How Fassbinder's movies were the mirror reflecting his life

Imprisoned by the Walls

Amir Siadat

Taking A Refuge In Cinema

Even if we put aside the qualitative aspects and our criterion is quantity and that's it, thirty-seven years is a brief time for what Fassbinder learned and presented. From the age of twenty-one, he worked non-stop, so that when he died, the number of his feature films was more than the years he lived! As if he knew that he had little time, he kept jumping to different fields and grasping whatever aroused his endless passion. In the cinema, there was almost nothing that he did not do. He was a director and a cameraman. He knew editing and stage designing. He was an actor and acted in many of his own (and others) films. In less than sixteen years, he made more than 40 feature films and two TV series. He wrote 14 plays, short stories, poetry and nearly 50 screenplays, staged 24 plays as a director, and performed four radio plays. He worked as long as he could, but like any other young artist, with his bitter end, he left his fans with regret for the works that could have been created but were not.

He was born on May 31, 1945 in Bavaria. His father, who was a doctor, used to visit patients in his apartment, near the red-light district of Munich, and this opened the door of the house to notorious people and made Fassbinder get used to seeing such people from a young age. He was less than six years old when his parents separated and he stayed with his mother (Liselotte). A little later, the mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and had to stay away from home for a while and leave her child's guardianship to her friends and tenants. In the absence of his mother, Fassbinder spent most of his time in the street. There, he became more independent and rebellious day by day. When he was nine years old, he was constantly arguing and fighting with Liselotte's lover. As a teenager, he did not have a calm relationship with his stepfather and never got along with him. Family was a scary word for him that he ran away from; More to the cinema. According to his claims, he watched movies almost every day and sometimes three or four movies a day. The image of the family in mainstream movies was completely different from his personal experience of this concept. What he later portrayed in Fear of Fear, may have been taken from this loaded fear: Margot standing in front of a three-sided mirror, in such a way that her face is duplicated to represent her multiple identity and her hesitation between staying and going; Between a housewife and unbridled rebellion: "So this is me. Me. Me?". This secret self-talk is the absent side of the clichéd family TV-dramas that are mentioned in the opening frames of the film: Margot is in the kitchen with a bulging belly preparing a cake, and her husband Kurt arrives to find joyfully that his baby kicking in the mother`s belly. In this initial demonstration, something is left unsaid, which continues to disrupt and advance the drama (similar to Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage that was made two years earlier). The objects and parts of the house are flawed and distorted in Margot's eyes (reminiscent of Edvard Munch's The Scream) and the film is full of subjective shots that observe her from different angles. The origin of the fear that accumulates the shots one by one remains unknown because the cause of fear is fear itself. It is possible to lead Margot to Hitchcock’s Marnie through different paths, but here the internal inflammation of the personality is not supposed to lead to discovery and there is no treatment; Nothing can be done by heavy swimming training, nor by Valium; Neither Leonard Cohen's songs can be effective, nor secret relationships, nor cognac. All the classic assumptions are mixed up. No one threatens the family; The family itself is a threat. At the age of 15, Fassbinder left his mother's house to go to Cologne - his father's place of residence. In Cologne, writing became a serious matter for him and he wrote a number of plays, short stories and poems. It was there that his physical reality was revealed to him and he realized that his desires are different from what is approved by the public. After finishing high school, he decided to enter the West Berlin Film School and when he was not accepted, he decided to make a short film. Unlike other names of New German cinema (Schlöndorff, Herzog, Wenders, etc.), he had a theatrical background; In 1967, he joined the Munich underground theater group, and a year later he formed his own "anti-theatre" group; A group that some of its members stayed with him until the end. Due to continuous teamwork, the secret of quickly putting together any project - with minimum budget - was well understandable to him. In the first three years (from 1969 to 1971) he made a total of fifteen feature films! He was a full-fledged pragmatist. He worked during the day and had orgies at night. Maybe today some of his works seemed old-fashioned, and the casual treatment and raw and unpolished performance elements in them are unpleasant, but this rawness is the result of a short life and a small opportunity to perfect the experience, as well as the result of the amazing speed of an artist who before performing, gave his actors less opportunity to practice and often he was satisfied with one take of each scene; An artist whose cinema was his refuge and home, and the border between his personal and artistic life was blurred. He used to invite whoever he liked to this "house". He made his mother an actress, as well as Irm Hermann - who was a secretary before - and Armin Meier who used to be a butcher. His relationship with Irm Hermann was relatively long, but unstable and turbulent. On the fall of 1969, when he was playing one of the main roles in a TV movie made by Volker Schlöndorff, he met Günther Kaufmann, a black and strong actor who had a small role in the same movie. He did everything he could to make Kaufmann leave his wife and two children and stay with him. He bought him expensive gifts and gave him roles in his films. In 1970, he married Ingrid Caven (who acted in many of his films), but this marriage was short-lived. After this separation, he experienced two other relationships, first with Moroccan El Hedi ben Salem and then with Armin Meier, both of which had tragic endings. The first relationship ended bitterly and violently in 1974 (Salem hanged himself in prison six years later) and the second relationship in 1978; Armin Meier's body was found in his apartment only a few days after Fassbinder broke up with him; He committed suicide on Fassbinder's birthday! The filmmaker presented Querelle to Salem and made In a Year with 13 Moons with the memory of Armin Meier and influenced by his life and sufferings.

