So tedious it’s excruciating. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a limited series about the working class. If you watch it in one day it’s like doing an eight hour shift at a job in a factory that’s mind-numbingly monotonous. It’s anti-Fassbinder in its dramatic content. And it breaks every rule there is about how to give the audience a reason to invest emotionally or any type of payoff for doing so.
The job of cinema at its best is to get you to forget about what’s going in in your life for a couple of hours. Stop looking at your watch. Forget what time it is. Definitely no reason to light up your phone. Forget about your job. Escape. Get swept up in the story you paid to see. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is a simulator that makes you constantly feel like you’re at work learning about the means of production, business, economics, capitalism, politics, the petty dynamics among your co-workers you’re stuck with listening to. And not only does it relentlessly torture you with having to put up with such boredom, but when the characters are outside the factory they mostly talk about the exact same thing.
Were I asked what I love about Fassbinder my answer would be characters who are doomed because of the anguish they go through chasing their unrequited object of desire. And his way of using crime genre elements as conduits of the dark crooked dead end trap where love, lust, and seeking a human connection get you. His moral that of the casino: you’ll lose it all, the stakes are everything, the house always wins, and you’ll keep coming back for reasons no one will ever know.
In Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day we get a mainstream audience pleaser that champions the underdog. Along with its overwhelming barrage of workers rights rhetoric there’s a cheesy commercial product decisions made by committee overriding focus on superficial external conflicts that every character faces and every single time are easily resolved with little effort. It’s a reality where nothing ever goes wrong. Where every bet you placed in the casino or every lottery ticket you bought would be a winner. Cliched love story logic. Perfect marriages. Cutesy antics.
I challenge you. Watch this movie and every single time it seems like something bad is going to happen or something is going to go wrong I guarantee you it will magically turn out in the only possible conclusion where everybody walks away happy. What’s wrong with Fassbinder? Is this a sick joke?
Is this a conceptual piece that’s supposed to make us think about how vapid cinema would be if you gave people what they want? Is this what AI’s going to look like? It wasn’t until Fassbinder’s first eleven films that he even centered one of his stories on a working class protagonist. And that’s probably the bleakest film he’s made. Work crushes Hans Epp. Fassbinder has also exclusively dealt with marriage in a derisive way. Marriage destroys Hans Epp. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day feels like a cursed mirror follow up to The Merchant of Four Seasons. The family’s name is also Epp. It’s always playing around with zooms. Except it feels like we’re stuck in a dream where everything’s perfect that proves as a film far more troubling than all of the brutality that’s typically de rigueur with Fassbinder.
Throughout the entire 8 hour runtime I only found one exception. Did you spot it? HARALD, the character played by Kurt Raab. He’s the anomaly in this world. With his serial killer pedo glasses and John Waters moustache, treated with contempt by all. Harald is the only character who earns my sympathy.
On JOCHEN (Gottfried John) and MARION’S (Schygulla) wedding night at the reception everyone is blissfully drinking dancing laughing and loving. Of course at this point everyone loathes Harald because he won’t give MONIKA a divorce. But sitting alone in his tux, when Harald asks the bride Marion if she wants to dance, she simply says “No.” That’s the only moment I felt anything throughout this ordeal. He awkwardly looks away at nothing in particular, lost, wounded, utterly alone. And as if that wasn’t enough they’re playing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” off somewhere during this moment. Okay those feelings I can process.
It’s also the way that all of the conflicts are external that make the film lack any way of empathizing with them. It’s too silly. There's no internal conflict because everybody gets everything they want every time. No one has to make touch choices because everything always works itself out. Exactly how not to craft drama. Then after all of the endless dialogues about workers rights and every conceivable detail associated with them finally at the end they go up to the head of their company with a list of demands to negotiate and as soon as they enter his office he’s like approved. It has to be ironic. Even the workers say they expected to have to fight for it. Nope. Not in this backwards logic cinematic curiosity. I hope the joke is on me. But that doesn’t matter. Because even if it is there’s no way for a second I could enjoy anything about this atrocious fabrication.
Were I asked what I love about Fassbinder my answer would be characters who are doomed because of the anguish they go through chasing their unrequited object of desire. And his way of using crime genre elements as conduits of the dark crooked dead end trap where love, lust, and seeking a human connection get you. His moral that of the casino: you’ll lose it all, the stakes are everything, the house always wins, and you’ll keep coming back for reasons no one will ever know.
In Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day we get a mainstream audience pleaser that champions the underdog. Along with its overwhelming barrage of workers rights rhetoric there’s a cheesy commercial product decisions made by committee overriding focus on superficial external conflicts that every character faces and every single time are easily resolved with little effort. It’s a reality where nothing ever goes wrong. Where every bet you placed in the casino or every lottery ticket you bought would be a winner. Cliched love story logic. Perfect marriages. Cutesy antics.
I challenge you. Watch this movie and every single time it seems like something bad is going to happen or something is going to go wrong I guarantee you it will magically turn out in the only possible conclusion where everybody walks away happy. What’s wrong with Fassbinder? Is this a sick joke?
Is this a conceptual piece that’s supposed to make us think about how vapid cinema would be if you gave people what they want? Is this what AI’s going to look like? It wasn’t until Fassbinder’s first eleven films that he even centered one of his stories on a working class protagonist. And that’s probably the bleakest film he’s made. Work crushes Hans Epp. Fassbinder has also exclusively dealt with marriage in a derisive way. Marriage destroys Hans Epp. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day feels like a cursed mirror follow up to The Merchant of Four Seasons. The family’s name is also Epp. It’s always playing around with zooms. Except it feels like we’re stuck in a dream where everything’s perfect that proves as a film far more troubling than all of the brutality that’s typically de rigueur with Fassbinder.
Throughout the entire 8 hour runtime I only found one exception. Did you spot it? HARALD, the character played by Kurt Raab. He’s the anomaly in this world. With his serial killer pedo glasses and John Waters moustache, treated with contempt by all. Harald is the only character who earns my sympathy.
On JOCHEN (Gottfried John) and MARION’S (Schygulla) wedding night at the reception everyone is blissfully drinking dancing laughing and loving. Of course at this point everyone loathes Harald because he won’t give MONIKA a divorce. But sitting alone in his tux, when Harald asks the bride Marion if she wants to dance, she simply says “No.” That’s the only moment I felt anything throughout this ordeal. He awkwardly looks away at nothing in particular, lost, wounded, utterly alone. And as if that wasn’t enough they’re playing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” off somewhere during this moment. Okay those feelings I can process.
It’s also the way that all of the conflicts are external that make the film lack any way of empathizing with them. It’s too silly. There's no internal conflict because everybody gets everything they want every time. No one has to make touch choices because everything always works itself out. Exactly how not to craft drama. Then after all of the endless dialogues about workers rights and every conceivable detail associated with them finally at the end they go up to the head of their company with a list of demands to negotiate and as soon as they enter his office he’s like approved. It has to be ironic. Even the workers say they expected to have to fight for it. Nope. Not in this backwards logic cinematic curiosity. I hope the joke is on me. But that doesn’t matter. Because even if it is there’s no way for a second I could enjoy anything about this atrocious fabrication.
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