Auteur List: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

[therewillbeblus]

I don’t like it either, but I would never call it “static”

[senseabove]

You've definitely got at least one more list coming from me. I slowed down a bit and got quiet after my long run of minimal returns, but I finally hit two new-to-me movies I loved—13 Moons and Veronika Voss. I'm still hoping to get a few more revisits—including Holy Whore, which I remember liking a lot!—and a few more deep cuts in before I finalize my list, though.

[Matt]

Nine lists in! Lists are due a week from today (at 12 PM CST). If anyone who has already submitted wants to send revisions before the deadline, I will accept them.

Barring any really surprising lists, the 1 and 2 positions look pretty safe. 3-11 are still very unsettled. One poor film languishes at 39 with a single last-place vote on a single ballot.

[Rayon Vert]

One poor film languishes at 39 with a single last-place vote on a single ballot.

That sounds like mine.

[Matt]

Barring any really surprising lists, the 1 and 2 positions look pretty safe.

Well, that didn't last long. Steve Kornacki, your job is safe.

[senseabove]

Well, my dry spell has ended, thank heavens. After a run of new-to-me films that were, at best, momentarily intriguing and far too drawn out, I took a two-week Fassbinder break, and things have gone fairly well during my December return. I've got too much more viewing to squeeze in to get too in depth, but for now, some brief thoughts in my haphazard viewing order:

The Third Generation takes Fassbinder's cacophonous kitchen-sink mode to its extreme, though it didn't, I confess, give me much hope for the future. It's another instance of formal audaciousness and an interesting conceit far oustaying their welcome, but it's an interesting swing for the fences, with enough black comic levity to keep it engaging. I do think it might be more enjoyable on on a second go-round, when parsing the multiple, overlapping sources of subtitled background noise and dialogue requires less focus if you know the basic plot... but I don't know how likely I am to submit myself to that.

It's most interesting as a point of comparison for how Fassbinder learned to use that cacophony judiciously in Berlin Alexanderplatz... which I confess I'm about to give up on. I'm 10 episodes in, and while, if I were to rank episodes individually on my list, the purgatorial DTs of 4 would likely put it near the top, my desire to spend time with these characters, who I find tortuously uninteresting and unengaging, is about exhausted. Franz most of all is just insufferable, and I am yet to understand why any other characters find him anything else, and yet more people who come to think they can't bear to live without him keep showing up. It's, as is becoming my refrain with the less-satisfying Fassbinder films, a gorgeous experience—the hazy, twinkly suffusion of Schwarzenberger's cinematography is fantastic—but I do not think I can be bothered to expend another 5 hours on these people.

But on to the streak of marvels and gems: In a Year with 13 Moons is the first masterpiece among my previously unseen films, and quite possibly the best example of Fassbinder balancing his alienating experimentalism with his all-engulfing Sirkian style, and his bitter socio-structural critique with his withering pity for individual's willful blindness. There are so many indelible sequences and such a remarkable variety to them, with Fassbinder employing all his various formal tricks over the course of the movie with such aplomb that, to a certain extent, it makes suffering all those early disjunctive mismatches a worthwhile endeavor, just to see those techniques applied with such perspicacity here.

Revisiting Maria Braun was a shock following on that, then, thanks to its return to relatively conventional, if masterful, mise-en-scene and acting styles, and its rock-steady plotting of Maria's swings, a metronome mysteriously gaining momentum with every tock right up 'til she tears herself apart and her world with it.

Veronika Voss takes Fassbinders' love for a certain strain of Hollywood and epitomizes it—rather than just naming characters and lifting the occasional scene, this one puts two helpings of Wilder, half a Fuller, and a whole lot of bitters in a blender. It feels a little half-realized aesthetically, never quite congealing the pot-boiler B-noir plotting with the grotesqueries of its style, but it's, weirdly, a thoroughly enjoyable movie in a way I would never think to ascribe to Fassbinder, perhaps because it seem to use so heavily a Wilderian wryness even in its darkest moments.

