October journal No.21 Summer (1982) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Art Rainer A Special Rainer Werner Fassbinder Robert Burgoyne Douglas Crimp Tony Pipolo Thomas Elsaesser $5.00/Summe...

Author: editors Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson

19 downloads 642 Views 21MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Art

Rainer

A Special

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Robert Burgoyne Douglas Crimp Tony Pipolo Thomas Elsaesser

$5.00/Summer

1982

Theory

Criticism

Fassbinder

Werner

Issue

In a Yearof ThirteenMoons Narrativeand Sexual Excess Fassbinder,Franz, Fox, Elvira, Erwin, Armin, and All the Others Bewitchedby the Holy Whore Lili Marleen: Fascism and the Film Industry

bytheMIT Press Published

for the Institutefor Architectureand Urban Studies

Politics

OCTOB

editors Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson managingeditor Douglas Crimp editorialassociate Joan Copjec

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2879) (ISBN 0-262-76011-8) is published quarterly by the MIT Press for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Subscriptions: individuals $20.00; institutions $45.00; students and retired $16.00. Foreign subscriptions outside USA and Canada add $4.00 for surface mail or $18.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. Manuscripts, accompanied by stamped, self-addressedenvelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 8 West 40 Street, New York, NY 10018. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, NJ 07110. Copyright ? 1982 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its editorial contents.

21

Annette Michelson Rainer Werner Fassbinder Robert Burgoyne Douglas Crimp Tony Pipolo Thomas Elsaesser

Rainer WernerFassbinder1946-1982 In a Yearof ThirteenMoons Narrativeand Sexual Excess Fassbinder,Franz, Fox, Elvira, Erwin, Armin, and All the Others Bewitchedby the Holy Whore Lili Marleen: Fascism and the Film Industry Rainer WernerFassbinder:A Complete

Filmography

Coverphoto: Rainer WernerFassbinderand Douglas Sirk on the set of Bourbon Street Blues, 1978.

3 5 51 63 83 115

141

2

ROBERT BURGOYNE, an editor of Enclitic, is collaborating with Sandy Flitterman and Robert Stam on a dictionary of film semiotics. THOMAS ELSAESSER teaches film and literature at the University of East Anglia. Formerly the editor of the British film journal Monogram, he frequently contributes to journals in England and America. RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER made In a Yearof ThirteenMoons, whose script is published in this issue, during the summer of 1978. His texts related to the film were published in S!A!U!, numbers 2 and 3, 1978. TONY PIPOLO teaches English and film at Queensborough Community College. His essays on film have appeared in Millennium, Film Reader, and QuarterlyReview of Film Studies.

The editorswishto acknowledgethe assistanceof StuartLiebmanand Clara Weyergrafin the preparationof this issue.

OCTOBER

Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1946-1982 In its brief five years of existence, Octoberhas had all too frequent occasion to salute the passing of those figures in whose work theory and practice have been joined in a manner both seminal and exemplary: Pasolini, Barthes, Sartre. And now, that of the filmmaker, born in a moment of catastrophe, whose death portends a contraction of the field of force within cinematic production both in Germany and abroad. It was Fassbinder's function during this past decade, as it had before been that of his senior, Godard, to oblige his contemporaries to situate their practice and expectations in some relation to his enterprise. It is this, rather than specific textual and systemic parallels, which produces the sense of ablation of an energizing presence, of grave loss. Fassbinder's filmography, published in this issue, is now, unfortunately, complete. Our own considerations, which had in large part crystallized around the film In a Yearof ThirteenMoons, were intended as a response to the first phase of an intensely prolific career. They must now, however, stand as a tentative first step toward the indispensible assessment of the work's full scope as a complex and powerful articulation of this extended period of crisis. ANNETTE

MICHELSON

In a Year of Thirteen Moons

RAINER

WERNER

FASSBINDER

translated by JOYCE RHEUBAN

Scene I. A bank of the Main Title:

Tango-Film Number Nine with Pro-ject Film, Filmverlag der Autoren Frankfurt am Main, July 24, 1978

Rolling title:

Every seventh year is a year of the moon. Certain people, whose existence is influenced mainly by their emotions, suffer from intense depressions in these moon years. This is also true to a lesser degree of years with thirteen new moons. And when a moon year is also a year with thirteen new moons, it often results in inevitable personal catastrophes. In the twentieth century, there are six years that are distinguished by these dangerous constellations. One of these is the year 1978, before that it was the years 1908, 1929, 1943, and 1957. After 1978, the year 1992 will once again threaten the existence of many.

Close-up of Elvira being stripped Volker Spengler as Elvira Weishaupt in Title: IN A YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS A film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Elvira and a hustler (Dialogue in Czech) Second hustler: What's going on? Third hustler: He says he's not a guy, he's a woman. With Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Title: Eva Mattes, Giinther Kaufmann, Liselotte Pempeit, Isolde Barth, Karl Scheydt, Walter Bockmayer, Peter Kollek, Bob Dorsay, and Gerhard Zwerenz.

::-:: ::-::

7777

.

.

.............

.

......8

-.:

:

i_:- ?a

:".............:_ :

.

to

......................:i~:-

..-::-

::?

li--::::i':i :~i-ii:---:-i:i~-:-

Lmil

MO*gi~

sw AVE?liiiil--'iiiiiiii

-il;~ii...iiiii iiii iii;-:-:

loomEm s ::ii:-:-iiii;i low','

. ....._:l...ii~iiir-i . . . . ....

I R&T-3

..~~

M

..............

i':::'':.::.:-il':~::::.:i:':

-

I .~~I:......

........

6

OCTOBER

In collaboration Milan Bor, Jo Wolfgang Mund, Alexander Witt,

with: Isolde Barth, Walter Bockmayer, Braun, Juliane Lorenz, Werner Liiring, Peer Raben, Karl Scheydt, Volker Spengler, Franz Vacek.

Story, Screenplay, Production, Set Design, Editing, Cinematography, Direction: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Elvira's apartment Men buzz around me like moths around a flame, Elvira: and if they get burned . Oh how good that no one knows that Rumpelstiltskin is my name. A soldier on the Volga shore stands, Keeping watch for his fatherland. He stands upon his roof of tin, and looks with happy ... Christophcomesout of the bathroom. Christoph:

Elvi ...

Elvira:

How was I supposed to know that today you'd. . . . You've been gone six weeks. Six weeks, that's forty-two days and....

Christoph:

One thousand and eight hours. I can count too, thank you. Is that all you ever think about?

Elvira:

Oh yeah, how stupid of me. You must mean my getup, right? Sure, you can't .... [laughing], you can't figure out why I'm. ...

Christoph:

You're drunk again.

Elvira:

Drunk? No, darling, I'm not drunk. Just the opposite, just the opposite--I'm lonely! I'm lonely and . Stop yelling! It's always the same, whenever you're wrong, you start yelling. Me ... wrong? You're saying that, you, of all people. No, my dear friend, I'm not wrong. You're the one who's abandoned me. I sit around here, week after week, until the walls close in on me. I stare at the telephone until I'm blind, until I go crazy. That's why I'm wrong, because I have this desire, a desire for someone to caress me and kiss me and ..

Christoph: Elvira:

Christoph:

Elvira.

What? I should caress you and kiss you. Your brain's really made out of jelly. Caress you, don't make me laugh.

In a Yearof ThirteenMoons

7

Elvira:

Don't, Christoph.

Christoph:

I don't care. .

Elvira:

Christoph, please, please, I'm afraid.

Christoph:

What are you afraid of? Afraid of what?

Elvira:

Of you. Today, you're so .

Christoph:

Know what you're afraid of? You're afraid of your own messed-up face. Look at yourself in the mirror, go on!

Elvira:

I'm afraid, Chris. .

Christoph:

No ...

Elvira:

Christoph, please.

Christoph:

Now look at yourself, Elvira, you hear me! Look at yourself, or I'll bash your teeth in. Look! Now do you see why I don't come home anymore? See?

Elvira:

I see myself loving you.

Christoph:

Yeah, that's why you drink and get fatter and fatter until even your face gets so bloated and ugly it's disgusting, like it was some kind of degenerative disease.

.

. Now look at yourself in the mirror.

! Open your eyes!

OCTOBER

8

Elvira:

I never wanted to hurt you.

Christoph:

Bullshit, you're not even funny, you're just disgusting. A fat, sickening, useless blob of flesh. And you know why? Because you have no will, that's why. No initiative, no brain, because you never think about anything and you're not interested in anything.

Elvira:

That's not true, Christoph. I've always been interested in things like the soul. .

Christoph:

You don't have a soul. You're just a thing. A thing . .. that's you, a thing. Completely useless. Nobody, absolutely nobody would even notice if you weren't around anymore. Splat, you're gone. Somebody should step on you and squash you to death, just squash you into nothing. [He hits Elvira. ]

Elvira:

Christoph, Christoph, oh . . . help, that hurts, that really hurts.

Christoph:

Stop screaming like that or you'll have everybody in the whole building out to hear us.

Elvira:

This is my apartment, Christoph, my apartment, you know, and I'll do whatever I want here.

9


Christoph:

So, it's your apartment.

Elvira: Christoph:

Yes, my apartment, mine, mine, mine! Okay, whatever you say. It had to come, sooner or later. And, God knows, sooner is better than later.

Elvira:

Dear . . . what is it all of a sudden, tell me?

Christoph:

Nothing, I'm packing.

Elvira:

You're packing? But you just got home.

Christoph:

If this is your apartment, then I can't be home here. I just made a mistake in the address.

Elvira:

Oh, I just said that about the apartment. You know that very well. You know very well how I really feel.

Christoph:

This is the thanks I get for trying so hard, for years, and it never even struck me again that you aren't even a real woman.

Elvira:

You said you loved me, and you knew it long before you said it.

Christoph:

Who knew what you'd turn into later, that you're a loser, that you'd get more and more like a man, big and flabby like a walrus, that your brain would get emptier and emptier and emptier, until there's nothing left but a bloated, wasted nothing.

Elvira:

You shouldn't say things like that, Christoph, because I'm so afraid you're going to ruin everything, everything .

Christoph:

Elvira, you have to stop lying to yourself- it's finished. There's nothing left to ruin, nothing! And it's been really getting bad for me for a while now. It's so bad, I almost have to puke whenever I touch you. You make me sick that I'd rather spend the weekend in an empty hotel room than come back here to you.

Elvira: Christoph:

You don't really mean what you're saying! Get out of here, get lost and let me pack in peace, will you. Just leave me alone. Go brush your teeth, for all I care.

Elvira:

Your life was lonely once, too. Now you're so

Christoph:

So . . . ? Did I deny that? Have I ever denied that? No, just

..

10

OCTOBER

the opposite ... completely the opposite. But I haven't let myself go like you, God knows. Elvira:

You didn't have to, because I was there for you.

Christoph:

So, should I spend the rest of my life on my knees to you?

Elvira:

Nobody asked you to.

Christoph:

Asked, no. But you act like that, as if I'll always owe you something.

Elvira:

God, you're unfair. I never said anything about owing me, I never even thought of it.

Christoph:

You don't think of it because you don't think at all, because your brain is nothing but jelly.

Elvira:

You said that already.

Christoph:

I know, because it's true -jelly-it coats your eyes and, not rancid and it stinks. It smells just like decay it's that, only whenever you're around. Like decay and death. That's why you need alcohol. What have I done to you that you need to treat me so badly, what? Is it because it was me that helped you be somebody who could respect himself again?

Elvira:

Christoph:

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what you think- do whatever you want, I couldn't care less. I'm leaving, get it! And I mean for good. Get out of my way. I don't give a shit what happens to you.

Elvira:

Christoph .

Christoph:

Leave me alone, don't bother me.

Elvira:

Christoph, please, do whatever you want. Do whatever you want, but don't go away, Christoph, please, please, don't go away. Christoph, wait a minute. .

Scene II. A street Zora:

'Til Friday?

A john:

Okay.

Christophgets into his car and starts to drive away. Elvira stops him.


Christoph:

Now what is it?

Elvira:

Please, please, don't go away.

Christoph:

Get out of here, or I'll run you down. Get out .

11

Christophdrivesaway. Elvirafalls off the hood onto the street.Zora comesand helps her up. Both go into a caf6. Two coffees, please, and two cognacs. Zora: Women's restroom in the caf6 Zora:

So, what's all this about?

Elvira:

It's because, because I put on men's clothes and went down by the Main.

Zora:

By the Main, and?

Elvira:

No and. I wanted to buy myself a boy, that's why. That was all, that's not really so bad, is it?

Zora:

Of course not. Of course it isn't bad. But .

Elvira:

But what?

Zora:

Only that, I mean, that you put on men's clothes. I'm not as ashamed when I pay if I'm wearing men's clothes. Maybe it's silly, it's just a feeling, but that's how it is with me. I've never been so ashamed as when I've paid as a woman, know what I mean?

Elvira:

Zora:

Yeah, I know.

Elvira:

I've gone around down there in men's clothes a few times now, but last night they beat me up. But even that's better than this snickering. Last week, I even tried to get a job in my old line of work.

Zora:

In men's clothes?

Elvira:

Of course, but. ..

Zora:

What kind of work?

Elvira:

I was a butcher, a long time ago, but hardly anybody from my later life knows about it.

Zora:

Butchering real animals?

Elvira:

Sure, that's what I learned to do. That's my trade. But they laughed at me when I asked. They looked at my tits, made

12

OCTOBER

jokes, and chased me away like I had leprosy all over my face. Nobody knows how important it is to me to find something to do again. And if it could be in my old line of work . Zora: Elvira:

But killing animals, baby-that's against life. It's not against life at all. It's life itself. The way the blood steams, and death, that's what gives an animal's life meaning in the first place. And the smell, when they die and they know that death is coming and that it's beautiful and they wait for it. When I was young, I felt the same revulsion you do, Zora. Now I understand the world better. Come with me, I'll show you. It'll smell, and we'll see them die and hear their cries, cries for deliverance.

Scene III. A Slaughterhouse ThroughoutElvira'smonologue,theemployeesareseenat workwhile Elvira and Zora walk throughthe slaughterhouse. Elvira: I really wanted to learn goldsmithing, but they didn't find me a place as a goldsmith, only one as a butcher, since it was easier then to get a job as a butcher. Eventually, I got used to


13

it, and the butcher I worked for had a daughter the same age as me. That was Irene. She passed her graduation exams at the same time that I finished my training period. We both wanted to be free, since her father treated us like his domestic animals, and since we sort of liked each other, and .... I don't know, it was never really true love, but something developed between Irene and me. So we had to get married, and then Irene had the child. That was our pawn, Marie-Ann. That was something her father couldn't object to. And Irene stuck with me, too, after I came back from Casablanca. She still hasn't divorced me even now, because of our child. Even though she's much smarter than me. She became a high school teacher, Irene, and her life's much more worthwhile than mine. Did you know that Christoph was an actor when I first met him? He was in the theater seven years - but in a much different way than most actors, you know, when the towns you play in get bigger and bigger. With Christoph, it was just the reverse-the towns got smaller and smaller, and finally, nobody wanted him at all. That made him depressed, so depressed that when I found him, he wanted to die, and I had to keep talking to him like you talk to a lame horse. It helped j::::: :i8-rEiiiiii:i-i:ii:ii! !!::"::?: ~ui:: :, ijj~i _:--i~j iii~~~~iliiin~~~• i:ijiiiiiiiiij ::! ;:::-'iii_::!•_

.:-ii~ i.iii :l ii:•i::i!::

iii+•:~ii

i::::::::::::':" ::?:--:'' -i:'::'-'?'i':.::B iiiiiigiiiii

_'-(?8:8~~~~~~~~~ i---i---iPii:i iil-iiiiiiiiiiil-i ~ ~ :::: ~ ~ ~ ~

isiiili

:i~i:::-:::::i~i--il--i::::--i--: : :

:U?

-i-i:....----:-ii~~-iiiliii-:l~jj

Ii.

14

OCTOBER

most, the way I rehearsed his lines with him. He always used to take one part, and I took the other. I'd say, "If our glance takes in something monstrous, for a moment, our spirit stands still." Then Christoph says, "Thus do I see myself in the end, banished, rejected and banished like a beggar here, ha, ha, ha. I was crowned and adorned to be led to the altar as a sacrificial animal. Even on the last day, they mocked my sole possession, stole my poem from me with flattering words, and kept it. My only possession is now in your hands, that which gained me entry to every place, which would yet save me from hunger. Now I see it all, why I must fall; so my song will not be perfected, so my name spreads no further, so my enviers may find a thousand faults, so I am finally, completely forgotten. Thus, shall I accustom myself to futility; and so shall I preserve myself and my sense. Ha, ha, ha. We judge ourselves so lightly, and honor those who honor us, though they be base." And then I say, "I will not desert you in such need." And Christoph, "Grant, oh grant me the present again for just a moment. And if, as a man, I am silenced in my agony, give me a god to speak of how I suffer." Believe me, Zora, I really did a lot for him, but eventually he had to realize for himself that this wasn't right for him. But I kept on helping him to hold on to a chance for survival. At first, of course, Christoph was still as good as paralyzed. Oh, this went on for years, this being paralyzed from depression, until Christoph finally decided for himself to go back to the way he was taught to be--that men are active, decisive, and should act independent. Until then, he lived off me. But without any shame. That was important to me. Believe me, Zora, that was very important to me. It wasn't like he was my pimp or anything, although our money came from other men who paid to have me. At first, he used to talk about the men, how they were, how they talked, if they were tender, maybe what kind of preferences they had, what their bodies were like, especially their cocks - like if they were big, maybe bigger than his. That was especially important to him, as if he had a problem with that, with the size of cocks. But as the years passed, this interest diminished, then completely disappeared, and finally changed into a more basic kind of interest - how you get a job and earn money as a man. Eventually, he decided to earn his money as an investment counselor with some kind of smalltime stock deal, selling shares in car washes, or something. But that used to change a lot, since everything wasn't exactly


15

on the up-and-up. But he made enough money at it that one day I was able to quit hustling. That was what he wanted, to support me. I just made it possible for him to get started. I bought the apartment and furnished it, but for the last few years, I've really been living off him. I know that's how he wants to make me happy.

Scene IV. Elvira's apartment Elvira comes in and looks around. Elvira:

Christoph.

. . Christoph.

. . Christoph! Chris.

Elvira lies down on the bed. Later. Irene rings the doorbell. Irene:

Elvira, can't you hear me? Why don't you open the door? [Irene lets herselfin. ] Elvira?

Elvira:

Christoph?

Irene: Elvira:

It's me. I rang like crazy, but you didn't answer the door. Did you take sleeping pills again? I did not. My head, I have such a headache.

Irene:

Drunk?

Elvira:

Hardly anything. I. . . oh, morning... Christoph ..

Irene:

What?

Elvira:

Oh, he packed all his things and left. For good, he said. Don't worry about it, darling. His books are still here.

Irene:

now

I

remember.

This

Elvira:

You're right. Always the same routine, back and forth, back and forth. And I fall for it every time. I get all upset until my head's about to split, and he laughs up his sleeve. Don't you have any classes today?

Irene:

School's out already. It's afternoon.

Elvira:

Really?

Irene:

Yes. So, what's it about this time?

Elvira:

. . . Oh, 'cause I, oh, you know, just like always, over nothing at all really.

16

OCTOBER

Irene:

Is that so?

Elvira:

Maybe you don't believe me.

Irene:

Maybe I shouldn't believe you.

Elvira:

Then who?

Irene:

Right, then who?

Elvira:

Oh, Irene, I really don't understand you.

Irene:

You don't?

Elvira:

No!

Irene:

You don't? And why didn't you tell me you were going to give this interview?

Elvira:

Why are you yelling at me like this?

Irene: Elvira:

Don't get off the subject again like you always do. I asked you why you. ... What, is the interview in the paper already? Show me. Fantastic! Did you see the picture? A real picture in a real newspaper. Look.

Irene:

Idiot, I asked you why you didn't tell me about the interview.

Elvira:

What's all this yelling for!

Irene:

I'm yelling because you've gone crazy and don't use your head to think one bit anymore. You just paint your face to look gaudy. Everybody's always yelling at me--yelling, yelling--just to hurt me.

Elvira: Irene:

Erwin, did you even read what you said here?

Elvira:

About Anton?

Irene:

Yes, about Anton!

Elvira:

No, why should I read it? I already know what I know about him. And I know it's true, so I can say it's true. But that's just it. You can't go around telling everything that's true, you just can't.

Irene: Elvira:

But ..


17

Irene:

Do you have any idea how powerful this Anton Saitz is now? Do you have any idea? And do you realize what you said here about somebody who has so much power? Do you know what this man is going to do? He's going to squash you like an insect, like an annoying fly.

Elvira:

Nonsense, Irene .

Irene:

Oh no, it's not nonsense, Elvira. God knows, that man has had his hands into your life enough already. He destroyed as much as he could.

Elvira:

What do you mean?

Irene:

What do I mean? First, prison, and then that . . . that trip to Casablanca.

Elvira:

He's not to blame for that.

Irene:

Oh, he's not, isn't he.

Elvira:

Alright, but he wouldn't do anything to hurt me. Never.

Irene:

Okay, maybe he will leave you alone. Maybe you're right. But he'll get revenge, he has to. And what if, out of revenge, he destroys your . . . our daughter?

Elvira:

Marie-Ann? What does this have to do with Marie-Ann? He's not evil, Irene, believe me.

Irene:

Our child has suffered enough. She has a right to her own life.

Elvira:

You're right, darling, don't cry, don't cry anymore.

Irene:

I'm afraid, Erwin. I've been afraid all day for our little girl. And . . . and now this interview. I'm so scared, Erwin, I'm so scared.

Elvira:

You're shaking. You're shaking like you had the shivers. Maybe you're sick?

Irene:

I'm not sick, Erwin. I'm not sick, I'm just afraid.

Elvira:

Alright, I'll do what I can. I'll go to him and ask him to forgive me. Better?

Irene:

Yes, better! If you'll just do it, Elvira, and if only it works.

18

OCTOBER

Scene V. Game arcade Player:

What do you want?

Elvira:

I, ah .

Just get lost, you silly cow, or I'll kick you out. Zora comesin and sees Elvira sitting in a corner,crying. Player: Zora:

Hey, baby, little one, what's the matter? You should get some sleep.

Elvira:

Irene woke me up.

Zora:

Did he come back?

Elvira nods "no." Zora: Elvira:

You shouldn't be crying like this. I don't ever do this.

Zora:

Then why?

Elvira:

I just sat down here, and suddenly it just came out.


19

~;:-::::

~ii~iiiiiiiii:-i iiii

iii:i_

::::::::::::: i:iii: :i--iiii::ii'

iiiiii

:::.... -ro

ii~iiii:i?-:.i:~ ?Isrsp~es~sa~8a~aaar~ ? ?-\a_,l

~~ii--: --.---:-I: :--:?:-?:~:::: ii_-: -:::-

a~c;~~sas~

_~

:i. iiiiii iiiii :?I

::?::?:::?: ?:

~i::::i:

~lla "-::j ::::-. ::i: BIE :::" "'ii~sS :ii-isi:i~isi'-il8~i~~iiiii:i4~iJ;'-IiiS :::

I --

-:i:i:I:I ::I::::::? :: ::::::::::::::::: :.:-:i: ?:-:I:::: ::: -:-: i:~ :::::: ~i-i-:-i -.?i:-i:i-i~:i:i:i:i-i-i-?i:, iii ::::::::: -:i? I:-: :::: ::?: iiiiiiii:i .:. -::__:;?-:: : : ::::: :::::?:

:-c: ::::* i'iii-i:i:~i:::^:::: ..:i-i-si:ii iiliiiiiziiiiii~i'~iiii:iiiii:~

Zora:

Oh, things aren't so bad. Know what I do when I get that way? I go to Soul Frieda's.

Elvira:

Who's that?

Zora:

Come on and you'll find out. [They pass a young man playing a videogame.] Like him?

Elvira:

He's the type that doesn't do it with women.

Zora:

I like him anyway!

Scene VI. Soul Frieda's apartment Soul Frieda:

Once I dreamed that I went walking in a cemetery, looking at the gravestones. Then something strange occurs to me. The inscriptions on the gravestones are very different from the other ones I've seen, for instance, born 1918, died 1968, or born 1927, died 1975. But on these gravestones, the dates are, like, 1970 to 1972, '65 to '66, '54 to '57. None of the dead people seem to be older than, at most, two years. Still others died

20

OCTOBER

even younger. Some were only a few days old, February 18 to March 11, or May 19 to June 5; others, only a few hours. So I continue along the path and can't make any sense out of this weird cemetery. Suddenly this old, old man is standing in front of me. It's the gardener, and I ask him in amazement how he got to be so old, when all the other people here had to die so young. He smiles and shakes his head and says, "No, no. The inscriptions on the gravestones don't mean the time a person lived, but the time he was truly happy." That's it! Zora:

But that's a sad dream, a really sad dream.

Elvira:

Yeah, Zora, this film is really sad.

Soul Frieda:

So maybe I didn't dream it at all, maybe I only heard it or read it. What's the difference. How's the weather outside?

Elvira:

Pardon me?

Soul Frieda:

I asked you how the weather is outside. Whether it's raining, or whether it's not raining; if the sun's shining, or if it's not shining. Actually, I haven't been outside for months, but believe me, you don't know anything. It's just the opposite people just don't believe in that fairy tale anymore- that there's a real life in a real world, and that that real life is more important than just living. What can I tell you? Naturally, I know that a person hardly has a chance, and neither does anybody who'd be able to make something of that chance if he had it. Oh, wouldn't you like to sit down?

Elvira:

Oh, I .

Soul Frieda:

You look so lost standing there, so lost and unhappy.

Zora:

Maybe she really is unhappy.

Soul Frieda:

Yeah, yeah, maybe she is unhappy.

Zora:

She's very lonely.

Soul Frieda:

Everybody's lonely, because people should be lonely. If you're sad, you have no time to think.

Zora:

You know, Elvira was a very beautiful woman the first year after the operation.

Soul Frieda:

Cancer?

Zora:

No, no disease. She just had everything down there cut off.


Soul Frieda: Zora:

Elvira:

Soul Frieda: Zora:

21

So? That's not the reason she's unhappy. She was probably always a woman in her soul. No, that's just it. She just did it. And she didn't even have a good reason, like, because of her soul, or something. I don't think she was even gay. Isn't that right, baby? You weren't even gay when you went to Casablanca. No, that's why it was so bad at first, but I had to live somehow. That's how it was with every man that felt me up in the bars, with every man I'd turn on. But there wasn't much else I was able to do. I was alive, so I had to go on living. I never felt anything but shame with any one of them. And the worst part is, when you feel ashamed, then they really like it. I like it when somebody feels me. Men are so awkward when they try to be tender that it really is charming. Anyway, all men are beautiful. [She refersto anotherman in the apartmentwho is lifting dumbbells.] That one, and this one, and this one. Especially when they have a cock that isn't all shriveled up yet. But it's getting so, more and more, that nobody can get it up anymore. It's like an epidemic.

OCTOBER

22

Soul Frieda:

Want something to drink?

Elvira:

No thanks. You know, it took a few years and I really had to try very hard. I really had to make an effort, but I did it. Even though it was hard, I learned how men smell, so it doesn't smell like an odor that makes me sick anymore.

Soul Frieda:

That outward manifestation which I call my body, I am also conscious of in a completely different way, as my will. Or, my body is the objectivization of my will. Or, as my body is a figment of my imagination, it is thus merely my will.

Elvira:

One day, I woke up and had pains in my back. I didn't think any more of it, and the pains went away. But then they came back. They were worse, and were even worse the next time. One day, I woke up and wasn't even able to move. So I lay in the house, as if I were paralyzed. They said it was rheumatism and that there was nothing they could do about it, because it comes from the soul. Maybe that's all it was.

Zora:

You said something about a chance. But when, all of a sudden, somebody can't move anymore - and that's not even the only thing- then you can't just leave him alone like that, because he stopped breathing.

Soul Frieda:

On the contrary. It's very common for people not to even notice when somebody stops breathing. And hardly anybody gets the kind of chance I'm talking about. Me, for instance, I was in the loony bin for eight years, dear lady. Eight long years as a sicko among sickos. And for what? I got straightened out. So now I don't attract attention or scare little children. But the only thing that maybe really could have helped - nothing doing, not a chance. "Unfortunately, in your case, Mr. Mfiller, psychoanalysis is out of the question because you're an orphan." Not a chance. [cries]

Zora:

Everything alright, baby?

Elvira:

Yeah, yeah, everything's alright.

Zora:

[sings]

Close-upof note tackedup in Soul Frieda'sapartment:"WhatIfear the most is if one day I'm able to put myfeelings into words, becausewhen I do.. "


23

Scene VII. The cloister of the orphanage Zora:

Is that her?

Elvira:

I don't know.

Zora: Elvira:

Don't you remember anything at all anymore? Let's go, Zora. I'm afraid .... I .

Zora:

Afraid? Of what?

Elvira:

Of ... that's just it. I can't get the words to go together anymore so they make sense. It's as if I had pipes in my head and some of them are clogged. Let's go, Zora. Let's get away from here, please!

Zora:

Now, baby, we purposely came here, and it was your idea. You wanted to find out something about yourself. Be reasonable and believe in yourself just the tiniest little bit.

Elvira:

Okay, maybe.

Zora:

No maybe. That's how it's going to be. Alright, now look around at the walls you lived inside for fourteen years.

Elvira:

This place does have thick walls, doesn't it?

Zora:

That sister there. .

Elvira:

[mumbles something]

Zora:

Is that her?

Elvira:

Could be, I can't tell for sure.

Zora:

Okay, then I'll go ask her.

Elvira:

Zora!

Zora:

Excuse me, are you Sister Gudrun?

Sister Gudrun: Yes, I'm Sister Gudrun. Zora:

Oh.

Sister Gudrun: Can I help you? Zora: Not me, but there is . . . I . . . there is someone out there who you used to know who might need help. Elvira . . . Sister Gudrun! Elvira:

How are you, Sister Gudrun. I am Erwin Weishaupt. Do you remember me?

OCTOBER

24

Sister Gudrun: Erwin Weishaupt. I do recall an Erwin Weishaupt. Oh, yes. Elvira:

I've ruined my life, Sister. My own life.

Sister Gudrun: No one ruins his life by himself. The world which people have made for themselves does that. Elvira:

And God?

Sister Gudrun: God can't be that cruel; if so, there would be no God. Erwin Weishaupt, little Erwin, I remember you. I remember very well, because I used to try to love you. Are you unhappy? Elvira:

Yes.

Zora:

Elvira came to ask about her childhood. She has no memory of it and that bothers her a lot.

Sister Gudrun: Do you really think you need to remember it? Do you really think so? Elvira:

Yes, Sister, I do.

Sister Gudrun: Yes, perhaps you're right. Sometime during the last war, Anita Weishaupt had a son whom she brought into the world in secret. Shortly after the birth, she gave the child up for

~ -i

i i~i :;-i~li

-ii ~i i -:i.i~s?:::~i~ii~ii~iW,::

liii~iiiiaiii~;imo l~:~i s:ai i~i-~i

~I~_~)f

1?0

FA

ow~


25

adoption here at the orphanage. The child was christened Erwin, and all the sisters liked him because he was a quiet child, who was nice to them and they thought he was what a good child should be. Even during the very worst days after the war, they always saved him enough to eat so he was well fed. Better too much than too little, so that the child would love each one of them better than the other. That's how the child was forced to learn how to lie. Naturally, he soon discovered that the more he said to each one what she wanted to hear, the better it went for him. He learned to master this system of profitable lying so perfectly that no one noticed that he had changed from a quiet child into a sad one. Then Erwin went to school and- without trying especially hard- was a very good student, for a year and a half. Then many things changed for Erwin. It all began when a married couple who wanted to adopt a child made friends with Erwin. They invited him to visit them at home and fussed over him, so it was heaven on earth for him. And then - they had thought it over carefully - they wanted to adopt Erwin. Something had developed between them, trust, maybe, and patience - it was something like love. The child was still very serene in his happiness, but his heart was as if overcome with a superhuman joy so

26

OCTOBER

great that we have no word for this feeling, this trembling of the soul on the verge of fulfilling a sacred yearning. According to our procedure, Erwin's mother was to be allowed to reconsider her previous decision to release the child. So I went to visit Anita Weishaupt, and as soon as she opened the door, I saw a very strange look of fear in her face. And when I talked about Erwin, the fear grew and grew. And I knew immediately that this woman had actually succeeded in forgetting her own child, and how terrible that must have been for her. She pulled me into a room and quickly shut the door behind her. The apartment was full of screaming kids. After she had heard nothing from him for years, her husband returned from prison camp. Since then, she had had three other children by him, but he treats her badly and frightens her. From the way Anita Weishaupt stood there, short of breath, pale and trembling, a terrible thought came to me. Was she already married to this man when she gave birth to her son Erwin? The fear became so great in Anita Weishaupt's eyes that I thought her head was going to explode. Her breathing grew faster and she clutched her heart as she nodded that it was true. Her nod didn't so much acknowledge, as it anticipated the fundamental flaw in her mental effort to construct this lie about her life. Since the


27

child Erwin, whoever his father may have been, was born to a married woman, he was a legitimate child whose release for adoption also had to be signed in this case by the mother's husband. When Anita Weishaupt got hold of herself again, she closed her eyes, breathed deeply, shook her head slowly and said, in a voice so clear it hurt me, and with such finality that I lost my courage, "This child will not be adopted. My husband can never find out that he exists." Anita Weishaupt actually said, "this child," and "my husband." She was beyond help. Her son Erwin received no more weekend visits and no more invitations. But he waited, waited for weeks, without asking anything for fear of the answer. The child's need was so great that he clung to hope long after there was any reason to hope. So long, that it began to make him sick. Erwin became ill with an unexplainable fever which the doctors couldn't cure. The child would die unless a miracle occurred. Whatever the miracle may have been, it happened. The fever disappeared as it had come, seemingly without cause. But somewhere inside him, the fever didn't stop burning. Erwin became a different person. He wasn't interested in anything anymore. His personality changed. For instance, he began to steal, but he only stole things he could easily have had anyway. And now he be-

OCTOBER

28

haved unpredictably toward the sisters, instead of predictably, as he used to. Now they began to fear the child, and finally to hate him in the same unthinking way they used to show their love for him. Erwin lived like this, in a virtual hell, for a long time. [Elvira, who has collapsedonto theground, now comesbackinto view.I And worse, he was despised because he learned to thoroughly enjoy the horrors of this hell instead of being destroyed by them. Sister Mathilde! Sister Franziska! [to Zora] You can help too, Miss! It's alright, Sister. You may go. Take him home and see that he doesn't do anything to hurt himself.

Scene VIII. Elvira's apartment Zora:

On a lovely summer evening, an old woman was passing by a cottage. She was carrying a big pile of wood, and it was too heavy for her. She asked the mother to let her children help her carry the wood into the forest. But the mother had a feeling. ... She didn't trust the old woman, and the children had always been forbidden to go into the forest. So the old woman cursed the cottage and those who lived in it.

