In a Year of Thirteen Moons Discussion

Academic film criticism generally goes over my head but I found this long discussion on youtube about Fassbinder's In a Year with Thirteen Moons really excellent, specially the comments by Thomas Elsaesser.

In a year with thirteen moons is the most personal and the most intense of all his films. I didn't really like it when I first saw it but that was more because I tuned myself off while watching, as a self-protecting move! As this review in new york times says, "Without adequate preparation, the uninitiated movie patron might think he was having a nightmare about a nightmare." I think I am more well-prepared for it now, after having seen Berlin Alexanderplatz which deals with similar subjects and similar metaphors in a (comparatively) more understated manner. Like in Berlin Alexanderplatz there is an extraordinary monologue in Thirteen Moons about how suicide is an act of affirmation, because it is a negation of the negation (which is life itself or rather the will to live). Also in Berlin Alexanderplatz the slaughterhouse scenes are more stylized and Fassbinder gives them an obvious religious (Christian) resonance something which is not there in thirteen moons, at least not at an explicit level but it is definitely possible to read it that way. In fact Elsaesser says that it is an example of a "Christological narrative" and also that the skin flaying in the slaughterhouse sequence reminds him of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting, which depicts an artist as a self-flayer. Lots of high-falutin stuff...

Fassbinder: Fear of Fear

Fassbinder's Fear of Fear (or the better sounding German title Angst vor der Angst) is one of the best examples of films of the "desperate housewives", or in fact more accurately, the "housewives going nuts" genre. Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, Todd Haynes' Safe are other great examples. In fact Juliane Moore seems to be the reigning queen of the genre, she was terrific in similar role in The Hours and Far From Heaven too. I haven't seen Chantal Akermen's Jeanne Dielmen yet which has a very high critical reputation too.

Anyway, here we have Margit Carstensen (who is a veteran of angsty characters as well) playing the same role. She is as superb and spectacular here as she was in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. She is in every single frame of the film and she is just spellbinding. In the beginning of the film she is heavily pregnant with her second child when she starts having anxiety attacks. Fassbinder shows it from her subjective perspective as the screen goes "wavy" and background swells on a soft and melancholy musical note. There is also another problem of a mysterious Herr Bauer of her neighbourhood who seems to be stalking her. If all this was not enough, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who live in the apartment next to hers, always intrude and pry upon her to give her good housewifey tips. She goes to a psychiatrist who prescribes valium and other medications but things get only worse as she gets addicted to valium and sinks lower and lower into isolation, despair and madness. The psychiatrist turns out to be the true villain in the film. He insists on sexual favours from her in return of drug prescription. She also tries to commit suicide impulsively by slitting her wrist but fails. (She herself runs off to the doctor after realizing what she has done.) In the end she is committed to a mental hospital where she meets another patient (played by Ingrid Caven) and forms an unspoken bond with her. After a while she is cured or at least that's what it seems. In the final scene we see the corpse of the mysterious Herr Bauer being carried away. He has apparently committed suicide. It is never clear who he is or why does he stalk her. The one sensible interpretation is that he is her double, the "insane" side of her personality and now that he has self-destructed she might be normal. But the ending is still ambiguous.

One important aspect of the film is that unlike other films mentioned earlier Fassbinder isn't really interested in analysing the root causes of Margot's nervous condition. He takes the soul-destroying effects of cold and impersonal life of domesticity as a given, he doesn't spend much time detailing and interrogating her daily routine or her past experiences. Instead he is more interested in how people in our society react to a someone like Margot. He is very prescient in his portrayal of our thoroughly medicalized society, where every nervous ailment can be cured through external psychiatric and pharmacological intervention. In the institution of psychiatry Fassbinder sees an agent of social and political oppression, one which makes possible for the status-quo to remain what it is by preempting any deeper scrutiny and questioning on the part of people who actually suffer from depression and anxiety and people who surround them. This is not the same as romanticising depression - something like wearing a cross for being sensitive in a brutal world - his criticism is entirely political. Quite a few leftist critics of Fassbinder while sharing his political position find his films too pessimistic but then they forget that despair and madness are forms of social protest too. In fact it is probably the only form of social protest available to someone like Margot who has an underdeveloped political consciousness or sense of self and is surrounded by such powerful institutional forces of normalization.

This excellent essay raises these points and others in more detail.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?