A revisit to Beware of a Holy Whore lost it a little esteem—so much of what struck me before as interestingly alienating just feels like Fassbinder on alienation auto-pilot, now that I've seen more of his pre-Sirk work—but I still enjoy its sense of increasingly listlessly outlined palace intrigue, especially the last third's descent into narrative chaos, its isolated scenes strung along with no sense of progression or development, referencing some half-heard lobby conversation, secret sidebar confession, or inferred relationship from earlier, until it just feels like a vaguely contextualized scream into an aesthetic void as Fassbinder flails for the handle to the door Sirk would unlock.

The American Gangster, third in the Gangster trilogy, is unfortunately closer to Love is Colder... in its form and feel than Gods..., where Fassbinder was beginning to shake off the earlier film's formal minimality. And yet somehow it worked for me—perhaps I was just in a more receptive mood, having had a run of successful discoveries before it, but it probably helps that it actually has some semblance of a triple-cross plot that happens to have some unusually long takes, rather than, as is so frequent in the early works, a plot the feels ginned up to prop up some formal purpose.

And lastly, Fear of Fear and Nora Helmer have already had some exellent write-ups (particularly sloper's triple-reading of these two and Martha), so I'll just echo those and say that these two are easily my favorite second-tier discoveries. I dearly hope Nora Helmer gets the full-scale restoration it deserves. I can only imagine how much more impactful it would be when its dense use of von Sternbergian foreground obfuscation is actually legible, and no longer obscures what seems like carefully layered background action. Of all the deep cut Fassbinder I've managed for this project, these two are the clear standouts.

[therewillbeblus]

If it’s any incentive to finish Berlin Alexanderplatz, the last few episodes push the narrative to a strange bizarro world of Sirkian melodramatics where Reinhold becomes a more central part- which could be compared to a terrifying yet deeply complex version of the flawed Robert Stack role in two Sirk films. The final chapter then departs from reality in such a way that should restore any pleasures you found in episode four’s delirium to even greater heights.

I know at least a few of us have been outspoken at having apathetic-at-best feelings about the miniseries before the end and subsequently reevaluated the final product as a masterpiece, so with ten hours of investment already in the bank it seems worth completing, but that’s just my experience.

[swo17]

If you hate these characters I would say it only gets worse before it gets better, but then the epilogue isn't even about them so much as the world at large and Fassbinder himself. If you've watched a good chunk of his other work, then it's a lot more than ten hours you've got invested in this particular bank

[senseabove]

If it’s any incentive to finish Berlin Alexanderplatz...

Huh... For some reason, my general sense of the consensus was "I was on board until that batshit ending—wtf was he thinking there," so I had given up hope of anything worth looking forward to, but I admit to skimming reactions here and elsewhere until I've seen their subject, and possibly recollecting them with a bias to the exit ramp in this case. Connecting the ending to Ep. 4 is close to persuading me—as with the end of Beware..., I seem to like it when Fassbinder goes just shy of fully nonlinear. On the other hand, Reinhold's introduction was really where I started to look for the exit signs—his and Franz's entire plotline...oof. One long session for me.

If you've watched a good chunk of his other work, then it's a lot more than ten hours you've got invested in this particular bank

That's the kind of thinking that got me ten hours into it. And I've only managed the last two hours in half-hour chunks!

[senseabove]

A weed gummy, a cocktail, and occasional use of 1.5x playback speed got me through the last 3.5 episodes last night so I could give the epilogue a go this morning. And the epilogue is indeed fascinating, but I remain unconvinced it was worth the (sliiiightly abbreviated) 13 hour slog to get there. If I could vote for just the epilogue, it too would do decently on my list, but as it stands, BA as a whole will not be anywhere near it.