It is necessary to dwell on Fassbinder's biographical aspects because his films are strongly rooted in him and his cinema is a mirror of his life. He wrote most of his screenplays himself, and when he went to the realm of literature with the intention of adaptation, he chose those who had common aspects with him in the way of presenting unconventional human relations, such as Nabokov and Jean Genet. However, it is not possible to draw out common and comprehensive themes or features in all of his works. How can one achieve a consistent pattern of his components and categorize his works under certain titles when some of them were cursed by both the left and the right wings, or when a film like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant both caused the praise of some feminists and the anger of some others?

Desire to Be Seen

Among Fassbinder's adapted works, Querelle is perhaps the most meaningful choice. Genet was a street child who was sent to the penitentiary many times for various crimes from the age of ten. He was a wanderer, who had nothing to do except theft and prostitution, and in the absence of his mother and femininity, men were his constant companions. With all their violence and delinquency, they supported him, and this was pleasant for him, who had not been taken care of since childhood. Genet saw in the violent behavior of the policemen a quality more or less similar to that of his criminal friends. For a displaced person like him, the prison, with all its suffocation, was a kind of shelter. The terrifying beauty that is evident in Querelle which shows that Fassbinder knows the mysterious side of Genet's world very well; A masculine and violent world, full of dirty words and forbidden desires, which takes its poetic tone from its distance from reality and from a strange and relative pleasure of violence. The only element of femininity in the film is the aging woman who is several decades older than Querelle; A "Mother" whose embrace has nothing to do with belonging and connection. Querelle wants to be seen and wanted. He is the object of speculation and the center of attention, and over time he turns into a destructive entity. If we accept that the text is the arena of the emergence of the unsaid and the undone, it must be said that Genet takes revenge from his mother and all those who rejected him with Querelle. If they had not wanted him, he would have thought that he was a bad commodity; He agreed to this "badness" in order to become someone and at least have an "identity"; Like Querelle - who betrays all those who love him and whom he loves - and like Faust, he sold his soul to the devil. How close is this struggle to be seen and accepted in Genet's life and works with the preoccupations of the German filmmaker!

"The marginalized and forgotten people are willing to do anything to be seen, and it does not matter if their actions are good or bad."

It is possible to shine this famous speech of Genet's The Maids on Fassbinder's career as a ray of light and see how "being seen" has significant dimensions in his career. Sometimes his characters come to the center from the margins, like Lili Marleen, with controversy and adopted to the contemporary time, or like Veronika Voss, they are thrown from the center to the margins in a reverse direction, without hoping for their return. Willie, joyful by the fact that she got her place, even if it was by mixing with Nazi leaders, kisses her reflection in the mirror. People come in droves to see her on stage and join her in singing "Lili Marleen". Willie's dazzling radiance in the heart of an illuminated stage with a huge swastika in the background has turned the concert hall into an ancient shrine with pilgrims of the same tribe and blood who are ready to strengthen their solidarity with the " goddess"! Willie does not know that the roaring wave that makes everyone in a "collective identity" transformed, in the end, will take away her “individual" desire and she will never reach her fiancé. Her final loneliness in mind, is tied to the isolation of Veronika Voss: the famous star of the Nazi era is a forgotten actress a decade after the war. From her pitiful struggle to prove that she is still the object of every gaze and the subject of every conversation, one can measure the pain she is taking. And the irony is that she is only an actress until the camera is not in front of her! She has a "mask" on her face and is immersed in an imaginary role. The presence of the camera, however, reminds her that in a system where the value of everything is measured by productivity and market conquest, an aging star is a disposable commodity, and this suffering is deeper than starting a new relationship with a reporter or being offered a role in a small play, can reduce it. Veronika is too old to return to life with a small push, and Fassbinder does not want to transform his characters. For the old star, there is no relief except drugs, and this is how the death of the ideal identity brings forward her physical death; And a death in solitude and isolation, in the corner of the room. She is nobody anymore, because she is not counted for a long time. This is almost the common pain of marginalized characters of Fassbinder.

