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Leave Home(Chemical Brothers)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was born on May 31, 1945 in the Bavarian town of Bad Worishofen. His father was a doctor and his mother, Liselotte, a translator. She starred in a number of Fassbinder's films, using her maiden name Pempeit.
Fassbinder attended the Rudolf Steiner Schools in Augsburg and Munich. He didn't finish school, but worked in various jobs. After studying drama at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich, he joined the 'Action Theater' in 1967.
His first play, Katzelmacher, premiered in April 1968. In 1969, Fassbinder made his first feature-length film, Love is Colder than Death. It was booed at the Berlin Film Festival. Fassbinder's breakthrough came with his next film, Katzelmacher (1969). It played at the Mannheim Film Festival, where it won the Film Critics' Prize, the Prize of the German Academy for Outstanding Artistic Achievement, and eventually, five prizes in all.
His commercial breakthrough was The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), his international breakthrough Ali-Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (International Critics Prize at Cannes). In 1971, he was a founding member of the "Filmverlag der Autoren".
His biggest success, which brought him the popular acceptance he sought, came with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), part 1 of his FRG-Trilogy. The TV-series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Effie Briest (1974) are two of his best-known adaptations. His last film, Querelle, was shot in 1982.
Fassbinder made 41 movies in 14 years, and also worked as an actor, producer, theatre manager, composer, designer, editor, and cameraman. He died in 1982 of an overdose. His death is often considered the end of New German Cinema.
FEAR EATS THE SOUL
Angst essen Seele auf
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974) 93 minutes
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Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Producer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Photography: Jurgen Jurges
Editor: Thea Eymes |
Brigitte Mira (Emmi)
El Hedi Ban Salem (Ali)
Barbara Valentin (Barbara)
Irm Hermann (Krista) |
Reviews and notesFestivals can discover, festivals can consecrate. This year there have been precious few discoveries at Cannes - none in the main festival - but one important consecration, that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A few of us have been writing aboout him for the past three years, but by and large, no one has paid much attention. This year, however, Fassbinder's newest film got into the main competition, and I wouldn't be surprised if it walked off with some kind of prize.
Of course, this is a simpler, easier film for audiences, than, say, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. It succeeds in telling a basic human-interest story without ever falling into sentimentality. The title, however, is difficult: literally, it translates as Fear eat up Soul, and that is because the hero of the film is a Moroccan worker in Munich and his German is not too good. The French, always suspicious of any liberties with their language, quite blithely retitled it All the Others are Called Ali.
In this, his eighteenth film (and he's not yet 30), Fassbinder has achieved an almost classic style which looks almost as if it could have been made 30 years ago - but not quite. The story is of the simplest: a 60-year-old widow, a cleaning woman, meets by chance a 30-year-old Moroccan. Emmi finds Ali pleasant, especially when, on a dare, he asks her to dance. She invites him home for a drink, and to his own surprise Ali accepts.
To her astonishment, he makes love to her; in fact, they settle down to having an affair. She can't believe it at first: an old woman like herself with such a handsome young man. Her family and her neighbours can't believe it either, and when they do start to believe it they are furious. Her son kicks in her TV screen, and the daughter walks out. Doesn't she know she's making a fool of herself, doesn't she know that "they" are dirty, that "they" are lazy? But Emmi perseveres, and they get married. Their troubles are not over, however, because even when the neighbours and family start to calm down, Ali has a few difficulties adjusting to life with a woman old enough to be his mother. But the film ends happily and convincingly so.
This may sound like a goody-goody fable of inter-racial marriage, or a tract for tolerance, but it is a lot more. Fassbinder, who comes from the theatre, has a genius for choosing and directing actors, a genius for making simple dialogue sound like something engraved on stone. Partly this is because he believes in it all: Of course old Emmi is a little ridiculous, but one feels that Fassbinder thinks her no more ridiculous than he, Fassbinder, or the rest of us are. There is total sympathy between the creator and his creations.
For some, the film was too artful, for others, too naive. For me, it is netther: although there are elements of "camp" in Fassbinder's view of life, somehow through the kitsch there shines something very rare in the cinema, something which I can only call a moral radiance. And if that sounds silly, I'm sorry.
-Richard Roud, The Guardian, May 22 1974.
This film won the International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Festival 1974.