Other quick thoughts as I'm powering through things: Lili Marleen is Fassbinderian Oscar-bait that, however Fassbinderian its strengths, is nevertheless just Oscar bait. Fassbinder's entry in the Germany in Autumn anthology is half dramatic autofiction and half presumably staged documentary that I dearly wish had been expanded into a feature, as it's a fascinatingly brief, self-reflexive slice of Fassbinder's mind. Chinese Roulette rose in my estimation on this revisit, where before I thought it was just a beautiful jewelbox filled with knives, now I think it's an epitome of Fassbinder's exploration of interpersonal manipulation, a kaleidoscopic parade of the wills and alliances within a small group eating itself alive. On the other hand, I Only Want You to Love Me has all the complexity of an after school special, and enough of neither Fassbinder's ruthlessness nor extremity to make it interesting.

I assume we can vote for his Germany in Autumn segment by itself, btw?

[swo17]

Well I did

[therewillbeblus]

Same

[Matt]

I assume we can vote for his Germany in Autumn segment by itself, btw?

Yes!

[Red Screamer]

Querelle I found hypnotizing, or at least its first half before the flights of high balletic style get a little weighed down by the detective plotline. Fassbinder takes Lola’s excessively stylized lighting and roving camera moves and turns them up a few more notches yet. It’s rare in movies to find an ambitious, in-depth, and politically incorrect immersion in a gay subculture (or more accurately a fantasy version of one) of the kind that fueled avant-garde literature in the era of Genet and Burroughs. The film’s explicit acknowledgement of its source works on both levels, as a literary essay on Genet and as a translation of the experience of reading his work to the cinema, a predecessor to Cronenberg’s film of Naked Lunch. Fassbinder’s own scripts can tend toward the excessively obvious so, for my money, the route of adaptation sometimes gives him more interesting material to work with. I understand most of everyone else’s criticisms of the film but not about its acting, since it seems to me of a piece with the combination of disaffected and over-the-top in earlier Fassbinder films like Merchant of Four Seasons, unless it’s just the English that’s throwing you. If anything, this performance style fits better in Querelle, with its artificial sets and operatic choreography, than in the zoom-heavy, television play mise-en-scène of that film. Or, for another comparison, the acting in Querelle is like the empty mouthpieces of Katzelmacher were transplanted from urban mundanity into a fairy tale, a cosmos of huge emotions that they can sense but can’t access.

Fox and His Friends is my favorite of the new-to-me films I saw this week, though. Its forward momentum and emotional shading make the film far more lively than his other social melodramas in this style. That's largely thanks to the performance of Fassbinder the actor, playing one of the sweet, mediocre minds that Fassbinder the writer has so much affection for, but without the naiveté and condescension that can make these characters a dramatic dead end for Fassbinder the director. Franz has to be one of the most memorable characters in his filmography, lovable and frightening for the same reasons as his emotional conflicts and confused intentions play out nakedly on Fassbinder's face, occasionally exploding into physical brutality. Fassbinder is such an engaging performer. Even in Katzelmacher he gives his minor, intentionally somewhat stereotypical role glimpses of human complexity. Fox and His Friends is the Fassbinder I've seen that works best as a straightforward class-conscious melodrama, something you could put next to Mildred Pierce in its mixture of behavioral observation and narrative ruthlessness. It’s a given though that most of his other forays into melorama are going for something different, sometimes a Marxist or sadomasochistic hijacking of the melodrama, sometimes a dreamy, postmodern reconstruction of the genre.

More than a dozen films in, I’m still wondering what I think of Fassbinder overall. I’m ambivalent or indifferent toward a lot of what I’ve seen, but there are enough glimmers of something fascinating that it’s easy to keep convincing myself that I’m on the verge of “getting it.” I mean, his name is on our forum’s header between Godard and Dreyer. What am I missing? Some of it has to be my resistance to his tendency for miserabilism—at this point I can usually tell who’s going to commit suicide or get murdered within the first ten minutes of these things—but I know there’s more to the story. Part of what makes it difficult to figure out Fassbinder, I think, is that he doesn’t have a handful of representative masterpieces (like Dreyer), but he’s also not really a body-of-work auteur (like Godard), whose every movie gets better in the context of their every other movie. If anything, seeing a bunch of Fassbinder back to back dulls me to the experience and makes the repetitions in his work look less like creative refinements or meaningful variations on a theme and more like uninspired reflexes. But given the breadth of his work it’s probably too early for me to say.