In the eyes of his family, the greengrocer of The Merchant of Four Seasons is a rejected outsider, because they no longer consider living with a low-man and undignified like him. According to more or less similar criteria, Ali (an Arab driver) and Emmi (a cleaner) are condemned to remain alone, in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (in fact, their strange relationship is the result of such a problem) and Franz in Fox and His Friends, despite the fact that he got lucky and won the lottery, cannot be considered an "insider" in a family of a higher class. They are all "others" in the eyes of the community; It is fine that they are there, but must be outside the community. By projecting its unwanted parts to "others" (or "minorities"), the community gives value and meaning to its cultural behavior. They call themselves "Cosmos" and the others "Chaos". The framework that Fassbinder proposes to observe and record the world around him is far from the usual paranoic demarcations and emphasis. In an example such as in In a Year with 13 Moons, his view more than anything else notices the complexity of the physical crisis of Erwin/Elvira; It shows that Elvira's troubles are the result of a network of social and institutional relations and genetic issues, and the issue of choice or non-choice is not much discussed in there. Elvira's painful and exhausting loneliness remains an unsolved problem until the end, and the journey we witness throughout the film is a struggle to discover the roots of this loneliness. What happened to him that his fate was wicked and his relatives all left him alone? Even Fassbinder's camera leaves him where it should - and more than ever - is expected to accompany him: in the moment of the meeting with the nun and the old woman's relatively long narrative of Elvira's childhood, we rarely see his/her face, although we know he/she is present. (Does Elvira run away from the camera or the camera runs away from him?) When he put the pieces of his life together, he sees that there is nothing that he can tell of, at least as long as he is alive. We hear his words from the record player when he is no more alive. As if he could not convince anyone to listen to his words except by eternal absence! Up until the end, he does not know himself what his choice really is and he is never sure if he wants to be a man or a woman. Erwin or Elvira!

After the Year Zero

Fassbinder himself was a "the other" for the society around him. He was a stranger with a discordant personality that does not fit into the assumptions and moral and social frameworks. He did not want to and could not be like others. As a German artist, he was well aware of the disastrous characteristic of every group in the polarization of insider and outsider. He knew that the generations behind him were the ones who greeted the Third Reich proudly. In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Ali tells Emmi about the humiliating behavior of the Germans. Germans do not want to know him because recognition blurs the boundary between the group and the individual outside the group. The other must remain anonymous (monstrous and inhuman) and one must keep a distance from him. By getting close to Ali and recognizing his individuality, Emmi has violated the "tribe" law, so she is no longer considered an insider and should be left aside. The day after the first night she spent with Ali, she listens to others' judgments about the immigrants on the stairs of her workplace. Now she is at the dilemma of choosing: connecting with the community and enjoying psychological security, or take the risks of marrying a black immigrant who is much younger than her? The reflection of her colleagues' voices in the building, in addition to having an alarming resonance, is a sign of the perception that is constantly multiplied to create a "single self" of opposing and demanding people in front of Emmi: colleagues, children, neighbors, local traders and ordinary people. This mechanism of attraction and rejection is characteristic of every group, even the immigrant minority. It does not matter that Arabs are few in a foreign country; They are the majority under the roof of the cafe that is their hangout. They are a different tribe and this gathering every night in the cafe has a ritual characteristic for them. When Emmi enters the cafe, who is upset because of what happened, everyone stares at her, who is sitting alone and away from them. A stranger has stepped into their privacy.

In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, evil is a dormant capacity in both main characters. As a result, they also participate in the battle of power and humiliation. When the neighbors welcome Emmi again, she sends Ali to help them - to move things - and when her colleagues have a drink and laugh as they surround Ali, she talks to them gently and shows them her husband's big-boned muscles, as if she like to recommend a suitable slave to a buyer! Emmi - unknowingly - is aligned with a soft and unifying violence and Ali does not tolerate this behavior; So, he leaves the house to make Emmi – who remorsefully is back to him – feel miserable in a similar scene, with the support of his colleagues in the garage. Is there an easier way to talk about fascism than this?