Weblink: Roger Ebert Review 
FEAR EATS THE SOUL
Angst essen Seele auf aka Ali ? Fear Eats The Soul : (West) Germany 1974 : Rainer Werner Fassbinder : 92-4 mins
With time on his hands in between major projects, the ever-industrious Fassbinder churned out a ‘quickie’ remake of a film by one of his favourite directors, Douglas Sirk. All That Heaven Allows (1956), scripted by Peg Fenwick, is a classic evocation of Eisenhower-era social repression in middle-class America: respectable middle-aged widow Jane Wyman (then 41) scandalises her family, friends and neighbours when she falls in love with her free-spirited gardener, Rock Hudson (then 30). The third cinematic version of the story is Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, which nods to Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1958, itself a remake of John M Stahl’s 1934 original) by making the gardener black ? Haynes eliminates the age-gap factor by casting Julianne Moore (then 41) and Dennis Haysbert (then 47) in the key roles.
Fassbinder diverges from Sirk and Haynes by setting his tale in ‘the present’ ? mid-seventies Munich, in the aftermath of that city’s blood-spattered Olympics. Prefiguring Haynes, he introduces a racial element ? Emmi (Brigitte Mira) is white, her lover (later husband) Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem) is one of the gastarbeiters (‘guest workers’) invited to Germany to solve the post-war shortage of manual labour. As in the other versions, the central coupling horrifies onlookers ? widow Emmi is snubbed by her neighbouts, ostracised by her family and colleagues, and is refused service at her local store. But she’s a stubborn sort, and has a history of experiencing (mild) prejudice after marrying a Pole. Perhaps keen to expiate the guilt of her Nazi-party membership, Emmi refuses to be broken down ? her determination is a key factor in the film’s major divergence from All That Heaven Allows: an ambiguous denouement which, by Fassbinder standards, can be described as a happy ending. Then again, the film does open (even before the titles) with a stern motto which reads : ‘Happiness isn’t always fun.’
Fassbinder plays down the class aspects emphasised by Sirk and Haynes: Emmi is, like Ali, a manual worker ? a cleaner. Instead, he dramatically widens the age-gap: it’s hard to tell Ali’s age, but he’s probably in his mid-30s. Emmi is in her sixties ? and it’s this, rather than the racial ‘barrier’, which emerges as the biggest threat to their relationship. Emmi does her best to satisfy Ali’s carnal needs, but he doesn’t seem entirely satisfied and seeks further ‘entertainment’ with the younger (but spectacularly hard-faced) barmaid (Barbara Valentin) at his local pub - though from what we’re shown their lovemaking is stilted to the point of inactivity.
That’s rather more than we see of Emmi and Ali, however ? there’s a brief scene early on with a cut that strongly implies sex, but nothing at all after the pair get married (they emerge from the register office to a bleak scene of rain and slagheaps). We see even less of Mira naked than we do of ‘octogenarian’ Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude, which was severely bowdlerised by the nervously prudish Paramount. This feels like a rare mis-step by Fassbinder ? it’s as if he’s as averse to the physical aspects of Emmi and Ali’s relationship as the character he plays, Ali’s bigoted son-in-law Eugen.
It’s also hard to know exactly how to take the Bavarian boorishness Eugen represents, and which is shared by the vast majority of the characters on view ? is this an accurate mirror of 1974 Munich reality, or a deliberately caricatured exaggeration? Sad to say, much of Fear Eats the Soul remains all too topical today ? the Olympic terrorism incident seems to have altered the atmosphere in the city towards immigrants: “They’re all Arabs, you know ? with bombs and all that” confides a neighbour to the (long-haired) policeman she’s summoned to break up a party in Emmi’s flat, a line that quite jarringly prefigures the paranoid aftermath of September 11th.
The few people we see who tolerate Emmi and Ali’s marriage seem to be motivated primarily by financial imperatives ? her son only starts talking to her when he realises he can’t afford a babysitter. Those hostile to Emmi’s choice of partner are presented as stiff, cardboard figures, shockingly close-minded in their prejudices. As usual, Fassbinder’s approach is deliberately stylised, melodramatic and mannered, with several instances of characters stiffly intoning their lines as they sit in fixed tableaux, often surrounded by spectacularly ugly instances of mid-seventies clothing and furniture ? vile decor for vile thoughts, indeed. |
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15th December, 2002
(seen Cineside, 8th December)
by Neil Young
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