Fassbinder's Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? will be an excellent companion film to Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent. Of course, someone has to be brave enough to watch the two together in a double bill. Like in the Haneke's film we see a series of episodes in the life of Herr Raab (Kurt Raab), a young man in his thirties with a wife and a son who works as a draughtsman in an architectural firm, before he runs amok and commits a random act of violence which, cataloguing the numbing routine of modern social and corporate life as the rest of the film does, comes across as cathartic not just for Herr R but for the audiences too, which makes it all the more disturbing.

There are some beautiful subtle touches in the film. Like the scene in which Raab says that drawing windows is what really interests him. Alas, all we see is him drawing the walls! There is also the final scene in which one of their neighbours relates the story of her skiing trip in mind-numbing detail, which ultimately provokes him to commit random violence. I was in the exact same situation not so long ago actually, of course I didn't bludgeon anyone to death though I did feel like taking some drastic step. In fact all the episodes in the film are wonderfully done. Raab's trip to the school to meet his son's teacher, His coffee breaks with his office mates, His hilariously inept attempt at spouting empty banalities himself at an office banquet - all these will strike very close to most viewers of the film, even more to the contemporary viewer as things have only gotten worse over the years.

Alienation, death of affect and coldness of life in modern urban societies are quite common themes in modern cinema. What makes Fassbinder's (and Haneke's) vision so extraordinary is their willingness to take the situation to its logical extremes however horrifying it can be and however uncomfortable it can make the viewer feel. It is like Antonioni with a Grand Guignol finish.

There is a great essay on the film on reverse shot website (though again a bit riddled with hyperbole.)

Fassbinder bric-a-brac

I was looking around for some information on Hanna Schygulla after watching The Edge of Heaven a couple of days back and found this short interview of her with Susan Sontag. Actually it's Sontag who does most of the talking but still it is interesting. She also had a short role in Bela Tarr's Werckmesiter Harmonies but she didn't have much to do in it (unlike in Heaven) which was specially disappointing since her character in the book is really one of the most important. Anyway, the film isn't really a character-based drama so it works out pretty well, the film is quite great actually.

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I love these chapter titles in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz. These are not from the book, they are all Fassbinder's inventions...

1. "The punishment begins."
2. "How is one to live if he doesn't want to die."
3. "A hammer on the head can injure the soul."
4. "A handful of people in the depths of silence."
5. "A mower with the violence of the dear Lord."
6. "Love has its price."
7. "Remember: an oath can be amputated."
8. "The sun warms the skin, but burns it sometimes too."
9. "About the Eternities between the many and the few."
10. "Loneliness tears cracks of madness even in walls."
11. "Knowledge is power and the early bird catches the worm."
12. "The serpent in the soul of the serpent."
13. "The Outside and the Inside, and the Secret of Fear of the Secret."
14. "My dream from the dream of Franz Biberkopf von Alfred Doeblin: An Epilogue."

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I was reading some reviews of Berlin Alexanderplatz on amazon and there was a one-star comment which expressed a strong disapproval of scenes of animal slaughter in the film. This is something that troubles me too whenever I see scenes of animal abuse in a film, even in the "certified" works of art. How ethical is it to torture a real animal just to prove a symbolic point, however vital that may be because with animals the concept of "acting" is not applicable at all. It is always "real" for them. It is probably as ethical as killing them for meat... (I speak as a vegetarian but one who is somewhat confused and non-committal about the philosophical concepts surrounding Animal Rights)

That said, the slaughterhouse imagery and the sacrifice of the lambs are indeed extremely important in the film because they serve as one of the key motifs and the central metaphor of the work. In the hallucinatory final epilogue Fassbinder even shows human beings being slaughtered (symbolically of course) and being hanged on a hook like raw meat. For Biberkopf life is just waiting for a final slaughter with a persistent voice, a stand-in for an embodied Death who in turn seems like God himself, telling him what the final life-lesson is going to be like. There are also elements of Passion play with Biberkopf playing the Christ-like figure alongwith references to other Biblical stories of God's cruelty and ruthlessness, the story of Job and the story of Abraham and Isaac. It is also interesting that "Death" is voiced by Fassbinder himself.

After all this I really do hope that the horrible death of Mieze's beautiful little Canary was simulated and not real!

Berlin Alexanderplatz

I have seen some bleak and despairing films in my life but nothing like Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz. Of course the length of the film is a major contributing factor too. After spending nine hours watching the wrenching spectacle of pain, suffering and hopelessness I am still only just above the half-way mark. I was trying to watch it as a movie and not as a TV series which I now gather is absolutely not advisable. It is better to watch one hour episode at a time and wait for it to settle before you begin the next episode.