According to Fassbinder, it is more of a joke that the spirit of freedom will spread in Europe after fascism. He believed that despite the changes of the new era, his motherland is still connected with fascism in infrastructure. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, he tried to show that the apparent welfare of the German society after the war, which is based on the principle of productivity and usefulness, also measures the value of man in terms of utility and exploitation. In the comic and intense shots at the beginning of this film, we see the bride and groom who, in the midst of war, bombs and the destruction of the city, and at the same time as Hitler's portrait falls, persistently ask the staff of notary to register them as husband and wife anyway! The end of the film also has a satirical treatment and, of course, a thematic contrast with this beginning: Maria and Herman, after years of separation and distance, are finally sitting together in a house that Maria destroyed his body and soul in Herman's absence to get it. Now Herman is there, and there are no explosions or bombings involved, but the two of them do not show the initial passion and mania on their behaviors, and this is the result of the conditions that both of them have given themselves to in the years of distance: Maria has a very good job situation due to her relationship with Oswald, and Herman also promised Oswald in prison that after his release, he would not be around Maria for a while, so that after Oswald's imminent death, he would receive half of his wealth. The fall and rise of Maria Braun have a direct relationship with the defeat and reconstruction of her country, and her fluctuating marriage evokes the history mixed with the separation and union of Germany, whose borders changed many times during the 20th century. In this way, the theme of identity crisis in Fassbinder's films - which are all his own stories - goes beyond the level of a personal issue to show the spirit of the era in post-war Germany; A divided country that was involved in an identity crisis and now is transforming. The country was at the center of the Cold War. Its western half had become American and capitalist, and its eastern half was run by a Stalinist government, and was disillusioned with both. In The Third Generation, he depicted a group of lawbreakers who did not know what they were fighting against and who were preparing to fight. In Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, he was the narrator of an old woman's successive abuses by journalists, communists and anarchists and showed how each circle drags Mother Küsters into political‌ schemes for their media or publicity interests. In this film, unlike Brecht's play, there is no more leap towards self-knowledge, partisanship and the establishment of a utopia as a result of the praxis of the working class. Although the way in which Mother Küsters and Pelagea Vlassova of the play Mother enter the political conflicts are more or less the same and compatible (both are strangers to politics at the beginning), but Mother Küsters, unlike Brecht's "hero" who becomes an avid revolutionary at the end, the further she goes, the farther she falls from the truth and in the end, she remains confused and helpless.

The World As Will

Ali and Emmi are sitting in a restaurant and all the seats around them are empty. Finally, Emmi, who is dismal by all those cold and suspicious looks, bursts into tears. Just at the moment when the emotional situation is at its peak, the camera pulls back from Emmi's close-up and slowly moves away from the couple until it reaches somewhere close to the view point of the restaurant staff. And this is the center of gravity of the narrative and the dramatic turning point. From here on, the audience is supposed to take a "distance" from their sympathetic emotions and stand in the position of judgment.

Seeing melodramatic situations from a distance, choosing ugly actors to minimize the audience's emotional involvement, the presence of revealing moments (in order to emphasize the reflexiveness of the work) in Fassbinder's cinema all came from a theater that had abandoned realism as a tool of bourgeois art. And with the tactic of breaking the illusion of reality, he insisted that his audience know that he is facing a restrained re-creation. Therefore, when faced with a work by Fassbinder, it is hard not to consider it as a "film". This characteristic in his early works (namely, from Love Is Colder Than Death, to Beware of a Holy Whore) is straightforward and even a bit exaggerated. The very opening scene of Love Is Colder Than Death is enough to represent the "artifact" of the frame, which, by placing all the characters at the end of the left side and leaving more than half of the shot empty, made all the components abstract, and Godard - the most radical mediator between Brecht and cinema – is remembered. However, Godard and Fassbinder later followed completely different paths in applying Brecht's rules. If the extreme approach of the former in diminishing the role of the story to the point of putting it in the shadow, and stepping on the manipulation of conventions and disrupting the style of the film reached a point where his works marked the freedom of the artist more than the awareness of the audience, the latter over time thought of preserving the audience and paved the path of Hollywood melodramas (specifically Douglas Sirk's cinema) to shape them according to his desired style. Brecht's intention was to clarify, not to add ambiguity. He wanted criticism and art to be political and believed that transformation is possible, and this is the point of distinction between him and Fassbinder for two reasons; First, that art was not a means for Fassbinder, not only because of its inherent characteristics, but because of its close connection with Fassbinder's daily life; Second, he basically had no hope of change. His films are a perfect expression of a low world that cannot be accepted or approved as it is, but there is no solution to change it either. The code word of The Third Generation’s terrorists is the title of Schopenhauer's famous philosophical work: "The World as Will"; And this should be more than a simple gesture. For Fassbinder, the world is as bad as Schopenhauer described; Full of discrimination and brutality that arises from "will", this main source of human motivations and behaviors. In Fox and His Friends, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, The Third Generation, The Marriage of Maria Braun and... Fassbinder speaks of the destructive force of desire to show that even the most private aspects of people's lives are affected by the relations of the capitalist system, the exploitation and power-seeking is the law of this world and "Homo homini lupus"(A man is a wolf to another man).

