An artifice calculated to inspire fear

Fassbinder marriage doesn’t work period prestige costume drama. Effi Briest (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is the life story of this character played by Schygulla that follows her from getting married off to INSTETTEN (Wofgang Schenck) when she’s 17 through something like 8 years later to her deathbed. She has an affair with this dude MAJOR CRAMPUS (Ulli Lommel) about a year into her marriage and hides it. So the whole entire long ass movie is a morality piece that’s always and only ever about this what comes to be looked at as minor indiscretion.

     At first when bon vivant Crampus moves in to exploit Instetten the privy counselor’s traveling for work leaving his home unprotected you think what a piece of shit. And kind of hate the Effi character for cheating on her husband. But in Effi Briest you have to look at it from the other side. Instetten tells his new bride that there’s the ghost of a Chinese man who used to work at the plantation at good old Kessin, taking advantage of Effi having mentioned that she hears noises upstairs like footsteps when she’s trying to go to sleep at night. Instetten uses fear to control Effi. He tells her as long as she isn’t fucking anyone else behind his back she doesn’t have to worry about the ghost doing her harm. Good one. 
     I’ve kept pointing out the symbolism in Fassbinder’s films linking those desperately chasing their desires chasing love like gamblers, but Instetten comes right out and says that’s what Crampus is doing. Yet Effi in some ways still acts like a child. And from the beginning she enters into her new married life in fear. Like a child approaches life, a mix of fear and curiosity. She seems an easy mark for the hustler. A really cool scene occurs when the married couple have trouble with their carriage and Maj. Crampus shows up to give Effi a ride home. It becomes so gothic. It’s night time in the dead of night in a forest and when Effi hops in she tells a story about an old widow desperate to avoid enemy detection praying for protection and God’s wall, a snow covering her home to safely hide her. We can hear owls while she’s telling the tale, but also we see Instetten with the broken down wagon and there’s this shot where it freeze frames on him along with Effi reciting God’s Wall. Like he’s the ghost.
     One other thing that complicates our judgement of who’s right or wrong is a scene between Effi and her servant ROSWITHA. So Effi way earlier sees this registrar widow funeral and remembers the woman’s servant was this big “simple looking” woman that she opportunistically scoops up for her own. Roswitha’s Catholic and it seems everybody likes her and is glad Emmi hires her. But way later Effi sees Roswitha flirting with KRUSE the groom-groundskeeper dude (who’s married to this woman who works in the kitchen and has a pet black hen) she gives her so much shit. Too much. As in how can Effi be such a hypocrite?
 
Like I said this thing is Effi’s life story. It’s long. But it really is mostly moral ramifications of her hooking up with Crampus. That and what society forces everyone to do here. A big Fassbinder theme. The tragedy is when Instetten gets a promotion along with a required move to Berlin, Effi is glad to now have a convenient reason to break it off with Crampus. Plus she really wasn’t that into him anyway. But when Instetten seven years later finds their love letters hidden in a sewing machine he’s gotta kill that dude. 
     The conversation between Instetten and WÜLLERSDORF (Karlheinz Böhm) though is truly sublime best part of the film. Could you stay with a woman who cheated on you because you love her is turned into this in depth debate between these two guys and the way they present it and ultimately confront their conclusion is thrilling, but more so the cinematic flourish wherein before they even get to the end there are shots of the carriage traveling to the duel dissolving in and out. This is the argument in effect that society makes us follow its laws. And it’s pretty compelling fun.
     The last part of Effi Briest is this long her losing everything trying to reconcile the question she asks herself of is she entirely to blame or not? It turns into her deathbed last thing in her life kind of scene. And my problem leading up to this for one is her parents disown her. They say because of their religious beliefs and because society will ignore them forevermore if they take Effi in then she’s on her own. But some old doctor tells the parents it’s better if Effi came to stay with them and all of a sudden they’re like okay cool. In terms of dramatic plotting that’s just too easy. Not motivated properly. And I didn’t expect Fassbinder to make that kind of sweet concession to the dying girl but whatever.
 
In the end it’s not about if you think Effi is to blame for all that happened or not. It’s more about seeing society’s effect on everyone in this narrative from the moment this old lawyer who the little girl remembers from visiting her grandfather’s house and asking her mother out long ago. And seeing how marriage doesn’t work. But this time there’s something fond about the way the whole story is told. A willful thoughtful desire to reconcile it all. 
     And I feel for Effi saying Instetten doesn’t know true love. But I also detest that she and Crampus cheated and am kinda with the whole Instetten winning the duel part. But even he admits he ruined his whole life in doing so. The truth I find in it all is it’s not our place to try to make sense of what goes on between someone else’s marriage. Someone else’s life. We do what we think is best at the time.