I was reading the novel by Alfred Doblin in parallel too and it is bleak as hell as well. Not a great idea to spend the holidays I tell you. Unless contemplating the senseless cruelty and mercilessness inherent in the plan of the universe is your idea of a good time-pass. The book is actually very inventive. It contains very innovative use of monologues, montage and collage. I will probably continue when I feel a little better.

Here is an excerpt from where I stopped reading. The passage is noticeably "cinematic" as is most of the book since it is designed as a work of collage - a sequence of interior monologues interspersed with facts and figures from the real external world. At the same time Fassbinder's treatment of this passage is quite "literary". We see a montage of still images while the voice-over reads the same exact passage in a totally objective voice drenched of all emotion. Anyway here it is:

A big, white steer is driven into the slaughter-hall. Here there is no vapor, no pen like they have for the swarming pigs. The big strong animal, the steer, steps in alone, between the drivers through the gate. The blood bespattered hall lies open before it with the chopped-up bones, and the halves and quarters hanging about. The big steer as a broad forehead. With sticks and thrusts it is driven up to the butcher. In order to make it stand still, he gives it a slight blow on the hind leg with the flat part of the hatchet. One of the drivers seizes it from below around the neck. The animal stands for a moment, the yields, with a curious ease, as if it agreed and was willing, after having seen everything and understood that this is its fate, and that it cannot do anything against it. Perhaps it thinks the gesture of the driver is a caress, it looks so friendly. The animal follows the tug of the driver's arms, turns its head obliquely to one side, mouth upward.

But then the butcher stands behind it with his hammer uplifted. Don't look around! The hammer lifted by the strong man with both his fists is behind you, above you, and then: zoom, down it comes! The muscular force of a strong man like an iron wedge in its neck! And a second later-the hammer has not yet lifted-the animal's four legs give a spring, the whole heavy body seems to fly up with a jerk. And then as though it had no legs, the beast, the heavy body, falls down on the floor with a thud, onto its rigidly cramped legs, lies like this for a moment, drops on its side. The executioner walks around the animal from left to right, cracks it over the head, and on the temples, with another mercifully stunning blow: you will not wake up again.

There is more but I will spare it...

Fassbinder's Veronica Voss

I saw a few interesting movies this weekend. The first one was Veronica Voss, the penultimate film by the German filmmaker Fassbinder, shown as a part of the ongoing retrospective of his films at the Siskel film center. The film is about an aging, once popular and now out of work film actress, who is addicted to drugs and alcohol to the point of self-destruction, and who falls into the clutches of a sadistic and villainous woman neurologist. A sports reporter falls for her mysterious charms and tries to save her but, as it always happens in Fassbinder-land, the story ends in inevitable, fatalistic tragedy.

What is so remarkable about this film, and which may apply to almost all of his other films, is how diametrically opposite the effects of this film are to the Hollywood melodramas that it seems to resemble and is apparently influenced by. Unlike traditional melodramas, this film doesn't engage our nicer emotions (of love, human bonding, selflessness) but actually turns them off. And in so doing it doesn't offer any easy outlets and cathartic moments and so the viewer is saved (is that the right word?) from the lazy, feel good sentimentalities of normal weepie films. It's almost as if Fassbinder felt that any traditional emotional response to the subject and themes of the film would soften the true-horrors of the everyday brutality that these characters have to go through and also muddy the waters and withhold the real truth. The more intellectual the viewer response is, the purer it is. I think this works very well with intellectual filmmakers who are interested in big themes and ideas (Bunuel and Bergman come to mind) but in case of Fassbinder, this becomes a little difficult specially in the beginning. Because Fassbinder is not much interested in big ideas and themes. Although his films are very political in nature, his subjects are actually emotions and feelings of human beings and how we all use and abuse those feelings and emotions.

Fassbinder also seems to believe that Veronika's tragedy was, as I pointed out earlier, inevitable; that she was doomed to a quest for eternal youth, for praise and adulation and a never-ending party (aren't we all are?). Drugs were just the way she continued the quest long after it had become a self-deception. Fassbinder's Veronica Voss is a bleak and sometimes savage addition to his oeuvre of similarly remarkable films but did he realize that he himself was one of the characters of his stories (he died of a similar self-destructive addiction)? This movie makes you wonder.

Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven

The Gene Siskel Film Center, here in Chicago, is holding a retrospective of films by German filmmaker Fassbinder. Yesterday I managed to catch the screening of one of his best known and perhaps most overtly political film Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven. I have been a long admirer of Fassbinder ever since I chanced upon his films without knowing who he was a couple of years back at a similar retrospective at the Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore. The first thing that struck me after watching his films was the keen eye and deep sensitivity that he had for all kinds of human selfishness, hypocrisy, manipulation and emotional brutality and the way he subjected all modern human institutions like love, family, marriage, society, politics etc. to question. What was also remarkable in his films was his honest true-to-life portrayals of victims and victimizers and perhaps his stark and despairing claim that the two needn't be different persons.

One of the persistent themes that interested Fassbinder, and which is present in Mother Kusters too, was that the fear of being left alone is the most important driver of our emotional life. It is this fear that forces us to depend on other people and which in turn, at least in the Fassbinder-land, invariably leads to oppression and exploitation of one human being by the other. He also explains and critiques the institutions of romantic love, marriage, family, society and politics in this framework. Some of his best films explore this idea very eloquently. In The Merchant of Four Seasons, an insecure, cuckolded fruit peddler who is forsaken by his family and his girl friend (apparently because he became a fruit peddler shaming their sense of bourgeois propriety) slowly discovers his own uselessness and drinks himself to death. In his other masterpiece The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, the titular character, an alcoholic lesbian, isolates herself in her room and lives on the floor with a bottle of alcohol after being rejected by her lover. In Ali -- Fear Eats the Soul a Moroccan immigrant, desperately lonely, marries a cleaning woman twenty-five years older than he is, and then collapses of an ulcer after being subjected to ridicule by the bourgeois society. As it appears, these films are not the kind of films you can take your girl friend to and have a nice time, rather these films are like cold slaps on the face and waking call to the senses and intellect which make yourself alive to the everyday brutality we all either face or subject others to.

Coming to Mother Kusters, like all films which are genuinely complex, the plot is very simple. Hermann Kusters, a factory worker, murders the son of his supervisor before taking his own life. As we learn later, he was disturbed by the news of the mass lay-offs that the company was going to make. After this event the media blitz descends on the poor mother Kusters like vultures to feed on her feelings and emotions. After a reporter, who manages to get close to the mother by faking real sympathy, publishes a sensationalist article branding the dead man as "the factory murderer", the name of Kusters is ruined is for ever. The daughter, who is a singer in a seedy club, decides to use the publicity to give life to her moribund career and she moves in with the reporter who originally wrote the article. The son is shown to be too passive and this event sours the already stormy relationship old mother had with her pesky and irritable daughter-in-law. Feeling desolate and lonely she meets an armchair communist couple, who decide to use her for their own narrow political goals by enlisting her in their communist party and when she gets disillusioned with the party politics and joins hands with a bunch of dilettante and immature anarchists, they think of taking extreme action.

I think what I liked most about the film and what makes it different form other Fassbinder films is the overtness and directness with which it goes along in its aim of doing social criticism of issues like urban alienation, sensationalist journalism, exploitation and futility of politics without forsaking honest portrayals of psychologically complex characters and relationships and so without any hint of didacticism. Also, Fassbinder dispenses with his usual cold cynicism in the end by making mother Kusters accept the dinner invitation of an equally lonely widower watchman after the anarchists leave her alone in the hunger strike, that originally they had inveigled her to participate in. In the process of all the trials and tribulations, Fassbinder seems to suggest, Mother Kusters has achieved personal and political enlightenment and matured her class instincts and may be perhaps even hinting at a possibility of a genuine solidarity of victims and exploited in future. Actually originally the film was supposed to end in a different way (which was shown in the screening too). The anarchists, in the original screenplay, immature and stupid as they are, take hostage of the editor and ask him for retracting the article about the dead Kusters and freeing all political prisoners in Germany. The film ends with a freeze frame of Mother Kusters face with subtitles informing us that Police reached the venue in time and everybody was killed including Mother Kusters (that's the clue to the title). But I think Fassbinder very wisely decided to change the ending. This new ending is more honest in emotional terms and gave the whole film a human complexity that would have not been possible with the brutally ironic "intellectual" ending that Fassbinder had planned for earlier.

Overall, I found Mother Kusters to be an extremely stimulating film, intellectually and emotionally, and rich in thematic and aesthetic complexity. I cannot recommend it highly enough.