Elvira:

Because I love you .

Zora:

You should go to sleep, baby.

Elvira:

Tell me more, Zora, then I'll sleep. Please, please, go on with the story.

Zora:

One day, the father and mother are going to town to the market and again, as always, they forbid the children to go into the forest and threaten them with severe punishment if they do. And, as so often happens, scarcely had the parents disappeared over the horizon than the children are drawn to the forest by secret powers much stronger than any warning from their parents. Now, as they come to a clearing, the same old woman suddenly appears before the brother and sister. The children are frightened and want to run away from the old woman, who just laughs a wicked laugh and utters a magic spell that paralyzes the children. Then she laughs again and changes the brother into a mushroom and the sister into a snail. Soon night comes and the enchanted children become more and more afraid of what their father and mother will say. Finally, the sister, the snail, tells the brother how hungry she is, and the brother says she can eat from him, the mush-


29

room. So the sister bites off a little piece of the mushroom and the brother says, "You've just bitten off my right ear." And the sister cries and feels very guilty. But she soon becomes hungry again, and again the brother lets her eat from him, and then says, "This time, sister, you've bitten off my left foot." Elvirafalls asleepand Zora turnson the televisionset. A videotapeof Christophand Elvira is playing. (Sound of videotaperecording) Elvira: Christoph, hands up! [laughing] Christoph:

Cut it out, Elvira! Stop fooling around, we don't have time for that now. We've got to get going.

Zora switchesfrom one channelto anotheron the televisionset showing a news reportabout Chile, an interviewwith Fassbinder, and a movie. Fade-out on interiorof Elvira's apartment.Pan of Frankfurtskyline. The rooftopsof old buildings are seen amid new high-rise buildings. Close-up of sign: "Bar."Close-up of plaque on ofice building. "'AntonSaitz. Broker." Elvira:

[mumbles] Anton Saitz. [inside the kiosk] A beer and a Jaigermeister.

Man:

You know, I stand here every day? No.

Elvira: Man:

Why should you, but it's the truth. Every day, from ten o'clock in the morning until six o'clock in the evening, for seventeen months now. How about that?

Elvira:

[mumbles something]

Man:

I look up constantly at the sixteenth floor, eight hours a day, five days a week, and I've been doing this for a year and five months. Surprised? See, I knew you'd be surprised. Everybody I tell is surprised, everybody, because the idea is absolutely compelling. Listen when I talk to you. But I. .

Elvira: Man: Elvira: Man:

Yeah, excuses, I know, nothing but excuses. Did you know that the owner has his office on the sixteenth floor? No. ... It's true! You can believe what I'm telling you, the entire building belongs to him. The man's name is Saitz, and Anton

30

OCTOBER

is his first name. Yeah, Saitz with "ai." That's important to him, that his name's spelled right. I know. Of course, you don't know why I know that; you don't know anything about it. But I'm going to tell you about it, though I don't really know why I'm telling you. I worked for this man Saitz until seventeen months ago. I worked for this man until seventeen months ago, and then, all of a sudden, he threw me out. And since then, I stand here and look up from ten until six. Think you can guess why he got rid of me? Elvira:

I don't believe .

Man:

Ha, ha . . . me either. The reason is actually very strange, hardly anyone guesses it. The fact is, I have cancer, of the kidneys. You can believe that easily enough. And Saitz can't bear any sick people around him, and a man like Saitz, who gets whatever he wants, can do something like that. Don't you believe what I'm telling you? You can! There are plenty of stories about how this man made his money by putting up buildings like this. Eventually one piece fits with the others, until together they form a picture. The story started with this man, still a boy at that time, in a concentration camp, where, with luck, he survives the end of the war, his head full to the brim with a dream called America. On the way to this new world, his journey ends in Frankfurt am Main, around the railroad station, where, with a little dirty dealing, he earns his first bundle. Some say it was some kind of meat-packing business, but over the years, details of the story seem to have been forgotten.

Elvira:

A story about the meat business .

Man:

Exactly!

Elvira:

Forgotten. .

Man:

Because it's not important.

Elvira:

Some people think it is; others don't want to have anything to do with such things. ..

Man:

[laughs] Suddenly you show interest in trivialities, but that's typical. In my story, it happens that this man, named Anton, and Saitz with "ai," buys into a brothel with this bundle he swindled, and pretty soon, he takes it over completely and sets up strict discipline among the girls there, like he learned, and learned to fear over and over while he was in the concentra-


31

tion camp. He runs the whole whorehouse like a concentration camp. It functions with frightening perfection, flourishes, makes Saitz richer and richer, and eventually makes him so much money that he can buy his first building, an old one. He tears it down, builds a new one, and is on the way which takes him straight to the sixteenth floor of this building, where he reigns over many people and many things. Elvira:

Thank you! You have hurt my feelings enough!

Man:

Don't forget! Saitz with "ai"! Sixteenth floor!

Scene IX. Inside Saitz's deserted high-rise office building Smolik comessinging with Saitz and his men down the stairs. From an upperwindow, Elvira observeswhat seemsto be an ambushof Saitz and his men. Elvira:

[screams]

Smolik:

[distantly,from below] Everything okay?

Elvira sits on thefloor in an emptyoffice.Later, she awakestofind a manpreparingto hang himself.

OCTOBER

32

Elvira:

Excuse me please, do you have a match? I was just sitting here and I can't find a match. Just go on with what you're doing like I'm not here. Thank you! Want one?

Bum:

Thanks.

Elvira:

Are you going to hang yourself?

Bum: Elvira:

Yes, of course. Am I disturbing you? Does this building belong to you? No, I was just going to have something to eat here. Are you hungry? I brought some food- French bread and cheese, and I have a bottle of red wine, but no corkscrew.

Bum:

Give me the bottle! I'll open it.

Elvira:

Thank you. You know, there's an old story that goes with the red wine and the French bread and the cheese that's almost kind of sentimental, come to think of it. But what is life without melancholy, don't you agree? Pretty sad, I'd say. It all started with cheese, because meat made Anton sick. We were in the meat-packing business then, you know, and Anton was totally unaccustomed to the smell of dead animals, especially the blood, and all of a sudden, he never ate meat again. That was the beginning. Simple, isn't it? Taste good?

Bum:

Thanks.

Elvira: Bum:

Why . . . why, I mean. ... Why am I hanging myself?

Elvira:

Yes!

Bum:

I don't want it to be possible anymore for things to be real because I perceive them.

Elvira:

What things? Feelings, for instance, pictures, letters, memories, stones; forsaken, forgotten. . . . At the moment of death, in the experience of pain, the world is very near and . . then? And the things of the world, know what I mean?

Bum:

Elvira:

No.

Bum:

That's just what I'm talking about. Your negation is a demonstration of the seemingly effective principle of the ability to negate.


33

Elvira:

Maybe what you say is right. But that doesn't change anything for me. Once I ended my life too, and all it did was hurt me and make me sick deep down in my innermost soul from an incurable disgust with myself. I had just come back from Casablanca and, you know, someone drove me into nothingness, someone who didn't have to do anything but smile his smile one too many times. By chance, and that's the truth, though it sounds like a lie, my life was saved. My ego was forced to learn to tolerate something intolerable- itself.

Bum:

If you want to know what people in general are worth in moral terms, then look at their general fate. It is want, misery, torment, death. Eternal justice reigns, and if it weren't in general so worthless, then people's fate would generally not be so sad. In this sense, we can say that the world itself is one's world view. In any case, to understand suicide only as the negation of the will to live, as an act of negation, is to completely misunderstand it. Far from being a negation of the will, this phenomenon is a strong affirmation of the will, since this negation means a denial of the joys, not the sprrows of life. The suicide desires life, but is just dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has come to him. He in no way, therefore, gives up the will to live; rather he merely renounces life, and destroys the outward appearance it has for him.

Elvira:

I think you'd better do it now.

Bum:

You can watch quietly.

The man hangs himself.

Scene X. A corridor in Saitz's building A woman kneelsand looks througha keyhole. Woman:

[laughs]

Elvira:

Pardon me, ah . . . hello! Can you hear me? Hello, God, can't you hear me!

Woman:

[laughs] You almost scared me to death! Why didn't you say something? Oh . . . the old trick, hmm. You want to make me think I'm hard of hearing, eh? Look here! Did my husband send you? He never thinks about anything but my ears.

OCTOBER

34

Elvira:

No, no, of course not! I don't even know your husband, believe me! It's only that somebody hanged himself downstairs.

Woman:

Did what?

Elvira:

I said, somebody hanged himself- hanged- one floor below.

Woman:

You don't have to yell so about it! Happens here every few weeks, now that all these offices are empty.

Elvira:

Oh, then .

Woman:

Um, hmm.

Elvira:

There was something else. I'm, ah, looking for the offices of Anton Saitz.

Woman:

Last door, straight ahead.

Elvira:

Thank you.

The woman kneelsat the keyholeagain. Woman:

[laughs]

Smolik:

Did you knock?

Elvira:

Oh, yes, yes. I'd like to speak to Mr. Saitz, Mr. Anton Saitz. Sorry, dear lady, but Mr. Saitz is in conference. Mr. Saitz is usually in conference. Know what I mean? Of course, of course, I understand. It's just, excuse me if I seem a little mixed up. I, ah, you don't take me seriously, do you?

Smolik: Elvira:

ah....

Smolik:

Oh...

Elvira:

Sure, sure, sure, sure . .. I know I'm ridiculous. Of course I'm ridiculous. It's just that, that I was so wrapped up in thinking about myself, that's why. In my head . . . you talk and talk, and think and think. You think so much, you forget what you were thinking about. That's why I'm so mixed up. Anyway, it's rather crucial for me that I see him. That's why . . . but you ... please excuse me, you ....

Smolik:

So you know him, personally, I mean.

Elvira:

Anton . . . sure, sure, sure... Saitz.

I know him. I know Anton


35

Smolik:

Well, if you know him, then maybe you also know one of the passwords. And then I can take you to him. But only with the password!

Elvira:

Password? I don't know any password. It's been a long time know what I since we've seen each other-an eternity-you mean? Almost in another life, really. That sounds funny- in another life. Well, I'll be going, then. I .

Smolik:

I'm sorry, but .

Elvira:

Password, you said. . . sure . . . password. He always used that for security when he had the whorehouse.

Smolik:

What? He ran a whorehouse?

Elvira:

Sure, and .

Smolik:

Yeah, how . .. without any .

Elvira:

God, if I could concentrate. Wait a minute . . . a thousand times, a thousand times . . . that's not it. It was . . . Bergen Belsen . . . that was it! Bergen Belsen!

Smolik:

[whistles] Why didn't you say that! Come on in! That's code 1A. That always works, in every situation, always! It's the one password he's always kept. With Bergen Belsen, you can even disturb him when he's fucking.

Elvira: Smolik:

[laughs] Hey, that's nothing to laugh about. Usually that's the worst thing you can do to him. That's him alright.

Elvira:

Tell me, is it true that nobody works here anymore?

Smolik:

Not for a long time now, that's true. In the old days, all hell was loose here. Those were the good old days. We bought up old buildings and vacated them. Sometimes it got really tough, but we always managed to pull it off. God knows! Then we tore the old shacks down and built new, mostly highrise buildings, and then sold them at a good profit. Pretty slick, eh? Of course, it wasn't always so easy, that goes without saying. People are envious. But the city was helping us. The police chief is a friend of his, the mayor, too, then. A few of the councilmen were in on it too. Anyhow, the plan itself didn't originate entirely with him. It was already there, the court orders were there, the decrees were there. He just did the dirty work for the ones who made the real decisions.

36

OCTOBER

Outwardly, though, they wanted to keep their distance, since they wanted to get reelected. They'd rather have the power than the profit, which they preferred to make a present of, to us, for instance. Elvira:

And now?

Smolik:

I don't know enough about this stuff- the economic situation, inflation, or whatever it's called. So I can't really explain what I'm saying, but I can tell you that, at the moment, foreclosing looks like the big, sure business with a real future.

Elvira:

[giggles] Sounds a little strange, but you yourself said before that things were done by others and decisions were made somewhere up above for those down below. And that all we do is carry out things that others are really interested in.

Smolik:

I didn't say that exactly, but if you heard it that way. . Tell me, how long have you known him, really?

Elvira:

I already told you that - forever.

Smolik:

Was it in a business way, I mean, excuse me, but you did say something about a whorehouse.


37

Elvira:

No, no, it wasn't a business relationship. It was, I was . . . I loved him.

Smolik:

Loved? Anton Saitz?

Elvira:

That surprises you?

Smolik:

Nobody loves Anton Saitz! Nobody! He doesn't want anybody to love him.

They look into Saitz's officefrom a doorwayas Saitz and his men watch a videotapeof a Dean Martin/JerryLewis movie. Smolik:

Disappointed?

Elvira:

No, no, not at all. Just the opposite. It's only . . . you can laugh if you want .

Smolik: Elvira:

[ watching the movie] [laughs] But I .

Smolik:

What?

Elvira:

I . . . tell me . . . which one of them is him, please. Didn't you just say .

Smolik: Elvira:

I know, I know, and that's the truth. Yeah, yeah, go on and laugh. I think it's funny myself, right now.

Smolik:

What's the difference, it doesn't matter to me. He's the skinny one in the tennis outfit.

Elvira:

Anton Saitz. .

.

. [continues unintelligibly]

The men laugh. Saitz:

Smolik!

Smolik:

Here, Sir!

Saitz:

What took you so long? I think we're. .

Smolik:

Sorry, Sir. There was a lady outside with code 1A, Boss!

Saitz:

Bergen Belsen.

Smolik:

Right, Sir.

Saitz:

Yeah, so? Didn't you let her in?

Smolik:

Sure, Boss! With 1A. With 1A, I let anybody in. Come in!

Saitz:

Well, well. So you know code 1A.

OCTOBER

38

Elvira:

Sir ... you, you don't remember me anymore? It's been a long time. I ... I'm Erwin.

Saitz:

Erwin? Erwin? Sorry .

Elvira:

I have an old picture of me. You really don't remember me?

Saitz:

Sure, sure! Somehow . . . what was it again . . . Erwin? It's coming to me. But first let's do the dance one more time. Turn it on!

Smolik:

Yes sir, Boss!

He turns the movie on again. Saitz:

I'm sure it'll come to me. Smolik!

Smolik:

Here, Boss.

Saitz:

Where are we?

Smolik:

This is a girls' boarding school, little one.

Saitz:

A girls' boarding school. What do they all want from me?

Smolik:

To celebrate your coming out.

Saitz:

A coming-out party? But I don't want a coming-out party, I don't want a coming-out party, I don't want a coming-out party, I don't want a coming-out party.

Smolik:

No exception will be made for you. No, no exception for you.

Saitz:

No, no, no.

All danceand sing along. Elvira joins in. (Sound track-Martin/Lewisfilm) I want to march out in front now. Saitz: Smolik:

You can't march out in front.

Saitz:

I wanna march out in front!

Smolik:

Alright then, march.

Saitz:

Rob, rob .

All:

Dang, dang. .

Secretary:

. . . Stay in formation. .

Elvira collapses. Smolik:

Say look, Boss, really

..


Saitz:

39

Yeah, really.

(Sound track-Martin/Lewis film) Now let's do the finish. Come on . . . quick . . . da-dahhh. Saitz: . . . Elvira . . . now I've got it. I went to bed with you. You've sure gone to pot, and you got fat. Elvira:

Yes, from too much drinking.

Saitz:

It doesn't matter. Most people are fat these days. Elvira . that's wild. Boys . . . this is really too much . . . how about that . . . this used to be a guy called Erwin. One day he got on an airplane to Casablanca and got his dick cut off. Isn't that it? Yeah, those were the days. So . . . now you come back again, just like that . . . always charging head-first into a wall, without thinking about the consequences.

Elvira:

Well, actually, I've also come because . . . here, I gave an interview in this . . . and I told some old stories about you, too. I really don't know how it happened, it just happened. Anyway, I thought I should apologize, or something . . . and SO. ..

OCTOBER

40

Saitz:

Forget it. I can't get excited every time somebody writes something about me. The main thing is that the name is spelled right, with "ai." That's the most important thing, right?

Smolik:

Right, Boss, that's the main thing.

Saitz:

Right, Harald. Aren't you the one who always made that good coffee like my Grandma used to make? That was you, wasn't it? Sure, that was you. Why don't we go to your place and you make coffee again?

On the street, theystart to get into Saitz's car. Saitz:

What, no hold up?

Smolik:

Not today, Boss. Not until tomorrow.

Saitz:

Why not?

Secretary: Saitz:

Just Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Boss. And today is Tuesday.

Secretary:

Right, that was your express order, Boss. I'm really sorry.

Saitz:

Okay, get in.

Scene XI. Elvira's apartment Elvira: You have to excuse it, Anton. It's not straightened up. Oh lord, that's a good one . . a riot. Saitz: .that's Elvira: What's so funny? Saitz:

He bet me you'd say that. That's what they all say. Come on, pay up.

Smolik:

Here, Boss, twenty marks. Braun and Kuhlmann can go. You stay here. Okay, Boss.

Saitz: Smolik:

Elvira:

Do you serve cake, too, with your coffee? Yes, I'm going into the kitchen. You can go on into the living room.

Zora:

Hello, big, strange man.

Saitz:

Hello, beautiful, strange woman. I almost didn't see you.

Saitz:


41

Zora:

That's because I'm so little. And besides, I haven't had anything to eat for days. The 'fridge is practically empty, and Elvira locked me in, as you can see. How do you do? I'm Red Zora.

Saitz:

How do you do? I'm Saitz, with "ai," Anton.

Zora:

Really? Not bad. Then you're the one back then who Elvira ... no. .

Saitz:

And why not?

Zora:

The man she went to Casablanca for?

Saitz:

Don't you think I'm worth it?

Zora:

Sure . . . but are you really him?

Saitz:

I sure am.

Zora:

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . . I've always wanted to meet up with you, so you could spit on me.

Saitz:

You want me to spit on you?

OCTOBER

42

Zora:

Yes, please. And three times, please, and over the left shoulder, please.

Saitz:

Three times over the .

Zora:

Yes, over the left shoulder, please. For luck. You know, when somebody like you spits, it brings luck.

Elvira looks onfrom thefoyer as theykiss, thengoes into the bathroom. And I always wanted to know how things really were with Zora: Elvira in those days. Saitz:

We used to work together, small-time stuff, in meat. She was Erwin then. He always used to look at me so strangely, so I asked him what he was really thinking. And he told me he loved me. Then I said that would really be nice, if he was a girl. And he thought so too. And then it just happened -he was a girl. That was it.

Zora and Anton kiss. Elvira, in the bathroom,beginsto cut off her hair.


Irene's garden Irene:

Are you going out today?

Marie-Ann:

No, I'm reading Kafka, The Castle.

Irene:

Do you like it?

Marie-Ann:

Yeah, but it scares me a little.

Elvira enters, dressedin men'sclothes. Elvira:

Irene, Marie-Ann.

Marie-Ann:

Papa.

Elvira, what have you done? Have you gone crazy? Irene laughs at Elvira. Irene:

Marie-Ann:

Come, sit with us, Papa.

Irene:

I'm sorry I laughed.

Marie-Ann:

Want something to eat?

Elvira:

No, thanks.

Irene:

How about a little red wine?

Elvira:

Okay, thanks. Is everything alright with you?

Irene:

Why do you ask?

Elvira:

I don't know. I want so much for you to be happy.

Marie-Ann:

I love you, Papa.

Elvira:

Really?

Marie-Ann:

Yes, really.

Irene:

Did you go see that man?

Elvira:

Of course.

Irene: Elvira:

And what happened? I asked him to forgive me.

Irene:

What did he say?

Elvira:

Oh. .

Irene:

Eat, child.

.

. [mumbles something]

43

OCTOBER

44

Marie-Ann:

I don't want anymore, Mama.

Irene:

Tell her she should eat. Children have to eat. If your father says so, it's true.

Marie-Ann:

Okay, if you say so, Papa, and I'll get big and fat, you'll see. Papa, what do you say? I want to stay in Frankfurt so much, but Mama says I should get out on my own and go to college in Munich.

Elvira:

Oh, your mother knows you better, you know. I, ah . . . I, ah ... I've been going around in men's clothes more often lately. I tried to find work in my old job. I just can't keep on living like this. I don't have any reason to keep on living anymore. I just have this strong desire to be back with you both again, even though it was never right before for us to be together.

Irene:

Elvira, you know I've always been fond of you, I still am. I'll always like . . . love you. But. ..


45

Elvira:

Don't go on, Irene. I know you're going to say it's too late, and I .

Irene:

Yes, Elvira, it is too late.

Elvira runs of. Marie-Ann:

Papa!

Scene XII. Stairway of Hauer's apartment building Hauer and Sybille climb the stairs to their apartment. Hauer:

Once there was a terribly nice man. He came from Swabia, and he looked like somebody's good uncle. He had very thin lips, but nobody noticed that his lips were so thin. His lips kissable mouth. This was the formed this . . . kind of... kind of man that everybody'd say about him, "Look at this man, how fine he is, how good he is, what a nice, wonderful uncle he is." This nice uncle was always there whenever anything happened. One time, the Swabians gathered to mark the occasion of a terrible, great war in their past. And the nice man stepped out in front of them, looked deeply into their eyes, and said, "You must be very sad, because your war was unjust. You became evil, and on the last day of the war, you put three people to death who were against the war. They were good men, and now you must repent in sackcloth and ashes. Now let us bow down deeply to these resistance fighters." And then a tiny, little old man appeared and said, "Sir, you are a nice man. But, tell me, weren't you there too as judge and prosecutor? You put them to death too. And you are as guilty as anyone." And then the nice man said, "Whatever you're saying about the war . . . I don't remember."

Sybille:

[seesElvira, who is sitting on the landing acrossfrom theirapartment] [screams] There's a strange man in the building.

Hauer:

Oh, nonsense..

Sybille:

Elvira?

Elvira:

I'm sorry for bothering you. But I cut my hair today, and then I went out for a while, and my hair. . . . Then I put on these

. Elvira?

46

OCTOBER

shoes and had absolutely no idea where I was going, and then, by chance I dropped in here at your place, and thought, go on up, because I want to talk to somebody so badly. Hauer:

It's pretty late.

Sybille:

It's already past eleven.

Hauer: Sybille:

It's already past eleven. And you have to get up early tomorrow and drive.

Hauer:

I have to get up early tomorrow and drive.

Elvira:

Oh yes, I understand. I have my life and other people have theirs. Sometimes I forget, because I'm so stupid.

Hauer:

That's nonsense, Elvira. You are not stupid. Not at all. You aren't stupid at all.

Elvira:

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm not stupid, basically, but there's something in my head, something very different, that sometimes makes me feel like I'm paralyzed.

Hauer:

We've already talked about that. Hasn't it gotten better? No, no, it hasn't gotten any better. Just look at my hair. I cut off my hair. I feel very sorry for you, that you don't like me this way anymore.

Elvira:

Hauer:

Because of your hair? That doesn't mean anything. Nobody even notices.

Elvira:

Sure, sure, sure. I know much better than you. I know very well. Everybody, everybody looks at my hair. I can't even stand to look at it myself.

Hauer:

Naturally, if you're always looking at it.

Elvira:

It was so nice then, the time you interviewed me. My pains let up for weeks, it was much better than usual. Well, if you really want to, maybe I could go out with you for one beer.

Hauer: Elvira:

Oh, that would be nice.

Sybille:

You said yourself that I should remind you to get to bed early.

Hauer:

Oh yeah, that's right. If I go out now, then it'll be very late. And I really do have to drive early tomorrow, you know.


Elvira:

Yes, I know.

Hauer:

Good night then, Elvira. Maybe some other time.

Sybille:

Good night.

[goes downstairs, stands underthe stairwell] Love ... [cries] Fade-out. Fade-in to close-up of Hauer's tape recorderplaying. Elvira:

47

love .

Elvira's voice:

What is being happy? Of course I'm not happy. There is no such thing as happiness. We search, and it's the process that's exciting, not the result, happiness. That's never exciting. Yes, I do just imagine my pains, just to get to know what life is like. I don't know if you'd exactly call it . . . maybe I could . . . I don't at all believe that it's masochism except that it adds to defining who I am. Sometimes I think of conversations I used to have, when I was maybe twenty or so, when I used to talk to people, to customers, and talk about the problems that could be solved if only I were Adenauer. Then I'd have all kinds of things to talk about with them, and then the prisoners of war would be returned. Now I have a different desire. You know, it was so difficult for me to get used to it.

Hauer's voice:

What?

Elvira's voice:

What I was forced into, or what I forced myself into. It doesn't really matter. Maybe I'd like to . . . I don't know, maybe I'd like it with Anton. Or maybe I'd like it with Irene. Or maybe. .... Get dressed, Sybille, we're going to Elvira's. I have a bad feeling.

Hauer: Sybille:

What about?

Hauer:

I'm not sure.

Elvira's voice:

This desire for Anton is something you hide from, or maybe that I hide from. But with Christoph, it's different. There, I tried to give him what I didn't get from Anton, and I thought . . . Maybe it has something to do with. . . . I try so hard ...

Smolik:

[to Hauer and Sybille at the door to Elvira's apartment]Hey, if you want to go in, I have to search you first.

Elvira's voice:

. . . to give him so much that he'll have something left over to

48

OCTOBER

give back to me. It sounds so calculated, but it isn't calculated at all. Maybe it's what they call love. Maybe it's. . . . Irene and I. ... Hauer:

Is she here?

Smolik:

She is.

Elvira's voice:

. . . that was an escape. We never really figured out what our relationship was to each other. There was just this desire to get out of the situation we were in at that time. That was our main concern, and so we found ourselves together. And then . . . then there was the binding link. It's like when you make a stew, you have to have flour. And Marie-Ann was this kind of catalyst. I don't know what love is. Somehow . . . the I have . . . think father. I Yes, key. My . . . I've always had this need for it, but I always rejected that word. And I think that's why I have these problems.

Marie-Ann: Elvira's voice: Marie-Ann:

Okay, I'll be right there.

Elvira's voice:

And, of course, Marie-Ann plays a part. But maybe not so much with me as with Irene. . . . These deals of Anton's were very strange. I'd really rather not say too much about that. Hello, Mama, I think there's something the matter with Papa. Somebody just called up and said he won't open the door. Should I take the key and go on ahead? Yes, okay.

Marie-Ann:

Elvira's voice:

. . . And then we got together. I'm telling you, it was a cry, an idealistic cry, of course. I don't know what you'd call it, but it didn't affect me at all, because I was already used to this feeling and it didn't interest me anymore. I was always different, but I really let myself in for a lot because of Anton. .

Marie-Ann arrivesat Elvira's. Smolik:

Where are you going?

Smolik searchesher. Marie-Ann:

Hey, what's this?

Elvira's voice:

for sure, I know that now. It was obvious to me that . . .that's Anton was the stronger one, and I was the weaker one. And he knew he was doing wrong, but that was okay with me.

Marie-Ann:

Papa, Papa.


49

Marie-Ann discoversElvira's bodyon the bed. Saitz and Zoraget upfrom thefloor beside the bed. Elvira's voice:

Of course, if he . . . of course, he should have stayed by me. Irene did. Why wasn't he able to do that? I don't know why you're asking these questions. He didn't even write. I waited for him. I waited for him every day, and he. . . . It's ridiculous, but maybe I'm right.

Irenearrives. Smolik:

[yells]

Elvira's voice:

That pig . . . he should have written. A pig can't write. A pig never learned to write. And what would it have to say?

Marie-Ann:

Mama, Papa's dead.

Elvira's voice:

He didn't even care. That hurt me a lot. Maybe what I did was right, I don't know, I can't say. That pig never. ..

50

OCTOBER

Sister Gudrunarrives. Smolik:

I think you'd better wait a minute . . . Everything's alright. Please go in.

Elvira's voice:

I wasn't sure. On the one hand, I was sure that . . . that it had to happen and that I wanted to die. But, on the other hand, I didn't know exactly what life still had to offer me. Life is, or was, still some kind of hope. Somehow it meant comfort, or, like I said before, desire, or maybe I was just curious to experience these things. Maybe if I really wanted to die. . . . I don't know, it was probably subconscious that I gave the right address. Because, now that I think back, I just can't explain why I did it. Since if I really didn't want to die, then maybe I shouldn't have given it. Thinking back, it's so . . . so hard to talk about. And the moment I gave Irene's address, I don't think I gave it a second thought. I just had the feeling that I had to fill out this registration form.

Title:

Frankfurt am Main, August 28, 1978.

Narrative and Sexual Excess

ROBERT BURGOYNE

The principle protagonist of In a Yearof ThirteenMoons is a transsexual, someone who has crossed an absolute border, transgressed the fundamental divide of gender upon which, according to psychoanalytic theory, all society the systems which compose it, including language itself- is based. Such a thoroughgoing anomaly would seem to demand an extraordinary restructuring of the narrative form which tells it. Instead, ThirteenMoons exhibits a balanced, stubbornly rectilinear form apparently indifferent to the transgression which, by an ordinary logic, should constitute the collapse of its classical symmetry. This essay examines some of the strategies by which, like the secondary revision of the dream text, the film binds the threatening and potentially disruptive sexuality to a plot all too familiar, a scenario all too recurrent. In S/Z, Roland Barthes isolates for discussion five codes that structure the narrative text: the hermeneutic, which sets up, holds in suspense, and discloses an enigma; the proairetic, which is the code of actions and gestures; the cultural or referential, which indicates the system of science, of knowledge within which the text operates; the semic, which controls the connotative level or the "character" of the text; and the symbolic, which sets up a system of antitheses and thus allows for classifications and legal substitutions. The classical realist text is constructed out of a hierarchical arrangement of these codes, whereby the hermeneutic and proairetic dominate the other codes by imposing on them an irreversible logico-temporal order. To use Barthes's word, the hermeneutic and the proairetic "vectorize" the text. In an elaboration of the relationship among the codes of the realist text, Peter Wollen has stated that the hermeneutic and proairetic codes are correlated with the symbolic order and encode the textual body with a gender identity, while the semic and symbolic codes (he does not mention the cultural) are correlated with the semiotic and release a kind of random erotics, a promiscuous force of uncathected energy.1 The dominant, sequential codes anchor the nar-

1. Peter Wollen, in a lecture delivered at New York University, May 1981. Wollen is here introducing Julia Kristeva's distinction between the symbolic - a rationalized structure - and the

52

OCTOBER

rative to an Oedipal scenario which thus becomes the narrative's point of origin and return, its closure. Instead of a free flow of energy, there is a blockage formed by the alliance of the voices of truth and empiricism, enigma and action, with the Oedipal drama that institutes society. This blockage forces the textual energies to grow "thick"and "dense," to be "kept in a kind of pregnancy" awaiting its full term. Every classical text, in short, is impregnated with the same gender-defined form "with which Oedipus (in his debate with the Sphinx) mythically impregnated all Western discourse."2 The textual economy thus enforced delays and defers the discharge of the semiotic energies which would throw the symbolic structure into imbalance. The avant-garde text, which transgresses this narrative form, opposes this blockage; it lets loose the dammed up energies by suspending the dominant classical codes and permitting the efflorescence and excesses of the subordinated codes. Purged of narrative constraints and liberated of the ballast of plot, the avant-garde text will have a symbolic trajectory free of Oedipal determinants. Clearly, by this definition, ThirteenMoons is more a classical than an avant-garde text. Although the film's protagonist remains throughoutundefined by a single gender and, in fact, initiates the narrative by her/his mingling of the two sides of the male/female opposition, the body of the text itself represses the contradictions which construct it and presents itself as homogeneous and whole, at least in its larger structure. In recent psychoanalytic film theory, the metaphoric correspondences between the filmic spectacle and the body image, between the vivid sensory and kinetic flow of images and the phantom of a superior, sovereign body have been forcefully developed.3 The filmic signifier in its sonic and visual plenitude and its overwhelming presence possesses the qualities of a phantasmatic body which resembles, in its internal coherence and heightened definition, the ideal body image of the Imaginary.4 Jean-Francois Lyotard has written of the cinema as a "somatography of bodies," a kind of hieroglyphic band modeled upon the idealized geography of the body. It is the classical narrative film which reinforces this metaphor at every turn, with its "seamless construction," "narrative closure," and "textual cartilage." Realism is generally named as the system which is the site of the pro-

to support the hierarchical a process which is in excess of and cuts across structuresemioticarrangement of codes in realism. Barthes himself uses the distinction between denotation and connotation in this same way. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, New York, Hill and Wang, 1974, pp. 62-63. 2. This analogy can be found in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Apparatus," Camera 3. Obscura, 1 (1976); in Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," Screen,vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975); in Raymond Bellour, "Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion," CameraObscura,3/4; inJacqueline Rose, "Paranoia and the Filmic System," Screen, vol. 17, no. 4; and in Mary Ann Doane, "The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space," Yale French Studies, 60 (1980). 4. Jacques Lacan's "Imaginary." The best treatment in English of Lacan's fundamental concepts is in Fredric Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," YaleFrenchStudies, 55/6 (1977).

Narrativeand SexualExcess

53

duction of this repression. Fassbinder's film, which also privileges the hermeneutic and proairetic codes, is governed by a slightly different, but not completely other system - that of the melodrama. I shall therefore attend to the singularity of the melodramatic form as it operates in ThirteenMoons, paying particular attention to a few of its melodramatic moments, each of which is structured like a theatrical vignette with the equivalent of an opening and a closing curtain. Virtually all the standard analyses of the genre oppose the melodramatic to the tragic protagonist. The tragic protagonist is one who acts - but this action also includes, within tragedy, suffering. Aristotle, who bound character to narrative action in the Poetics, was able to define history as "what Alcibiades did and suffered" because action and passion were themselves bound by narrative form at this time and, indeed, up until the romantic period. At this point there was a split. This divergence consisted of a differentiation of narrative forms. Certain forms featured an active hero impervious to emotional pain; others featured a hero or heroine whose role was to suffer. Melodrama, which is one of the by-products of this split, characteristically displays protagonists who are purely passive. The internal conflicts which allowed the embracing of action and passion in tragedy are exteriorized as conflicts between the active social world and passive "sympathetic innocents who have done nothing to deserve their miseries."5 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has pointed out that the opposition active/passive enfolds another: male/female.6 The melodramatic protagonist is often a woman, since in bourgeois society it is women who are equated with passivity. Peter Brooks's analysis in The MelodramaticImagination takes no notice of this sexual difference, although it does not specifically repudiate it. Instead, Brooks overlays the active/passive opposition with that of society/individual. He notes that the private and individual nature of the protagonist's point of view is at odds with the social; indeed it is the conflictual point on which the melodrama turns as it attempts to shake itself loose from this troubling individuality which threatens to unravel the social fabric.7 There is only a step from Brooks's observation to Nowell-Smith's. For, if society's coherence is synonymous with its patriarchal structure, that is, if it coheres around a male point of view (and its Oedipal structure ensures that it does), then surely a point of view which opposes this male identity renders society illegible. This is a step of logic which Fassbinder takes. In speaking of his choice of this genre, evaluating its strengths over those of other genres, he has said that in melodrama we actually 5. James I. Smith, "The Critical Idiom," in Melodrama, ed. John D. Jump, New York, Methuen, 1973, p. 56. 6. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Minelli and Melodrama," Screen, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977), p. 117. 7. Peter Brooks, The MelodramaticImagination, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976.