Death in Rome

Fassbinder marriage doesn’t work melodrama. Martha (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a gothic black comedy infused satire in which a young woman marries a tall dark stranger who grooms her into his ideal tradwife. To everyone’s horror.
     Straightforward looking at Martha you could see it as this thriller about the contrast between how a marriage looks from the outside against the emotional reality of its interior private goings on. But then there’s also another way of looking at it like a metaphor for how there’s two kinds of movies: art and industry. Art is European. Industry is Hollywood. Martha is an art film. Helmut is commercial product popcorn movies. Bombastic as that camera move when they first meet a 360° around the two as each of them rotate on their own axes for maximum gratuitous Hollywood desperate ploy attention grab film grammar. Helmut is a control freak. He asserts his will over the weak. The narrative becomes that which is of Helmut’s nature: oppressive. Nothing more than sex and violence to sell box office. External conflict. But the money to live in mansions and vacation in exotic locales. 
     Helmut is a sex maniac who gets turned on by violence. When Martha’s mom o.d.’s he’s ready to fuck. When Martha asks him to rub suntan lotion on her he forbids it so he can later have rough lobster sunburn sex with her. No doubt killing her black cat Blackie’s also aphrodisiac. 
 
But there’s yet another dimension to the subject matter that’s as a way for the working class to indulge their disdain for the rich and those people who place to much emphasis on conforming to an ideal society prizes above all else—superficial material surface prominence. After their honeymoon Helmut ignores Martha wanting to live in her parents’ old house and buys this huge mansion that Martha remarks asking wasn’t there a murder there. This isn’t foreshadowing as much as it’s a way of saying the last people who could afford that house committed a murder because they can and will do it again.
     Another dirty little joke is when Helmut’s away to punish Martha with his absence and she walks around in a slip with her hair greasy tangled and dark circles under her eyes she’s heroin chic looking like a junkie as parallel to what an abusive relationship is like. But like a drug addict do you ever wonder why doesn’t she ever just leave Helmut? I’ve always loved the idea of comparing relationships to substance abuse. Could this be the first time a movie did so?
     This film is the most conventional narrative Fassbinder has dabbled in. Which is what leads me to suspect most of its significance is below its surface. When Martha winds up in a wheelchair do you feel like she’s victim to a tragic fate at Helmut’s hands? I don’t. I think she belongs in that wheelchair. And I think she believes she does too. Yet I don’t see anything wrong with that. The heart wants what it wants.

     MARTHA (Carstensen) is on a vacation in Rome with her father who chides her for being too emotionally needy-clingy. Later her mom calls her a revolting horrible old spinster. And when HELMUT (Karlheinz Böhm) picks her up she’s a virgin who looks like she has bad b.o. Society tells young women they’re nothing. But getting married will change all that. There’re two things I can say about this couple as characters. One no matter how psycho Helmut gets and no matter how violent he gets Martha accepts him. Two Helmut doesn’t have any character development. 

19th nervous breakdown

The crowning jewel in Fassbinder’s illustrious filmography just so happens to occur at precisely the midpoint of all his films, his 19th. Ali Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) has always been my favorite. Its opening credits contain a warning: Happiness Isn’t Always Fun. This film speaks to a certain temperament. Gloomy, lonely, introspective, tender souls who are sensitive and capable of great affection yet ultimately wary of admitting to themselves that they need anybody other than themselves to find happiness. Ali Fear Eats the Soul for me says if you are lonely and want someone to be in love with it may happen. And then all of a sudden you’re empty again. And alone again. And it hurts as bad as ever. Is this type of loneliness a greater symptom of some pre-existing condition? Is it harmful? Or is it merely a convenient deflection to avoid other more important emotional puzzles?

