von Stein (Vitus Seplichal), the aforementioned Bakunin fan. These two join the uncomfortable troupe, but while Bernhard seems to be dismissed by everyone, Franz is eventually enticed into the group, being an almost archetypal explosives expert. But Franz isn't ready to be radicalized until he fails repeatedly to find work and Ilse finally OD's herself to death. At that point, he isn't radicalized as much as he's reduced to having nothing to live for.

Heroin is a terrible thing to waste

Franz joins up just as the revolution is about to devour its children. Left to his own devices as the gang fans out on various missions, Bernhard eventually discovers a conspiracy to make any paranoid blissful. The terrorists are planning to kidnap a businessman, P. J. Lurz (Eddie Constantine), for whom the Schygulla character works. Lurz jokes with Inspector Gast that capitalists may have invented terrorists to speed the creation of a more perfect police state -- but it turns out that Lurz wasn't joking -- or else was just toying with an ignorant cop. In fact, Lurz is paying one of the terrorists to keep the cell in operation, and to inform the inspector about their activities, without Gast knowing Lurz's full role in the drama. Now, even as the terrorists finalize plans to kidnap Lurz, dressing themselves up all too appropriately like carnival clowns and fairytale creatures, some members are being wiped out by the police. Can Bernhard catch up to his old buddy Franz and talk him out of walking into a deathtrap? Will the surviving terrorists take Lurz, and if they do, who'll actually be whose captive?...

The Third Generation is set in a world of shit. Fassbinder divides it into acts, each of which has for an epigraph graffiti or overheard conversations from Berlin's public toilets. The director hangs his portrait on an oppressive wall of sound. Nearly every scene has the sound of a TV or radio playing over it, on top of multi-character dialogues, and on top of that Fassbinder piles on Peter Raben's droning score. It actually adds a layer of reality to the cheaply shot scenes -- many of which were clearly filmed in unheated locations -- while furthering the impression that there's nothing but noise in everyone's lives and minds. Fassbinder's terrorists don't stand outside this world to prepare themselves to change it. They're completely immersed in it and embody in themselves all of its corruptions. The result is as complete a deromanticization of revolutionary terrorism as a reactionary could want -- and Fassbinder was no reactionary -- more effective than portraying them as evil masterminds or pitiless fanatics.

P.J. Lurz is ready for his close-up

Fassbinder died not long after his 37th birthday. Had he lived, he would be all of 66 years old today. His early death might be considered one of the tragedies of world cinema -- and could still be thought so -- if not for the fact that in a 13 year career he made 27 films. That's several careers of canonical directors put together, a formidable lifework with which I've just made my first acquaintance. Third Generation seems to have been a reversion to an earlier manner of guerrilla filmmaking after some international arthouse successes, but it shows a directorial eye attentive to the aesthetics of space and the subtleties of both human and camera movement. It combines dispassion and disillusion while touching the depths of Seventies pessimism and paranoia, making it an important cinematic document of its time. Fassbinder himself was arguably one of the most important directors of my favorite decade, so I expect to check out more of his filmography very soon.