54

OCTOBER

see women think.8 His strategy is to imbricate passivity and gender identity and set them against the comprehensiveness of patriarchal structures. The actor who appeared as an ursine being named Gabriel in Chinese Roulette becomes, in ThirteenMoons, like an angel, essentially sexless. This creature's first words resonate with the complications of sex and naming: "Rumpelstiltskin is my name." When we are at last given the real name of this being in her present form - Elvira - we recognize it as a remarkable condensation of gender signs, a feminine form harboring a masculine root. This condensation, refusal of differentiation, violation of sexual codes, is the mark of a passive resistance which initiates the narrative process. What ensues is less a sequence of events than a reception of increasing violence by increasing passivity and resistance. In the opening sequence, Elvira, dressed as a man, is found wanting by a hustler. Rebuffed, pummeled, and stripped by his gang of leather boys, she is left in a slip and stockings, her men's clothes dumped into the river, where they float unceremoniously away. This introductory presentation of Elvira elaborates a maze of sexual identities: a woman who was once a man dresses like a man in order to attract men who like men. The reason for this paradoxical behavior confirms the total dislocation of the character in the social order. She dresses as a man because she is "ashamed" to pay for it "as a woman." The statement of motivation, a classic double bind with obvious feminist resonances, expressly links and divides the sphere of private sexuality with the social and ecoonomic circuits. This overdetermination of the cliche is characteristic of the text. That a character so blind or indifferent to social convention as to undergo a sex-change operation - without being gay - should feel obliged to observe the propriety of a stereotype - that women shouldn't pay for it - is remarkable indeed. It defamiliarizes the cliche; the stereotype is somehow opened to its own contradictory messages which had previously lain concealed within its seemingly natural formulation. The protagonists of melodrama, however, live these cliches mechanically, indiscriminately, denied any transcendent position of awareness. Melodrama projects no ideal future in which its protagonists gain awareness, only an uneasy and contradictory present in which they suffer from a failure to be at one with a patriarchal society. The opening sequence presents this interference between the personal and the social as a perpetual asymptote between desire and its gratification. Dressed like a man, Elvira attracts only men for whom her anatomical peculiarity is an affront to their libidinal proclivities. Dressed like a woman, Elvira is limited by gender roles: when she does tender an overture, she receives responses like, "Get lost, you silly cow." This gender ambiguity makes every encounter a con-

8. Fassbinder, "Six Films by Douglas Sirk," in Douglas Sirk, ed. Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday, Edinburgh, 1972, p. 5.


55

frontation. Although the character wishes to be loved and caressed "just like everyone else," she is incontrovertibly other in terms of gender identity. For everyone she meets she is a perverse mirror, a grotesque enactment of gender stereotype, rebounding from male to female, unable to conform, unalterably deviant. Elvira confronts a materialistic culture in its most concentrated regime: that of sexuality. Although sexuality usually seethes in the background of melodrama, where it is equated with repressed truth, here it is foregrounded in the form of sexual identity, as the evacuation of truth. Sexual identity in ThirteenMoons can serve as no index to the natural self. In a Yearof ThirteenMoons is a tale of evacuation and self-erasure, the playout of an original lack. Dragged in front of a mirror by her former lover and ing commanded to describe what she sees, Elvira says only, "I see myself loving you." This denial of the self in the mirror underlies the transparency of a character who is herself the reflector of every other character, male and female, depending on her aspect. If the narrative follows the peregrinative course of Erwin/Elvira as she strings together her life story, it happens that each narrative episode closes with an act of self-annihilation: getting beat up, falling off a car, hysteria, sleeping, weeping, fainting, hanging, suicide. A castrated being of this sort, who gives unconditionally but who has lost the means of exchange, constitutes a familiar type in Fassbinder's films: the protagonists of Mother Kiisters Goes to Heaven, The Merchantof Four Seasons, The Marriageof Maria Braun, and Effi Briest are all sainted individuals, natural prey. ThirteenMoons, however, poses the question of the sympathetic innocent irrecoverable for society except through the stark gesture of self-sacrifice.9 Indeed, this theme is posed with a certain lyric inevitability that makes Fassbinder seem at one, not with Sirk or Walsh or Godard, but with such filmmakers as Bresson and Dreyer: the mortification of Elvira becomes a chronicle of corporeal rivening, similar to that of Bresson's Diary of a CountryPriest or Mouchette,or Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. For Fassbinder's protagonist, however, there is not even the remote possibility of redemption or epiphany. The eroticization of death neither liberates nor sanctifies the victims of Fassbinder's melodramas; rather, it underscores the price paid to society for the borrowed sexual identity. Although Elvira masturbates while tightening a noose around her neck, and eventually commits suicide in precisely this manner, the pincers of contradiction will not relax in any final image of ataraxy. As the problem of Elvira is the problem of the acquisition of a sexual idenand as this identity is established at the meeting point of family and tity

9. In many ways ThirteenMoons appears to be a companion piece with The Marriage of Maria Braun. In the latter, a woman is forced to masculinize herself; in the former, a man feminizes himself; in both the return of the long awaited lover eventuates in death.

56

OCTOBER

society - that is, in relation to the father who represents the symbolic law - In a Yearof ThirteenMoons follows the pattern of a "family romance," the play of fantasies which the child constructs in seeking to define its relation to paternity. Erwin/Elvira's quest is to reconstruct the past and define his/her origins. Through this imaginary scenario Elvira hopes to rescue herself from the nebulous zone in which she is bereft of sexual identity and to be restored to the system of clear definitions and polar organization, and thereby to the society which rejects her. It is in this cause that the proairetic code, as the carrier of sequence, assumes such importance in the film. The linear and causal relations of the narrative drive are narrowly and starkly laid out so as to form a kind of defile through which Elvira must pass in her quest for sexual gender and the answer to the mystery of her origins. Since the one is dependent upon the other, the direction of the film is almost exclusively toward a retrieval of the past, a return trip to memorial landscapes or characters. A journey to the orphanage thus takes on a privileged status in the fiction. The core of the enigma, the nodal point of the narrative, seems to be harbored within this scene which precisely reconstructs the hamartia of the character. Aristotle defined hamartia as a kind of ignorance, usually of the past or of kinship which causes the characters to make mistakes and to fall into error. Hamartia is associated with only positive characters, whose acts "seem like those of a wicked man but are unlike them because not deliberately bad."10The return to the convent-orphanage, where Erwin grew up and which he cannot remember, discloses the ancestral guilt that marks him: the repudiation of little Erwin is connected with the Nazi era. While the camera moves in a precise and measured tracking shot which reechoes an earlier scene in a slaughterhouse, Sister Gudrun, the nun who fostered him, delivers a monologue about Erwin, an illegitimate child whose adoption was forbidden by his mother out of fear of her exposure. This scene manifestly makes Elvira the auditor of her own life story, the passive witness of her own narrative. In tragedy this scene would figure the moment of peripety, a recognition which would reverse the expectations of the protagonist, but melodrama, as we said previously, disallows any such transcendence of lack through a recognition of its significance. The "happy end" of melodrama is the result of an acceptance, rather than an understanding, of repression. The enclosed courtyard, the interior garden of the convent, makes this a characteristic topos for the melodramatic: both in this scene and elsewhere, the film propels its characters into spaces that initially seem protected, only to become claustral. The invasive force in this sequence, the evil principle that

10. Aristotle, in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1962, p. 86.


57

enters from without, is the past. What is most striking about the sequence, apart from its dramatis personae consisting of a prostitute, a nun, and a transsexual - two of whom have sacrificed their natural sexuality for an "impossible" love - is the disjoining of the embedded story from its focal subject. Elvira is "forgotten" by the camera as it follows Sister Gudrun in her processional movements. Occasionally it rediscovers Elvira, poised like some grotesque caryatid against the pillar of the cloister. More frequently the camera lingers on Zora, the sympathetic prostitute, who weeps for the injustice of the tale. When the camera finally notices Elvira at the story's close, she has fainted: she lies prone and unconscious for the fourth time in the film. It is as if the decentering of the character literalizes the marginal status accorded her in life, as if this momentary lapse in narrative focalization articulates the character's displacement from her own life story. The scene illustrates what Thomas Elsaesser, in a marvelously evocative image, calls "the grotesque distance between the subjective mise-en-scene of the character and the objective mise-enscene of the camera."" The distance interposed here between the protagonist and the story of her origins is what disjoins her from knowledge. Where the tragic protagonist's suffering leads to knowledge, it leads here only to more suffering. The proairetic code, as we begin to see from this discussion, is intricately bound up with the hermeneutic, the code which governs the enigma and hence meaningfulness, significance. This is true of tragedy as well, but in melodrama the protagonist is a failed rather than a masterful interpreter. Muteness, Brooks tells us, corresponds to melodrama as blindness does to tragedy and deafness to comedy. Blinding moments of insight, failures of insight, typify tragedy; while comedy is based on misapprehension and mistaken communication.'2 The melodramatic text is mute, caught up by fear of the failure of rendering itself articulate. But where blindness and deafness lead to errors which are recoverable by reviewing and attending to the very literalness of the original message, melodrama is a matter of the failure of literalness itself, of the articulateness of the literal. The melodramatic text does not speak the truth; it merely points to it, to its existence elsewhere. It is because the literal, which is rendered through the codes of realism, is grasped as not enough, not sufficiently significant, that the melodrama is characterized by its spilling over from its realist constraints into an excess of language, into the metalanguage of metaphor. Melodrama thus has an allegorical stamp which marks its difference from realism. The representational codes are de-emphasized; and seemingly insignificant gestures are exploded, out of realistic proportion, into theatrical

11. 12.

Thomas Elsaesser, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles," Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns, London, BFI, 1980. Brooks, p. 57.

58

OCTOBER

events worthy of a second level of interpretation. In melodrama, every action-the finding of a coin, a salutation on the street - becomes an event irradiated with possibility, with narrative potential, an event which will perhaps advance and clarify the character's own textual course, the subject's own "arabesque of plot." The proairetic code of the narrative is intersected by the connotations of theatrical performance. The tendency to dramatize, to refract the quotidian event into highly colored episodes, allows Brooks to say that melodrama represents the theatrical impulse itself. Stereotype and clich6 are thus only the starting points for the interrogation of reality which melodrama develops. The inordinate attention to the surface of the mundane turns it into a specular surface; events are peered into until they reflect the whole troubled life of the protagonist. It must be emphasized that this represents a constriction, rather than an enlargement, of the ontological range of the text. It would be easy, from the above description, to misconstrue the genre as a form of the gothic, or its ancestor, romance. In romance, however, alternative, magical worlds are a definite possibility, while in the gothic, the oneiric world of visions and telepathic connections occupies an ontological level equivalent or superior to the everyday. There are two diegetic levels, two diegetic frames to which the text appeals. In melodrama, however, the overworld of the "moral occult" is denied an equivalent diegetic status, manifesting itself in the world of the characters only in madness, hysteria, hallucination. In ThirteenMoons the quest for a metalanguage which will deliver the characters from the muteness of their surroundings embeds the film in a proliferation of texts by which the characters probe their lives for concealed metaphors. The status accorded these narratives turns the characters into "storytelling epicenters." The characters seem almost comically eager to unburden themselves of lengthy anecdotes, parables, histories. They become so many oracles encountered by the central character on her way to her ritual curtain. At times, the poetic resonance of these tales is marvelous in its connotative power. Directly after the slaughterhouse scene, for example, in Elvira's furlined bedroom, Zora tells Elvira a story about a brother and sister who were metamorphosed into a snail and a mushroom. The snail - the sister - becomes hungry, and the brother offers a piece of himself to feed her appetite; first she eats his ear, then his left foot, and so on. Later, Soul Frieda, a friend of Zora's, tells of a mysterious dream. In a room lit by dozens of candles, and suffused with the music of the void, Soul Frieda recounts his dream of a cemetery, where all the dates on the tombstones are of very short duration. Sometimes only a few days, sometimes only a few hours. The dates represent not the span of a person's life, says Frieda, but the time that they were truly happy. When reconnoitering Saitz's office building, prior to throwing herself on his mercy for exposing their past together, Elvira comes upon a man who has


59

been staring at Saitz's office window for "eight hours a day, five days a week, for seventeen months." The man has cancer, and Saitz has fired him for his malady. As he drinks from a bottle of bitters, he tells Elvira that he now spends his days exposing Saitz to the evil eye. Later, when Elvira penetrates the office complex and spends the night preliminary to meeting Saitz, she is visited by a black man preparing to hang himself. His discourse on the protocol of suicide includes the statement: "The suicide desires life, but is just dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has come to him." Insisting that this act of selfdestruction is a confirmation of the will, the character says, "I don't want it to be possible anymore for things to be real because I perceive them." Elvira at this point accepts the burden of perceiving reality and tells the man, "I think you'd better do it now." This series of embedded narratives bound by Elvira, the consistent auditor, recalls Dante's Inferno; the circular camera movements linking the separate scenes and the incarnadine lighting of certain sequences contribute to this correspondence. Each of the citizens encountered by the protagonist in her movement of descent delivers his own story of damnation. In the penultimate scene, the last in which we see Elvira alive, she is sitting on a spiral staircase, crying. The following shot places us inside the journalist's apartment, where his naked wife, in a candlelit room, plays Elvira's taped interview. This confession continues until the end of the film, once again making Elvira the auditor, this time literally absent, of her own narrative. There is one sequence in Thirteen Moons, however, which is most emblematic of the hyperbolic "melodramatic imagination" which exponentially enlarges and theatricalizes gestures in an attempt to make them yield up deeper meanings and secrete suggestions of grandiose forces. This is the slaughterhouse sequence, which releases a charge of heightened emotion that both intensifies and releases the pressure of the earlier scenes. As Elvira, accompanied by Zora, provides a guided tour of the packing house where she previously worked, we are made witnesses to the detailed process of dismemberment and rendering through all its grisly stages. In this stainless, antiseptic theater, Elvira recounts her earlier life, her marriage (as a man) to Irene, and the birth of their child Marie-Ann. She then skips ahead to recall her affair with Christoph, and how she performed as a prostitute to provide income. As the camera travels in precisionist patterns detailing the rendering process, Elvira explains how she rehearsed Christoph, an actor, in his roles. Her voice verges on hysteria as she quotes an extended passage from Goethe's Tasso. There is, to say the least, a rich counterpoint operating here: the passionate sadness of the music, the emotional frenzy of the voice, the stately flow of the camera movement all the while recording a kind of cinematic nature morte. The incongruity of Elvira and Zora walking in high heels and stockings on the wet tile floor of the slaughterhouse - the flowing blood is constantly hosed away--wrings a comic moment from this grim material.

60

OCTOBER

The most dissonant aspect of the scene occurs in the juxtaposition of the surgical proceedings with the discourse of the theater. This can be read as a condensation, anchored in the phrase "operating theater," recentering the passage on the particular physicality of Elvira. Later in the film it is revealed that Saitz, the man for whom Elvira transformed herself, made his fortune initially in meatpacking and prostitution -"he ran his whorehouse like a concentration camp" - analeptically placing the slaughterhouse scene under the sign of Saitz, the castrative figure. The diegetic function of this sequence is thoroughly incommensurate with the hyperbole of its presentation. It is, however, a scene invested with ultimate significance. For it testifies to the insufficiency of the literal and to the withdrawal of the sacred. This profane setting must be transformed into an allegorical text, a melodramatic scene which is, according to Brooks, "a dramatic choice between heightened moral alternatives where every gesture . . . is charged with the conflict between darkness and light.""3It is death, says Elvira (who "divines" the significance of the scene), that gives meaning to these animals' lives. The parallel to her own life is obvious, and the ensuing scenes propel the narrative into the conflicts of two forces: the desire for self-identity, selfadequation, and the nirvanic impulse towards self-destruction. Nowell-Smith's analysis of melodrama also focuses on its excess. But where Brooks describes this excess as a circumventing of the literal by means of the allegorical, Nowell-Smith describes this same circumvention differentlythrough an analogy with hysteria. Melodrama, he says, somaticizes its excess, or displaces its repressed material onto the "body" of the text. That which cannot be represented directly, in the actions or the discourse of the characters, is displaced onto the mise-en-scene, or the lighting, or funneled into the music. The hysterical moment is frequently the place where the mimetic codes of realism break down. The slaughterhouse sequence of ThirteenMoons represents just such a moment and corresponds to the overt hysteria of Elvira within the sequence itself. For the most part, however, ThirteenMoons functions in a somewhat different fashion. It is the character who receives, like stigmata, the uncathected energy of the text and not the text itself. Rather than fully accommodating the undischarged emotion in the mise-en-scene, Fassbinder projects it onto the body of the protagonist. This body thus becomes the conflictual center of the narrative. For both Nowell-Smith and Brooks, however, the excesses of melodrama tear the text away from the conventions of realism. In ThirteenMoons, as in melodrama in general, the result is a loosening of the narrative mesh, a vignetting of individual scenes. Dissolves (frequently corresponding to the oblivion of Elvira) punctuate the narrative flow, dividing rather than linking the discourse,

13.

Ibid., p. 5.


61

creating a disaggregate structure with most elements of the "textual cartilage" removed. Melodrama, like realism, is fraught with nostalgia for origins; it is intent on the conservation of society. It is, however, unable completely to integrate its excesses within its structure. Nowell-Smith points to a group fantasy as the hysterical moment which constitutes the breakdown of the realist conventions of the film Cobweb."This submerged fantasy," he says, "[is brought] to the surface, but not directly into the articulation of the plot. Realist representation cannot accommodate the fantasy just as bourgeois society cannot accommodate its realisation."14 Similarly, as all the characters featured in the film, including Sister Gudrun, gather incongruously at Elvira's apartment, it becomes evident that the death of Elvira enacts a kind of group fantasy; each of the characters betrays Elvira, to no particular end. Like a pinball, Elvira rebounds from one character to another, lighting them up as they tell their stories, momentarily delaying her extinction. The suicide, so reminiscent of that of Bresson's Mouchette, fails however to elicit a sense of moral elevation, of the character ultimately achieving a kind of "moral sainthood." The character departs with the same ignominy with which she was introduced. Elvira is the excess which must be repressed in patriarchal society. The melodramatic form of ThirteenMoons reveals both the necessity of this imperative and the consequent and irreparable suffering which it entails.

14.

Nowell-Smith,

p. 118.

Fassbinder, Franz, Fox, Elvira, Erwin, Armin, and All the Others

DOUGLAS CRIMP for Joseph Jacobs

1. TheSubject The story narrated by In a Yearof ThirteenMoons, that of the last five days in the life of a despairing transsexual, is nearly submerged in textual excess. The explicit presence of text as text, often recited by the actors in a detached voice, as if reading directly from the script; the plurality of textual sources and styles--vernacular, literary, philosophical; the disjunction of text from image: this textual overdetermination constantly threatens to disrupt the narrative. Yet it is precisely this logorrhea which structures the film, gives it its particular, odd appeal. That, and the brilliant performance by Volker Spengler as the character Erwin/Elvira. As Octoberprepared its special issue on Fassbinder, In a Yearof Thirteen Moons became its focus, with the film's script as its central document. Fassbinder's representative in Germany responded to our request to publish the script with the following sentence: "Es freut uns, dass Sie In a Yearof Thirteen Moons publizieren wollen; als ein sehr persbnlicher Film ist dies geradezu ein Schliissel zu Fassbinder's gesamten Werk." "Because this is a very personal film, it is actually a key to Fassbinder's entire oeuvre." I remembered similar phrases about this special subjective nature of ThirteenMoons from the reviews that had appeared when the film was released in New York. This babbling of the Doxa-"Public Opinion, the mind of the majority, petit bourgeois Consensus, the Voice of Nature, the Violence of Prejudice"- kept nagging at me: "Fassbinder at his most personal," "Fassbinder assumes total artistic control," "Fassbinder's immediate response to the loss of his lover." Thus, Wilhelm Roth, in his annotated filmography of Fassbinder: Fassbinder worked on the film from July 28 to August 28, 1978, a few months after the suicide of his friend Armin Meier, who appeared with him in Germanyin Autumn. Fassbinder not only wrote the script and directed, but was responsible for the sets and editing, and did the camerawork himself for the first time. Never before had he taken a film so fully into his own hands; hardly any other film is so much tied up with his life. In a Year of Thirteen Moons, sceneVIII. Zorawatches a TV interviewwith Fassbinder.

I::

4: ;:

I

64

OCTOBER

A film about a transsexual, whose narrative I had experienced as constructed in a complex relation to a series of texts, is also understood to be Fassbinder's most personal work, the film most tied to his life. (Of course, the same has been said of Fassbinder's television adaptation of Alfred Doiblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz.Wolfram Schiitte: "What story is Fassbinder finally telling us? The story of himself.") 2. A Trilogyfor Armin Meier In 1974 Fassbinder made Fox and His Friends, a schematic melodrama in which a working-class homosexual is taken up by a group of middle-class gays, is systematically exploited and humiliated by his lover, and finally commits suicide. Fassbinder plays the title role in the film, which is dedicated to his lover, Armin Meier, "and all the others." Roth: "Fox stimulates speculation as to interpretation. For the first time in five years, Fassbinder again plays a leading role, the most extensive so far in his films. It seems to me that Fassbinder wants to depict here, in a distanced way, his experiences with German cultural life." Three years later Fassbinder made a segment of Germanyin Autumn, a collaborative effort in response to the recent political events: the kidnapping and murder of Hans-Martin Schleyer, the Mogadishu hijacking, and the "suicides" in Stammheim of three members of the Baader-Meinhof group. In Fassbinder's thirty-minute sequence, he and Meier constantly quarrel, their relationship evidently a shambles as a result of Fassbinder's overworking (he is at work on Berlin Alexanderplatz),his despair and paranoia about the political conditions of contemporary Germany (the Berufsverbotlegislation had just been passed), and his inability to communicate any of this to Meier due to irreconcilable differences between the two. Meier, a working-class man who had been a butcher, voices standard cliches about terrorism and authority, which literally makes Fassbinder sick and causes him several times to throw Meier out of the apartment. The following year Fassbinder made In a Yearof ThirteenMoons, in which a transsexual (who had been a butcher) is berated and left by her lover, fails to find sympathy from her friends, and commits suicide. 3. Another Trilogy To write on oneself may seem a pretentious idea; but it is also a simple idea: simpleas the idea of suicide. - Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes When Roland Barthes died a month after he was hit by a laundry van, Alexander Cockburn published a snide obituary in The Village Voice. Knowing

Fassbinder,Franz, Fox ...

65

of Barthes's despair over his mother's recent death, Cockburn suggested that Barthes's own death had been a kind of suicide, a lack of the will to live as a result of that extreme attachment to the mother that is said to be a condition of homosexuality. This innuendo has continued ever since (Michael Starenko: "Did Barthes throw himself under that laundry van?"), finding its confirmation in certain passages of CameraLucida, Barthes's final and "most personal" book. But the suggestion of suicide extends beyond Barthes's loss of the will to live to encompass a loss of faith in his work. The last three books, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Camera Lucida--Tzvetan Todorov has designated them an "egoist" trilogy - are taken as a volte-face, a repudiation of Barthes's "position" against the authorial voice, the voice of an irreducible subjectivity. With Camera Lucida especially, Barthes is said to have renounced writing for autobiography, to have discovered his own "mortal voice" in the construction of a "more humane discourse" (J. Gerald Kennedy: "La chambre clair marks a fundamental break with his past writings"). 4. To Abjure-Another Trilogy Each voicemightappearauthenticif we heard it in isolation;together,eachstampstheothers with the sign of borrowing(if not of theft). - Tzvetan Todorov, "The Last Barthes"

The horror is this: it is Barthes's death that allows him to come into being, to become an essence. This is what he recognized as deathlike in photography: " . . for what society makes of my photograph, what it reads there, I do not know (in any case, there are so many readings of the same face); but when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person; others- the Other- do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal, classified in a file, ready for the subtlest deceptions. ." Unlike Balzac, who felt the spectral layers of his essence being peeled away one by one with each photograph taken of him, Barthes feels his essence under construction - "I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter." It is the integration of his being which is death, which converts Barthes into a specter, self-present to himself. Kennedy: "In this last book, he has become the faithful witness of his own being." This tendentious reading of Barthes converts his meditation upon how a metaphysics comes to be instituted through the sentiment attendant upon

66

OCTOBER

death into a plea for the truth of that sentiment. And this is then taken as the definitiveBarthes. CameraLucida is not a prophesy of Barthes's death (a banal mysticism), but a recognition that mortality consists, whenever and however death comes, of no longer being able to set paradox against the Doxa, no longer being able to assume another voice, to abjure an earlier pose or fiction. CameraLucida might have been taken as a cautionary tale; instead it has been taken as "a memorable emblem of being, a reconciliation between the writing self and the 'I' of writing" (Kennedy). Barthes relished the drift, the constant movement of the writer, likening it to the game of hand over hand. He traces this drift in his own career in the "autobiography": Let us follow this trajectory once again. At the work's source, the opacity of social relations, a false Nature; the first impulse, the first shock, then, is to demystify (Mythologies);then when the demystification is immobilized in repetition, it must be displaced: semiological science(then postulated) tries to stir, to vivify, to arm the mythological gesture, the pose, by endowing it with a method; this science is encumbered in its turn with a whole repertoire of images: the goal of a semiological science is replaced by the (often very grim) science of the semiologists; hence, one must sever oneself from that, must introduce into this rational image-repertoire the texture of desire, the claims of the body: this, then, is the Text, the theory of the Text. But the Text risks paralysis: it repeats itself, counterfeits itself in lusterless texts, testimonies to a demand for readers, not for a desire to please: the Text tends to degenerate into prattle (Babel). Where to go next? That is where I am now. The "now" is 1975, two years prior to his appointment to the Chair of Literary Semiology at the College de France. No wonder that he took the opportunity of his inaugural address to comment upon the irony of this appointment to a professorship of something he no longer professed-and to speak once again of the necessity to abjure, this time in relation to the work of another who had suffered posthumous integration (after a violent death in which he is said to have been complicit - the fate of a homosexual of his tastes): It is precisely because it persists that writing is forced to shift ground. For power seizes upon the pleasure of writing as it seizes upon all pleasure, to manipulate it and to make of it a product that is gregarious, nonperverse, in the same way that it seizes upon the genetic product of love's pleasure, to turn it into soldiers and fighters to its own advantage. To shift ground, then, can mean: to go where you are not expected, or, more radically, to abjurewhat you have


67

written (but not necessarily what you have thought), when gregarious power uses and subjugates it. Pasolini was thus led to "abjure" (as he said) his Trilogy of Life films because he realized that power was making use of them--yet without regretting the fact that he wrote them in the first place. "I believe," he said in a text published posthumously, "that beforeaction we must never in any case fear annexation by power and its culture. We must behave as if this dangerous eventuality did not exist. . . . But I also believe that afterwards we must be able to realize how much we may have been used by power. And then, if our sincerity or our necessity has been controlled or manipulated, I believe we must have the courage to abjure." The death that Barthes foresaw in his mother's death - his own - was his final annexation and integration, an end to the drift of writing. He recorded this recognition in CameraLucida. How ironic, then, that this very same book should be the occasion for gregarious power to manipulate Barthes's writing into a product that is nonperverse, to unify it immediately into an oeuvre. Susan Sontag: "The voice was always singular." "Much of what Barthes wrote now appears autobiographical." "Inevitably, Barthes's work had to end in autobiography." The most accidental of deaths - crossing a street - determined the end of Barthes's work. Yet gregarious power reads it as inevitable, essential. Starenko: "The temptation to turn CameraLucida into a kind of testament has been almost irresistible." CameraLucida- the book which parts company with all Barthes's other books; the book which constitutes and retrospectively humanizes Barthes's oeuvre. 5. An Oeuvre I am isolating three films by Fassbinder and letting them stand for his oeuvre, but only in order to ask in what ways that unity might be constituted. The three can be bound together by this "biographeme": Fassbinder's lover Armin Meier. But also by the repetition (and variation) of a particular scene involving the characters that we take to represent Armin Meier. Two scenes precede Franz's suicide at the end of Fox and His Friends. In the first, Franz (Fox) returns to the apartment he had bought for himself and his lover Eugen, only to find that the locks have been changed. He rings the bell and the door is opened by Philip, Eugen's former lover, who tells Franz that the apartment now belongs to Eugen. Franz screams: "It's my apartment, paid for with my money." But, as one more step on the way toward his total destruction at the hands of Eugen's scheming family, Franz had signed his apartment over to the family business so that it could be put up as security for a loan. The next scene shows Franz at his alcoholic sister's place, to which Eugen has sent his belongings. After insisting that Franz repay her for the delivery charge, she,

68

OCTOBER

too, throws Franz out, only to regret it and plead with him to return, but too late. In the opening of Fassbinder's sequence of Germanyin Autumn, Fassbinder returns to his Munich apartment a day earlier than expected. Finding Armin still in bed, he berates him for his slovenly life. Armin: "How could I know you'd arrive today?" As they begin to fight about the Mogadishu hijacking, Fassbinder loses his temper and orders Armin out of his apartment. Armin: "It's our apartment." Fassbinder: "My apartment." Armin prepares to leave, saying as he does that it's for good. At the beginning of In a Yearof ThirteenMoons, Elvira returns to her apartment after being beat up by a group of hustlers. Her lover Christoph has unexpectedly returned and shows surprise at seeing Elvira in her degraded state. Elvira: "How was I supposed to know that today you'd. . . ?" During the ensuing fight, Christoph reproaches Elvira for her worthless life and orders her to stop screaming. Elvira: "This is my apartment, Christoph, my apartment, you know, and I'll do whatever I want here." Christoph: "So, it's your apartment?" Elvira: "Yes, my apartment, mine, mine, mine!" Christoph packs his belongings, preparing to leave, this time for good. Elvira, regretting her words, pleads with him to stay, but too late. Through these repetitions, a possible theme of this oeuvre we have constructed for Fassbinder: the catastrophic effect of property relations on lovers (for if we can constitute an oeuvre, then we can discover its thematic unities). Thus, an exchange from Gay Left: Bob Cant: "Fassbinder's Fox is a film about the corruptive nature of capitalism. The fact that the main characters are gay men does of course make it interesting for gay men but it is not primarily a film which attempts to Deal With The Problem of Homosexuality." And, "Relationships are more than just a matter of good individuals and bad individuals- they are a clear reflection of the economic structure of a society and are no doubt intended here to be seen as an allegory of such." Andrew Britton replies: "A clear, honest, coherent portrayal of the ways in which gay relationships are repressed, perverted, curtailed in bourgeois-capitalist society might be . . . admirable. This is not what Fox is. Its version of homosexuality degrades us all, and should be roundly denounced." Fassbinder: "I think it's incidental that the story happens among gays." In taking these three films, which explicitly show a homosexual milieu, as representative of Fassbinder's work, I have already imposed on his oeuvre the necessity of conforming to a biographical fact: Fassbinder's homosexuality. And having isolated this biographical fact as essential, as determinant, it is then possible to proceed to a more specific thematics of the oeuvre, thus continuing to move in the wrong direction.

in his segmentof Germany in Fassbinder RainerWerner Autumn, 1978.

