Fassbinder films capture a frantic life's desperation | Roger Ebert's

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by Roger Ebert

April 27, 1997   |   0

In the 1970s Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a familiar presence at film festivals, invariably clad in black
leather, a cigarette always in his hand, a scraggly mustache drooping over lips that seemed curled in
constant ironic amusement. He traveled with a pack of friends, lovers and associates, and at Cannes, for
example, you expected them all to turn up sometime after midnight at Le Petit Carlton, the little all-night
bar where the party spilled out into the street.

He was sublimely uninterested in publicity, in press conferences, in interviews. He wasn't awake during
the hours when all of that went on. I had dinner with him once at the M ontreal festival, but he was more
interested in brandy than conversation. At some festivals he would have two or three films (he made about
40 in 14 years), but until late in his career they were made on small budgets with unknown actors, so he
didn't have to play the money game. Yet the screenings for his movies were always packed--critics wanted
to see them even if their readers back home didn't--and there was always a feeling of heightened
anticipation when the lights went down.

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Fassbinder worked quick and loose, but his films weren't sloppy; his visual style was a tight observant
mannerism that locked all of those strangely assorted stories into the same world view. His typical films
were supercharged melodramas in which the eternal themes of love, jealousy, shame and betrayal were
played out in a style that valued them at the same time it mocked them. You felt he had a certain
contempt for the formulas of romance and heartbreak, but that he took the subjects very seriously indeed.

Fassbinder died in 1982, at 37. He was found on a mattress in a shabby room with a video machine, a large
amount of cash, and indications he had been doing drugs and drinking. The death came as no surprise to
those who had watched him steadily wall himself inside a world of cocaine. But the loss was great, because
Fassbinder was still so young and productive; his tremendous energy had crashed through every barrier (his
unhappy youth, his unimpressive appearance, his homosexuality, his arrogance, his messy personal life, and
the fact that when he started Germany essentially had no film industry). In a flood of creativity unheard of
among modern directors, he made films like he smoked cigarettes, one after another, no pause in
between.

It is now 15 years since Fassbinder's death. Has his work dated? Does it seem less exciting that it did? I've
been looking at some of his films again recently, and I believe Fassbinder's work has not only survived but
grown in stature. At a time of timid commercial projects in the mainstream and copycat coming-of-age
dramas on the fringes, he stands as a bold original artist who took universal themes and handled them in a
defiantly anti-establishment way. A director so prolific needs an unusual retrospective to contain all of his
work, and starting this weekend the Film Center of the Art Institute and Facets M ultimedia will cooperate
in their first joint tribute, a two-month screening of virtually every film he ever made. Some of them films
will be playing here for the first time. Others were discovered here; Michael Kutza of the Chicago Film
Festival was one of the first Americans to showcase Fassbinder's talent, at a time when the New York
Festival was still focused on the French, and such key works as "M erchant of the Four Seasons" (1971) and
"The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (1973) had their American premieres in Chicago.

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It is often said that Fassbinder was influenced by the work of Douglas Sirk, the German-born director
whose Hollywood melodramas ("Written on the Wind," "M agnificent Obsession," "Imitation of Life," "There's
Always Tomorrow," "All that Heaven Allows") were a fixture on the Universal-International lot in the 1950s.
But what does that mean?

To understand what Fassbinder got from Sirk, it might help to imagine a movie set with invisible walls
separating the characters. They can see and hear one another, but some kind of force of destiny prevents
them from connecting; they are choreographed by fate. The camera isolates them--or groups them--so that
they are trapped in their space. Watch a Fassbinder film, and you sense that the characters are following
unstated laws. They are doomed to be forever who they are: Heredity, environment, intelligence,
appearance, gender and sexuality have written their scripts. When they try to break free, it is with anger.
bitterness and vast melodramatic gestures.

He used the same actors over and over again, sometimes in bit parts, sometimes as leads. It was impossible
to work for him, they said, and impossible not to. Only one became an international star--Hanna Schygulla,
whose work in "The M arriage of M aria Braun" is possibly the best performance in a Fassbinder film (he cast
her in one of his last films as the fabled "Lili M arleen"). But many were able to show an astonishing range--
Irm Hermann, for example, who shares the lead in "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant," as the slavish
assistant of a self-destructive dress signer, and then turns up as a housewife in "The Merchant of the Four
Seasons," and the unloving daughter of a lonely old lady in "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" (1974--reviewed as this
week's Great Movie on page 5 of Showcase). All of those titles are among Fassbinder's best, but consider
also "Fox and His Friends" (1975), starring Fassbinder as a lower-class workingman who wins the lottery and
find popular in M unich's gay circles. He is flattered to become the lover of a middle-class businessman, little
suspecting that his winnings, not his charms, are the attraction. Other films of its period would have
considered the gay theme daring; "Fox" accepts the homosexual milieu in an utterly matter-of-fact way, as
background for the romantic melodrama that Fassbinder is more interested in.

He moved back and forth between gay and heterosexual sex in his stories, and insiders claimed they could
decode some of them: The lesbian triangle in "Petra von Kant," for example, is "really" about an
entanglement in Fassbinder's own life. The dowdy middle-aged lady in "Ali," who is astonished to find
herself the lover of a handsome M oroccan, may have "really" been Fassbinder, too (he cast his lover of the
time as the man). Who knows.

What matters is that the films came from deep within; we sense the hurt and urgency in many of them.
Fassbinder borrowed or refurbished standard Hollywood plots and situations in many cases, but not to
remake them--to rethink them, since so many classic heartbreak situations do play out in ordinary lives, as
well as in the movies. He demonstrated this approach again in the epic 13-hour miniseries "Berlin
Alexanderplatz," which Facets will show in early June.

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Fassbinder directed his first feature in 1969, and was dead in 1982. Who else has created such a torrent of
film, at such a high level of artistry? It's tempting to say he hurried because he knew his time was limited.
Not at all. He hurried because his life was in his work, and those who knew him best wrote afterwards that
he feared losing his friends and lovers if he did not always keep them around, in a flood of films and plays.
If he had lived, and worked at the same rate, he would have made 80 films by now. Perhaps no one could
have kept up that pace. He might have kept up the quality, however; it is sobering to think how much we
lost when he died alone in that sad locked room.

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Chaz is the Publisher of RogerEbert.com and a regular contributor to the site, writing about film, festivals,
politics, and life itself.
M att Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine, the creator of
many video essays about film history and style, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the author
of The Wes Anderson Collection. His writing on film and TV has appeared in The New York Times, Salon,
New York Press, The Star-Ledger and Dallas Observer. (Banner illustration by Max Dalton)

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