[domino harvey]

I’ve been dutifully reading this thread and finding the effusive depths plumbed from the films like looking at a language I don’t speak, so it may be as simple as not finding him an auteur that clicks for you. I think 10+ films seen from any director is enough to make some kind of judgment call, even with caveats that you obv haven’t experienced the full scope and breadth. If there’s still an internal itch to keep going, there could be something more there for you in the corpus and perhaps you’ll unlock the “there” there in his work with more films seen. But we all have our canonical auteurs that fail to connect with us, and no one could claim a dozen-plus tries wasn’t more than a fair shake, so I wouldn’t put any pressure on yourself to continue forward if you don’t want to either!

[swo17]

Just so long as you at least watch Martha before giving up

[Red Screamer]

The fact that I can't make up my mind about him is part of what makes me want to keep going, at least until I see everyone's favorite Fassbinder. I'd actually say I enjoy his films for the most part, I just have a hard time connecting the work to the reputation. But we'll see what happens!

Just so long as you at least watch Martha before giving up

That's on the docket for tonight!

[Lemmy Caution]

Would there be any objection to allowing lists to be submitted by the end of the weekend?
I've really enjoyed this thread and am making a late push to watch and rewatch a load of Fassbinders.
My Top 4 or 5 I've seen recently enough, but when trying to rank another dozen or so, I found that I need to rewatch most of them. I could submit a better, more informed, and longer list by the end of Sunday than I can by mid-Friday. And I can't see the extra two days being an issue. So I'd like to propose this a Fassbinder weekend. RWF wouldn't want us to follow any set rules anyway ...

[Red Screamer]

Two stray observations after watching Martha which is indeed a great, supercharged sister film to Fear of Fear and one of Fassbinder's funniest until it's his most terrifying: 1) I think the Sirk comparison is overplayed, but I finally realized who Karlheinz Böhm looks like—Lyle Bettge, the cartoonish creep from All I Desire and Leisen's No Man of Her Own. 2) For a filmmaker who gets more and more preoccupied with style, it's interesting that Fassbinder repeatedly makes being an aesthete a sinister character trait, while bad taste is an endearing sign of sincerity. The dynamic between the two is the basis of the manipulative relationship of Fox and His Friends as well. This contradiction in Fassbinder's sensibility is particularly suited to the extremes of the abusive marriage in Martha, where the beauty of the style (color-coordinated, precise framings) comes on as an intoxicant, then becomes a trap, then an imposed violence, as in the film's final shot where a unified color design slides into place with the forced inevitability of a wrecking ball.

[Matt]

Would there be any objection to allowing lists to be submitted by the end of the weekend?

Best I can offer is to move the deadline to 12 PM CST on Sunday, January 2. That’s 48 extra hours. I’m going back to in-person work on Monday and need to have this wrapped up before then.

[Lemmy Caution]

okay, thanks.
I'm in China and will figure out when that is here.
But that should give me til Sunday night (I think).
A lot of Fassbinder titles don't help me at all remember the film, while even a brief IMDb summary often doesn't jog the memory. For instance, Satan's Brew. I popped that in last night and all of the slimy distraught relationships started flowing from the get-go, and I can see how I would easily forget the film/title. 30 minutes was enough to know SB won't get near my list.

[Rayon Vert]

Yeah not something you'd want to waste your last hours on...

[therewillbeblus]

It made my list, but the first 30 minutes are also the best (and would be fine enough, or better, as a short film) so it's worth giving up if you aren't on its wavelength by that point

[zedz]

It made my list, but the first 30 minutes are also the best (and would be fine enough, or better, as a short film) so it's worth giving up if you aren't on its wavelength by that point

And if that doesn't give you an idea of how thoroughly awful the film is, I don't know what will!

[Matt]

okay, thanks.
I'm in China and will figure out when that is here.
But that should give me til Sunday night (I think).

You’ll have until 2 AM Monday (China Standard Time)