6. The Essential Biographeme:Homosexuality Can one assume thatyou use camouflagein yourfilms, that homosexualrelarelationships?I'm thinkingof Fear Eats tionshipsaredisguisedas heterosexual the Soul. Fassbinder: No, that's what the good Marcel Proust did with his thing-with the boys and the girls. That's not the case with me. And it's not true evenfor The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant ? Fassbinder: They are two women, and that's what they're supposed to be. But you dedicatedthefilm "tohim who becameMarlene." Fassbinder: Surely one can dedicate a film to someone. Yes, but isn't that a hint? The question camouflaged in the foregoing is: is he "out" in his work? A filmmaker who is gay evidently has only two choices: either he makes films which are not about homosexuality, in which case a disguised homosexuality will be the inevitable result - Who'sAfraid of Virginia Wolf?- or he makes films about homosexuality, in which case he necessarily presents his version of homosexuality. Homosexuality, it seems, cannot merely be there; if there, it has to be in the foreground. No matter what the film's official pretext, the subject is "coming out." Richard Dyer: "There is nothing attractive about the situation or the character [in Germanyin Autumn]- yet it is moving in a way different from the compassion displayed/provoked in the earlier films. Partly, no doubt, this is because one recognizes Fassbinder as Fassbinder, and this makes the sequence the most unambiguous coming out in his work. Coming out is always a difficult and moving occurrence. . . "

70

OCTOBER

But it is moving only to the extent that we have already assumed the essential nature of the author's homosexuality. Then the unambiguous act of self-revelation can be understood to free the subject to speak what he has always wanted to say. Such bids for freedom are usually seen as courageous. Sontag: "A brave meditation on the personal, on the self, is at the center of [Barthes's] late writings and seminars. Much of Barthes's work, especially the last three books, with their poignant themes of loss, constitutes a candid defense of his sensuality (as well as his sexuality) - his flavor, his way of tasting the world." Anything short of this candor must presumably be subterfuge, an elaborate ruse of writing masking the inability simply to come out with it. The complex strategies of the text reduced thus to reticence and mystification. Kennedy: "In one sense this [consideration of the haiku in a late seminar] was a typical bit of mystification: as we see in Roland Barthesand A Lover'sDiscourse,he was driven to self-revelation yet curiously unable to bare his heart except in formal, oblique ways." 7. The Subterfugeof Writing Barthes's textual ploys--erudition, method, theory; classification, citaare employed tion, fragmentation; digression, ellipsis, parenthesis--these In called the terrorism of what he discourse. opposition to the against an of their effect of their directness and authority, instrumentality languages unwarranted Barthes sought transparency, languages-for example, the lover's discourse-"spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one." What is this discourse? How does it proceed? "The lover, in fact, cannot keep his mind from racing, taking new measures and plotting against himself. His discourse exists only in outbursts of language, which occur at the whim of the trivial, of aleatory circumstances." These outbursts are called figures and placed under headings arranged alphabetically. They disrupt the inexorable flow of discourse with what Barthes labels the Argumentum:" 'exposition, account, summary, plot outline, invented narrative'; I should add: instrument of distancing, signboard 'a la Brecht." A Lover's Discourse adds another kind of Brechtian signboard, as well- the small-type marginal notes of reference to "ordinary reading . . insistent readings . occasional readings . . . conversations with friends": Pasolini, The Marriage of Figaro, Balzac, La Rochefoucauld, Pellias, Diderot, double bind, Proust, Holderlin, Freud, Bouvardand Picuchet, Zen, Sartre, Greek, D.F., Symposium, etymology, Mme de Sevign6, Gide, Schonberg, haiku. . . . A quick leafing through the text produces this list. One reference, however, appears incessantly: Werther.Barthes's book constantly returns to Goethe's, as if to a manual; A Lover'sDiscourseis written through Werther. And what becomes of these ploys in CameraLucida? The Argumentumis still present, but simply as the traditional table of contents corresponding to the


71

numbered textual fragments. And these now run together smoothly, under the guise of a return to a more traditional narrative. Kennedy: "By its form alone, this work signals a difference, a basic realignment of writer and subject. Surprisingly, the discussion unfolds not through whimsically arranged fragments but through a sustained, cumulative reflection on the nature of photography." And yet, is photography the object of Barthes's narrative? Is this where its directness and transparency lead us? The photography critics agree that Camera Lucida is not about photography, at least not in any instrumental sense. Starenko: "For both [Sam] Varnedoe and [Andy] Grundberg the verdict seems to be that CameraLucida, contrary to its subtitle [Reflectionson Photography],is really about something other than photography - Barthes himself, Proust's epic novel, or death. Any reader of CameraLucida could easily add to the list: the ontology of photography, semiotics, writing (ecriture), Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire, the death of a beloved, Barthes's mother, homosexuality, the soul, phenomenology, immortality. . . . Whichever term one chooses will determine what the book is 'about.' " For his part, Starenko chooses sentiment: "This, to answer the original question, is what CameraLucida is 'about.' " And who is this " 'I' of writing," now realigned with his subject? Is it not another's voice that speaks through Barthes, or through which Barthes speaks? Is this not the voice of Proust: "One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph . . . " and "Now, one November evening shortly after my mother's death, I was going through some photographs"? The narrative machine of CameraLucida may operate smoothly, but we are still left to conjecture about who operates it and where it leads. For if A Lover's Discourse is produced through a concatenation of narratives, Camera Lucida's single narrative produces a concatenation of objects. 8. The Concatenationof Narratives The first time I saw In a Yearof ThirteenMoons, I saw a print in which the episodes had been spliced together out of sequence. I know that this has forever stamped my sense of the film as essentiallyfragmentary. After having read the script and subsequently seen the film again, this time with its sequences in the right order, I realized that its more or less self-contained episodes do follow a certain narrative logic. That logic pertains to the film's narrative present. But a number of past-tense narratives jostle this logic: Elvira's story of her life with Christoph, told to Zora at the slaughterhouse; Sister Gudrun's story of Erwin's childhood, told to Elvira and Zora at the cloister; the cancer victim's story of Saitz, told to Elvira as she is about to enter Saitz's office building; Elvira's interview with Hauer, played as a voice-over during the film's final sequence. And these are interspersed with other narratives, more obliquely connected to Elvira's last days: Soul Frieda's dream, Zora's fairy tale, the suicide's recitation of Schopenhauer, Hauer's fable. Even within these, other narratives: the final

72

OCTOBER

The "I Like to Hike"number from You're Never Too Young, 1955.

monologue of Goethe's TorquatoTasso in Elvira's story at the slaughterhouse; the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis musical number from You'reNever Too Young mimicked by Saitz and his lackies; the changing video images as Zora flips television channels after telling her fairy tale- an interview with Fassbinder, news footage of Pinochet, Chabrol's Le Boucher. The present tense of the narrative then came to seem like nothing other than the space within which the past narratives could be declaimed. As I was thinking about this narrative form, I read this, from A Lover'sDiscourse: As Narrative (Novel, Passion), love is a story which is accomplished, in the sacred sense of the word: it is a program which must be completed. For me, on the contrary, this story has alreadytakenplace; for what is event is exclusively the delight of which I have been the object and whose aftereffects I repeat (and fail to achieve). Enamoration is a drama,if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche Nietzsche gave it: "Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes which excluded action (action took place beforeor behindthe stage)." Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place beforediscourse and behindthe proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order:


73

it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse. NIETZSCHE: The Caseof Wagner.

But more than simply providing the space of the various narratives' agglomeration, In a Yearof ThirteenMoons's present-tense story depends upon what is disclosed in the past tense for its intelligibility; and this intelligibility is retrospective. At the film's end, we hear the interview given to Hauer by Elvira, the publication of which causes Irene's fear and her extraction of Elvira's promise to go to Saitz for mercy. Seeing Saitz again pushes Elvira toward her final despairing act, which occurs as we hear her say, on tape: "He didn't even care. That hurt me a lot. Maybe what I did was right, I don't know, I can't say. . . . " Elvira is referring to her earlier suicide attempt when she had returned from Casablanca a woman, only to be rejected by Saitz anyway. As the final scene fades out, Elvira's voice-over continues, explaining how she was saved from her suicide. Not only does the narrative momentum of In a Yearof ThirteenMoons build inevitably toward this final suicide, but suicide everywhere pervades the film: a central meditation on suicide--from The World as Will and Representation--is spoken by one character after another: Soul Frieda: That outward manifestation which I call my body, I am also conscious of in a completely different way, as my will. Or, my body is the objectivization of my will. Or, as my body is a figment of my imagination, it is thus merely my will. Sister Gudrun [holding a copy of Schopenhauer]: God can't be that cruel; if so there would be no God. Bum: We can say that the world itself is one's world-view. To understand suicide only as the negation of the will to live, as an act of negation, is to completely misunderstand it. Far from being a negation of the will, this phenomenon is a strong affirmation of the will, since this negation means a denial of the joys, not the sorrows of life. The suicide desires life, but is just dissatisfied with the conditions under which life has come to him. He in no way, therefore, gives up the will to live; rather he merely renounces life, and destroys the outward appearance it has for him. Elvira: I think you'd better do it now.

ili~~' '''iiiiiiii ii:-'~'~' ''''''''i'i:i :iiiii'' .l-?::: ?ii ?iii'i~~:: -?'' ii::li'''~~n M ~ i~~ii'--'''?

ai: a: i::~ill'ii iiii:?: g

:::::::::::::: ::_:_-iiiii iiiii-~ ij::~ji: iiiiiiii~-iii~ :i::~~;::--ii~ii-.i~i --~jj:ii-k~iiiii i~:isi :iiiiiii n~-:a:-,::::__:_i~ liti.~i~i'~~-iij-ii_ i:i:ii~ia l~i~iiii~ii--l j:

'IM::

NMIlr,- : : -ji i -i i i~_:'-j

I:

:i

:i :

:;il

.:

M

09-?:a~-:- ?

JI

i' i ji' i i :I"

i

i i :-l.~-i

'Pip,--~:::-:---

Ma:ji: : : : : :I:-,_:

owls

l:

i :D

:-_j:_.

w:

:?hn-::-:-I-:: :-:::'Ki?:1--

i: : i: : :

:

-~: :r: :i-_-: - : _:;-: :

g

sl:i i l i

i i i ~ i i i -,i:~:- ":- i

:

i- ?-:_: :i~ i.?:. : .:-;

li'

.

i ~:ii::il.im-.:::-;:i:--:.'~S

s

l -

.:

i

.

li-:

:_ : -

..

:i::-I i ~i i i i i i ~i i' -i i i:.i

-

;

l'iiii-iiiiii..:i`:Ilk' i

:?:': :

:

i:l

i~:

.i: :

:?

-:

i::-:::of:

-:-:_i ji j i i - : : -i

:

: :il~ :

: - -:

-: ._

: :

.:; -

. .:

~

I?-~ai~;?i:,

-:,~i: El

,~ i~ i~

:i :

i -;: - i: - :_:

:

:- `c- i-: - - '-:

-:

:-i

i

:_

-:

: : : :

w: j:i :j : i::j

?:

O

i-

?: :- i

:,.

:.

i- i

-i'

i

: - '- - ' '

~i

ii

- i

_-i

~-.

i i i li i~i -

: ~ij i: i:- ~:-i~: :

-:i~,

_j:

i- i:~- -;RIN

:----iiiiiiii::i:ii~:::iii-::-::i:.:_

-i :-

-

:i

I:sii~~i.:~s:--~i:i5.:i~~-:i -:: i -i i~i i :

~

::: ---:-:-;--::van;---

':i

i:-i~

.:-

:i~- :i-

- :_

- :-i ~-i-i i i i-i

: i -i -

AA:i~i--.--:-_

:i_

i- A

q g

_ i -i si- -

. . . - -:_.-i :_- :

:- :j-i

:i-

I N

M-

i: i l:-i ?_.- -i-i~-: i i

si.~ :

:-

M :_

i'

::::::::::::_:_i:r:;

~:s~: l~i~?i?

E

: : :

::

-

-? -':

:-

-'- :- :'-: - -:-"':i: :-l

EE:::I?--j:;::

-

:

i

i-i:-i :

: iiiii-:ii'~i-~-g

:-i:::-:-?--?:-':--:i::

.i ;i ~i -i;:-i:): i:

.("~~;I-`

l i;

l:-

- i i -i~i

-:- - -' :-:': : :

i

: '-: ?:

-?

::::

i-: liiii''-iii~

i:.

:-

i i-i-:l:i:i : :.i-

-: :

:

:

iii-i~iii~i~iii-ii-~ ii~~ -01 -iiiii~? ii~-i:-i I: : -_: :-_-:_:-;?

~

'El

:

.-

:,

:-i

"W:1i ~ i ~i

i-l~ig

ig

75

Fassbinder,Franz, Fox . . .

9. Suicide and Biography Madame Bovary, c'estmoi. - Flaubert Der Biberkopf das bin ich. - Fassbinder I guess thefilm In a Year of Thirteen Moons was a directreactionto the suicideofyourfriendArminMeier. To what extentwas the moviean existential necessityfor you? Fassbinder: I felt the necessity to do something. There were basically three possibilities. One was to go to Paraguay and become a farmer. I don't know why Paraguay; it just came to me. It might sound like coquetry now but at the time it wasn't that at all; it was real to me. Another possibility was to stop being interested in what was happening around me. That would have been like a mental illness. The third possibility was to make a film-certainly the easiest for me. It's perfectly logical that that's what I did. What's important for me is that I managed to make a film that doesn't simply translate my emotions about the suicide, my pain and despair about the fact that lots of things went wrong in our relationship. Of course I made a film which takes its impulse from Armin, but - this I wouldn't have been able to do before-it extends far beyond that impulse. It tells much more than what I could have told about Armin, and that, for me, was a decision for life. In a Year of ThirteenMoons opens with a barely visible scene in which several male hustlers cruise along a bank of the Main at dawn. On the sound track is the adagio movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony (also used at the opening - again at dawn - of Visconti's Death in Venice).A rolling title, the film's epigraph, suggests that what we are about to see is a story of fate, governed by natural forces: Every seventh year is a year of the moon. Certain people, whose existence is influenced mainly by their emotions, suffer from intense depressions in these moon years. This is also true to a lesser degree of years with thirteen new moons. And when a moon year is also a year with thirteen new moons, it often results in inevitable personal catastrophes. . . . One of these is the year 1978 [the year of Armin's suicide; the year of Elvira's suicide]. . As the day begins to brighten, Elvira (dressed as a man) is introduced; she slips a hustler some money, initiating the first in a series of encounters of the last five

76

OCTOBER

days of her life. Fassbinder: "The film In a Yearof ThirteenMoons describes a person's encounters during the last five days of his life, and attempts to determine whether this one person's decision not to carry on through these encountersbeyond this last day, the fifth, should be rejected, at least understood, or maybe even found acceptable." What are these encounters through which such a determination might be made? They are-again-the means by which we will encounter Elvira's has Fassbinder published an extended narrative of the life of biography. Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt under the simple title "A Biography." It begins, as biographies do, with the story of the mother, Anita Weishaupt, who bore Erwin illegitimately while her husband was a prisoner of war. This is the story we hear told by Sister Gudrun (played by Fassbinder's own mother, Liselotte Eder/Lilo Pempeit), although in less detail. Indeed, this biography, the central text of In a Yearof ThirteenMoons, never appears in its entirety; like suicide, "A Biography" simply pervades the film. In a note preceding his story of Elvira, Fassbinder attributes the biography not this time to the forces of nature but to their opposite, to the city of Frankfurt, "a place whose particular structure virtually provokes biographies like this one-or at least doesn't make them seem particularly unusual." Another such story is Berlin Alexanderplatz,D6blin's novel of 1929, written in a montage technique which "allows the city of Berlin to speak in a thousand voices." It is the story of Franz Biberkopf (the full name of the central character of Fox- Fox der sprechender Kopf), which Fassbinder read as an adolescent: "It helped me to admit my tormenting fear, which almost crippled me, the fear of acknowledging my homosexual desires, of realizing my repressed needs . . "

Fassbinder,Franz, Fox. . .

77

When he later reread the novel, he recognized that he was Franz Biberkopf: "An enormous part of myself, my attitudes, my reactions, so many things that I had considered all my own, were none other than those described by D6blin." Quoting these phrases, Wolfram Schfitte is dismayed: "A second-hand life, dictated by literature: an 'I' invented by someone else." 10. The Soul You know, Elvira was a very beautiful woman the first year after the operation. Soul Frieda: Cancer? Zora: No, no disease. She just had everything down there cut off. Soul Frieda: So? That's not the reason she's unhappy. She was probably always a woman in her soul. Zora: No, that's just it. She just did it. And she didn't even have a good reason, like, because of her soul, or something. I don't think she was even gay. Isn't that right, baby? You weren't even gay when you went to Casablanca.

Zora:

This conversation rehearses the clich6s of transsexualism: its denial of make the homosexual desire, its determination by an essential identity-to body conform to the soul. But Elvira's identity, like Fassbinder's, is arbitrarily imposed from without, in her case the result of an off-hand remark by Saitz: "It would be really nice if you were a girl." The terrifying arbitrariness of such an act as Elvira's trip to Casablanca is what a faith in the soul, in human essence, would abolish. According to Kennedy, Barthes, too, had a conversion experience in Casablanca, one which would ultimately lead to his "rediscovery of the soul." This "mortality crisis" was related by Barthes in one of his late seminars: Barthes recalled how one afternoon he had visited a waterfall [a favorite site near Casablanca] with a few of his graduate students, but feeling increasingly detached and depressed, he returned alone to his apartment and there experienced a powerful consciousness of his impending death. The encounter with this "physical presence" lasted several hours, and afterward Barthes felt a remorse about his career, perceiving an absolute rupture between his emotional life and mental life. The direction the seminar took from this relating of the "incident in Casablanca" to a discussion of the "poetics of the haiku" caused Kennedy's accusation of Barthes's evasiveness, of his failure to express his real need to recenter himself, to integrate his emotional with his mental life. But with the writing of Rainer WernerFassbinderin Fox and His Friends, 1974.

78

OCTOBER

CameraLucida, it seems, the evasion disappeared, and Barthes "finally arrived at a concept of a soul in defiance of his own theory of the subject." "La chambre claire reflects a centering of consciousness in the use of a single voice, a consistent perspective, through which Barthes expresses concerns which are rigorously personal." "The voice belongsto Barthes and the story is self-evidently his own." Sontag agrees: "His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it." But, of course, precisely the reverse: the grain of the voice, as Barthes described it, is not the personal but its opposite, all that is individual without being personal. It is the (material) body, not the soul. To explain what he means by the voice's grain, Barthes describes the Russian church bass: The voice is not personal: it expresses nothing of the cantor, of his soul; it is not original (all Russian cantors have roughly the same voice), and at the same time it is individual: it has us hear a body which has no civil identity, no 'personality', but which is nevertheless a separate body. . . . The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance. . the whole of musical pedagogy teaches not the culture of the .. 'grain' of the voice but the emotive modes of its delivery - the myth of respiration. How many singing teachers have we not heard prophesying that the art of vocal music rested entirely on the mastery, the correct discipline of breathing! The breath is the pneuma, the soul swelling or breaking, and any exclusive art of breathing is likely to be a secretly mystical art (a mysticism levelled down to the measure of the long-playing record). The lung, a stupid organ. . . , swells but gets no erection; it is in the throat, place where the phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that signifiance explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance. Not content with merely opposing the body to the soul, Barthes resorts to this image of fellatio. Should we then suppose that his mother's death forced him to repudiate this as well? that the body's pleasures, impersonal as they are, were forsaken for more "rigorously personal concerns"? The view of CameraLucida as returning to an unproblematic notion of human essence, as a book which is "purposive and referential," as constituting a "work rather than a text," and as possessing an "end beyond the play of words - the rediscovery of a soul" (Kennedy) - this view would deny, precisely, signifiance:the indeterminacy, the arbitrariness, the erotics of the signifier, the disappearance of the subject in the text.


79

11. The Dedication Whatfollows the dedication(i.e., the work itself) has little relation to this dedication. The objectI give is no longertautological(I give you what I give you), it is interpretable; it has meaning(meanings)greatly in excess of its address,;thoughI writeyour name on my work, it is for "them"that it has been written (the others, the readers). -Roland Barthes, A Lover'sDiscourse

Much has been made of Barthes's dedication of CameraLucida "in homage to L'Imaginaireby Jean-Paul Sartre." Dana Polan: "It is not surprising that CameraLucida is dedicated to the Sartre of L'Imaginaire,for Barthes's narrative of his personal involvement duplicates the agon of the existential individual central to Sartre's early work." Sontag: "While a quarrel with Sartre's view of literature lies at the heart of his first book, 'Writing Degree Zero' (Sartre is never mentioned by name), an agreement with Sartre's view of the imagination, and its obsessional energies, surfaces in Barthes's last book, 'Camera Lucida' (written 'in homage' to the early Sartre, the author of 'L'Imaginaire')." In fact, Sartre is mentioned by name repeatedly in WritingDegreeZero, a book for which Sontag wrote the introduction to the first American edition; though she claims to have known Barthes "personally," she can hardly claim to have read him carefully. There is no question but that Barthes has turned to those philosophical problems which engaged Sartre in his early work on the phenomenology of the image, but to say that CameraLucida represents anything so simple as a duplication of, or direct agreement with The Psychologyof Imagination is precisely the kind of reductive view that Barthes's book resists. Indeed, given Barthes's argument for the necessity to abjure, it may well be that he has returned to Sartre in order to counter the reverse but equally reductive view that Barthes's work stands in simple opposition to Sartre's. Barthes returns to the early Sartre, to "classical phenomenology, the kind I had known in my adolescence (and there has not been any other since)," through returning to photography; for the photograph raises for Barthes "questions which derive from a 'stupid' or simple metaphysics (it is the answers which are complicated): probably the true metaphysics." But these questions cannot be identical with those of The Psychologyof Imaginationsince Barthes sees them as posed precisely because the photograph is unlike any other kind of image: "It is precisely because Photography is an anthropologically new object that it must escape, it seems to me, usual discussions of the image." Sartre, on the other hand, makes no distinction at all for the photograph: "Mental images, caricatures, photos are so

80

OCTOBER

many species of the same genus, and from now on we can attempt to ascertain what it is they have in common." In this attempt Sartre moves from image type to image type, ultimately arriving at his object: the mental image of his friend Peter. But at every step along this route, if the image of Peter has meaning it is because Sartre himself has "the intention that animates it": "If I see Peter by means of the photo, it is becauseIput him there."Barthes takes up this notion only to complicate it, to render this intentionality fundamentally ambivalent: "Suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph is in no way animated (I do not believe in 'lifelike' photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure." What had been for Sartre the simple "I animate it," has become for Barthes the far more problematic "It animates me, and I animate it." To reduce these to an equivalence is not to grant Barthes his individuality but to abolish it. The specific photographic adventure to which the second half of Camera Lucida is devoted is Barthes's attempt to rediscover his mother, to find the image that would assuage his grief. This search for the essence of his mother in an image reenacts Sartre's search for the image of Peter-that is, its strategy is this textual doubling - except that Barthes's quest is couched in private terms. This is not, however, in order "to fill the scene of the text with my individuality; but on the contrary, to offer, to extend this individuality to a science of the subject." 12. The Voicesin the Text (for in orderto speak one must seek support from othertexts) -Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes Roland Barthes, CameraLucida,trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1981. Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New ,"The Grain of the Voice," in Image-MusicYork, Hill and Wang, 1977, pp. 179-189. S"Lecturein Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collfege de France,"trans. Richard Howard, October,no. 8 (Spring 1979), 3-16. A Lover'sDiscourse:Fragments,trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill and -1, Wang, 1978. , RolandBarthesbyRolandBarthes,trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1977. Andrew Britton, "Foxed,"GayLeft, no. 3; repr. Jump Cut, no. 16 (November 1977), 22-23. Bob Cant, "Fassbinder'sFox,"GayLeft, no. 2; repr.Jump Cut,no. 16 (November 1977), 22. Richard Dyer, "Reading Fassbinder'sSexual Politics," in Fassbinder,ed. Tony Rayns, London, British Film Institute, 1980, pp. 54-64.


81

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "In einem Jahr mit dreizehn Monden: Expose zu einem Spielfilm," S!A!U!, no. 2 (1978), 52-59. Gerald Kennedy, "Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of Writing," The J. GeorgiaReview, vol. XXXV, no. 2 (Summer 1981), 381-398. Wolfgang Limmer, Rainer WernerFassbinder, Filmemacher(a collection of interviews), Hamburg, Spiegel-Verlag, 1981. Dana Polan, "Roland Barthes and the Moving Image," October,no. 18 (Fall 1981), 41-46. Wilhelm Roth, "Annotated Filmography," in Fassbinder, trans. Ruth McCormick, New York, Tanam Press, 1981. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychologyof Imagination, Secaucus, N.J., Citadel Press, 1972. Wolfram Schiitte, "Franz, Mieze, Reinhold, Death and the Devil: Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz,"in Fassbinder, trans. Ruth McCormick, New York, Tanam Press, 1981. Susan Sontag, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes," The New Yorker,April 26, 1982, pp. 122-141. Michael Starenko, "Roland Barthes: The Heresy of Sentiment," Afterimage, vol. 9, no. 4 (November 1981), 6-7. Tzvetan Todorov, "The Last Barthes," trans. Richard Howard, CriticalInquiry, vol. 7, no. 3 (Spring 1981), 449-454.

Bewitched by the Holy Whore

TONY PIPOLO The best thing I can think of would be to createa union betweensomethingas beautiful and powerful and wonderfulas Hollywood films and a criticismof the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a Germanfilm beautifuland extravagantandfantastic, and neverthelessable to go against the existing order,like someHollywood massfilms which are in no way apologiesfor the establishment, as is always superficiallymaintained. - Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Between 1969 and 1980, Fassbinder directed- and in most cases wrote and edited - thirty-three feature films,' almost twice the number made within a comparable period by Jean-Luc Godard. This productivity, even when measured against that of the Hollywood auteurs who left their mark on Fassbinder's generation, remains impressive. In his first eleven working years, Fassbinder made more films than Douglas Sirk in his entire American period, and more than Nicholas Ray, Joseph Losey, Sam Fuller, Robert Aldrich, or Blake Edwards in their entire respective careers. Billy Wilder, John Huston, Vincente Minnelli, and Otto Preminger have, in Hollywood careers that span four decades, made between twenty-five and thirty-six features. The most productive of postwar European Rossellini, Bergman, Chabrol-do of prolificacy. A full account of Fassbinder's acnot approach Fassbinder's levelfilmmakers-tivity must also include his work in the theater, as both a playwright and direc1. This tally includes those films Fassbinder made for German television, three of which are in several parts: Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972), filmed in five parts; Bolwieser (1977), in two parts; and Berlin Alexanderplatz(1980), in fourteen parts. Three other titles can be added if we include the video productions of The Coffeehouse(1970), Bremen Freedom(1972), and Nora Helmer (1973), all of feature length.

Beware of a Holy Whore, 1970.

4lk:

84

OCTOBER

tor, and his acting in more than a dozen films of other directors, as well as in many of his own. Since many of the films are not available in the United States, and his theater work is generally unknown outside of Germany, a complete assessment is not possible. Nevertheless, a sufficient number of the films have been seen in this country so that we may speculate on the nature and importance of his work in relation to both the Hollywood and European traditions.2 Fassbinder's position within the German film industry differs from that of Wim the Hollywood director in the studio system. Like his colleaguesWerner Volker had to others-he has Wenders, Herzog, Schl6ndorff among and his did on and subsidies; depend government grants reputation popularity not until recently make him economically secure and independent.3 It has been suggested by Thomas Elsaesser that one reason for his amazing level of activity was the necessity of maintaining a large stock company at his disposal.4 Fassbinder's reputation for bringing films in "under schedule and below budget" also happens to have won him many offers from television companies.5 The compulsion to work at this speed and intensity is reflected in countless interviews in which Fassbinder speaks not of "expression" or "artistic vision" but of his need to reach an audience. Fassbinder distinguishes, moreover, between the respective audiences of different mediums. The "intellectual" audience, for whom his features are intended, "is completely free to work on the problem with all [their] intellectual capacities," whereas for "the larger public that the TV series reached, it would have been reactionary, even criminal, to give a hopeless picture of the world."' Fassbinder's cinema proclaims its seriousness through an apparently uncompromising choice and view of thematic material; but it insures accessibility through its brilliant and cunning appropriation of traditional cinematic strategies. The canonical forms of narrative cinema accommodate the most controversial of subjects. Films such as The Merchantof Four Seasons(1971), Fox and His Friends (1975), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), and The Bitter Tears of Petra vonKant (1972), as well as Fear Eats the Soul (1973), Despair (1977), and Lili Marleen(1980), have their place in the European - particularly the French and 2. Particularly helpful in the preparation of this essay was the retrospective of seventeen films shown last fall at the Film Forum in New York. I would also like to thank Barry Gillam for providing useful documentation. For an account of the economic and production situation in postwar Germany which has a 3. direct bearing on Fassbinder, see Thomas Elsaesser, "The Postwar German Cinema," in Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns, London, BFI, 1980 (revised and expanded edition), pp. 1-16. Thomas Elsaesser, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles," in Fassbinder, ed. Rayns, p. 35. 4. 5. Ibid. "Interview #2" with Christian Braad Thomsen, "Five Interviews with Fassbinder," in 6. Fassbinder, ed. Rayns, p. 85.

Bewitchedby theHoly Whore

85

cinematic resurgences generated in the late 1950s and '60s, and that in the Hollywood tradition. beyond To enumerate the handful of international filmmakers who have been able to resist the American model and to create unique narrative forms is to sense the strength and resiliency of that model and the system of representation on which it is founded. In the quotation which precedes this essay, Fassbinder not only declares his passion for the Hollywood model- something he shares with more radical European directors- but also asserts a conviction central to his engagement with filmmaking: the model itself is not irreconcilable with that critique of social practice generally considered to be antithetical to mainstream narrative cinema. Prior to 1974, Fassbinder had made seventeen films. Several of theseLove Is Colder Than Death (1969), Gods of the Plague (1969), The AmericanSoldier in their eccentric and allusive stylistics, the degree to (1970)-demonstrate, which Fassbinder had absorbed Hollywood genre films. Others, notably The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Fear Eats the Soul, show a tempering of eccentricity in a drive toward an aesthetic founded more solidly upon the tradition of the Hollywood auteur. After 1974, that drive continues, albeit sporadically. Effi Briest (1974), Fox and His Friends, Mother Kisters Goes to Heaven (1975), Chinese Roulette(1976), Despair, The Marriageof Maria Braun, and Lili Marleen- however different from each other- all display the qualities of that tradition in the fine tuning of an expressive mise-en-scene: precision camerawork that articulates nuances of character, the framing and reframing of figures in relation to signifying aspects of the decor, a dramatic use of foreground and background, a symbolic use of light and shadow, and in many cases a rich play on color schemes in tandem with psychological or thematic motifs. Even the inevitable "title" or "theme" song which accompanied Hollywood films throughout the 1950s7 finds its equivalent in Fassbinder's abundant quotation of American rock and folk music, always suited to the narrative occasion.8 There is, to be sure, no simple duplication of the Hollywood model; Fassbinder has not attempted to remake his favorite films, nor does he simply reproduce the styles he most admires. There are, in fact, crucial differences on Italian-

7. Consider, for example, the title songs of three Douglas Sirk films from the 1950s which Fassbinder greatly admires: Writtenon the Wind (1956), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1957), and Imitation of Life (1958). Fassbinder has written glowingly of all three in "Six Films by Douglas Sirk," trans. Thomas Elsaesser, in Douglas Sirk, ed. Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday, Edinburgh,

1972, pp. 95-107.

8. Consider the uses he makes of "The Great Pretender" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant; the Leonard Cohen songs, "Suzanne" and "Marianne," heard on the jukebox in Bewareof a Holy Whore;"Here We Go Again" in Godsof the Plague; "I'mJust a Lonely Boy" and "You Are My Destiny" in Jail Bait; and "Around the World in Eighty Days" in Mother Kilsters Goes to Heaven, to name a few.

86

OCTOBER

the level of style alone which refute any facile claim of this sort. For although his films deploy those strategies associated with the Hollywood model, they are less dependent on devices that reinforce identification. Fassbinder's editing practice, in conjunction with the unstressed narrative rhythms of his films, tends to de-emphasize notions of "rising" and "falling" action, of climax, of dramatic peaks. Those marks of transition between sequences which unambiguously position each moment within, and sustain the temporality of, the diegesis are largely absent from his work. Drawing attention to such devices in Effi Briest represents his attempt to fully engage himself with the nineteenthcentury novel's aesthetic postulates; here is a foregrounded exception that proves the rule. While several of Fassbinder's films seem to suspend the very strategies he has mastered, this does not indicate a fundamentally divided sensibility. When, as in Godsof thePlague (1969) and TheAmericanSoldier(1970), Fassbinder ostensibly imitates certain conventions and mannerisms of the American gangster film, the material is redeemed by the expressive devices offilm noir: high-contrast lighting, articulate camera movements, atmospheric music, elliptical dialogue, silent gestures, meaningful glances, and so on. The stressed references to Hollywood prototypes-particularly to the films of Raoul Walsh, Samuel Fuller, and John Huston - make these films highly self-conscious and at times undeniably amusing, but not really parodic.9 The protagonists are not merely caricatures of American genre types; they are also social outcasts of a contemporary Germany. The opening shot of Gods of the Plague is virtually a transposition of the first image and sentence of Alfred D-blin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, a novel in which the confused "hero" is released from prison and must find his way in a mercenary society.'0 The view of the law in both films is, if anything, too close to reports of West German police tactics to be read as satire. And the final, excessive slow-motion tableau of The AmericanSoldier, in which the protagonist's corpse is repeatedly embraced by his brother, is too evidently a release of homoerotic tensions to be contained within the category of the impersonal genre exercise. Fassbinder's sentiments on Douglas Sirk, expressed prior to his own production of films close in style to the tradition in which Sirk worked, is illuminating in this context: "Film is like a battleground," Sam Fuller, who once wrote a script for Douglas Sirk," said in a film by Jean-Luc Godard, who, shortly In several interviews, in fact, Fassbinder repeatedly denies any conscious attempt at 9. parody in these films. As was indicated earlier, Fassbinder filmed Berlin Alexanderplatzfor German television as a 10. series running more than fifteen hours; it was shown during 1980. This is actually an exaggeration. Fuller submitted a script which Sirk liked, but the pro11. ducers brought in another writer to change it. See Sirk on Sirk (interviews with Jon Halliday), New York, Viking Press, 1972, p. 77.

BewitchedbytheHoly Whore

87

The American Soldier, 1970.

before he made A Bout de Souffle,wrote a rhapsody on Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die. But not one of us, Godard or Fuller or me or anybody else, can touch Douglas Sirk. Sirk has said: "cinema is blood, is tears, violence, hate, death, and love." And Sirk has made films with blood, with tears, with violence, hate- films with death and films with love. Sirk has said: you can't make films about things; you can only make films with things, with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things which make life worth living. Sirk has also said: a director's philosophy is lighting and camera angles. And Sirk has made the tenderest films I know, they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn't despise them as we do.12 A certain ambivalence with respect to filmic conventions, both stressed and subverted, largely accounts for Fassbinder's appeal to seemingly opposed critical positions. On the one hand, his acknowledged affinity with Hollywood stylists has attracted the interests of those auteurists for whom success is measured by the degree to which mise-en-scene "expresses" narrative and thematic material. Within this perspective, Fassbinder's bolder cinematic enterprises appear as deviations, the results of a fractured artistic conception. For the politicized criticism of the 1970s, on the other hand, it is precisely that divisiveness which is of primary interest, validating Fassbinder's practice 12.

Fassbinder, "Six Films by Douglas Sirk,"p. 95.

88

OCTOBER

within the dominant cinema of capitalism. What had been, for the auteurist strategies of the sixties, indexes of stylistic triumph over mundane material, became signifiers of the problematic posed by the work, its deconstructive gesture. The very same directors rediscovered and acclaimed by Cahiers du Cinemain the 1950s were now being reexamined in terms of an alleged subversion of "their own ideological coherence.""' Thus, for Andrew Sarris, Douglas Sirk had "a personal style, distinct from the impressive technological apparatus of the Universal-MCA-Decca complex. . . . The essence of Sirkian cinema is the direct confrontation of all material. . . . Sirk . . . by a full-bodied formal development . . . transcends the ridiculous, as form comments on content .*"4 And for Paul Willemen, "it is quite evident that [Sirk] shares the ... complete rejection of the conventions of illusionism. . . . He drew on his theatrical experience not to break the rules of [the] genres, but to intensify them . . . and by altering the rhetoric of the bourgeois melodrama, through stylization and parody, Sirk's films distanciate themselves from the bourgeois ideology."15 While Willemen appears to extend and clarify the notion of "form commenting on content," he does not account for the immediacy and force of Sirk's emotional appeal- clearly the quality Fassbinder seems to envy. One would, however, want to locate and define the basis of this sort of reading of Sirkian stylization in Fassbinder's case. Unlike Sirk, Fassbinder is not filming scripts imposed by a Hollywood studio but those of his own composition, explicitly critical of bourgeois ideology. But more precisely, what are the role and function of an appropriation of those elaborate strategies which, in a cinema like Sirk's, were allegedly deconstructive and "distancing" with respect to bourgeois ideology? Do they intensify the rules of the genre? Do they constitute a critique of the illusionism they generate? Do they constitute a subtext? If these questions are valid, they also obfuscate a fairly obvious point. As Fassbinder has told us, his films are aimed at a reproduction of the "beautiful and powerful and wonderful" Hollywood films and at a production of a radical critique. This assertion instructs us of both his achievements and his limitations. Clearly, he refers to the introduction of social problems into established genres and to a more critical attitude toward social patterns. There is, however, no automatic connection between critical or taboo subject matter and radical form. Walter Benjamin, in discussing the futile attempts of leftist intellectual writers in Germany in the twenties, noted that "the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of

Paul Willemen, "Notes Towards the Construction of Readings of Tourneur," in Jacques 13. Tourneur,ed. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, Edinburgh, Edinburgh Film Festival, 1975, p. 19. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1968, pp. 109-110. 14. Paul Willemen, "Distanciation and Douglas Sirk," in Douglas Sirk, pp. 24, 26, 29. 15.


