Home Video Hovel: Early Fassbinder, by West Anthony
Having only recently been exposed to the brilliance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy, it seemed like a good idea for me to pounce on the Criterion Collection’s new Eclipse Series box, Early Fassbinder. Having watched these five examples of the budding auteur in action, the idea doesn’t seem so hot anymore. The man directed roughly a dozen pictures between 1969 and 1971, but if your idea of cinema was ninety minutes worth of moody noodling, you could probably churn out a similar amount of product in the same amount of time — here is proof positive that quantity does not equal quality.
Love Is Colder Than Death, his first feature film and the first in this collection, could be a parody of arty black-and-white European films from the 60’s if it wasn’t the genuine article already — sullen, disconnected people saying very little whilst framed in static shots against stark white backgrounds. Fassbinder himself co-stars as a doughy tough guy in an ill-considered leather jacket who teams up with another gangster for mayhem and suchlike; Hanna Schygulla, luminous even in such a dour environment as this, is the dame that ultimately comes between them. The picture owes more than a nod and a wink to Godard and Melville in terms of influences, but the execution is not their fault in the least. I don’t know how Godard managed to make a minute of silence so compelling in Band Of Outsiders, but Fassbinder gives us just over a minute of a guy staring wordlessly into the camera and while I know it’s supposed to represent one person’s sublimated longing for this person, it just comes off like a pretentious test of the viewer’s patience.
There is some improvement in the second film in this collection. Katzelmacher is what I imagine an episode ofFriends would be like if Friends was a TV show about young, disaffected couples living torpid, joyless lives in an arty black-and-white European film from the 60’s. A bunch of young twentysomethings sit about, indoors and outside as it may be, exchanging gossip and disdain for one another while constantly framed in the lower half of the screen as though the director expected word balloons to appear and generate more interesting dialogue for his actors. Things pick up when a Greek immigrant (played by Fassbinder) shows up and gets the gang gossipy and disdainful about something other than one another. The casual racism the gang displays toward the hapless Greek would be disturbing enough anywhere in the world, but is particularly alarming when it is set in a country that a mere quarter of a century before was murdering six million people just for being different. Katzelmacher is a step in the right direction, but Fassbinder still seems too attached to disaffected behavior, and it wears thin in a big hurry. It doesn’t help in the least that this film also features the worst performance of Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues” I’ve ever heard.
Gods Of The Plague is a great leap forward. While Fassbinder returns to the gangster milieu of his first picture (he even has a cameo wearing the same leather jacket he wore in Love Is Colder Than Death), this film is helped not only by a more compelling dramatic narrative, but a vastly improved visual style. It feels as though he has more confidence in his abilities and clearer ideas as to the use of lighting and camera movement in his storytelling. Not that the characters are much more excitable, but one thing at a time. It’s still crime and betrayal as an ex-con (Harry Baer) can’t make up his mind between two women (the returning Hanna Schygulla and Margarethe von Trotta; the latter would become a director herself, with the searing picture The Lost Honor Of Katharina Blum, co-directed with Volker Schlondorff, to her credit); not helping matters is his friendship with a guy who killed his brother, which you just know is going to lead to all kinds of mischief and shooting and death. Fassbinder’s notions of hard-boiled gangster action never progresses past taciturn posturing, occasional eruptions of gunfire, and the unnecessary and casual slapping around of women, and if it’s his comment on film noir cliches it might be a more potent one if his characters were a little less consumed by ennui and whatnot.
The American Soldier is the conclusion of a loose trilogy of gangster films after Love Is Colder Than Death andGods Of The Plague, in which a Vietnam vet (Karl Scheydt) comes home to Munich and is hired for contract killings by some crooked cops. The sparse dialogue, bursts of gunplay and abuse of women continue, the film takes off here and there on intriguingly oddball tangents, and Fassbinder seems to be trying to further develop his style after the previous picture in this collection… and then there’s this one thing. This one thing that is probably the one thing I’m going to remember most from the entirety of these five films. The final shot of The American Soldier is one of the most brazenly, unapologetically goofy things I have ever seen. As a wholly unrestrained (and vaguely inappropriate) depiction of overwhelming emotion and tragedy, it is nearly unrivaled among all such scenes that I have seen in global cinema; however, as its connection to all that has preceded it is tenuous at best, it might have been more potent in another movie. Here, it just feels inexplicable and, eventually, interminable.
The final film in the collection, Beware Of A Holy Whore, is almost insulting in its director’s self-aggrandizing, self-pitying handjobbery; this picture is to filmmakers what Pink Floyd’s The Wall is to rock stars, but at least you can dance to The Wall (well, parts of it, anyway). In Fassbinder’s tribute to himself and all the crap he has to put up with to realize some grand vision of motives and irony, a film crew loafs around in a Spanish villa waiting for something to happen, passing the time by drinking cuba libres, talking smack about each other, and playing Leonard Cohen on the jukebox (something that probably never happened anywhere but the early 70’s). Eventually something like a film production commences, but even then it seems that there’s less filming and more of the same yelling and whinging. If Truffaut’s Day For Night, and its brilliant depiction of film production, hadn’t gotten to me first, Beware Of A Holy Whore might have had a chance with me, but even then it is incredibly difficult to get past Fassbinder’s woe-is-me-the-sensitive-artist routine — I kind of want to smack the guy.
The BRD Trilogy remains a magnificent cinematic experience to be treasured, but I now consider myself very fortunate to have seen it before I saw the films in this Eclipse Series collection, because if it had been the other way round I would likely have dismissed Fassbinder out of hand as a pretentious schnook who made some progress with his visual style but couldn’t get past tiresome depictions of people bored with their own lives. Perhaps if he had restricted his early output to, say, one film a year, he could have really refined his work before throwing it in front of a camera; as it is, these five films have me halfway convinced of the wisdom of Mrs. Stephens’ words to Mark, the murderous protagonist of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom: “All this filming isn’t healthy.”