     Still whittling away tinkering with my conception of Fassbinder’s style, Ali Fear Eats the Soul is upper echelon what I wanna call his own: marriage never works melodrama. The most effective aspect of the film however is how its act structure deceives us, leading us to think the impending conflict will be society’s cold prejudice, but foments a second half where that entire obstacle diminishes before our eyes, brilliantly poising us to ask ourselves now what conflict will arise in its place? This is big. I’m obsessed with this. This notion that what seem to be your biggest problems in life really aren’t. I know Emmi says time heals all wounds. But it’s more than that.
     Ali Fear Eats the Soul made me cry so much the first time I saw 20 years ago. And I still do. It’s that rarest of cinema tearjerkers though because have you ever asked yourselves of all the times you’ve cried in a movie how many times is it because of something tragic? It’s hardly ever because of something sweet, but it happens—as Sirk has taught us. Ali Fear Eats the Soul is eloquently framed. Each setup is precise, nothing is wasted. And images are paintings. The beginning is something else. (That’s where all the scenes that make me cry occur.) When Emmi walks into the bar and sits down it breaks me down because she’s old. These kind of romantic fantasies in Hollywood movies aren’t for us. Because they’re not for us in real life either. (I only saw this once I got old of course.) Old age withers our looks and looks are the currency of attraction. But our feelings are still fresh and strong as ever. When Emmi orders a Coke it cleanses our cynicism awash with suggestions of youth, innocence (who walks into a bar and doesn’t order alcohol? people too cool to drink yes but what I meant is teens), and nostalgia. 
     When Emmi wakes up the morning after and she looks in the mirror it’s not guilt she sees when looking at her own reflection, it’s that she’s old. And this might be Fassbinder’s greatest, final, definitive example among all of his many depictions of desire being the source of doom. But to stop at that would be limiting Fassbinder’s reach. Emmi gets to experience bliss with Ali. She gets to have it all. When Ali invites his friends over and they’re playing board games listening to music is one of the purest moments of goodness—it’s that simple yet that elusive. Just like it is for all of us. Before it’s gone that is. Emmi’s happiness takes us through to the midpoint of the narrative, as in life. So what’s left? As brutal as the scene when Emmi’s coworkers ignore her on their lunch break and move to sit somewhere else leaving her alone on the staircase is, this film is about more than that. (Although what a great shot.)
 

The reveal of the narrative’s ulterior moral in the second half consists of two phases. First, even though Ali Fear Eats the Soul seems like it’s about society’s hatred of Arabic immigrants, and their close-minded disapproval of this age-gap relationship, it’s not really. The masterful subtle shift whereby that conflict resolves on its own—as Emmi even says let’s go on a trip and when we come back everything will be different. Why? How? The narrative is winking at us. This is a movie it doesn’t matter how. But it really wants us to know it’s actually the same in our own lives.
     So what changes? For one it’s money. The racist supermarket owner’s wife nudges him to venture a reconciliation with Emmi because she was such a good customer. The status quo. Life is too powerful a threshing machine to care about our petty problems. When we think others are our oppressors it’s time for an ego death. No one cares that much. And now that they don’t have to constantly anguish over how no one will let them be happy because life isn’t fair, what’s next for them? To work on their relationship on their own. Which doesn’t’ go well. Man Emmi really should have just made him couscous. But that’s how it starts. Some tiny little thing builds into an argument and then all is lost. Romance withers.
     And the second reveal is people aren’t evil, they’re just bored. When the new cleaning lady Yolanda suffers the social exile in place of Emmi at work, thus allowing her to return to the fold, we see that it’s in their nature to shit talk. People don’t hate other people because they’re bad, they project their aggression onto other targets because they’re ugly and lack something better to give them a sense of purpose. But this type of ugly is relative. Subjective. Part of what it means to be human. Pushing Ali away sends him on a self destructive plummet to seek rock bottom.
     Why does Ali fuck the barmaid? Because he’s desperate for something he can’t quite understand. It’s his emptiness. Depression. He leaves home and goes to her place because she’s easy. And once she lets him in he sleeps all day and into the night because that’s depression sleep. When she gets off her night shift and wants sex, he undresses and then just wants to embrace. He’s not lonely like he thinks he is. He’s not looking for someone or warmth or affection. He’s lonely because life has let him down. He perpetuates a cycle of his own design as a way of inferiority confirmation. Why does he ridicule Emmi along with the others calling her his Moroccan grandma? Because he’s sick of his life. Everything. The scene where at the bar Ali goes into the bathroom and keeps hitting himself in the face as he looks in the mirror at his own reflection says it all. It sounds weird when you put it into words. But seeing it is to witness the sublime. It conveys emotions that aren’t meant for words.
     What sticks with me is the way the slight disharmony between the married couple has such drastic consequences. The stuff of life. And the way they are revealed to be on their own inevitable paths. The final scene stripping away everything but the very essence of each of them. Ali’s illness. Emmi’s longsuffering attentive care. That is there entire identity defined in the simplest way possible.The beauty of their kindness and intimacy. Yet still having found each other. I can’t help but see this as a sweet romance, thinking back on them. After their marriage going to that place that Hitler used to eat and ordering off a fancy menu for the first time is adorable. Power of the melodrama. The waiter doesn’t judge them. Nor do we. And this is all that heaven allows.