89

revolutionary themes, indeed, can propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it seriously into question."16 In the superimposition of Hollywood stylistics upon his material, Fassbinder neither challenges traditional forms nor transforms their principles. This apparent incongruence is cited as evidence of his "distancing" techniques. (Sirk's "distanciation" appears as a matter of interpretation; Fassbinder's, as foregrounded.) A question arises - as for all narrative cinema that claims a modernist stance: what are the nature and limits of the deconstructive function in those formal gestures which are recuperated at the level of the narrative's psychological or thematic aspects? We should distinguish between those filmmakers who contest the very postulates of the narrative/filmic juncture through the creation of a radical form of discourse (Godard), and those who carry stylization of the given syntax to its limits (Fassbinder). Divergences, then, from the conventional narrative function, as in Katzelmacher(1969) and In a Yearof ThirteenMoons (1978), present strong indications of an effort toward new narrative form, the control of an excess of pathos. Both, however, are grounded in the premises of classical film narrative. From this perspective one understands why Fassbinder has been so cordially received. The majority of his films fall well within the parameters defined by auteurism in its concern with the director's relation to the "rules of the genre" or the stylistics of allegory, the generation of a subtext. The often problematic question for auteurism- that of the filmmaker's more fundamental position with respect to cinematic representation-has, naturally, been stressed by more theoretically oriented criticism. For both groups, the dazzling effect of Fassbinder's enormous productivity has tended to blur the contradictions of his work, encouraging a deferral of critical judgment. The question that must dominate discussion of Fassbinder's existing films is this: is it enough to replaceHollywood forms and syntax with idiosyncratic, unpredictable styles of one's own if one wishes to create a cinema that is critical and at the same time popular? Or is it necessary to transformHollywood forms and syntax?17 By 1979, when Tony Rayns posed this question, it was hardly the question to ask concerning Fassbinder, who had long since gained the favor of international film festivals and was proving himself accessible to an ever widening audience outside Germany. It was apparent by then, and has since become increasingly so, that the "idiosyncratic and unpredictable" nature of Fassbinder's "styles" articulates the difficulty of replacing or transforming Hollywood forms 16. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in Reflections,trans. EdmundJephcott, York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979, p. 229. 17. Tony Rayns, "Fassbinder, Form and Syntax," in Fassbinder, ed. Rayns, p. 81.

New

90

OCTOBER

and syntax when one is formed in that tradition, in awe of its achievements, and committed to the mass audience.'8 Like Bertolucci, Fassbinder was first introduced to American audiences through the New York Film Festival; since 1971, nine of his films have been shown in this country for the first time at the festival.19 The ideological and political commitments of both Bertolucci and Fassbinder, evident in their filmmaking practice, are those of the moderate, humanist, liberal left - precisely those of their middle-class audiences. Finally, Fassbinder and Bertolucci enlisted the critical support of those who also supported Chabrol and other European filmmakers primarily involved in the refinement of the classical American cinema's stylistic strategies in the interests of an ostensibly more sophisticated weltanschauung. With the notable exceptions of Dreyer, Bresson, Godard, and Straub, much of the European cinema in the last few decades is not so far removed from the Hollywood model of production. It is, however, all too tempting to make convenient parallels and to map a newly emerging cinematic landscape in terms of coordinates familiar from preceding ones, thereby domesticating individual national cinemas, foregrounding those figures who best resemble established favorites from other contexts.20 18. Fassbinder's calculated estimation of the limits of the toleration of the public extends to those festival audiences to whom a critical point of view on issues such as racial prejudice, women's liberation, sexual role-playing, domestic enslavement, social injustice, and political tyranny, presented within the framework of polished and sophisticated but tried and effective cimematic forms, is not only acceptable but de rigueur. It is usually when subject and form violate expectations, reject familiar structures, and subvert identification that the "sophisticated" audience withholds its allegiance. Anyone who has sat through screenings at the New York Film Festival can attest to this. Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), according to one New York critic, "electrified" the atmosphere in the auditorium and constituted a breakthrough to a "new sexual maturity" on the screen. A few years later, however, when Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses(1976), after first being denied entry through U.S. customs, was finally shown at a festivalsponsored screening at the Museum of Modern Art, responses ranged from boredom to outrage. It is not difficult to see why. Bertolucci had become a celebrated European auteurwho had struck the perfect balance between "controversial" subject matter and a chiaroscuro mise-en-sc'ene in an earlier film The Conformist(1970). Last Tango led its audience by means of the same artful methods through the psychosexual anguish experienced by an American male protagonist, played by perhaps the most respected film star of his time- Marlon Brando. Oshima's work, on the other hand, outside the Western tradition, refused to proffer any familiar narrative, character, or formal device. One was confronted, almost unrelievedly, by the spectacle of an increasingly obsessive sexuality disjunct from psychological moorings; there were no flashbacks, no angstridden monologues, no dazzling period reconstructions. The New York Film Festival has shown virtually every Bertolucci feature since 1964 as 19. well. The festival equally endorsed Godard at every festival between 1963 and 1970 and again in 1972 and 1980. Godard, however, had already been exposed to American audiences when his first feature, Breathless, opened here in 1961. The film had drawn international attention to his importance two years before New York had its first film festival. Given the marketplace conditions that govern the film world, this often creates an instant 20. hierarchy of exportable artists even before any representative sampling of works from a crosssection of a particular cinema can be seen, absorbed, and understood. These circumstances account, in part, for Fassbinder's popularity here while several of his compatriots, for example, Alexander Kluge and Reinhard Hauff, have had only minimal exposure.


91

Thus, Fassbinder's prolific activity has prompted commentators and interviewers to make facile cross-national correspondences; we find, for example, in articles and interviews, highly questionable parallels drawn to Godard, although the best criticism on Fassbinder recognizes the superficiality of the comparison.2" Any such comparison fails to acknowledge the precise nature, the intensity, and the scope of Godard's contribution, the manner in which his films swept aside questions of whether or how to "replace" or "transform" the Hollywood model, dissolving them through a sustained discourse located at the nexus of cinema's insertion in Western culture. Godard's passion for language and the arts, together with his evolving political critique, gave his work an unparalleled density. Every film was an examination of institutionalized modes of thinking and acting, not only within its particular frame of social reference, but in its construction and deconstruction of image-sound relations. His work throughout the 1960s was genuinely radical in its aesthetics, and in its demand for critical thinking, speaking, writing, acting, and filmmaking; Godard was, without question, the filmmaker provocateur par excellence. But at the same time his work celebrated the signs of true life in the joining of theory and practice. To distinguish Fassbinder's cinema from Godard's is to recognize that it addresses different issues, performs different tasks. It is to recognize, as well, the ways in which Fassbinder's work emerges from the quiescent climate common to Europe and America following the activism of the 1960s. The growing critical interest in Fassbinder's work throughout the 1970s and his appeal to a widening audience of successful, college-educated, middle-class consumers are a direct effect of this conjuncture. That aspect of his style to which a variety of terms have been applied- Brechtian distanciation, alienation, detachment, confounded criticism by virtue of its anti-illusionism, theatricalization-has didactic character and an unabashed pathos. The films hesitate between embrace of the Hollywood aesthetic and recoil from the full cathexis of that style. Perhaps more than any other contemporary narrative filmmaker, Fassbinder has adopted, together with dominant standards of production and mise-enscene, the sullen tenor of disillusionment in the 1970s for which the aestheticized strategy of distanciation is a fitting analogue. There is irony in the fact that it is the very adoption of the Hollywood idiom-"the language that a Ger21. Elsaesser, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles," p. 27. One can still find in the pages of the New YorkTimes, however, the kind of unqualified declaration that passes for critical acumen. Thus, in assessing Fassbinder's career, Vincent Canby writes, "There hasn't been a comparable phenomenon in film since Jean-Luc Godard came on the scene in the early 1960s" (review of The Third Generation,September 9, 1980). This is not necessarily an indication of Canby's failure to perceive the differences between Godard and Fassbinder, but is rather a reflection of the journalistic tendency to encourage vague, uncritical thinking. One might also note that the Timess senior film critic at the time Godard came on the scene-Bosley Crowther-was consistently hostile to Godard's work and oblivious of its aims and intentions, which might suggest something of its far more radical impact on the film world.

92

OCTOBER

man film-maker in the Seventies still shares with his predominantly under-30 working-class and lower-middle-class audience"22- which has bridged the gap between Europe and America, attracting the middle-class patrons of art houses and university film clubs who constitute Fassbinder's audience in this country. For Fassbinder's American audience is a particular one. To understand it is to recognize that none of Fassbinder's confrontations with the topical issues of the 1970s-women's liberation, gay rights, the breakdown of the family, terrorism - has evoked much response from militant groups organized around these issues. One therefore wonders if this lack of response does not stand in direct relation to the ways the issues are presented in Fassbinder's films. The acknowledgment of societal erosion and personal alienation as circumscribed by the cinematic codes of the Hollywood/European production axis is consistent with the curious but politically disengaged posture of film festival and art cinema audiences. For a large segment of this audience, Fassbinder has filled a need by providing a theater of cosmopolitan aspiration whose projection of an intensely contemporary social discourse does not call into question one's beliefs and convictions. This is largely because the films themselves do not work to dispel that sense of helplessness so pervasive in the present atmosphere. Conditions are generally depicted as virtually unchangeable and characters are denied the personal redemption of classical tragedy.23 In considering those areas of social and domestic life which Fassbinder's enterprise engages, it becomes evident that his immediate precedents are by no means confined to the Hollywood melodrama. The small-scale intimacy, the addressing of a given problem, the confined scope of the drama, the accent on domestic and workplace relationships, the repetition of character types and familiar faces - all these are eminently familiar to audiences of television soap operas. Their ongoing theatricalized representation of everyday life provides the endless series of surrogate victims not only, as the cliche would have it, for the "oppressed housewife," but, as any survey of America's college campuses will confirm, for the young men and women on the threshold of social, marital, and professional responsibility.24 An interaction of television and cinema aesthetics in most of Fassbinder's work intensifies the sense of familiarity which has facilitated his acceptance. It is therefore worth noting that the particular kind of small-scale melodramas made by Sirk in the 1940s and early 1950s, so 22. Elsaesser, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles," p. 27. In this respect, his films differ from the standard Hollywood product, and even from Sirk's 23. melodramas which allow certain characters privileged final moments in which they transcend their flaws or rise above their circumstances (for example, the Dorothy Malone character in Writtenon the Wind and the Robert Stack character in The TarnishedAngels). A recent article discusses this particularly in reference to Harvard, and indicates that such 24. programs are popular with college audiences nationwide. See Diane McWhorter, "A Severe Case of General Hospital Hits Harvard," New York Times, May 25, 1981, p. B4.


93

admired by Fassbinder, virtually disappeared as a regular genre from the screen once afternoon television popularized the form in the mid-1950s. It has subsequently expanded and been extended into evening television, where it reigns supreme, converting every social, personal, and political problem of our times into formulaic cycles of interchangeable crises and resolutions. Although Fassbinder's films- those designed for theatrical release or those are not to be identified with that particular level made directly for televisionof production, the range of questions addressed is largely that prescribed by television soap opera and problem drama. Indeed, Fassbinder's is the first cinema of international prestige to persistently tap the material and aesthetics of television, aggrandizing them with a cinematic elegance. Fassbinder has indicated some of the differences in mood and technique which he observes for each medium. The form also changes when you want to reach a larger group of people. You can use more close-ups in TV than in cinema, and zooming is often used in TV photography whereas it can be very disturbing on the cinema screen. In film, you prefer to use a tracking-shot. TV-films work more directly with feelings and effects, with real laughter, but films depend more on atmosphere.25 It would require a detailed examination to determine the way in which formal operations affect the material both in individual cases and in the overall proclivity to conceive situations and characters within the more manageable and comprehensible terms of television. Since almost all of Fassbinder's films have been shown on German television - not only those commissioned for television - it seems appropriate to investigate the determining effect of this arena of exhibition. Technical specifications notwithstanding, there is nothing about Bolwieser(1977) or Fear of Fear (1975) (both made for television), in terms of the approach to subjects or visual execution, that differs greatly from The Merchantof Four Seasonsor Fears Eats the Soul. There is, of course, in the latter, a richer elaboration of mise-en-scene, more atmosphere, as Fassbinder explains. But certain visual strategies are common to all four films and, in fact, to most of the others. Example: a predisposition to collapsing, through deliberate foreshortening, the space of images that might have been deep-focus shots.

"Interview #2" with Christian Braad Thomsen, p. 86. Despite these indications, 25. Fassbinder's approach to films made for television has been criticized specifically on aesthetic grounds: "It seems to us that in the aesthetic history of the Arbeiterfilm,Eight Hours Are Not a Day is less remarkable. The series is flawed by its conception of working-class life, by the absence of trade unions, politics and the institutions of the working class, by the adoption of the family as the integrating unity of the narratives and by the excesses of Fassbinder's mise en scene"(Richard Collins and Vincent Porter, WDR and theArbeiterfilm:Fassbinder,Ziewer and Others,London, British Film Institute, 1981, p. 60).

94

OCTOBER

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972.

There are exceptions, of course. Effie Briest, for example, makes great use of deep focus. But even when, in The Bitter Tearsof Petra von Kant, let us say, the perspective between foreground and background is sharpened for dramatic as when we have a view of Petra and her lover framed against the purposeshuge Poussin painting from a foreground position normally occupied by Marlene - the evocation of depth is achieved by means of boxing in the foreground through an element of the decor, and contrasting this with the acknowledged open space of the background (or vice versa), a strategy frequently employed in-the early days of live television drama to compensate for the medium's inherent lack of visual perspective. A more intensive examination of television and the way in which it has affected the aesthetics of film would be fruitful. The rest of this essay, however, concerns itself with different aspects of Fassbinder's work. I shall therefore describe sequences and visual strategies from a few films which fairly represent Fassbinder's diverse stylistic approaches. They range from the most classically economical breakdowns of narrative cinematic space to those in which conventional narrative cinematic structures undergo a series of inversions and "reflexive" permutations. Throughout this range, Fassbinder has had his share of notable achievements. With Katzelmacherand In a Yearof ThirteenMoons he has come close to creating alternative forms of narrative cinema. But in America, at least, popular and critical attention have favored his more classically determined ventures, those entertainments which represent an immersion in established stylistics. By now we can locate so many reflexive and distancing


95

gestures across the spectrum of narrative cinema that they appear to constitute a code. In Fassbinder's films, such strategies have been absorbed into his overall style and have lost their radical potential.

I can competewith the ultra-modernistsin hunting for new forms and experimenting with myfeelings. But I keeprealizingthat the essenceof art is simplicity,grandeur,and sensitivity, and that the essence of its form is coolness. - Bertolt Brecht Katzelmacheris central to Fassbinder's early Antiteaterperiod,26 while The Merchantof Four Seasonsis at the pivot point between his Antiteaterand his more traditional films. The earlier film is not, however, a more "primitive" version of the latter. These films represent that divergence in his aesthetics which has prompted Fassbinder's critics to stress the conflict within his production between avant-garde and commercial tendencies. To be sure, Katzelmacherinverts the traditional strategies that can be found in virtually all of his work after 1970. The structured procedures of Katzelmachercan be very clearly described. All the shots are very precisely framed, with a preponderance of tableau effects and frontality; except for seven regularly spaced and identically executed tracking shots, no other shot involves camera movement of any kind; the tracking shots themselves also stress frontality, and are rhythmically so controlled by the slow, regulated movements of characters that they are drained of the dynamic Fassbinder belonged to a "fringe" theater group in Munich called the Action Theater from 26. mid-1967 to the time it was "closed by police in May 1968." Fassbinder then formed the Antiteater group with several members of the original group, including Hanna Schygulla, Peer Raben, and Kurt Raab. "Anti-teaterlost its home at the end of 1969 . . . but by that time Fassbinder had already begun making feature films" (Tony Rayns, "Documentation," in Fassbinder, Rayns, ed., p. 102). Except for Die Niklashauser Fahrt (1970), Fassbinder's first ten features were produced under the Antiteater label, which in its most literal sense was intended to advertise the blatant anti-illusionist, anti-theatrical posture assumed by Fassbinder and his acting company prior to the more commercial enterprises beginning with The Merchant of Four Seasons. The idea was to create a "sort of commune" in which "everyone concerned . . . was basically an author." But Fassbinder himself declared later that this ideal was utopian and that works of art are inevitably created in an authoritarian manner ("Interview with Rainer Werner Fassbinder" conducted by Wilfried Wiegand, in Fassbinder, trans. Ruth McCormick, New York, Tanam Press, 1981, pp. 64-65). The deliberately self-conscious and mimicking gestures in these early films, along with their freewheeling stylistic references to prototypical Hollywood films, were perfectly consistent with the "reflexive" posture. Clearly, Fassbinder's subsequent desire to reach a large audience necessitated relinquishing such a posture and the adoption of a mimetic style consistent with the priorities of narrative cinema.

96

OCTOBER

and expressive import they convey in other films; every shot is also a "scene": that is, there is no classical breakdown into long shots, medium shots, closeups, and reverse angles to dissect narrative space; continuity between shots is often marginal, so that many of the sequences could conceivably be rearranged. On the few occasions when the logic of narrative incontrovertibly connects subsequent shots, there are effects of ellipsis in the editing to disrupt the sense of continuity (for example, when Peter visits Rosy, he rings her doorbell; she opens the door in the same shot and asks him what he wants; silence ensues, followed by a cut to inside the apartment with each of the characters already seated in different positions). The lighting is uniformly gray, creating an achromatic effect occasionally offset by black jackets. The dialogue is as sparse and elliptical as are the spatial and temporal articulations between shots. The action within shots is generally limited to one gesture or idea that disrupts an otherwise unrelieved sense of stasis. Often the gesture comes so late and so suddenly into a prolonged shot/scene that its narrative function is less important than the startling effect it exerts on the composition of the image. This effect, in its sparseness, recalls Warhol's strategy in a film such as Harlot. Katzelmacher, 1969.


97

It would appear, then, that we have in Katzelmachera textbook case of minimalist cinema within the modernist tradition. But Katzelmacheris a narrative film and, like many other examples of reflexive narrative film, it is something of a paradox. As such, it epitomizes Fassbinder's position with respect to traditional narrative and avant-garde cinemas and therefore is worth examining. Its thematics, which reappear in Fassbinder's subsequent work (the futility of hope, the immobility of youth, the self-perpetuation of the status quo), easily translate into the schematically designed and barely varied visual strategies of the film. In the frequently repeated shot of characters lined up against a railing in front view, all three notions are suggested. We know that little of importance happens to these people; that they "spend" the day moving between their position on the rail and a few other locations: the local pub, the courtyard behind the building (the site of the tracking shots), and the various apartments they occupy. We learn that the men are without profitable work when they intermittently devise half-baked- and, it is implied, crookedschemes to make money. Their relation to the women is of the most deeply repressive nature, and the women themselves, though mildly distressed by outbursts of male violence, display no signs of sexual or social consciousness and seem completely acquiescent to male tyranny. These basic narrative and character typologies are echoed by everything on both image and sound track. Characters lacking in drive and curiosity, whose words and gestures reinforce the provincialism which constrains them, are not apt to energize the screen. A single event elicits response: the intrusion of an outside force in the person of Jorgos, a Greek immigrant worker. His presence acts to impel the spare narrative. Word gets around that Jorgos is better endowed sexually than the "natives"; rumor and gossip take over, until he is beaten and forced to leave. The film's important statement (which Fassbinder will deliver again, notably in Fear Eats the Soul) concerning the general abuse of foreign workers in Germany27 is argued through the film's visual strategies. By the time Jorgos makes his appearance, we have become accustomed to the undisturbed routine of the characters, and in particular to the repetition of the unchallenged frontality of the group portrait in tableau. The consonance of statement and formal decision is pointedly explicated in the shot that introduces Jorgos. Dressed in a black suit, he enters the frame from the left carrying a suitcase and stands screen center, his back to the spectator, facing the other characters. Words are exchanged but communication is impossible. Jorgos (played A recent article in the New YorkTimes confirms the continued existence of this problem. A 27. statement signed by fifteen doctors of philosophy, law, and medicine in Germany reads as follows: "It is with great concern that we observe the undermining of the German people through the presence of several million foreigners and their families, the de-Germanization of our language, our culture and our national character." It is echoed by a poll made last year which "reported that 79 percent of the population thinks there are too may foreigners in West Germany" (New York Times, February 22, 1982, p. A3).

98

OCTOBER

by Fassbinder), intending to rent a room, seeks an address; he is directed off-screen. Unaccustomed as we are to the presence of any figure in the foreground of this tableau shot, the intrusion of Jorgos comes as a shock. He literally challenges the horizontality and frontality of the shot by altering the optical perspective. The "new"composition thus concretizes a point: a foreigner disrupts the balance of the familiar symmetry. Fassbinder uses a situation clearly recognizable to a German audience in order to dramatize the unification of characters, their arousal from lethargy, investing the narrative with the simplicity of a parable. Here is the focus of Fassbinder's interesting and problematic relation to classical narrative cinema. We perceive in the contrasting phenomena of Katzelmacherthe lineaments of a film form expressly designed for its parabolic function. As such, it makes no use of "material outside the realistic range of credibility."28 The simplification of its images, characters, and situations insures its instant legibility. Even the disjunct relation between sequences, by de-emphasizing narrative continuity, gives each moment that singular gestural force manifest in the single episodes of the parable. The film thereby elicits a response throughthe displacementof the various foci of filmic illusion which enlist involvement, suspension of judgment, and the recognition of psychological complexity attendant to the classical narrative cinema. Katzelmacheroffers certain thematic and aesthetic constants of Fassbinder's cinema: in particular, the parallel between rigidity of form and that of social and psychological stasis. In this sense, Katzelmacheroccupies a position not unlike that of Baal in Brecht's career: a unique, summary, and nihilistic statement following which one must discover a way to go on. Fassbinder's path is obviously that of energetic engagement with social issues. He found in the cinema of Hollywood the means by which to convert his parables into sophisticated, witty, and elegant entertainments. Many of these lend themselves quite well to allegorical readings (indeed, some -like The Marriageof Maria Braun and Lili Marleen-lend themselves a little too easily); but they differ from that "genuine allegory [which] is a structural element . . . it has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation alone."29 It is precisely the form of the parable/allegory which Katzelmacheroffers more directly and with more purity than any other film by Fassbinder.

Jail Bait has a strikingly naturalistic tone, something like that of the Italian neo-realist films of the late 1940s and early '50s (a period, in fact, close to the 28. 29.

Northrop Frye, Anatomyof Criticism,Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 300. Ibid., pp. 53-54.


99

Jail Bait, 1972

setting of the narrative itself), and this is carried into the strategies of composition, framing, and editing, which reveal behavioral features and sociopsychological elements. Before the tension of the plot - involving teenage sex and patricide - develops, Fassbinder constructs in masterly fashion the petitbourgeois milieu of the film. The predominance of medium close-ups and medium shots which include indications of the smallness of the space (the mirror reflections, the views through doorways) gives us an accurate picture of a claustrophobic domestic environment. The juxtaposition of the rooms suggests the way many such families exist, the children within earshot of parental lovemaking and squabbles. Throughout the film Fassbinder employs a particular framing strategy to articulate the parent/child relationship. In one instance, Hanni, a buxom adolescent, bounces on the bed with her father as her mother is seen between them, in long shot, mildly distressed at Hanni's manipulativeness. This framing strategy subtly suggests that it is not the child who is torn between her parents, but the parent who is "caught" in a position which fluctuates according to the demands of the child. Certain aspects of the decor stand out; the religious paintings identify the family as Catholic,3" though this fact remains undeveloped, as if religion had become an irrelevant feature of their lives. Mirrors, too, while used symbolically throughout Fassbinder's work, are so functional a part of the decor here that one almost overlooks their effect. A mirror shot early in the film gives us a mediated view of this unexceptional couple on the threshold of receding physical attractiveness, who, for a fleeting moment, evoke a 30. This was an important point in the original play by Franz Xavier Kroetz, who, incidentally, disapproved of Fassbinder's presumably more sensational treatment of the material. See Wilhelm Roth, "Annotated Filmography," in Fassbinder, Tanam Press, pp. 143-144.

100

OCTOBER

picture of domestic sensuality as the sole refuge of their mundane lives. The unaccented quality of this touch is made more palpable in the subsequent shots of the youthful sensuality of the daughter, which are striking foils to the pale colors and dreariness of the home. What one sees in the film's opening sequence is the meticulous use of cinematic strategies to depict-in the full sense of that word-a socially specific environment, a detailed domestic reality, and the outlines of "the family romance," all of which have great bearing on the subsequent narrative. It exemplifies a kind of filmmaking which derives its sense of conviction from neorealist tendencies, and augments these with that stylistic mastery of mise-enscene peculiar to the Hollywood auteur. For, although Jail Bait is not one of the films generally thought to exhibit the influence of Sirk, almost all of the strategies discernible in this opening sequence can be found to illustrate a social

DouglasSirk, Imitation of Life, 1959 milieu similar to Sirk's in Imitationof Life. In the early section of that film, when both the white and black mothers-neither their gainfully employed-and are in a small New York Sirk's manner of young daughters living apartment, of the constriction and the it educes is identical to conveying space intimacy Fassbinder's: a concentration of medium shots and medium close-ups, and shots through doorways with a long lens to reduce the impression of depth. In many shots throughout the film, Sirk makes similar expressive use of threefigure compositions. And of course in Imitationof Life, as in most of Sirk's work, mirrors proliferate and often serve to mediate between a character's delusions and the spectator's recognition of them. Not all of Fassbinder's mirrors can be said to do the same thing; the mirror shot in Jail Bait has a subtle way of taking the edge off the cruelty of the donne. In its way, then, Jail Bait represents a perfect marriage of the Hollywood and neo-realist traditions.


101

In Fox and His Friends something other than pure exposition is at work in the narrative's opening. Self-conscious references to the narrative conventions and stylistic mannerisms of American cinema make this film a prime example of Fassbinder's appropriation of that cinema. Its subject matter solicits a reading beneath the surface narrative, thereby constituting the kind of filmic text which auteurist analysis has often addressed as exemplifying the filmmaker's stylistic manipulation of material. The film opens with an aerial view - upon which the credits are supera fairground sprinkled with the reds, whites, and blues which imposed-of dominate the color scheme of the film. The camera slowly descends and repositions itself just outside of a police car in which we glimpse the backs of two men. The car faces a show stand where Klaus, the sideshow manager, is displaying several girls to a crowd of customers. He seems to be "selling" them to the public in the same manner that he plans to "sell" the central figure not yet on stage- Fox. Another shot from inside the car, still behind the men, reinforces their point of view. In a subsequent shot, the men get out of the car and approach the stage where Klaus bluntly announces their presence to the public. It is Inspector Braun, he says, who has come to arrest him and close the show because it is operating without a license. From the rear of the stage, while Klaus is speaking, Fox makes a rather sudden, noticeable entrance. He walks directly up to Klaus and the two men embrace and kiss on stage in full view of the police and the crowd. There are no reaction shots following this gesture, which seems to give it significance outside the narrative per se. Klaus tells Fox that his incarceration will be for only two years. The scene disperses rather quickly. As the sideshow is closed, the girls can be seen complaining about having to look for other work. In the final shot of the sequence, Fox, in the foreground, his leather-jacketed back to the viewer, faces the Inspector in the background and asks him for money. He is turned down and as he walks into the frame and exits into the impersonal mass, the camera ascends to a position above the crowd and comes to rest on a fragment of a turning Ferris wheel. On the level of narrative, this opening sequence is that of a typical Hollywood plot. There are, as a matter of fact, several precedents for the situation with which the film begins: a traveling carnival or circus act goes out of business and forces a protagonist out of work- a standard device to propel a narrative forward. Fox, forced to make his way without job or lover, tries his luck and wins the lottery, only to get involved with a collection of bourgeois sophisticates who use up his money, become bored with his proletarian manners, and cast him out, leaving him to die alone. Another aspect of the Klaus/ Fox relationship, which is interrupted by Klaus's arrest, refers us to the Hollywood example of the man-husband, to prison fianc6, breadwinner-sent while his wife or girlfriend is forced to make her way until his return and, supposedly, to remain faithful during that time.

Fox and His Friends, 1974.

The theme of homosexuality itself, presented so early in the film and in the context of the sideshow, suggests an important subtext. The fairground seems an appropriate setting, in that the film openly declares its subject to be (1) a view of a certain kind of gay life in West Germany; and (2) a more overt acknowledgment of Fassbinder's homosexuality. Literally and figuratively, he is here on stage, both within the film's narrative as Fox himself and before the film's public as filmmaker, thus suggesting the rationale for the absence of reaction shots when Fox kisses Klaus. As a replacement for an insert of an intradiegetic reaction to the gesture, the gesture is directly offered to the film's spectators, situating the narrative as a kind of personal interaction between Fassbinder the author, whose sexual identity is confirmed, and the audience, who will now read the film's formal and narrative devices as a series of codes. The play with the subtext, however- not limited to autobiographical material in Fassbinder's work31"-is assisted by the richly colored design and ironic use of camera work and mise-en-scene, which comes as close to the lookof Sirk as any of his films do. We recognize in the camera's descent which opens this sequence, and its closing ascent, the kind of visual rhyme that defines the sequence as a unit of meaning. Those shots, and the setting of the fairground itself, even recall a particular film of Sirk's: The TarnishedAngels- a title that would be equally appropriate for Fassbinder's film. Wilhelm Roth, however, sees the entire film as a kind of autobiographical allegory: "It 31. seems to me that Fassbinder wants to depict here, in a distanced way, his experiences with German cultural life: his rise out of the counterculture; the condescension mixed with enthusiasm with which the proletarian enfant terriblewas greeted by the Cognoscenti; the exploitation of his talent by the culture industry; and the loss of freedom and spontaneity resulting from accommodation to its traditional norms" ("Annotated Filmography," p. 164).

103


The Merchant of Four Seasons was clearly a pivotal film in Fassbinder's career. Following the incredibly productive years 1969 and '70, in which he made ten features, it is the only theatrical film made in 1971, the first to be produced by Tango-Film. It is, as well, the first to deliberately develop a "universal" theme with a much wider audience in mind. The allegorical thrust of the film exemplifies another sort of narrative technique employed by Fassbinder. Its overall structural simplicity recalls Katzelmacher,but the compacted emotive force of many scenes owes something to Bresson. The visual strategies are more schematic than those of Jail Bait and Fox and His Friends, and one notes in particular the symbolic uses of framing and editing. Even before the credits appear, there is a brief sequence of two shots which succinctly sets the theme and tone of the film. In the first, a woman, in medium close-up, opens the door of her apartment, and in walks Hans, her son, just returned from the foreign legion. Her reaction to his presence is shocking: "Good boys get killed, while people like you come back." She walks out of the shot, past the camera, leaving Hans in medium close-up. He declares he is determined to make something of his life. A cut to a reverse angle of the mother shows her on her way out of the room as she says, "A no-good will always be a no-good." Immediately following this, as the credits appear, there is an outdoor shot, in medium close-up, of Hans turning, his head tilted upward, as the camera revolves with him. A subjective low-angle circular pan reveals the apartment buildings in a courtyard which Hans is addressing. We realize he is a street vendor when we hear him announcing the quality and price of his

The Merchant of Four Seasons, 1971.

104

OCTOBER

pears. A cut to a medium shot of a woman in a doorway (Han's wife, Irmgaard) fixing her stockings follows. Another cut to a low-angle shot of a window above shows us a woman calling for the pears. The cut from the mother's remark to Hans's upturned head marks a narrative ellipsis; our immediate recognition of his trade seems to undercut his preceding resolve. And, as the subsequent narrative makes clear, the shots of the two women sum up the extent of Hans's worldly aspirations. Hans, as we learn, is in another of Fassbinder's domestic traps; but the misery which expedites his alienation and leads to his death is furthered by his suspicion of his wife's sexual betrayal. Thus, the initial focus on her legs and the care she devotes to them is significant. The other woman, described later as Hans's great love, was courted but lost because he could not offer her a "future." Hans's position in the courtyard shots reflects his relationship to both: the grotind-level reality is anchored by his wife's presence and reinforced by the reference to her sexuality; the low-angle shot of the other woman represents her as "out of reach." The initial shot in the courtyard of Hans's upturned head walls him within the frame not through a static composition but through a continuous revolution of character and camera that literalizes the notion of "vicious circle." And so, with a near-Bressonian economy, the first few shots of the camera angles, camera invested with a symmovements--are film--images, function. bolic *

Fontane lived in a society whose faults he recognisedand could describevery precisely but all the same a societyhe needed,to which he really wanted to belong. He rejected everybodyandfound everythingalien and yet fought all his lifefor recognitionwithin this society.And that'salso my attitudeto society. - Fassbinder A story of resignationcan't be bad. -A title card placed between the second and third shots of the film If Effi Briest brilliantly recreates the text of Fontane's novel, it also epitomizes the manner in which Fassbinder's mise-en-scene simultaneously expresses thematic elements and distances the spectator. "I kept close to the novel . . . not to the story it tells, but to Fontane's attitude to the story."32He narrative voices, inserted portions of the devises a number of ways--off-screen 32.

"Interview #3" with Christian Braad Thomsen, in Fassbinder, ed. Rayns, p. 87.