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant talks about the omnipresence of this law with minimum of tools (six characters and a single location) and by relying on the keywords of Marxism (commodity fetishism, chauvinism, class struggle, etc.). The costume designer is fascinated with what he has made; In this contemporary "Pygmalion", the "sculptor" is from a wealthy family and the "statue" is from the working class, and this fascination turns the relationship between the two upsides down. Karin ignores Petra's insane passion (after all, a statue is a statue), humiliates her with her indifferences, commands her in her house, and after getting what she wants from a relationship with Petra, leaves her and returns to her husband (the husband who promised to divorce her in the beginning). Petra constantly insults Karin and does not remember that she herself has taught Karin the "rule" of this world earlier - by explaining how to "replace" every person. Now Karin has "consumed" her and does not need her anymore; So, it is not odd that in the midway we see that Petra has clearly become like her mannequin. Probably all the vagaries and self-destructions and sufferings and struggling in the second half and the long part of the birthday (which is like a therapy session) is nothing but the intention of breaking the statue that was made of her and facing her true self - which has been hidden behind masks and hats and colorful clothes since the beginning. Throughout this part, the camera, which used to roam freely in the house, is like Petra herself, who is unable to get up and move, as if she is stuck on the ground and her eyes are staring at a corner of the house that is empty; There is no space to be a refuge for Petra, and no window to let fresh air in. This world will not be saved by Schopenhauer's solution - which was rooted in his attachment to Buddhism - that is, avoiding the world. At the end, after the self-destruction of the birthday night, Petra calmly admits that she wanted to "own" Karin and this is not love. When Petra expresses remorse for domineering behavior with her servant, Marlene, the servant packs her suitcase and leaves Petra to show that she submitted to humiliation of her own accord and that slavery was a "choice" and a reason for her presence in Petra's house. Fassbinder's melodramas in this way transform the moral and integrated world of the genre and leave the audience in such unknown and strange places. When Marlene leaves, the lights in the house are turned off for the first time and the "scene" falls into absolute darkness. Petra is left alone at home; Alone, imprisoned by the walls.

Fassbinder's body was found on the bed while he had a drop of blood from his nose due to an overdose of drugs and sedatives. In how many of his films such a death can be traced? In the final scenes of In a Year of 13 Moons, Erwin/Elvira's relatives - who are actually miles away from him - open the door of the room to circle around the bed on top of his body and hear the words they did not take very seriously before, from his tape recorder. Elvira's recorded voice is louder than the cry and whispers of the rest in the scene. Death also has a liberating quality for Hans in The Merchant of the Four Seasons. The world around us has rejected and crushed him so much that there is no way left for him but to drink and forget. The people around him are sitting around cold and indifferent and he is drinking continuously. It is as if they are waiting to see how drinking too much will make him die. Like Elvira, Hans is lonely and rejected. The congregation at his funeral hardly reaches ten people, and in the last scene, his wife talks about a common future with his close friend. Everything seems normal. Hans is forgotten. At the end of Fox and His Friends, Franz - played by Fassbinder himself - is lying on the floor of the subway station; The camera slowly moves back so that we can move away from him and see that the station is empty of passengers. Franz - whose “friends” tricked him out of everything he had - looks more isolated and helpless than ever at this last stop, and the soothing bottle is by his side.

It has been said that if Fassbinder wanted to make a movie about Christ, he would have crucified himself! His characters were parts of his body. Was his world like Elvira, Hans or Franz - in the exact sense of the word - "black"? The law of the earth in most of his works is nothing but evil and exploitation, and we do not remember any kind of hope and salvation in his cinema. Instead, the inner spaces of his films cannot be forgotten; Spaces that do not have any signs of shelter and security in them, on the contrary, look narrow and hollow, and the door frames in his camera frame make the space for the characters in the room more and more narrow. The vertical lines that always show off in his compositions seem to have captured people. Is Fassbinder also thinking about suicide? As evidenced by his works, yes and strongly; But he had a security that his characters did not benefit from: art; Another "desire" to continue, that breaks despair and closes the way to madness and suicide. The existence of manuscripts related to the plot of "Rosa Luxemburg" next to his body was a testimony to his desire to stay alive and create and continue.