A doll's house

What do you feel when you watch this? I feel like NORA (Carstensen) has got it all. She’s beautiful, young, has a nice home, family, decorating the Christmas tree and her husband is getting a new promotion as a bank manager. And Nora likes to shop, spend money. But when a trip to Italy she paid for to save her husband’s life earlier comes back to threaten her quaint life, she gets defensive and shifts the blame onto her dead father and husband. And leaves her marriage. Because she resents TORVALD treating her like she’s a possession? No. Because as a woman she’s powerless.

     Nora Helmer (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is like the perfect material for Fassbinder. Nora is constantly trying to assess the situation she’s found herself in and do her best to gain the life she wants. But the paradox is she feels like it’s all fake. Like playing house. The artifice of domestic melodrama. Where the feelings are the only thing that’s real. Is this the problem with women?
     At times I can see how someone would take Nora’s side. The whole dramatic conflict is the result of her saving Torvald’s life. She has sacrificed to be a good mother, loyal wife. She’s getting ready to look her best for the ball with Torvald. And I wanted to see this as an argument against the oppressive nature of a woman’s place in the home, but I missed it. And lest I sound like a misogynist for lacking fempathy, what’s so bad about Torvald?
     Nora is misguided, self-justified, and gets on my nerves. She says finally that neither her dead father nor her husband ever loved her. I don’t know man. I don’t believe anything she says. I think Nora took advantage of Torvald when he was a lawyer to get her dad out of some shady business dealings and then took advantage of her dad by forging his signature (over his dead body) to have him stand surety against her 4800k loan. Her dancing was exceedingly naturalistic is a way of saying women are conniving ambitious selfish fickle snakes. I mean not in real life of course just in the context of this fun little drama.
     And we don’t know what KRISTINE said to KROGSTAD to get him to mail Torvald back the promissory note, but I feel like the real point is that in life things that often seem overwhelmingly bleak usually get resolved and the storm passes. Back to normal. But what about DR RANK? So he had a whoring syphilis dad whom because of he now is dying and has a crooked spine. Which could mean this film doesn’t exclusively hate women or anything. What else? This motif of parents morally poisoning the children? Except no, Rank has physically inherited his father’s disease, not morally. Is this to say that Torvald’s accusations against Krogstad aren’t entirely plausible? Does it matter?
     Because despite all Torvald’s moral condemnation against Nora, what harm does he actually do her because of it? What’s important however is Nora’s indignant resentment of his moralizing. I think she’s the poison. And when Nora threatens suicide, not only does Torvald laugh it off as a joke, but throws in that her father used to say the same things. Are we supposed to hate Torvald? I love that there’s this dark suicide talk and he lightheartedly calls her bluff. I see Fassbinder’s film here as yet another of his examples of dismantling the institution of marriage to show how it can’t work. And how everyone who tries to use this couple for their own personal benefit are trampled upon and left for dead. Back to it’s all business. And everyone loses in the end. The couple don’t lose their finances, health, reputation in society, no none of that. Nora leaves because of some illegal money scam she got into behind Torvald’s back that he finds out about, even though she ends up off the hook for it. It’s like she leaves because she’s exposed as being the fake. And that’s the kind of tragic irony that ultimately I can find that I care about her through.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Oh, the problem of labels in film viewing. There have been certain directors that I've found where I have tried to find and watch as many of their movies as I could. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a case of one of those directors. And it was worth it. And when I heard that he was around and working with contemporaries of his time in Germany who are called the New German Cinema, that didn't do much for me. I didn't respond to any of the other filmmakers sharing that label like I did to Fassbinder. But this is because I had not made sufficiently diligent efforts to explore the films themselves.

I've never been a big Herzog guy, but it's to my embarrassment. Especially because his name is thrown around so often. Movies either click with me or they don't, that is the mystery of the public's taste. I'd held even less of a regard for Wenders' reputation as I had Herzog's, but I've also spent less time viewing his films.