105

Effi Briest, 1974. novel's text on title cards-in which the notion of the film as a text to be "read" is proclaimed. But these are only the most obvious means. In this film, more than any other, the mirror truly becomes a vital instrument of the film's thematic and illusionistic motifs. There are over two dozen shots in which mirrors figure prominently, and many of these are held so long that their total screen time is even greater than this number would suggest. In some shots, mirrors are an unaccented part of the decor, but even these sustain the seamlessness of the device, like so many unstressed connective passages in a musical composition. In others, mirrors occupy a good portion of the frame and, by giving us a double view of a character (or characters), signal an inherent contradiction in a given socio-psychological situation. Social obligation, of course, is the principle theme of the novel, and several beautifully composed mirror sequences demonstrate Fassbinder's commitment to Fontane's perspective. The first, early in the film, is a dinner-table conversation between Effi's parents. The small talk about Effi's marriage and her mother's old passion for the Baron is exchanged politely but is not without its cutting edge. The conversation over, a wall mirror behind the wife reflects both characters in a rigidly composed image, its portraitlike quality emphasized by the mirror's size and shape. But the most striking example of the mirror's embodiment of this primary theme occurs later, in the scene between the Baron and Willersdorf, as they discuss the action the former should take upon discovering Effi's "affair." Several shots convey a deceptively casual air: Wiillersdorf plays the piano while the Baron paces. As the scene progresses, the conversa-

Effi Briest, 1974. tion becomes more urgent. Wiillersdorf wonders if something that happened six years before should be allowed to disrupt one's life in the present. The Baron asserts that if it were only a matter of one's pride, one could forgive and forget. But "that somethingwhich forms society - call it a tyrant if you like" will not allow us to ignore such matters. The Baron insists that a duel is necessary to preserve "the code of honor." Intercut with these shots are dissolves, at increasingly shorter intervals, to long shots of trains and carriages. Unless one is aware of the subsequent events, the immediate context would not make the connections apparent. It soon becomes clear, however, that these images in dissolves comprise the journey-made by the same men we see conversing-to the scene of the duel; that is, while they debate the course of action, the editing has already embodied the foregone conclusion; the duel is an inevitable consequence of the society's established codes of behavior. Moreover, as the conversation moves toward its conclusion, the framing strategy drops all pretence of liberality and resorts to the rigidly composed mirror image. First, the Baron is seen in medium shot, facing slightly to the left of center, speaking to Wiillersdorf, who is off-screen but reflected in a mirror behind the Baron. The mirror-of unusual and elegant design-appears to have one glass surface framed by another; the result is a doubly reinforced image with a recessional perspective, conveying an illusion of space behind the character. It is, of course, only the reflection of that space in front of the character, off-screen. The median plane between these "two" spaces is that occupied by the character who can thus be seen as an axis of the entire space, represented and inferred. Here is the plane of action, or, to be more precise in this instance, the position from which the Baron persuades Wiillersdorf of the logic of his decision. The image, by encompassing both the on-screen and off-screen space, appears to be "in control."


107

The men then reverse positions. Now it is Wfillersdorf- whose previous arguments sounded a note of civilized reason- who stands within the axis, and the Baron who is seen in the recessional perspective of the mirror. And it is Wfillersdorf who gives the more powerful, rhetorical argument: It's terrifying to think that you're right, but you are right. I won't worry you any longer with my question as to whether it's necessary. The world is how it is and things don't go the way that we want but the way that others want. All that high-falutin' talk about "God's judgement" is nonsense, of course, and we don't want any of that, yet our own cult of honour on the other hand is idolatry. But we must submit to it, as long as the idol stands.33 As Wfillersdorf concludes with the words, "It [the code of honor] will be served," he turns his head; his profile now is also reflected in the mirror. This shift in the composition, altering the tension between the plane of action/persuasion and the space of containment, places both men within the structure that of the mirror-that has circumscribed the range of action from the beginning. It is at this precise moment that Fassbinder cuts to the close-up of a gun and the sound of its firing. A long shot of the duel scene follows, the "action" already completed. Thus, the elements of the actual challenge, preparation, and suspense are elided, temporally and symbolically. The arena of physical action and events has been displaced by the social plane, which is determinant. There is, however, more to be said about the play of mirrors. The recognition of the representational status of the narrative's designated spatial zones-that of the recessional perspective within the mirror and of off-screen space reflected in it-is important. It confirms the critique of social patterns and their rhetoric, characterizing a sense of order as an artificial construct. The recognition of that status generates our understanding of the social representations within which the diegesis functions. Another kind of mirror shot is therefore interesting with respect to the spectator's position of recognition. It occurs later in the film, after the duel. Effi has been cast out and is living in a small flat with her faithful friend Roswitha. They are both seen in long shot talking about Effi's poor circumstances and the prospect of her seeing her daughter. Effi reclines on a sofa, frame left, and Roswitha stands performing household chores, frame right. Between them we see what appears to be a partition dividing the frame vertically, so that the left panel looks as if it might even be a glass door through which we see Effi in the room beyond. Effi then rises and walks forward, that is, "toward" the camera, and suddenly, as we watch her, she also enters into the frame from off-screen and appears in the 33. Theodor Fontane, Efti Briest,London, Penguin Books, p. 216. This text is almost identical in the film; I have quoted from the novel to be more thorough.

108

OCTOBER

foreground, frame left, facing herself in a mirror. In other words, the impression that both women occupied the same space - an impression strengthened by their positions in relation to each other, their identical body sizes, and their glances - is now seen to be false. Effi had been off-screen all along and what we saw was her reflection. The effect is achieved by having the entire left-hand side of the frame becomea mirror. It is not difficult to see how this entire set-up differs from the earlier examples, not because there are no possible thematic readings of this shot (several do, in fact, suggest themselves); this time, however, the spectator has been deceived and has fallen into misrecognition. A homogeneous space of representation is now recognized as one of a reflection of off-screen space. To two different cinematic depictions of space-one represented and one inferred-a single status had been ascribed, as in the Baron/Wfillersdorf scene. This time, however, it is the spectator's recognition which is revealed as faulty. While this shot is an example of reflexiveness in Fassbinder's cinema, we cannot ignore its content. Effi, a victim of the social order, has been, by this point in the film, rendered invisible. Her husband has ordered that their daughter be told that her mother no longer exists; her parents write that they cannot condone her behavior. These actions effectively reduce Effi to a mere reflection of herself. Fassbinder has placed the spectator in a position analogous to that of his characters as they are determined by social codes. Effi's recognition attests to their force. And in identifying the social, narrative, and cinematic trajectories, Fassbinder implies an acceptance, on the part of the filmmaker, of the classical narrative system.

Why do we need a story? Are we a story ourselves? -Jean-Luc Godard in an interview by Peter Wollen and Don Ranvaud in Godard1980, a film by Jon Jost I have a story and you have a story and my story doesn'ttouchyour story, o.k.? -Jeff, the film director, to another character in Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore In a Yearof ThirteenMoons represents a return to the experimental tendencies of Katzelmacher;it constitutes an attempt to construct an alternative narrative form and succeeds to some extent in probing the meaning of narrative


109

itself. The task necessitated a dispersal of classical narrative's coordinates. The film's episodic structure evokes Godard's My Life to Live rather than American narrative film. An extensive use of camera movement and deep space, in contradistinction to that of Katzelmacher,functions as a demonstration of the ways in which these elements can, when tied to character, subvert the representational system which they support. The concept of character itself is explored. The individual's importance as characterdevelops, of course, in conjunction with the rise of the novel throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, literary criticism sustains one of its central axioms - the three-dimensional depiction of character- as a result of that development. And, of course, the tradition of narrative filmmaking is founded on the notion of realistic character as it is defined within a social, historical, cultural, and psychological context. The film, in its stylized allusions to narrative and dramatic forms, exemplifies a kind of search- for a form of tragedy that can fully reflect the maze of modern life and redeem the anxieties of the individual. This may well be impossible, but its very improbability is equally manifested in the form the film transsexual-overhas taken. For not only is the principal character-a whelmed by his/her isolation, but this isolation is concretized in the detachability of the individual narratives from the "scheme," the consigning of all other characters to the periphery. Thus they too become sealed within their own "stories." In a Yearof ThirteenMoons ultimately expresses the despair of the narrative filmmaker who can neither resolve the contradictions within himself nor find a form that can confront the agony of the individual and the needs of society within a proliferating media of diminishing relevance. A notion that is sustained throughout Fassbinder's work, however, - from the Antiteaterperiod right through to The Third Generation(1979)- is the conception of character as story. A character is identified through the accumulation of incident or the accident of circumstance, rarely through the exploration of psychology.34 This accords with the general ambience of the films, but in addition, it facilitates the use of many performers whose embodiments of particular social and character types can be cited in other works. This strategy - one of the distinguishing marks of Fassbinder's cinema- warrants some elaboration.

In an essay on Balzac, Michel Butor has examined Balzac's attempts to free himself from the novelistic hegemony of Walter Scott, whose influence on French historical fiction of the nineteenth century was considerable. Balzac's definitive victory over his great predecessor, his liberation 34. Is it mere coincidence that the possible exceptions to example, The Bitter Tears of this--for and spirited Petra von Kant and Satan's Brew-display some of the most hyperbolic performances of any actors in Fassbinder's work?

110

OCTOBER

from him, finds its expression in an extraordinary invention which will utterly transform the structure of his work, allowing him to make the novel a la Walter Scott into a detail or chapter of what he, Balzac, regards as his novel. I mean the recurrence of characters.35 Fassbinder's attempt to go beyond Hollywood's colonization of the German cinema may be considered in this light, and historical circumstances even present a reasonable parallel. Just as English and German influences on French literature increased after the revolution of the eighteenth century, so American culture in general was ingested by German filmmakers following the postwar period. Scott's novels, an accomplished, popular blend of romance and realism, held sway in the realm of English and continental fiction for some time. He is credited, in fact, with having single-handedly invented the form of the historical novel, with its emphases on action and spectacle. Certain conventions of the romantic hero and of the "values . . . of a settled society traditionally ordained,""6 popularized by Scott and assimilated by much of the fiction throughout the nineteenth century, have had perhaps a more pervasive influence on the Hollywood aesthetic than, say, the work of Dickens. Fassbinder's position in relation to the dominant practice of American narrative cinema is not unlike that of Balzac in relation to the popular novelistic form of his day. Although Fassbinder's importance in world cinema or his artistic achievement is not comparable to Balzac's in the history of the novel, Balzac's resolution of his dilemma offers a model which clarifies our understanding of the manner in which Fassbinder adopted existing American forms and converted them into a sustained allegory of the contemporary German experience. One aspect of this parallel is suggested by Fassbinder's use of his acting company to constitute a network of cross-reference with personal, social, and artistic reverberations. In particular, it is the performers' acting out, across the films, of a series of connecting or complementary roles that evokes the aspiration, the overarching scheme of Balzac's La Comidiehumaine.37 In a society marked by historical disruption, its traumatic, alienating consequences are continually cited within the texts of the films. As in Balzac, characters occupy the foreground or background of different works; the importance of certain actors fluctuates from film to film, the lead actor in one narrative playing an identical or similar, but peripheral character elsewhere. This trans. Remy Hall, New York, Simon and 35. Michel Butor, "Balzacand Reality," in Inventory, Schuster, 1968, p. 103. 36. Walter Allen, TheEnglishNovel, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1954, p. 131. 37. There is, by the way, an indirect reference to Balzac's Historyof the Thirteenin The Third which appears to parody the plot of Jacques Rivette's OutOne.:Spectre(1972), which is Generation, is filled with references to French in turn adapted from the Balzac work. The ThirdGeneration to cinema, from the opening shot's inclusion of a television replay of Bresson's TheDevil, Probably Eddie Constantine's presence in a contemporary society more alien than that of Alphaville.


111

has the effect of creating an extra-cinematic dimension to the fictional status of the characters, reinforcing their behavioral patterns and stressing the impression of stasis in the personal and social realms. Understandably, this strategy is most evident in the depiction of family relations, but it is not restricted to the domestic melodramas. It permeates all of the films, from the most experimental (for example, Katzelmacherand In a Yearof Thirteen Moons) to the adaptations of novels (for example, Eji Briest and Bolwieser). Thus, Hans, the protagonist played by Hans Hirschmiiller in The Merchantof Four Seasons, is readable as an extension of Erich, the character he plays in Katzelmacher.At the end of the latter film, Erich is about to join the army, a nondescript but predictable alternative to the aimless life he leads. At the opening of Merchant, Hans arrives home from the foreign legion to a less than genial welcome from his ego-destroying mother who recalls the impression one had of Erich when she says, "A no-good will always be a no-good." Hans's working-class existence, as it is subsequently delineated in that film, is a confirmation of the social and economic stagnancy and the complete lack of hope already ritualized in the static compositions of Katzelmacher. Similarly, the character of Elisabeth in Katzelmacherhas the manipulativeness and conniving business sense of Hans's wife, Irmgaard, in The Merchant of Four Seasons. Both characters, played by Irm Hermann, display a ruthlessness that appears to emanate from social and domestic restraints. Hermann's perfect masklike face renders her the perennial sufferer who can survive anything. She plays equally miserable wives in Fear Eats the Soul and Mother Kiisters Goes to Heaven. Her roles in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Effi Briest are intriguing in this light. In both films she plays a servant who suffers humiliation for the sake of her superior, reflecting the nether side of the frustrated lower-middle-class hausfrau of the domestic melodramas. The effect that neurotic parental behavior has on children is represented in a number of films. Eva Mattes plays the neglected daughter of Petra von Kant, the daughter of the transsexual Volker Spengler in In a Yearof Thirteen Moons, and the sexually precocious adolescent who plots her father's death in Jail Bait. In all three, she is the only child, but the social standings of her parents vary. While the first two are contemporaneous, Jail Bait is set in the fifties in a Germany still plagued by ruined landscapes and economic ills. These facts imply a continuity of the problems of family life, tracing them in part to a general moral and political collapse following World War II. The three films cross social and economic barriers, suggesting the pervasiveness of the problem. This is equally apparent in three other films. Andrea Schober as Annie in Effi Briest is generally unseen and unheard as Effi's daughter and is turned against her mother by her father. Earlier she appeared as the child of the working-class Hans and Irmgaard in The Merchantof Four Seasons, in which she is haunted by the fear of her father's death wish, is witness to his drunken beating of her mother, and discovers her mother's sexual abandon with a

112

OCTOBER

stranger. In ChineseRoulette, her behavior in the forefront of the narrative as a malicious brat is nothing less than the unleashed vengeance of one whose character has been deformed by parental abuse. In these films, too, each child is from a different social class, but the behavior manifested in ChineseRouletteis the outgrowth of the "character building" the child undergoes in the earlier films. The practice of "typecasting" is redeemed by the sense we gather of a fictive continuity sustained by a social reality outside the films. This differs from the repeated use of certain actors in the work of Hollywood auteurs- for example, John Wayne in the films ofJohn Ford or Howard Hawks- which engages the mythic connotations that a star accumulates. In Fassbinder's work, the important element in the replaying is the social fact it underlines, and the familiarity of the performer facilitates this point. We also recognize that, although time has elapsed between the character's situation in one film and his or her appearance in the next, no positive development has taken place. This acts to intensify the enveloping negativity of affect and creates a collectivity of imprisoned characters. Fassbinder's cinema distinguishes itself from standard television fare in that it does not prolong indefinitely, through a host of circumstances, the characters' shifting fortunes, which rarely depend on credible social contingencies. The continuity achieved through the role-playing strategy in Fassbinder's work is not a fantasy of endless life, but a confirmation and delimitation of lives lived.38 Fassbinder's engagement with his stock company is of more than ordinary relevance to his social and aesthetic preoccupations. The careers of two of the most active members of the company - Hanna Schygulla and Kurt Raab -intimate what these might be. Hanna Schygulla has appeared in seventeen of the films, usually in a co-starring capacity, but twice in minor, one-scene cameos. At first, her presence is rarely signalled as more important than anyone else's. In the early films the ensemble dominates, and each film in some way refers to another. Beware of a Holy Whore(1970) reenacts the production situation of an earlier film of the same year - Whity- and hurls everyone together in a kind of potpourri of personal and professional, autobiographical and fictional, real and imagined revelations. Consistent with the reflexive posture assumed in the early films, Fassbinder has named all but one of the characters played by Schygulla in the first eight films either Hanna or Johanna. After 1970, at the beginning of what is clearly Fassbinder's more commercial career, Schygulla begins to play more "fictionalized" characters. In fact, her evolving importance in the narratives is emblematic of a dominant line one can

38. Of course, this idea is made explicit in the examples I have cited; but it certainly operates throughout most of Fassbinder's work in general in the multiple incarnations of social types and characters played by all the members of the company.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla in

Katzelmacher, 1969.

.4

,S aw•iiiiii~~~~iiiiiii••iii~~i~iiii•iiiiiiiiiii~iii~ii•

.i~i~ iiiii iii!iii i iii ~i iiiiiiiiii iii !i!iii iiii

. ...

~iiiii~~~i iiiii•i~i i•? :%i~ii!••!i~ii ...iiiii~~ii!!iii!!!•~•! ii:ii•i•i:•i•,. ii•i!i ........... 6 •••J !•!!i••ii' Miiiiii!~!!i~~i~ii•i!• •!::!•J •:••••H ZVIi~ii

•IX 's•i nN:ii••i:•::

114

OCTOBER

The Marriage of perceive in Fassbinder's cinema. And in her latest two films--star, dominating Maria Braun and Lili she emerges as an international Marleen-the narrative itself. The narrative centered around this single character emerges in parallel fashion. The more grandiose conceptions of these two films suggest Fassbinder's move to amplify the allegorical tendency in his work and to create idealized figures not unlike the mythic creations of Hollywood. The characters of Maria Braun and Lili Marleen can be read as symbolic of the human qualities overshadowed by the nightmare of the most turbulent period in Germany's history. They both manifest self-sacrificing humanism and obsessive love, which are set against the brutality and terrorism of Nazism. Maria Braun exhibits a strength and determination of character which parallels and reflects the survival, reconstruction, and adjustment of postwar Germany from the invasion of the Allies to the leadership of Konrad Adenauer. The international popularity of this film attests to the wider appeal such an idealized treatment of character within a historical framework has with audiences. Fassbinder's course as a filmmaker could not be better symbolized than by Hanna Schygulla's emerging importance in the films. But there is, throughout this evolution, another powerful emblem of the paradoxical artist who sheds successive roles in a search for artistic identity. The varied roles played by Kurt Raab offer the embodiment of this restless spirit. Unlike so many of the others who play similar or identical roles, Raab's character seems driven to assume a multiplicity of established social occupations as if to adopt a ready-made posture in order to face the world. He is actor, boss, bartender, neighbor, railroad employee, secretary, pianist, gas-station attendant, drafting designer, bishop, and, most tellingly of all, the leftist writer, in Satan's Brew (1975-76), who suffers from a writing block and a mid-life identity crisis. The continual inscription of the question of identity - as a problem posed within the narrative, and as rehearsed through the strategies of actors and roles - can be understood in the context of the "human comedy." In this sense, the historical drama of the society is reflected not only in the various fictional counterparts of German life, but in the chosen roles played by the filmmaker and this troupe within that society. As a community of working artists in a divided society, they have provided- in the collected body of work that now stands- an emblem of unity in a common endeavor. Whatever the present or future status of this community may be, it is clear that it has played no small part in Fassbinder's prodigious enterprise. Though it may seem ironic that the work of an independent German filmmaker of the seventies has kept alive that image of the Hollywood studio system which no longer exists, one doubts that this is mere coincidence.

Lili Marleen: Fascism and the Film Industry

THOMAS ELSAESSER

Filmmaking in West Germany since the late 1960s has a complex background. Its current high productivity follows twenty-five exceptionally arid years, a moribund period for the country's commercial film industry. Hollywood's particularly ruthless exploitation policy as applied to the West German market meant the enforcement by distributors of block-booking and other nearmonopolistic practices. The Germans, unlike the French or British, were unable to protect their own private industry through legislation. Import quotas and the freezing of box-office receipts - the two most frequently applied trade barriers of the 1950s and '60s - proved politically unacceptable in the face of the massive lobbying undertaken by the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Motion Picture Export Association during the Adenauer era. The decline was slow since West Germany did grant subsidies to its ailing industry. A combination of fiscal measures (reduced entertainment tax on films of cultural value) and a levy on all box-office receipts sustained production. The industry remained undercapitalized, however, existing from hand to mouth, from film to film. The general slide into insignificance of other European film industries during the 1960s demonstrated the inadequacy of purely economic incentives. The Hollywood product was superior in almost every respect and the attempt to compete by means of exploitation pictures brought some producers shortterm profits but ruined the already volatile market. The loss of the popular audiences was followed by the disaffection of the more serious ones. It was perhaps the very thoroughness with which the Americans "cleaned up" in West Germany that opened the way for a different concept of filmmaking. How did Europe's most sophisticated and entangled system of government subsidized filmmaking come into existence? It derived partly from the defensive posture of the German industrial establishment in response to the postwar

116

OCTOBER

absorption of national industries by American capital and from the European Community regulations protecting trade and exchange between individual member countries. More decisive, however, were the ongoing internal struggles between certain groups of German new wave directors on the one hand, and those organizations representing the old guard commercial film industry, on the other. The manifesto issued at the 1962 Oberhausen Short Film Festival represents a turning point. This show of strength was premature, as it turned out, but it set in motion a government machinery which culminated in the creation of a production fund for first films (Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film) in 1965. Two years later, the filmmakers' lobby actually pushed through Parliament the Film Subsidy Law which, since its inception in 1967, has seen no less that three important and hotly debated amendments (1971, 1974, 1979). With financial aid now becoming available on a relatively extensive scale, the latent conflict between culture and commerce within independent filmmaking began to surface; to this day it continues to be crucial. The Constitution of West Germany provides for the jurisdiction of matters of education and culture by the individual states. Since the Film Subsidy Law created a federal agency, however, its provisions had to be phrased in terms appropriate to an economic aid to industry. Hence the ambiguity in the statutes: "The aim is to improve the quality of the German film on a broad basis, and to ameliorate the structure of the film industry." The "and" in this sentence begs several questions, but the law seems to work in favor of a "cultural" interpretation of filmmaking; at least initially, it relieves the filmmaker of box-office pressure. It also renders the status of the finished film and its relation to an audience increasingly problematic. One consequence of the German subsidy system has been to impose the identity of an auteurupon the filmmaker. Not only are the functions of scriptwriter, director, and producer often united in one person so as to maximize eligibility for aid and cash prizes, the system tends, as well, to reward success and a high international visibility, such as those of Herzog, Wenders, and Fassbinder. Directors tend to turn themselves into superstars, "artists," selfconscious representatives of German "culture," of the new Germany. They become "bankable" within both the subsidy network and the international art market. By subsidizing and promoting the new German cinema, through its embassies and cultural institutes, the federal government has cut the Gordian knot that ties film to both industry and art. The success of the Subsidy Law confirms that culture has been recognized as a commodity, part of the range of commodities one might call the national heritage, itself a diffuse accumulation of values that demands a distinct marketing strategy. This holds especially for a country such as West Germany, whose prosperity so largely depends upon exports. The mistake in the case of the cinema has been to consider films as material goods, similar to machine tools, BMW or Mercedes cars, and to attempt direct and

Fascism and the Film Industry

117

unsuccessful competition with the U.S. and Hollywood. The French, by contrast, have always been highly successful in retaining the "French" label associated with a variety of material and immaterial products: wine, cheese, Roland Barthes, Francois Truffaut, and Chanel No. 5, so that "Frenchness" becomes almost an autonomous signifier of value.1 Films, compared with other artifacts, are cheap and efficient to transport. Unlike a ballet company or a symphony orchestra, a few cans of film can go by diplomatic bag, if necessary. And unlike literature, films present no insuperable language barriers, and insurance problems pale to insignificance compared with those attendant upon the shipping of paintings or other auratic works of art. If the subsidy system tends to reinforce the status of the filmmaker as a personality, so culture as export detaches the individual film from any historical or aesthetically precise context. It begins to circulate in as many forms as there are occasions for exhibition: as media event, "masterpiece," star vehicle, brand-name product, or as controversial treatment of a sensitive subject. Films are constructed in their coherence, meaning, and value, not at their points of origin or level of intentionality; rather, discernible shape crystallizes around them in the act of consumption. They become objects, but also "texts." The films of the new German cinema acquire political meaning in ways not always controlled by their makers, and irrespective of their practical, aesthetic, or thematic opposition to West German society and its institutions. The international distribution and consumption of this particular national cinema are such as to make these films opaquely reflecting mirrors in which an audience may find confirmation of its own cultural or psychological identity. They are also official representations, sanctioned and sponsored by a country that has had difficulty in profiling itself either politically or culturally, except through a relatively recent, though intensive preoccupation with its internationally notorious past and its troubled ideological identity as a nation. Hence the special status of this cinema and of Fassbinder's films in the debate on the social function of the artwork today. The European film director acclaimed at the international festivals is often called upon to make either a European film in Hollywood or international films in his own country. The consequence of even a modest commercial success in filmmaking is a thrust toward capital investments and production values that may structurally modify a nation's cinema as a whole.2 The new German cin1. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York, Hill and Wang, 1972, and "Rhetoric of the Image," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York, Hill and Wang, 1977, pp. 32-51. If the example of East European filmmakers (Polanski, Skolimowski, Forman, Passer, 2. Jancso, Makaveyev) is politically overdetermined, the careers of Malle, Bertolucci, Wertmuller and of Truffaut, Chabrol, Reisz or Schlesinger have also developed in the 1970s within a field of force such that money from the major companies becomes treacherous, a gamble with a lifetime's work.

118

OCTOBER

ema shows all the symptoms of a success that will force mutations on the very structures that begot it: Wenders's time with Zoetrope, Herzog's years in the wilderness with Fitzcarraldo,and the emergence of German "Hollywood" films like Das Boot provide instructive case studies about the inadequacy of a precarious balance between television funding and government subsidy. The pressures of an author's cinema caught in changing technologies and changing markets can no longer be regulated by that balance. Only Fassbinder, with his high rate of productivity, seemed able to meet the relentless demands of productivity imposed on him by success and his role as a symbol of the German cinema. Besides his international art-house films (Despair, The Marriageof Maria Braun, Lili Marleen), he revived film genres from Germany's despised 1950s (Die GrosseSehnsuchtder VeronikaVoss) and filmed his own stage productions (New YorkWomen). This productivity made him an important employer. Having silenced and outflanked the remnants of the old film industry lobby, he was able to treat West Germany's largest commercial studio, the Bavaria Atelier in Munich, as his own, virtually private production base.3 Firmly rooted as he was in Germany, despite his occasional, well-publicized outbursts ("rather a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany"), his work, no longer dependent on the subsidy system, offered a constant and intense reflection on the German cinema in transition. Fassbinder's international reputation was gained by a series of "critical" family melodramas; he thereby appeared to demonstrate his ambition to work in a popular fictional genre, and at least in principle, to aim at a mass audience. It is also evident that very complex theoretical issues of subjectivity, socialization, of spectacle and the relays of power, of meaning and value are addressed in his films. The passion and insistence that sustain these concerns from film to film spring not only from their contemporary or fashionable relevance: they bespeak a personal urgency as well, a strangely earnest conviction that a filmmaker is, in his work, accountable to a public and works within history. Thus, the constant, probing meditation on show business, German fascism, and their relations to the nature of desire. This essentially bourgeois self-understanding of the artist - and Fassbinder's subversive-provocative variation on it - stems directly from both the specific mode of patronage for West German filmmaking during the last two decades and the acute contradictions encountered, as the ceiling of the subsidy system touched the floor of the fully capitalist international film and television industry: Fassbinder's films have been made with "real" money, that is, funds that materialize from the dizzyingly complicated profit-and-loss calculations, the write-offs, deferral and refinancing policies, the ceaseless and now wholly selfevident logic of unlimited speculation. This is the most abstract, intangible Two of the most vociferous lobbiests for the old industry, Luggi Waldleitner and Manfred 3. Purzer, acted as producer and scriptwriter respectively on Lili Marleen.


119

form of value and exchange known; its manifestations are "everywhere to be felt, but nowhere to be seen"- a phrase that once referred to the creator of the universe.

In films such as LiliMarleen, Fassbinder indicates that fascism, forty years on, is neither specifically German nor merely historical as a phenomenon; it is rather the constant shadow cast by the crisis cycle of capitalism and of "world trade." Its crystallization points are the constantly displaced "theaters of war," both local conflagrations and those concentrations of power realized through the mass media and the new technologies; they are promoted and naturalized by the ubiquity of war spectacle and show. In the unmediated, pure presence of "Lili Marleen" on the airwaves during World War II, "hard" military rule and consolidated corporate interests became "soft"through the relay of the product, the personality, the image, and the sound. Power had channeled, dispersed, and liquified itself, until it became as insubstantial and dematerialized as the air we breathe. The project of Lili Marleen originated in the base proprietary rights of Luggi Waldleitner (West Germany's most industry-oriented producer) to the song and its title. Fassbinder thereby participates in the process by which capitalism strips history to the skeleton of its own truth; to that which survives as bankable assets. One might suggest that he is thus like his heroine, complicit in his exploitation as the figurehead of a particular regime. The vulgarity of nostalgia is the price paid for operating capital in the currently available valid currency of (German-International) show business. Fassbinder's film is, however, the only film about fascism which constructs its narrative entirely around a paradoxical but historically authenticated montage effect such as the fortuitous encounter of a love song and a world war. The song's former popularity is all that Fassbinder actually takes from history; but it is also all that actually survives. If that "popularity" is indicative of the nature and function of mass culture and the entertainment industry, this is because it designates their products as both objects (commodities) and signs (elements of a discourse). Could Breton have envisaged such a total victory for the objettrouvi and its convulsive beauty as the appearance in novelty shops of Taiwan-made ice-cream-cone saltshakers? Did Brecht realize that the aesthetics of the Messingkauf(buying a trumpet for its brass value) would be adopted by men such as Luggi Waldleitner, who buy a piece of history for its (song-) title? To talk of commercialization, "exploitation," or commodification is to miss the point. We suffer from overproduction of both commodities and discourses, but we now produce commodities directly as discourses (repetition is a form of destruction and recycling). Their consumption is managed, regulated, and assured by pe-

120

OCTOBER

riodic de- and revaluations, which is to say, by either adjustment or redefinition of the material support of the signifiers. The historical montage of Fassbinder's film is a trompel'oeileffect, achieved by suppression and foreshortening of the many specific instances mediating between "Lili Marleen" and a Fascist war. These instances appear as discontinuities, cuts, abrupt transitions, only insofar as they represent different states of power, energizing and reinforcing each other across the gaps of the many media forms, the institutions, the representations, the channels of communication, the circuits of production and consumption. The gaps, modalities, and manifestations of the invisible substance of power also produce "subject-effects," emotions, and intensities. That is the secret of power's hold on desire. Commodities and discourses are, in their "origins," circulation, and destinies, subject to the same disjunctive logic of exchange and transformation that concentrates economic power on one side, while splitting and dividing the subject on the other. Surrealism, dada, and conceptual art have consciously and unconsciously shadowed this leapfrog logic of monopoly capitalism with their mimetic or critical discourses. The difference between readings of surrealism as symptomatic or as critical art practice may now, retrospectively, seem uncomfortably slight. In the cinema, however, it would seem that the symptomatic is the critical discourse, and vice versa. Love stories, crimes, domestic interiors, disasters, battle scenes, the factory facade, the city street, the view of Monument Valley are surely in some sense the equivalents of Duchamp's urinal or bottle-rack or Max Ernst's magazine illustrations: ready-mades, the material substratum, transformed by cinematographic reproduction and editing into the support of signs. Preconditions for the discourses of the real and on the real being narrative d coupage, editing, and framing, one might well place Lang, Renoir, Ford, and Hitchcock in the "avant-garde" beside Richter, Dulac, and Leger, except that the discursiveness of the latter three lacks an equivalent grasp of this social materiality of cinema, seen in relation to the act of separation and disjuncture. Fassbinder's materials are those of the commercial cinema, the "industrial products," the commodities and consumer goods, transported from the hardware stores of show business to the cultural spaces of the art cinema. For his melodramas have never, in any sense, addressed the same audience as the Hollywood films of the 1950s that are now so called. One sometimes wondered where to locate the spectator of the early films, looking about for the object of the finger pointed in one's direction. Fassbinder was able to develop forms of textuality in his films which, while reframing and repositioning the melodrama as a genre, disclosed the constant slippage of the economic and the sexual, while closely adhering to the modes of textuality of the popular cinema; through pathos and irony the cinematic referent becomes a sign, retaining its materiality. Irony is, however, in many ways a weak kind of textuality, and Fassbinder has increasingly concentrated on narratives which heighten coincidence, chance,


121

and the apparently unmotivated contiguity of events. His films have become more political and historical in that they move toward a more explicit "social" textuality. Fassbinder, increasingly concerned with the historical moments of rupture (the inflation period, World War II, and the early postwar years), has redefined melodrama as a possible deconstruction of the hidden discursiveness in the realm of the referent, history, material reality, and the psyche, on the basis of a rigorous and everywhere enforced celebration of the arbitrary. This regime of invisible division within social life itself Fassbinder opposes in his later films through a textuality which parodies the social text that is monopoly capitalism and its most flamboyant self-representation: fascism and the war. LiliMarleen develops in a series of gags and jokes which point to the logic, by no means arbitrary, of the economic and symbolic systems by which our society reproduces its power relations and thus lives its history.

The preoccupation with fascism in the cinema of the last decade is a complex European phenomenon, not satisfactorily explained by references to the appeal of political pornography. For countries without a strong and continuous tradition of filmmaking, international success may depend on an ability to "market" the national history as international spectacle.4 Common currency, such as the iconography of Nazism, establishes a signifying system no less complete, or replete with antinomies and binarism, i.e., possible narratives, than say, the American West or the Civil War. Has fascism perhaps become Europe's answer to the Hollywood genre cinema? It might be argued that fascism was Europe's last genuinely historical experience, the negative image of unification, against which the troubled emergence of national states within the European Community can be assessed. Or, more accurately, the most violent, spectacular face/phase of capitalist production and of (symbolic) consumption prior to the age of the supermarket and the mass media. In films such as Visconti's The Damned, Cavani's Night Porter, Bergman's The Serpent'sEgg, Losey's Mr. Klein, Truffaut's The Last Metro, Schl6ndorff's The Tin Drum, Syberberg's Hitler - A Film from Germany,Petersen's Das Boot, and Fassbinder's Lili Marleen, the Nazi regime and its visual paraphernalia function simultaneously within several other (generic, psychological, authorial, economic) discourses, so that the filmic status of fascism- as signifier, referent, or both- is therefore often extremely difficult to locate. The films of Fassbinder and Syberberg have an advantage in that they foreground those aspects of Nazism which make of it a specific subject of filmmaking in Germany. The establishment of connections between fascism and show business, with a view to Britain's BBC television exports and recent trends in the Australian cinema (Gallipoli, 4. BreakerMorant) suggest such an assumption.

122

OCTOBER

a historical and critical placement of their own practice, appears to be the implicit common perspective of Hitler and Lili Marleen. Both directors have, on the immoderate scale characteristic of the new German cinema, found in the regime's use of radio as technology and as machine of social control a way of locating the present situation of the commercial film industry and state-sponsored German culture; and they have found in it a metaphor for the medium that would in time displace radio as well as the cinema, namely television. They agree that the cinema can deal with history only when and where history itself has acquired an imaginary dimension, where the disjunction between sign and referent is so radical that history turns on a problem of representation, and fascism emerges as a question of subjectivity within image and discourse (of power, of desire, of fetish objects and commodities), rather than one of causality and determinants for a period, a subject, a nation.

We know that the arts have survived (as commodities for the market, as vehicles of ideology) in the face of all historical evidence of anachronism and subservience by virtue of an intense and sustained self-scrutiny. The cinema is, at this stage in its history, in a similar situation, as though its abandonment as site for ideological work in favor of television had become the necessary condition for a realization of its conceptual dimension. Reflexive films have long existed, but cinema's history is now seen within other histories. In the case of Fassbinder and Syberberg, the mutations and transformations of cinema through the German subsidy system and its marketing abroad as "authentic German culture" (the phrase is actually Herzog's) become the occasion for historical and theoretical reflection. Here, however, similarities end: although both directors are no longer dependent upon direct state funding, Syberberg's quasi-artisanal mode of production contrasts sharply with Fassbinder's essentially industrial form of filmmaking. Syberberg's treatment of profilmic material produces a condensation of image and narrative, reminiscent of certain avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century which attacked pictorial representation and the romanesquewith the economy of the mechanically reproduced, the collage, and the juxtaposition of heterogeneous verbal and visual material. There is in his work, however, an essayistic discursiveness that owes more to baroque or biblical models of interpretation than to surrealism. Compared to Syberberg's textual system, it is the romanesque,with its metaphorical condensation of time into action and argument into character conflict, that appears as the saving reductionism of fictional discourse. The conceptual dimension of Fassbinder's work derives not from a reduction in the profilmic, the materials of film production, but rather from a certain narrative economy: his grasp of the idioms of popular cinema and the imagework condensed in its narrative stereotypes and dramatic clich6s, as well as his

The Scarlet Empress, 1934. Josef vonSternberg,

understanding of the abstract forces inherent in the rhetoric of mise-en-scene and of editing technique. The devices of illusionistic representation- camera movement, in-depth lighting, point-of-view, and reverse-field cutting- yield, in Lili Marleen, a textuality in which the imagined plenitude of filmic representation is opened through ellipsis and disjunctive cross-cutting. In the classical narrative cinema, a relay of surrogates, a process of substitution, is constantly activated with respect to point-of-view and the delegation of the look. Considered as a system of enunciation, any form of direct address the fictional space con-be it spectacle, "number," or performance-makes tract, approximating a kind of zero degree of filmic narration. There are film directors-most notably Sternberg, but also Antonioni (in the films made with Monica Vitti) or Godard in PierrotLe Fou- who use their female stars and their performative presences as a way of literalizing, "representing" the filmic process itself. In Sternberg's Marlene Dietrich films, spectacle often draws attention to the (absurd, improbable, even tragic) disproportion of means to ends, causes and effects. When, in The ScarletEmpress, huge doors are worked by an army of attendants or, in ShanghaiExpress, crowds of extras surround the train with their myriad activities so that Marlene Dietrich can fan herself in statuesque immobility as if to recover from the sight of so much human sweat, do we not have a relation between the cinematic apparatus- camera, crane, technicians, lights,

The Scarlet Empress.

to the spectator, and the spectacular display of a pieces of machinery--invisible mere image, highlighting the narrative insignificance of the action? The ironic and gratified smile of Dietrich on such occasions evokes pleasure (and a measure of self-deprecation) in the immense and absurd labor involved in displaying her image, her effortless entrance, presence, performance. She appears to know that she is watched, not so much by the imaginary or invisible male gazes of diegetically present or inferred audiences, but by the immense business of an elaborate machinery, which is itself a metaphor of (male) sexuality. The psychological motivation provided by the narrative is an expedient disguise for the pleasure that consists in becoming aware of this play, of this discrepancy between the machinations of the apparatus and the phantasmatic nature of the apparition. In Fassbinder's film, this metaphorical relation of performance, of spectacle to camera and apparatus is disturbed and foregrounded in such a way as to become the condition under which a purely fictive, anecdotal relationship of spectacle to a political or historical referent can be actualized in the cinema. Fassbinder's refusal to construct a "properly" constituted narrative space, the ellipses and elisions of plot information and of image construction and spatial continuity, his very flat, frontal, and symmetrical compositions, juxtaposed with very cluttered, obstructed, wilfully extreme viewpoints, generate a systematic opposition between motivated point-of-view shot and exhibitionist performance which becomes a cinematic signifier in its own right. The spectacle is thus broken down into the imaginary one-to-one relationship between performer and viewer (sign of illusionist immediacy), and the relation seeing/seen


125

comes to signify the agencies that produce the spectacle not behind the scenes, but in front of them. This "in front of" makes possible the entry of the extracinematic referent ("history," fascism) by way of a metaphorical relation to the filmmaking process, for which the action/performance on the screen is the metonymic surrogate. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that the song "Lili Marleen" is a metaphor, or even a representation en abymeof Fassbinder's film fictional narrative and the historical pre-text, of that title. But Lili Marleen--the the song and its reiterated performance in sound and image, the subject slippage of actress, character, name, and addressee- does create a symbolic field of receding and nested references that places the film both as material object and, in the act of consumption, within the mirror-image of its own subject. To point to an obvious example: Hanna Schygulla plays a woman called Willie, singing a song in which a first-person narrator (a man) addresses an unnamed woman by invoking another woman, named Lili Marleen. Once this song has become popular, because it provides a subject position and a temporality for lonely men in the trenches, Willie autographs pictures of Hanna Schygulla with the name Lili Marleen. Hanna Schygulla is not Willie (in the tautology elaborated over decades by the star system which allows actor or actress to "use up" the fictional character they portray), she is Lili Marleen, because both are identical imaginary objects (or discursive effects) for two historically distinct audiences (soldiers of World War II and cinema spectators now) constructed en abymein relation to each other. Fassbinder, in Lili Marleen, isolates something as ephemeral and banal as a popular song, albeit one that, like the cinema, commands its own imaginary and mythological space within history. This space is such that it can be neither metonymically collapsed with history (in the sense that one might be tempted to say that "Lili Marleen" stands for the use of the mass media under fascism) nor metaphorically separated from it (by treating the song as a symbolic representation of the cinema, for instance). It is precisely the complex status of the song as object, irreducible and recalcitrant to the uses it served, and at the same time, product, expression, and signifier of a historical period, which is at issue. The narrative is charged with tying down, anchoring, and articulating these relations and effects in both their metaphorical and metonymic implications.

Lili Marleen is a love story. Love stories such as Dr. Zhivago and Reds, played out against the background of historical events, advertise themselves as prestige products of the international film industry. Such films, however, represent not only the accumulation of production values and second-unit location work; they represent, as well, a certain textuality in which the narrative organization prescribes to the characters roles that relate them to the events as either embodiments or antagonists of the historical conflicts. As heroes or victims of

126

OCTOBER

history, they participate in a rigorously metaphorical discourse. Battles and revolutions, a journey or an exodus, the founding of a nation or the fall of an empire duplicate or counterpoint individual desire or the destiny of a family in a reciprocity of analogies and paradigms. The dramatic and spectacular ingredients of a film epic meet in the contractual coherence of the package deal as a montage of elements which the narrative is called upon to articulate and shape into binarisms and metaphoric equivalences. Recent novels, as for example, D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, have, with a certain knowing confidence, attempted to employ this popular mode in order to turn it against itself. Lili Marleen, like The White Hotel, extracts its heroine from narrated history to implicate her in ways that challenge directly the metaphorical construction of classical narrative. Questions of heterogeneity and disjunction in these works are inseparable from questions of sexuality and desire. Fassbinder (dis-) articulates his narrative as a sequence of coincidences, accidents, ruptures, border crossings, and discontinuities: "love" is what inhabits always the spaces in between. In this respect, a line of development emerges from Fassbinder's career as a filmmaker. The early films could be described as love stories in which the desire of the central character displaces itself ceaselessly in relation to an unattainable object and in which the quest terminates in literal or symbolic death (The Merchantof Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and His Friends). In each case the object seems, more or less explicitly, to be a reading which the films, however, attempt, as it were, to the maternal body-didactic use of coincidences, underscoring nonpsychological block by a rather structure. When, for instance, in The Merchantof Four Seasons, Hans hires as his assistant the very man whom his wife had taken as her lover, the fact that Hans remains ignorant of the irony is less important than the narrative economy that results from the construction of a dramatic hinge between sexual and economic exchange. Exaggerated coincidences, in films like Fox and His Friends or Fear Eats theSoul, appear as part of Fassbinder's strategy of redefining melodrama as social parable. In the later films, the structural use of coincidence has if anything increased in importance, especially in the films that deal with fascism; nevertheless, they cannot be read as social parables. If one looks at Despair, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and Lili Marleen, one notices that all three films begin with a moment of break, in which an apparently "successful" heterosexual object-choice is disturbed by the more or less violent entry of a completely different referent. In Despair it is the Wall Street Crash that seems bound up with the hero's mental dissociation, and in Maria Braun an explosion at the Registrar's office anticipates both the violent collapse of the Third Reich and the couple's separation. These political or economic signifieds are casually embedded in the narrative, but the relations of equivalence established between psychological motivation and political issues and events become increasingly precarious. Whereas in Despair it is possible to construct


127

an essentially metaphorical discourse which holds the film in place until it deconstructs itself before the spectator's eye as a fiction of filmmaking ("I am a film actor. Don't look at the camera. I am coming out."), the relation between love and war in Maria Braun or Lili Marleen is the very occasion for a noncongruent, nonmetaphorical discourse. The collisions, divisions, and separations that structure these films when read as metaphorical appear preposterous. It is this which has led many critics to dismiss Lili Marleen as just that: a preposterous exercise in bad taste. This judgment is founded on the mistaken assumption (provoked by the manner in which juxtaposition teases the spectator with the promise of a hidden analogy) that the film constructs its coherence on the apparently naive metaphorical relationship between fascism and the song, between a doomed love affair and a war ending in defeat. Yet in Lili Marleenboth love story and fascism are represented in ways that effectively dismantle the armature of popular romance and historical melodrama. Maria Braun has generally been interpreted as a further exploration of the critical possibilities inherent in the Hollywood family melodrama. Fassbinder appears to establish a link between emotional privation and economic investment, leaving open the question whether economic activity is a substitute for sexual gratification or sexual activity a displacement of the erotic attraction of power. In this respect, Maria Braun does seem to invert the conventions of the melodrama, where the economic is usually the dimension that is repressed and thus gives to the dramatic situation the force of emotional excess. Here, renunciation and emotional coldness underpin a certain puritan work ethic, which provides a meta-psychological explanation for the energy Germans invested in the reconstruction of their national economy. Such a New Left reading of (Sirkian) melodrama by critics (including Fassbinder himself) does not altogether account for the perversity of a film like Maria Braun and risks seeing the heroine as an allegorical figure. It is true that in concentrating on the economic repressed of Hollywood melodrama, Fassbinder offers a view of the genre's social function within the historical context of the 1940s and '50s. But Maria Braun mourns her missing husband even after his release, for she engineers situations that send him first to prison and then to Canada where he, too, can make a fortune. The marriage survives because it remains based on separation and is practically unconsummated, except in death, and under circumstances that return to and repeat, in the form of parody and "farce," the historic explosion which opens the film. There is considerable figurative ambiguity about the ending: whether it is an intratextual deferral of the initial violence, thereby constructing the terms of a difference that gives the narrative the circularity of its closure, or the representation of an orgasmic moment that subsumes a psychic and a political referent in a common metaphor is critically undecidable. It would appear that Maria Braun revolves around the heroine's attempt to retain absolute control over the terms of her own libidinal economy within a historical period of rapid and violent economic changes.

128

OCTOBER

Lili Marleenresembles Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die in the way it sets love story against the background of historical events. It resembles Maria Braunin the way it represents this love as forceful and significant only insofar as it is based on separation, rupture, nonfulfillment. The story about love is doubled (or multiplied perhaps) by a story not, as in Maria Braun, about the love object, but about an objectification of this love in a form that both contains it and betrays it, namely the song "Lili Marleen." But in order to consider the significance of this shift, from the absence of the love object to its displacement by mechanical reproduction in the form of a phonograph record, it is necessary to indicate briefly how Lili Marleenactually does refer itself to the codes of filmic melodrama. The film opens with the lovers in each other's arms. The stereotypical goal of the melodrama is here its point of departure. The subsequent narrative develops out of the interruption of this embrace which ensues when Robert's brother enters the room to remind him of his duty toward his father and the Jewish resistance group operating from Switzerland against the Nazis. The scene sets out all the antinomies that simultaneously structure the conflicts Jew/Arian, Nazi/underground, Germany/Switzerland, father/lover - and keep the lovers apart. Since nonfulfillment is not only the driving force but also the goal of the narrative, the conflicting terms are never mediated in a "classical" narrative resolution. Robert's insistent demand to know which side Willie is on never receives an answer. Rather, the condition of their love is that it sustain the territorial and moral divisions that the film sets up. As in Maria Braun, object and desire establish a unity in the heroine only across a separating bar which both films represent as, among other things, a geographical border.

Lili Marleen, 1980.

129


At one level, the narrative movement of Lili Marleensimply illustrates the pressures that force the lovers to identify themselves with groups opposed to their love-the Jewish resistance on the one side, Nazi show business on the other. Both remake themselves in the image and the terms of the worlds they inhabit, at the same time as they try to use these worlds to realize their love. The world of moral and political obligations which Robert chooses turns out to be dominated in every respect by his father, so that he is defined completely by the oedipal limits of patriarchy. The world of spectacle, show, performance, and self-display which Willie chooses is synonymous with Nazism. The difference between Robert's and Willie's "inscription" into society reproduces the sexual difference which society traditionally sanctions. The Law of the Father alots duty, work, renunciation to him; specularity and objectification to her. The film also makes a distinction between the vicissitudes of Robert's and Willie's displaced desires. As these are so carefully underscored, Lili Marleen, depending on whose destiny one is most concerned with, is actually two films: a melodrama and an antimelodrama. Robert's story follows the lines of the typical German melodrama of the mid-'30s, exemplified, say, by Detlev Sierck's Schlussakkordand of "composer" or "great artist" films that Hollywood made popular during the 1930s and '40s. In these films, an impossible love, the lashings of sexual frustration, gives rise to virtuoso performances and master works. This identification, by bourgeois art forms, of art and frustrated love is attributed, in a complexly edited scene near the film's end, to the castration anxiety which empowers the Law of the Father. The face-to-face meeting of Willie and Robert at the Zurich opera house is mediated by the glances of two women- Robert's mother and his wife. These glances are intercut at several

Lili Marleen.

130

OCTOBER

points, however, by an image that cannot be located within the diegetic space of the narrative, but that acts as a kind of master shot for the sequence: this is a frontal mirror shot of Robert's father as a benevolent but threatening spectator of both the triumphant performance onstage and the embarrassing scene backstage. Robert's escape into the world of performance has not liberated him from anxiety as Willie's spectacular resurrection as the mythical Lili Marleen has liberated her by giving her, as she says, "a passport to no longer being afraid." Willie's story offers a reading that turns the melodrama on its head; it also suggests a kind of psychoanalytic approach to the genre. She, too, sublimates and displaces her unfulfilled desire in music and performance. The substitutive function of "Lili Marleen," when she first sings it in a Munich nightclub, is explicitly established by the phone call she places backstage to Robert in Zurich. Her frank and' reiterated declaration of love can be heard, due to a fault in the amplification system, throughout the bar, to the great hilarity of the guests and to the detriment of her performance. The attempt to fix her subjectivity in this way is a disaster, quite literally, insofar as her cabaret number gives rise to a riot in the bar, between a group of young Germans in SA uniforms and some English visitors. The ensuing demolition of the premises is staged and cut in a manner later reserved for the depiction of air attacks and of bomb explosions in German trenches. These shots are themselves intercut with those of bouquets of flowers being tossed on stage in tribute to her smash hit. Here is a good example of Fassbinder's undercutting of the metaphorical use of parallel editing by playing on a pun: "Lili Marleen" is a Bombenerfolg,while the bombs are falling; human bodies erupt from the ground like flowers on opening night. There is another irony at work in Willie's story. Frustration is not sublimated in a symphony, an immortal score, or an unforgettable performance, but in the performance of a popular song on a phonograph record. Fassbinder, however, twice makes the point that no psychological, causal, or intentional relationship exists between the singer and the phonograph record. Frustrated love remains just that: her performance is a flop, and the fact that her Nazi protector insists on recording it merely emphasizes that it is not her desire that speaks, but someone else's desire for her. Even the record would have passed unnoticed, had it not been for the coincidence of the war's breaking out. It takes the additional fortuity of the Belgrade radio operator's finding a stray copy of it among looted spoils for the song to air at all. At the climax of her career, Willie dances around the luxury apartment given to her by the Fiihrer; holding a mirror in front of her, she exclaims, "We've made it, we're above the clouds." Taschner, her pianist and companion, responds as if to complete her sentence, "And the irony is, you have no voice and I'm a lousy pianist." This is the most Sirkian moment in the film, a rapid undercutting of subjective elation with a sobering objectivity. Irony is piled upon irony: Taschner's comment


131

severs, in the most direct and brutal way, any organic or necessary connection that might be thought to exist between singer and song, self-expression and success, talent and recognition, subjectivity and image, authenticity and exhibition value. Which advises us, as spectators, against construing the relationor as merely coincidental. ship between love and war as metaphoricalThe all-night recording session in which the song is cut is most revealing of the film's ironies. After several takes, Willie's manager agrees to a short break; it is 6:00 AM. They turn on the radio for the news just in time to hear Hitler announce, "Since 5:45 AMthis morning, the German Army is returning fire." The outbreak of the war coincides with the recording of the song. A clich6 from the B-picture thriller - the hero on the run turns on the radio to learn that he is wanted by the police - thus serves to introduce a historical referent, a documentary piece of evidence that the cliche clearly cannot contain. Not only has war been declared, but outside in the park, Willie's lover is waiting, having crossed the border illegally and against his father's orders. These three moments of drastically unequal weight and significance are made to coexist within the same narrative space, against all probability, and in breach of every code of verisimilitude (except that which governs the comic book). It is only the artifice of fictional construction, dependent on the viewer's ability to read coincidence as a conceptual montage effect, which unites these events. Otherwise the incongruity between the private, the anecdotal, and the historical remains so radical and unbridgeable as to offend the sophisticated viewer's sense of proportion and even propriety. For having to read the coincidence between the end of a recording session and the start of a world war as significant on the diegetic level- as a moment of symmetry, as an explanation of why the song was so meaningful during the war- amounts to dismissing the film as "not serious."5 The scene must appear as grotesque, unless one sees the film as pressing narrative coincidence to the point where it deconstructs itself as "gag." Fassbinder here appropriates, as he had already done in Satan's Brew (1976), the logic of film comedy for melodrama- a move that is motivated in this case primarily by his views of fascism and the shortcomings of the melodrama as a socially significant form. The problem with melodrama, as has already been indicated, lies in its particular modes of disjuncture and discontinuity: irony and pathos. Both depend on the spectator's assumption of a secure position of knowledge, which is to say, on a narrative which establishes a strong sense of closure. Depictions of fascism, for example, are ironic, whenever they assume, as they invariably do, the spectator's knowledge of fascism's histori5. "It is a costly business digging up Germany's recent past. . Lili Marleen will have to .. gross over DM 1Im at the box office just to recover its production cost. . . . With Fassbinder's favorite actress, Hanna Schygulla, in the title role, the film is a slap in the face of anybody who ever thought Fassbinder an important director: it is pure weepy ...." ( The Guardian, February 6, 1981).

132

OCTOBER

cal and geographic boundaries. The play of anticipation, rhyme, and echoeffects which this knowledge allows makes the historic referent metaphorical. Fassbinder's problem is precisely how to inhibit this metaphorization, how to stop Nazism from becoming a Hollywood melodrama which is what it becomes in all narrative accounts, since the reader-viewer knows in advance "how it ended." In Lili Marleen, May '45 is not the endpoint of the narrative, nor is irony its primary mode. The misconception that fascism has ended, has been contained, that it was just another story is thus disallowed. Instead coincidence is presented as gag and disturbs, with its asymmetry and nonequivalence, the formal closure of popular narrative. A series like Holocaustattempts to contain fascism by translating its effects on and making it equivalent to the bourgeois family. What is scandalous to many viewers of Lili Marleenis that the relation family/fascism is presented as a structural symmetry onto which the antagonism Jew/Arian is simply mapped as additional confirmation that the heroine must find her subject position outside either set of value systems or narrative constraints, at the same time as she represents an object-of value, of exchange-for both sides. Her lover's antifascism is entirely recuperated within patriarchy. His desires thus become fixed in an object-choice and a mode of "self-expression" that trap him in the melodramatic resolutions of renunciation and sublimation. For Willie, on the other hand, political and subjective value are noncongruent. By resisting all constructions of herself by the terms of binary oppositions, she achieves a particular kind of freedom. She becomes a sign without a unique referent. Instead, her star image and the phonograph record-are several referents--notably to attached her, allowing her desire to exist outside either possimultaneously session or fulfillment. Neither her show business "personality" nor the song she records and sells represents or expresses her desire, except in the way they permit her to constitute herself outside fascism and outside the family. Spectacle becomes a form of escape. Whereas her lover forcibly unifies himself in a discourse of repression, she lives desire as pure displacement and difference without fetish or object. Fassbinder becomes aware of the limits of melodrama at precisely the point where the major ideological premise of his earlier work begins to change, namely that "love"- whether given or withheld, whether betrayed or upheld against all odds- is both the supreme source of value and the supreme instrument of inequality and exploitation. In all his early films, emotional, sexual, and economic exploitation are metaphors for each other, substitutable fields that make love "colder than death." Love remains the only currency still valid, but it lends itself to any form of speculation and calculation of gain and loss. Godard links economic and emotional relations under capitalism through the metaphor of prostitution (the ubiquity of exchange-value criticized from a romantic perspective of use-value), so that in his films it is only the active pursuit of prostitution (My Life to Live, Two or Three Things I Know aboutHer, Everyman for Himself) which affords any promise of freedom. Fassbinder, for whom it is


133

above all the way love is traded within the family that provides the condition for perpetuating exploitation elsewhere has, in his recent films, shed any residual romanticism about alienated use-value as the basic source of value in Western societies, and instead begun to analyze what is paradoxical and ideological in the very notions of exploitation and prostitution. In an obvious, though banal sense, Lili Marleen does pose the paradox of the earlier films: is Willie prostituting herself to the Nazis in exchange for fame and wealth, or is she merely being exploited by the regime that launches her on a career? How can she be on the right side (morally) and on the wrong side (physically); how can she work for the resistance and be a figurehead and showcase for the Nazis; how can she love Robert and accept the luxury and glamour with which the Fiihrer himself surrounds her? To think of her as either exploited or as prostituting herself is to hold her to the same binary alternative as her lover does. One sees here a constellation of factors which could structure a much simpler film, a "classical" melodrama where male desire, established and simultaneously divided by the jealousy that results from the oedipal triangulation, salvages itself from its own contradictions through the phantasmatic production of the woman as both victim and villain. It is through the constant return to periods of economic crisis and collapse in his recent work, the dramatization of an unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire, that Fassbinder represents "exploitation" as a false question, or rather, as merely the partial and particular form of another problem. Recognizing that her desire is unfulfillable-that withdraws any desire is unfulfillable-Willie herself from the sphere of authority and control, from gain and loss. The question becomes no longer one of "exploitation," but of that which underpins and gives currency to exploitation and speculation, namely substitution and substitutability. In short, the realm of metaphor and exchange, where narrative form and the social production of meaning and value converge, is exposed to examination. At the same time as Willie seemingly consents to lend her voice and body, her image and her performance to the Nazi regime, she also lets herself be used by the other side. Her attempted suicide is seized upon by the Jewish resistance as an occasion for making public to the world press certain facts about the concentration camps. In a countermove, the Nazis revive her in order to bring her back on stage. She is paraded before the same international press, as evidence that the Jewish claims-not about Lili Marleen, but about the concentration camps- are mere propaganda. The "reality" of her performance, of her death, and of the concentration camps, is entirely subsumed by their function as signifiers and shifted from one discourse to another. Her final appearance enacts that blissful version of death which turns the individual into a transparent sign - dematerialized, the human substance which has supported it used up. Only herself into a site of while at the same time insistby turning sign-production, on does Willie constructed as an object - of desire difference, ing escape being and exchange, a commodity.

Lili Marleen.


135

It is almost entirely within this perspective - which is obviously also the perspective of Fassbinder's own construction as a filmmaker, as a performer in that fascism becomes the cultural contexts of sign and commodity productionin well as as historical Lili Marleen. the well-known iconogAlthough specific of invades historical the Nazism maintains its metfilm, spectaculars raphy onymic ties with the war, or rather, with several kinds of warfare (the military fronts, the propaganda and media war, and the "secret war" between the Nazis and the Jewish resistance organization). The rigorous and businesslike administration of war destroys existing criteria of value and conventional forms of coherence. War is represented from the point of view of production: it is seen as an acceleration and a unifying force which, by speeding up the productive and reproductive cycles of the economy, intensifies consumption. This is, in the film, the point on which another surreal gag turns. The popularity of the song is confronted with the need of a Fascist society to liquidate and destroy surplus material (human and technological) in its attempt to impose the abstract and disguised rationality of war. "Six million"- Willie's face beams as she is told by her Nazi friend how many listeners are tuning in to "Lili Marleen" every night. "Fantastic," she says, trying to hug herself with both arms to confirm that this means her. Turned to the camera in medium close-up, Hanna Schygulla's face reveals the bliss which her definition as a star, by means of sales sheets and rating figures, brings her. Six million-the figure connects her fans, soldiers dying in the trenches, and the Jews dying in concentration camps, as it equates mass consumption and show business with war and organized waste. The coincidence of soldier and fan is turned by Fassbinder into a gag when a pianist-turned-soldier takes his platoon over the hill and straight into the machine gun fire of the Russians whom he mistakes for German troops because they, too, are playing "Lili Marleen." If this is an example of the way the same becomes different, of the way the song is shown to be nonidentical with itself, the extent to which this is a structural principle of the film as a whole emerges in the sequence in which Willie attempts to prove to her lover that she is on his side. The film documenting the existence of concentration camps in Poland is smuggled out under cover of Willie's Eastern Front entertainment tour; it is given to her during a car ride which is to provide her with an alibi for a meeting with her lover. The Gauleiter's attempt to recover the film (she has hidden it in her bra) is deliberately misinterpreted by her as a sexual advance which she rebuffs with the help of her pianist friend whose assertion of his own sexuality starts off another chain reaction directly leading to his death. During a body search ordered by the Nazi command, he offers to transmit film to the Jewish resistance as a sign of his love for her, even though he knows that for Willie the film is merely a sign of her love for Robert. The film reaches Switzerland at the same time as Robert's father is negotiating the release of his son captured by the Nazis who demand the film in exchange for Robert's return. The film, which is never actually ex-

136

OCTOBER

hibited, is circulated and exchanged in a number of conflicting deals and "discourses," acquiring from each a different value quite separate from any original meaning or intended use. It is Robert's brother, the "terrorist," who refuses to submit to the logic of these exchanges between sex and politics, cinema and life. He blows up the bridge between Germany and Switzerland, reestablishes their division and distinction, because, as he says, he hates "these dirty deals." As Willie receives the information about the number of fans who comprise her audience, her face is lit by a lamp, placed conspicuously in the foreground. Her Nazi friend, standing diagonally opposite in the background, idly (and prominently) spins a globe. Glamour lighting of the star image controlled by the global strategies of war, trade, and dominion - or a subjectivity entirely enthralled by itself on one side of the divide, and an objectivity wholly instrumentalized on the other? The Fascist war economy and its show business operation appear as a kind of immense and universalized black market where, in the manner of all military dictatorships, the Nazis impose their own rate of exchange- fixed from moment to moment and liable to sudden and surreal reversals- which suspend all moral or referential values other than their own. With this, Fassbinder's view of show business as an instrument that splits sign from referent is doubled by the picture of fascism as a form of crisis management in the economic sphere, called upon to regulate by force the acceleration of production. Seen as eliminating surplus by simple destruction while at the same time developing radio, and organizing through it an elaborate system of transportation and communication, Nazism becomes a particularly flamboyant merely because of figuration of capitalism in the sphere of representation-not its gigantic aspirations or the brutality of its public life, but more because of its power to reorganize a society's ethical, material, and erotic relations in the direction of spectacle or rituals of communal consumption of sounds and images. The identification, in Lili Marleen, of mass coercion (the Nazi regime and the army) with mass consumption (show business and the electronic "global village" of radio and television) is interesting in another respect. The question which Nazism raises today is perhaps less its relation to material production and capitalism, or the monstrous scale and consequence of its demographic planning, than its astounding ability to create a public sphere, a mass audience. The song of Lili Marleen, endlessly repeated as a nightly ritual above and between the sights and sounds of war, is such a fascinating phenomenon, partly because of the discrepancy between the pure presence of the song, hermetically sealed by its technological immediacy from any contact and context, and the ceaselessly destructive and immensely busy machinery of war. Media technology binds, in this case, performer and listener in an imaginary unity. It molds a whole array of social and communicate activities (performance, recording, broadcasting, listening, phoning, and letter-writing) around something which, while still in need of some sort of material support (a phonograph


137

record, a receiver, a broadcasting station), nonetheless has no determinants itself other than a kind of mirror surface for the projection or reflection of desire. What exactly is this desire? In a sense, "Lili Marleen" voices a protest, a refusal, a critique even: it says no to war, and yes to memory, loss, and love. ("For you and I again to meet/Under the lantern on the street/Like times gone by, Lili/Gone by, Lili Marleen"). One can see why the Nazi leadership felt ambiguous about it, because it gives expression to a death wish at the same time as it disguises and disavows it ("Out of the earthly soil, out of the silent realm/ Your loving lips could lift me, as if in a dream/And late, when the fog is rolling in/I'll stand beneath the lamp again/Like times gone by . . ."). This double impulse may well explain the song's popularity during the war; it certainly explains the symptomatic significance which it is granted in the film. As a protest and a refusal, its message would seem to be at odds with its social and political function as a nightly theme song: to boost morale and unite the and the idea of the Volksgemeinpopulation--civilian military--behind and the The stark opposition of love to military discipline in the schaft Fiihrer. song, its "politics of subjectivity," is, however, recuperated by the ritual and turned to the advantage of the regime. But the situation is even more complex. Not only is the song repeated nightly (and throughout the film), it is itself entirely built on repetition and refrain ("wie einst"- like times gone by). Conjuring up a lost object and a lost moment, both of which the song re-presents and repossesses through the refrain and the overall melodic structure, the song is clearly obsessional and fetishistic.6 How is it that mass subjectivity becomes so intricately bound up with this obsessional song? As Robert is tortured by broken snatches of the song, we are given a vivid representation of the hounding persistence of the compulsion to repeat and of the frustration, violence, or aggression it entails. The utterly subjective death-wish expressed in the song stands in symmetrical relation to the historical death to which its listeners are headed. For, by the film's terms, the German popular culture which is massively committed to the articulation and representation of subjectivity and desire works in tandem with an entertainment industry that extends its dominion and economic control more and more firmly into the same area- that of the subject. Here the split, unreconciled in most contemporary theory of culture, between the economic structure of the mass media and the political meaning of subjectivity, is made obvious. As the products of culture reveal their commodity/sign status, which destines them for The refrain embodies a kind of temporality typical of the ballad form: circular and self6. canceling, progressing forward from strophe to strophe while at the same time attempting regressively to rejoin the phantasmatic moment of origin. Presence is signified indirectly, by absence "beneath the street light's glow," "our two shadows," "as if in a dream," and so forth. In this respect "Lili Marleen" functions in a way similar to another famous song in another obsessional and fetishistic film: Marlene Dietrich's "Falling in Love Again" which appears refrainlike at the beginning and end of Sternberg's Blue Angel.