The Austin Film Society has programmed a Wim Wenders retrospective and I chose to check out some of his movies. Of particular interest for me were the early ones, which I'd never seen before.

Last night I went to a screening of a gorgeous DCP restored  Alice in den Städten (1974, Wim Wenders) not expecting a lot and found immediately that it had far exceeded any expectations for it I could have imagined. I don't know what the formal criteria are for minimalism, or if there's even a strict way of defining it as a aesthetic movement, but all I kept thinking about during Alice In the Cities is that compared to most other films it doesn't seem to be trying to do a lot, but does. And I can't think of a better way to describe that as minimalist.

Alice in den Städten starts with a young German Bohemian type with longish messy hair on a beach taking Polaroids of the landscape, as he sings "Under the Boardwalk" to himself. Then he drives, takes more pictures, checks into motels, watches TV, eats, sleeps, and listens to the radio. And the style of Alice in den Städten that's established early on will remain evident throughout its runtime: Robbie Müller's 16mm black and white cinematography, the locations, the stillness and silence.

Robby Müller is a cult hero of mine because of his diverse array of collaborators and work, which includes:

• Saint Jack (1979, Peter Bogdanovich)
• They All Laughed (1981, Bogdanovich)
• Repo Man (1984, Alex Cox)
• Paris, Texas (1984, Wenders)
• Down by Law (1986, Jim Jarmusch)
• Dead Man (1995, Jarmusch)
• Breaking the Waves (1996, Lars von Trier)
• Dancer In the Dark (2000, von Trier)

And these are only a few.Alice in den Städten is composed of so many subjective shots from driving in cars, flying on airplanes, trains, and even a ferry. And there are obviously those with the opinion of what does and doesn't belong in a movie who do not value empty shots of landscapes, but in this case it's done with such an eye for interesting images that it becomes one of the best parts of Alice in den Städten. Müller also exposes the negative in just the right light to where there's always a lot of detail and deep focus. After what I'm guessing are Florida beaches, the loner drives to NYC and in several instances the Empire State Building is in the background, like a postcard. There's also an in-camera technique used often where the lens closes as opposed to an optical fade out.

Then there're the shots that don't function solely to enhance the plot, like when Alice is on the roof of a building looking through binoculars, and a POV starts on the World Trade Center then tilts down and across other buildings and finds a seagull then tracks it. That stuff isn't planned. That stuff is creative filmmaking.

Turns out the loner is a journalist whose deadline has approached for completion of an article written about the American landscape, to be published by his bosses based out of Germany. But, the loner has only taken pictures and not written a single word. Just one quote culled from his esoteric ramblings is "when you drive through America something happens to you, the images you see change you." And that's profound for me without going into anything deeper.

Okay so if any of this sounds boring, maybe it would be, except ALICE is some little kid whose mom abandons her in the care of the loner whom she trusts to take her daughter back to Germany and meet up with in a day or two.

The kid who plays Alice delivers an amazing performance. She's precocious, critical of the loner, bright, eccentric, and always eating. The chemistry between the loner and the kid turns into this humble, honest, simple just plain old tender bond that occurs as the trip progresses. Lots of the scenes find that rare slightly off European prosaic dry humour that's what gives Alice in den Städten its quality and will pop up later in the best work of Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch.

For being so young, it's hilarious how over everything Alice is. So the story is a little sentimental, but I'm tired of associating that word with a negative connotation. For me one of the best moments is in a photo booth, when Alice and the loner are looking into the booth's lens and Alice starts to smile, but the loner doesn't. She looks at him and sees this, then changes her facial expression to deadpan to match his. She wants to be like him. And yeah even though the movie never says who her real dad is I feel like she needs this guy, even if it's only for a few days.

Alice in den Städten is also so impressive because it doesn't portray high stakes drama, it's just a few days this dude and this kid cross paths and it's not about them teaching each other anything groundbreaking about life or anything. It's just a couple of people who don't hate each other and form a little attachment and the realization that that's pretty important in a way.

There are so many little moments that find relevance beyond logic. Like the kid slouched next to the jukebox in the German diner who hums and mumbles along to Canned Heat's "On the Road Again," for the duration of the song it seems, as the conversation between Alice and the loner continually returns to him lost in his sesh. There's a Chuck Berry concert for, I don't know, just because. But the score is so sparse, it's just a few strums of an electric guitar and can convey so much, slightly spooky, a little empty, maybe just as casual and unassuming in its charm as the rest of the movie.

--Dregs