138

OCTOBER

consumption or the devaluation/revalorization processes of the market, so the subjectivity that articulates itself across these products speaks only of loss and destruction, nostalgia and death. In this respect, the particular "sensibility," the powerfully melancholic, Saturnalian turn of the new German cinema is perhaps nothing other than the precisely perceived demonstration of its political function, the negative truth about its objective condition: the representation of radical subjectivity trapped in commodity form. The more the song, "Lili Marleen," is repeated, the more it becomes a pure signifier, able to signify any number of different and contradictory signifieds, to enter into any number of conflicting discourses. Caught in a cycle of repetition, it no longer denotes anything, but merely connotes a wholly abstract, generalized structure of absence or loss and reinforces the primary death wish of the subject. Yet the song colludes with fascism only insofar as its repetitive form installs within the subject that same synthesizing force which unites the social system to a Fascist politics, unites it, that is, under a single figure, a single image, a single insignium. The disjunctive though metonymic relations between performer and song on the one hand, and between song and material object/commodity on the other are absolutely fundamental to Fassbinder's conceptualization of the cinema, since they implicate, by way of a series of displaced analogies and en abyme constructions, the film object and its author/performer. The song, insofar as it exists prior to and apart from its material shape as record or infinitely repeatable performance, may function as a mode of self-expression, a declaration of love, of morbid protest, of a desire for nostalgic return; it may even, in its circularity, assert a kind of internal closure and coherence, of aesthetic autonomy. Its value as a record of subjective intention, however, contrasts with its exhibition or circulation value, since its intentions become literally immaterial as soon as the work realizes itself in the iterative acts of consumption. It is these acts which establish the commodity as sign, as vehicle (potential or actual) of an infinite number of discourses-the critical discourse being only one among several. This sign form is, above all, the symbol of the technical and economic power inherent in the mass media, of the power it has to reorganize, from the point of view of consumption, both the production of materials and of meaning. As these totally abstract processes of power emerge in concrete contexts (here, as a song that serves to console soldiers on both sides as they face annihilation; that becomes an instrument of torture, a political weapon in a propaganda war, a means of turning an individual into a star), they assume for their material support not that which is rich, varied, or profound, but that which is bland, banal, devoid of any but the power to circulate. The mass media artifact is thus not the product of a field of combative forces - between the author, for example, and the industry which exploits him or her - but of the site where, through immense technical and logistic effort, all forces are neutralized. The


139

conjunction of Nazism and "Lili Marleen" illustrates the way the logisticmilitary machinery stages the perfect spectacle as the one from which all external referents are emptied. Yet there is at work here another, a conflicting force. "Lili Marleen" also obliquely, stubbornly opposes itself to all the forces that attempt to appropriate it. When Willie says, "I only sing," she is not as politically naive or powerless as she may appear. Just as her love survives because she withdraws it from all possible objects and objectifications, so her song, through its very circularity, becomes impervious to the powers and structures in which it is implicated. Love and song are both, by the end of the film, empty signs. This is their strength, their saving grace, their redemptive innocence. In this way Fassbinder acknowledges the degree to which his own work is inscribed within a complex system (of production, of dissemination and reception, of devaluation and revaluation) already in place and waiting to be filled by an individual, a locus of intention, energy, and desire. It is this system, after all, that transformed him from the director of this material (Nabokov's, D-blin's, Lale Andersen's) into a personality, a star. Straub and Huillet construct all their films around the notion of the resistance of their materials to the filmic process; Fassbinder, on the other hand, constructs his films around the notion of the inability of materials to resist. It is not through resistance, but through self-cancellation that materials are supposed to achieve any purity in his films. Fassbinder has written a personal performance for himself into both Maria Braun and Lili Marleen. In Lili Marleen he is the leader of the resistance group who contacts Hanna Schygulla and gives her the film that will document for the "free world" the precise nature of German atrocities. In Maria Braun he plays a black-marketeer who gives Hanna Schygulla (again) the evening dress that launches her on a career as the "Mata Hari of the Economic Miracle." He also carries in his black suitcase a bottle of schnaps and the collected works of Heinrich von Kleist. These self-portraits establish the filmmaker as a trader in intoxicants, glamour, culture, and documentary evidence, selling his wares in a world where war and the black market fix the prices. It is in this light that the direction of Fassbinder's later films, especially Maria Braun and Lili Marleen, becomes evident. As he deconstructs the irony and pathos of melodrama by highlighting coincidence, turning fortuity into a surreal gag, Fassbinder constructs tighter and tighter narratives. Convoluted and intricate relations of act and motive, of cause and consequence, the manipulative strategies of European history become signifiers of a narrative economy that realizes its objectives through the juxtaposition and equation of noncomparable entities. The logic of the narrative by which move gives rise to countermove and acts of substitution or parallel editing replace head-on conflict becomes, in a very specific and restricted sense, the textual equivalent of the logic that regulates trade, barter, and exchange and defines value by force, the crossing of borders, and circulation of discourses. The logic which directs Robert's

140

OCTOBER

father first to pay for all of Willie's "debts" in order to accumulate enough evidence to obtain an expulsion warrant from the Swiss government, and then to allow Willie to accompany Robert to Munich so that the lovers can be served the warrant and legally separated at the German-Swiss border, is the mirror equivalent of the logic which directs the Nazis to use Willie and Robert as bait for each other and as pawns in the circuit of exchange that results in the release of Robert and the transfer of Jews to Switzerland. The same chiasmic path defines the journeys of the reel of film as it makes its way from Poland via Germany to Switzerland and back and "Lili Marleen" as it circulates between contending forces both within and outside Germany. Robert and Willie's love affair is always masterminded, but it would be inexact to interpret the film's logic - by which the actions and methods of the Jewish resistance and the Nazis parallel each other and seem to hint at some vast conspiracy which locates the lovers (and the spectator) as victims- as paranoid. Each move implies a redefinition of genre (melodrama, thriller, historical epic, musical), a testing of the value of the objects in circulation. We might say that in this sense Lili Marleen reworks and historicizes Fritz Lang's M (in which police and organized crime are both in pursuit of the same suspect) and his Mabuse films (which are constructed entirely on the exchange and substitution of objects whose values are redefined). Certainly Fassbinder shares with Lang a concern with questions of cinematic enunciation, with the way a film addresses and situates the spectator. The two kinds of discursive practices which confront each other in Lili Marleen- the economic one of unlimited exchange-value and the narrative one of metaphor and metonymy are brought together in a historical reading of a subject position, in a fiction which is not about madness or sexual pathology, but about fascism and the negative desire embodied in a song and a love affair. The theatrical address, the emphasis on performance and spectacle does not work to establish a unified position of knowledge, but to make visible that particular, historical inscription of desire which is controlled by popular fictions. Cinema is indeed a machine that displays desire, but most often this desire is disguised in the endless chains of substitution that make up the narrative. In Fassbinder, it is desire in its disjunctive dimension that displays the machine (the whole institution of filmmaking, including its part in trade, in film financing). Instead of attempting to arrest the flow of commodities and the marketing of history and its images, Fassbinder has helped to promote their circulation by giving his later films the same complex sign character that social "reality" has under capitalism. He insists, however, by the negativity of his self-consuming narratives and their notto-be-realized consummations, on the nonreconciliation of sign and desire, of sign and referent. In this way he rescues for the cinema, for spectacle, a dimension of loss and incommensurability that makes desire itself appear a historical force.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: A Complete Filmography

This filmography has beencompiled using thefollowing sources: Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns, London, British Film Institute, 1980; Fassbinder, trans. Ruth McCormick,New York, Tanam Press, 1981; Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Filmemacher, Wolfgang Limmer, Hamburg, Spiegel-Verlag,1981, Variety; The GermanFilm Board, New York. When two datesfollow the film title, thefirst is theyear of thefilm's completion,the second theyear of its first showing.

Der Stadstreicher,1965. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Josef Jung. Production: Roser-Film. 16 mm, b & w, 10 mins. Cast: Christoph Roser, Susanne Schimkus, Michael Fengler, Thomas Fengler, Irm Hermann, RWF. Das Kleine Chaos, 1966. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Fengler. Production: Roser-Film. 35 mm, b & w, 9 mins (originally 12). Cast: Marite Grieselis, Christoph Roser, Lilo Pempeit, Greta Rehfeld, RWF. Love Is Colder Than Death (Liebe ist kiilterals der Tod), 1969. Dedication: "For Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub, Lino and Cuncho." The track along the Landsberger Strasse was provided by Jean-Marie Straub. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Franz Walsch (RWF). Music: Peer Raben, Holger Miinzer. Set: Ulli Lommel, RWF. Assistant Director (for several days): Martin Muller. Production: Antiteater-X-Film. 35 mm, b & w, 88 mins. Cast: Ulli Lommel (Bruno), Hanna Schygulla (Joanna), RWF (Franz), Hans Hirschmilller (Peter), Katrin Schaake (woman on train), Peter Berling (arms dealer), Hannes Gromball (Joanna's customer), Gisela Otto, Ingrid Caven, Ursala Striitz (prostitutes), Irm Hermann (salesgirl), Les Olvides (Georges), Wil Rabenbauer (Jfirgen), Peter Moland (judge at syndicate trial), Anastassios Karalas (Turk), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (motorcycle cop), Yaak Karsunke (inspector), Monika Stadler (young girl), Kurt Raab (detective).

142

OCTOBER

Katzelmacher,1969. Dedication: "For Marie Luise Fleisser." Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Franz Walsch (RWF). Music: Peer Raben (after Franz Schubert). Set: RWF. Assistant Director: Michael Fengler. Production: Antiteater-X-Film. 35 mm, b & w, 88 mins. Cast: Hanna Schygulla (Marie), Lilith Ungerer (Helga), Elga Sorbas (Rosy), Doris Mattes (Gunda), RWF (Jorgos), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (Paul), Hans Hirschmilller (Erich), Harry Baer (Franz), Peter Moland (Peter), Hannes Gromball (Klaus), Irm Hermann (Elizabeth), Katrin Schaake (woman on Landstrasse). Gods of the Plague (G6tter der Pest), 1969, 1970. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Franz Walsch (RWF). Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Kurt Raab. Production: Antiteater. 35 mm, b & w, 91 mins. Cast: Harry Baer (Franz), Hanna Schygulla (Joanna), Margarethe von Trotta (Margarethe), Gfinther Kaufmann (Gfinther), Carla Aulaulu (Carla), Ingrid Caven (Magdalena Fuller), Jan George (cop), Marian Seidowske (Marian), Yaak Karsunke (commissioner), Micha Cochina (Joe), Hannes Gromball (supermarket manager), Lilith Ungerer (woman in caf6), Katrin Schaake (caf6 owner), Lilo Pempeit (mother), RWF (porno dealer), Irm Hermann, Peter Moland, Doris Mattes. Why Does Herr R Run Amok? ( Warum liiuft Herr R. amok?), 1969, 1970. Co-director: Michael Fengler. Screenplay: improvisations by Michael Fengler and RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editors: Franz Walsch (RWF), Michael Fengler. Music: Christian Anders. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Harry Baer. Production: Antiteater, for Maran-Film in collaboration with Suddeutscher Rundfunk. 16 mm, b & w, 88 mins. Cast: Kurt Raab (Herr R.), Lilith Ungerer (his wife), Amadeus Fengler (their son), Franz Maron (boss), Harry Baer, Peter Moland, Lilo Pempeit (office colleagues), Hanna Schygulla, Peer Raben (school friends), Mr. and Mrs. Steer (father and mother), Carla Aulaulu, Eva Pampuch (record salesgirls), Ingrid Caven, Doris Mattes, Irm Hermann, Hannes Gromball (neighbors), Peter Hamm, Jochen Pinkert (policemen), Eva Madelung (boss's sister). Rio das Mortes, 1970. Screenplay: RWF, from an idea by Volker Schlondorff. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Directors: Harry 16 mm, Baer, Kurt Raab. Production: Janus Film and Fernsehen/Antiteater-X-Film. color, 84 mins. Cast: Hanna Schygulla (Hanna), Michael K6nig (Michel), Gfinther Kaufmann (Gfiinther), Katrin Schaake (Katrin), Joachim von Mengershausen (Joachim, Katrin's boyfriend), Lilo Pempeit (Gfinther's mother), Franz Maron (Hanna's uncle), Harry Baer (Michel's colleague), Marius Aicher (boss), Carla Aulaulu (customer), Walter Sedlmayr (secretary), Ulli Lommel (car dealer), Monika Stadler (travel-agency employee), Hanna Montezuma, Elga Sorgas (Hanna's colleagues), Kurt Raab (gasstation attendant), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (bar patron), Carl Amery (librarian), RWF (disco patron), Eva Pampuch (his friend).


143

The Coffeehouse(Das Kaffeehaus), 1970. Screenplay: RWF, from a play by Carlo Goldoni. Camera: Dietbert Schmidt, Manfred F6rster. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Wilfried Minks. Production: Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Video, b & w, 105 mins. Cast: Margit Carstensen (Vittoria), Ingrid Caven (Placida), Hanna Schygulla (Lisaura), Kurt Raab (Don Marzio), Harry Baer (Eugenio), Hans Hirschmiiller (Trappolo), Giinther Kaufmann (Leander), Peter Moland (Pandolfo), Wil Rabenbauer (Ridolfo). Whity, 1970, 1971. Dedication: "For Peter Berling." Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editors: Franz Walsch (RWF), Thea Eymbsz. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Harry Baer. Production: Atlantis Film/Antiteater-X-Film. 35 mm, 95 mins. color, cinemascope, Cast: Gfinther Kaufmann (Whity), Hanna Schygulla (Hanna), Ulli Lommel (Frank), Harry Baer (Davy), Katrin Schaake (Katherine), Ron Randall (Mr. Nicholson), Thomas Blanco (Mexican quack), Stefano Capriati (lawyer), Elaine Baker (Whity's mother), Mark Salvage (sheriff), Helga Ballhaus (lawyer's wife), Kurt Raab (pianist), RWF (man in saloon). Die NiklashauserFart, 1970. Screenplay: RWF, Michael Fengler. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editors: Thea Eymbsz, Franz Walsch (RWF). Music: Peer Raben, Amon Difiil II. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Harry Baer. Production: Janus Film and Fernsehen, for Westdeutscher Rundfunk. 16 mm, color, 86 mins. Cast: Michael K6nig (Hans B6hm), Michael Gordon (Antonio), RWF (Black Monk), Hanna Schygulla (Johanna), Walter Sedlmayr (priest), Margit Carstensen (Margarethe), Franz Maron (her husband), Kurt Raab (Bishop), Gfinther Rupp (his counselor), Karl Scheydt (citizen), Gfinther Kaufmann (leader of peasants), Siggi Graue, Michael Fengler (peasants), Ingrid Caven (screaming woman), Elga Sorbas (fainting woman), Carla Aulaulu (epileptic woman), Peer Raben (Monsignor), Peter Berling (executioner), Magdalena Montezuma (Penthesilea). The AmericanSoldier (Der amerikanischeSoldat), 1970. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Thea Eymbsz. Music: Peer Raben, "So Much Tenderness" by RWF, sung by Gfinther Kaufmann. Set: Kurt Raab, RWF. Assistant Director: Kurt Raab. Production: Antiteater. 35 mm, b & w, 80 mins. Cast: Karl Scheydt (Ricky), Elga Sorbas (Rosa), Jan George (Jan), Margarethe von Trotta (chambermaid), Hark Bohm (Doc), Ingrid Caven (singer), Eva Ingeborg Scholz (Ricky's mother), Kurt Raab (Ricky's brother), Marius Aicher (policeman), Gustl Datz (police chief), Marquard Bohm (private detective), RWF (Franz), Katrin Schaake (Magdalena Fuller), Ulli Lommel (gypsy), Irm Hermann (whore). Beware of a Holy Whore( Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte), 1970, 1971. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editors: Franz Walsch (RWF), Thea Eymbsz. Music: Peer Raben, Gaetano Donizetti, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Leonard

144

OCTOBER

Cohen, Spooky Tooth. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Harry Baer. Production: Antiteater-X-Film/Nova International, Rome. 35 mm, color, 103 mins. Cast: Lou Castel (Jeff, director), Eddie Constantine (himself), Hanna Schygulla (Hanna, actress), Marquard Bohm (Ricky, actor), RWF (Sascha, production manager), Ulli Lommel (Korbinian, producer), Katrin Schaake (scriptgirl), Benjamin Lev (Candy, producer), Monika Teuber (Billi, makeup woman), Margarethe von Trotta (production secretary), Gianni di Luigi (cameraman), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (lighting director), Herb Andress (coach), Thomas Schieder (Jesus), Kurt Raab (Fred), Hannes Fuchs (David), Marcella Michelangeli (Margret), Ingrid Caven (extra), Harry Baer (her husband), Magdalena Montezuma (Irm), Werner Schroeter (Deiters, photographer), Karl Scheydt, Tanja Constantine, Maria Novelli, Enzo Monteduro, Achmed Em Bark, Michael Fengler, Burghard Schlicht, Dick Randall, Peter Berling, Tony Bianchi, Renato dei Laudadio, GianniJavarone, Peter Gauhe, Marcello Zucche. Pioneersin Ingolstadt(Pioniere in Ingolstadt), 1970, 1971. Screenplay: RWF, from a play by Marie Luise Fleisser. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Gilnther Kraiai. Production: Janus Film and Fernsehen/Antiteater, for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. 35 mm, color, 83 mins. Cast: Hanna Schygulla (Berta), Harry Baer (Karl), Irm Hermann (Alma), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (Fabian), Walter Sedlmayr (Fritz), Klaus L6witsch (sergeant-major), Giinther Kaufmann (Max), Carla Aulaulu (Frieda), Elga Sorbas (Mariel), Burghard Schlicht (Klaus), Ginther Kraii (Gottfried). The Merchantof Four Seasons (Der Hiindler der vierJahreszeiten), 1971, 1972. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Music: "Buona Notte" by Rocco Granata. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Harry Baer. Production: Tango Film. 35 mm, color, 89 mins. Cast: Hans Herschmiller (Hans Epp), Irm Hermann (Irmgard, his wife), Hanna Schygulla (Anna, his sister), Andrea Schober (Renate, his daughter), Gusti Kreissl (his mother), Heide Simon (Heide, his married sister), Kurt Raab (Kurt, his brother-inlaw), Klaus Lowitsch (Harry), Karl Scheydt (Anzell), Ingrid Caven (Hans's "great love"), Peter Chatel (doctor), Lilo Pempeit (customer), Walter Sedlmayr (fruit cart seller), Salem El Hedi (Arab), Hark Bohm (policeman), Daniel Schmid, Harry Baer, Marian Seidowski (job applicants), Michael Fengler (playboy), RWF (Zucker), Elga Sorbas (Marile Kosemund). The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die bitterenTriinender Petra von Kant), 1972. Dedication: "To him who would become Marlene." Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Music: The Platters, The Walker Brothers, Giuseppe Verdi. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Directors: Harry Baer, Kurt Raab. Production: Tango Film. 35 mm, color, 124 mins. Cast: Margit Carstensen (Petra von Kant), Hanna Schygulla (Karin Thimm), Irm Hermann (Marlene), Eva Mattes (Gabrielle von Kant), Katrin Schaake (Sidonie von Gransenabb), Gisela Fackeldey (Valerie von Kant).


145

Jail Bait ( Wildwechsel), 1972. Screenplay: RWF, from a play by Franz Xaver Kroetz. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Music: Ludwig van Beethoven. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Irm Hermann. TV adaptation: Rolf Defrank. Production: Intertel, for Sender Freies Berlin. 35 mm, color, 102 mins. Cast: J6rg von Liebenfels (Erwin), Ruth Drexel (Hilda, his wife), Eva Mattes (Hanni, his daughter), Harry Baer (Franz), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (Dieter), Hanna Schygulla (doctor), Kurt Raab (boss), Karl Scheydt, Klaus L6witsch (policemen), Irm Hermann, Marquard Bohm (prison guards), Salem El Hedi (friend). Eight Hours Are Not a Day (Acht Stundensind kein Tag), 1972. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann. Editor: Marie Anne Gerhardt. Music: Jean Gepoint (Jens Wilhelm Petersen). Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Directors: Renate Leiffer, Eberhard Schubert. TV adaptation: Peter Mairthesheimer. Production: Westdeutscher Rundfunk. 16 mm, color, part 1: 101 mins, 11 secs; part 2: 99 mins, 31 secs; part 3: 91 mins, 56 secs; part 4: 88 mins, 53 secs; part 5: 88 mins, 53 secs. Cast: Gottfried John (Jochen), Hanna Schygulla (Marion), Luise Ulrich (Oma), Werner Fink (Gregor), Anita Bucher (Kithe), Wolfried Lier (Wolf), Christine Oesterlein (Klara), Renate Roland (Monika), Kurt Raab (Harald), Andrea Schober (Sylvia), Thorsten Massinger (Manni), Irm Hermann (Irmgard Erlk6nig), Wolfgang Zerlett (Manfred), Wolfgang Schenck (Franz), Herb Andress (Riidiger), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (Rolf), Hans Hirschmilller (Jiirgen), Peter Gauhe (Ernst), Grigorios Karipidis (Giuseppe), Karl Scheydt (Peter), Victor Curland (Foreman Kretzschmer), Rainer Hauer (Floor Manager Gross), Margit Carstensen, Christiane Jannessen, Doris Mattes, Gusti Kreissl, Lilo Pempeit (housewives), Katrin Schaake, Rudolf Lenz, J6rg von Liebenfels (landlords), Ulli Lommel, Ruth Drexel, Walter Sedlmayr, Helga Feddersen, Heinz Meier, Karl-Heinz Vosgerau, Peter Chatel, Valeska Gert, Eva Mattes, Marquard Bohm, Klaus L6witsch, Hannes Gromball, Peter Miirthesheimer. BremenFreedom(Bremer Freiheit), 1972. Teleplay: RWF, Dietrich Lohmann, from Fassbinder's production with the Bremen Playhouse Ensemble. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann, Hans Schugg, Peter Weyrich. Editors: Friedrich Niquet, Monika Solzbacher. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Fritz Milller-Scherz. TV adaptation: Karlhans Reuss. Production: Telefilm Saar. Video, color, 87 mins. Cast: Margit Carstensen (Geesche), Ulli Lommel (Miltenberger), Wolfgang Schenck (Gottfried), Walter Sedlmayr (clergyman), Wolfgang Kieling (Timm), Rudolf Waldemar Brem (Cousin Bohm), Kurt Raab (Zimmermann), Fritz Schediwy (Johann), Hanna Schygulla (Luise Maurer), RWF (Rumpf), Lilo Pempeit (mother). World on Wires ( Welt am Draht), 1973. Screenplay: Fritz Miller-Schert, RWF, from a novel by Daniel F. Galouye. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Marie Anne Gerhardt. Music: Gottfried Hiingsberg. Set: Kurt Rabb. Assistant Directors: Renate Leiffer, Fritz Miiller-Scherz. TV adaptation:

146

OCTOBER

Peter Mdirthesheimer, Alesander Wesemann. Production: Westdeutscher Rundfunk. 16 mm, color, part 1: 99 mins; part 2: 106 mins. Cast: Klaus L6witsch (Fred Stiller), Mascha Raabem (Eva), Adrian Hoven (Vollmer), Ivan Desny (Lause), Barbara Valentin (Gloria), Karl-Heinz Vosgerau (Siskins), Gfinther Lamprecht (Wolfgang), Margit Carstensen (Schmidt-Gentner), Wolfgang Schenk (Hahn), Joachim Hansen (Edelkern), Rudolf Lenz (Hartmann), Kurt Raab (Holm), Karl Scheydt (Lehner), Rainer Hauer (Stuhlfaut), Ulli Lommel (Rupp), Heinz Meier (Weinlaub), Peter Chatel (Hirse), Ingrid Caven, Eddie Constantine, Gottfried John, Elma Karlowa, Christine Kaufmann, Rainer Langhans, Bruce Low, Karsten Peters, Katrin Schaake, Walter Sedlmayr, Salem El Hedi, Christiane Maybach, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Peter Kern, Ernst Kiisters, Peter Moland, Doris Mattes, Liselotte Eder, Solange Pradel, Maryse Dellannoy, Werner Schroeter, Magdalena Montezuma, Corinna Brocher, Peter Gauhe, Dora Karras-Frank (guests). Nora Helmer, 1973, 1974. Screenplay: RWF, from A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, translated into German by Gernhard Schulze. Camera: Willi Raber, Wilfried Mier, Peter Weyrich, Gisela Loew, Hans Schugg. Editors: Anne-Marie Bornheimer, Friedrich Niquet. Set: Friedhelm Boehm. Assistant Directors: Fritz Mfiller-Scherz, Rainer Langhans. Production: Telefilm Saar, for Saarlandischer Rundfunk. Video, color, 101 mins. Cast: Margit Carstensen (Nora), Joachim Hansen (Torvald), Barbara Valentin (Mrs. Linde), Ulli Lommel (Krogstedt), Klaus L6witsch (Dr. Rank), Lilo Pempeit (Marie), Irm Hermann (Helene). Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf), 1973, 1974. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Jfirgen Ji"rges. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Set: RWF. Assistant Director: Rainer Langhans. Production: Tango Film. 35 mm, color, 93 mins. Cast: Brigitte Mira (Emmi), Salem El Hedi (Ali), Barbara Valentin (Barbara), Irm Hermann (Krista), RWF (Eugen), Karl Scheydt (Albert), Elma Karlowa (Frau Kargus), Anita Bucher (Mrs. Ellis), Gust Kreissl (Paula), Walter Sedlmayr (grocer), Doris Mattes (his wife), Liselotte Eder (Mrs. Mfinchmeyer), Marquard Bohm (Gruber, landlord's son), Hannes Gromball (headwaiter), Katharina Herberg, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Peter Moland, Margit Symo, Peter Gauhe, Helga Ballhaus. Martha, 1973, 1974. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Liesgret Schmitt-Klink. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Directors: Fritz Mfiller-Scherz, Renate Leiffer. Production: Westdeutscher Rundfunk. 16 mm, color, 112 mins. Cast: Margit Carstensen (Martha Hyer/Martha Salomon), Karlheinz B6hm (Helmut Salomon), Gisela Fackeldey (mother), Adrian Hoven (father), Barbara Valentin (Marianne), Ingrid Caven (Ilse), Ortrud Beginnen (Erna), Wolfgang Schenck (boss), GUinther Lamprecht (Dr. Salomon), Peter Chatel (Kaiser), Salem El Hedi (hotel guest), Kurt Raab (secretary in embassy), Rudolf Lenz (porter).

E.f Briest ( Fontane EJ Briest), 1974.

Screenplay: RWF, from the novel by Theodor Fontane. Camera: Dietrich Lohmann, Jiirgen Jiirges. Editor: Thea Eymbsz. Music: Camille Saint-Saens. Set: Kurt Raab.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder.: A Complete Filmography

147

Assistant Directors: Rainer Langhans, Fritz Mialler-Scherz. Production: Tango Film. 35 mm, b & w, 141 mins. Cast: Hanna Schygulla (Effi), Wolfgang Schenck (Baron Geert von Innstetten), Karlheinz B6hm (Counselor Wiillersdorf), Ulli Lommel (Major Crampas), Ursala Stritz (Roswitha), Irm Hermann (Johanna), Lilo Pempeit (Luise von Briest, Effi's mother), Herbert Steinmetz (Herr von Briest, Effi's father), Hark Bohm (Pharmacist Gieshubler), Rudolf Lenz (Counselor Rummschiittel), Barbara Valentin (Marietta Tripelli, singer), Karl Scheydt (Kruse), Theo Tecklenburg (Pastor Niemeyer), Barbara Lass (Polish cook), Eva Mattes (Hulda), Andrea Schober (Annie), Anndorthe Braker (Mrs. Pasche), Peter Bauhe (Cousin Dagobert), narrator: RWF, dubbed voices: Wolfgang Hess for Ulli Lommel, Kurt Raab for Hark Bohm, Renate Kiister for Ursala Stritz, Fred Maire for Herbert Steinmetz, Rosemarie Fendel for Lilo Pempeit, Margit Carstensen for Irm Hermann. Fox and His Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit), 1974, 1975. Dedication: "For Armin and all the others." Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Music: Peer Raben Archives. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Irm Hermann. Production: Tango Film/City Film GmbH, Berlin. 35 mm, color, 123 mins. Cast: RWF (Franz), Peter Chatel (Eugen), Karlheinz B6hm (Max), Rudolf Lenz (lawyer), Karl Scheydt (Klaus), Hans Zander (Springer), Kurt Raab (bartender), Adrian Hoven (Eugen's father), Ulla Jacobsen (Eugen's mother), Harry Baer (Philip), Irm Hermann (Madame Cherie), Kitty Buchhammer (Madame Isabell), Ursala Striitz (Madame Antoinette), Christiane Maybach (Hedwig, Franz's sister), Peter Kern (florist), Brigitte Mira (shop owner), Walter Sedlmayr (used-car dealer), Salem El Hedi (Moroccan), Elma Karlowa, Barbara Valentin, Bruce Low, Evelyn Kiinneke, Ingrid Caven, Marquard Bohm, Liselotte Eder. Like a Bird on a Wire ( Wie ein Vogeldem Draht), 1974, 1975. Screenplay: RWF, Christian Hohoff. Lyrics: Anja Hauptmann. Camera: Erhard Spandel. Editor: Helga Egelhofer. Music: Ingfried Hoffmann. Orchestra: Kurt Edelhagen. Set: Kurt Raab. TV adaptation: Rolf Spinards. Production: Westdeutscher Rundfunk. color, 44 mins. Cast: Brigitte Mira, Evelyn Kiinneke. Mother Kiisters Goes to Heaven (Mutter Kilsters'Fahrt zum Himmel), 1975. Screenplay: RWF, Kurt Raab. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Thea Eymesz. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Director: Renate Leiffer. Production: Tango Film. 35mm, color, 120 mins. Cast: Brigitte Mira (Mother Kiisters), Karlheinz B6hm (Thilmann), Margit Carstensen (Mrs. Thdilmann), Ingrid Caven (Corinna Corinne), Armin Meier (Ernst), Irm Hermann (Helene), Gottfried John (journalist), Peter Kern (nightclub manager), Peter Chatel, Peter Bollag (photographers), Kurt Raab, Vitus Zeplichal, Y Sa Lo, Lilo Pempeit, Matthias Fuchs. Fear of Fear (Angst vor der Angst), 1975. Screenplay: RWF, from an idea by Asta Scheib. Camera: Jiirgen Jiirges, Ulrich Prinz. Editors: Liesgret Schmitt-Klink, Beate Fischer-Weiskirch. Music: Peer Raben. Set:

148

OCTOBER

Kurt Raab. Producer: Peter Mirthesheimer. Production: Westdeutscher Rundfunk. 16mm, color, 88 mins. Cast: Margit Carstensen (Margot), Ulrich Faulhaber (Kurt), Brigitte Mira (mother), Irm Hermann (Lore), Armin Meier (Karli), Adrian Hoven (Dr. Merk), Kurt Raab (Neighbor Bauer), Ingrid Caven (Edda), Lilo Pempeit (Mrs. Schall), Helga Mirthesheimer (Dr. von Unruh), Herbert Steinmetz (Dr. Auer), Hark Bohm (Dr. Rozenbaum), Constanze Haas (Bibi). I Only Want You to Love Me (Ich will doch nur, dass Ihr mich liebt), 1976. Screenplay: RWF, from an interview in the book Lebensliinglichby Klaus Antes and Christiane Ehrhardt. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Liesgret Schmitt-Klink. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab. Assistant Directors: Renate Leiffer, Christian Hohoff. Producer: Peter Mdirthesheimer. Production: Bavaria Atelier GmbH (for Westdeutscher Rundfunk). 16mm, color, 104 mins. Cast: Vitus Zeplichal (Peter), Elke Aberle (Erika), Alexander Allerson (father), Ernie Mangold (mother), Johanna Hofer (grandmother), Katharina Buchhammer (Ylla), Wolfgang Hess (construction supervisor), Armin Meier (foreman), Erika Runge (interviewer), Ulrich Radke (Erika's father), Annemarie Wendl (Erika's mother), Janos Goncz6l (innkeeper), Edith Volkmann (innkeeper's wife), Robert Naegele (court bailiff), Axel Ganz (house master), Inge Schultz (Mrs. Emmerich), Heinz H. Bernstein (furniture salesman), Helga Bender (boutique salesgirl), Adi Gruber (post-office clerk), Sonja Neubauer (jewelry salesgirl), Heide Ackermann (sewing-machine saleswoman), Reinhard Brex (building contractor). Satan's Brew (Satansbraten), 1976. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Jfirgen Jiirges (part 1), Michael Ballhaus (part 2). Editors: Thea Eymesz, Gabi Eichel. Sound: Paul Scholer, Rolf-Peter Notz, Roland Henschke. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab, Ulrike Bode. Assistant Directors: Ila von Hasperg, Christa Reeh, Renate Leiffer. Producer: Michael Fengler. Production: Albatros Produktion, for Trio-Film. 35mm, color, 112 mins. Cast: Kurt Raab (Walter Kranz), Margit Carstensen (Andree), Helen Vita (Luise Kranz), Volker Spengler (Ernst), Ingrid Caven (Lilly), Marquard Bohm (Rolf, her husband), Ulli Lommel (Lauf), Y Sa Lo (Lana), Katharina Buchhammer (Irmgart von Witzleben), Armin Meier (Stricher), Vitus Zeplichal (Urs), Dieter Schidor (Willy), Peter Chatel (Eugen), Michael Octave (Jiinger), Katren Gebelein (Lilly's mother), Helmut Petigk (Schneider), Hannes Gromball (taxi driver), Adrian Hoven (doctor), Monika Teuber (woman in elevator). ChineseRoulette(Chinesisches Roulette), 1976. Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editors: Ila von Hasperg, Juliane Lorenz. Sound: Roland Henschke. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Curd Melber. Assistant Director: Ila von Hasperg. Organization: Christian Hohoff, Harry Zottl, Kerstin Dobbertin. Production: Michael Fengler; Albatros Produktion, Munich/Les Films du Losange, Paris. 35mm, color, 86 min. Cast: Margit Carstensen (Ariane Christ), Andrea Schober (Angela Christ), Ulli Lommel (Kolbe), Anna Karina (Irene), Mascha M~ril (Traunitz), Alexander Allerson


149

(Gerhard Christ), Volker Spengler (Gabriel), Brigitte Mira (Kast, his mother), Armin Meier (gas-station attendant), Roland Henschke (beggar). Bolwieser, 1976, 1977. Screenplay: RWF, from the novel by Oskar Maria Graf. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editors: Ila von Hasperg, Juliane Lorenz. Sound: Reinhard Gloge. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Kurt Raab, Nico Kehrhan. Assistant Directors: Christian Hohoff, Ila von Hasperg, Udo Kier. Costumes: Monika Altmann-Kriger. Production: Bavaria Atelier GmbH, for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. 26mm, color, part 1: 104 mins; part 2: 96 mins. Cast: Kurt Raab (Xaver Ferdinand Maria Bolwieser, stationmaster), Elisabeth Trissenaar (Hanni), Bernhard Helfrich (Frank Merkl), Udo Kier (Schafftaler), Volker Spengler (Mangst), Armin Meier (Scherber), Karl-Heinz von Hassel (Windegger), Gustl Maryhammer (Neidhart, Hanni's father), Maria Singer (Mrs. Neidhart), Willi Harlander (Stempflinger), Hannes Kaetner (Lederer), Gusti Kreissl (Mrs. Lederer), Helmut Alimonta (Hartsmannseder), Peter Kern (Treuberger), Gottfried John (Finkelberger), Gerhard Zwerenz (ferryman), Helmut Petigk (innkeeper), Sonja Neudorfer (innkeeper's wife), Monika Teuber (Mariele), Nino Korda (lawyer), Hannes Gromball (judge in district court), Alexander Allerson (chairman), Manfred Guinther (defendant), Roland Henschke (judge in Werburg), Adolph Gruber (accused peasant), Doris Mattes (witness), Ulrich Radke (Counsel Schneider), Liselotte Pempeit (Mrs. Kdiser), Reinhard Weiser (sailor), Elma Karlowa (nurse), Isolde Barth (first heckler), Margot Mahler (second heckler), Renate Muhri (whore), Monica Gruber (waitress), Katharina Buchhammer (barmaid). Women in New York(Frauen in New York), 1977. Screenplay: Clare Boothe Luce's The Women, translated by Nora Gray. (This is the television film version of the play directed by RWF in Hamburg.) Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Wolfgang Kerhutt. Sound: Horst Faahs. Set: Rolf Glittenberg. Costumes: Frieda Parmeggiani. TV adaptation: Dieter Meichsner. Production: Norddeutscher Rundfunk. 16mm, color, 111 mins. Cast: Christa Berndl (Mary, Mrs. Stephen Haines), Margit Carstensen (Sylvia, Mrs. Howard Fowler), Anne-Marie Kuster (Peggy, Mrs. John Day), Eva Mattes (Edith, Mrs. Phelps Potter), Angela Schmid (Nancy Blake/Princess Tamara/Miss Trimmerback), Heide Griibl (Jane/gymnastics instructor/desperate woman), Ehmi Bessel (Mrs. Wagstaff/Ingrid, the cook/first manager/Miss Watts, secretary/second lady), Susanne Werth (first hairdresser, first saleswoman, first woman), Carola Schwartz (second hairdresser, second saleswoman/Helene, lady's maid), Irm Hermann (Olga, manicurist/Miriam), Adelheid Milther (Euphie/mannequin/cigarette woman), Ilse Bally (woman in mud pack/second manager/first lady), Andrea Grosske (Miss Fordyce, tutor/Luca, cleaning woman/Maggie, cook/widow), Christina Prior (Little Mary), Gisela Uhlen (Mrs. Morehead/Countess de Lage), Barbara Sukowa (Crystal Allen), Henny Zschoppe (nurse), Sabine Wegener (debutante). Despair ( Eine Reise ins Licht - Despair), 1977, 1978. Dedication: "To Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh, Unica Ziirn." Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor:

150

OCTOBER

Juliane Lorenz. Sound: James Willis. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Rolf Zehetbauer. Costumes: Dagmar Schauberger. Assistant Director: Harry Baer. Producer: Peter Miirthesheimer. Production: NF Geria II Film GmbH, Munich, in collaboration with SFP, Paris, produced by Bavaria Atelier GmbH. 35 mm, color, 119 mins. Cast: Dirk Bogarde (Hermann Hermann), Andrea Ferreol (Lydia Hermann), Volker Spengler (Ardalion), Klaus Lowitsch (Felix Weber), Alexander Allerson (Mayer), Bernhard Wicki (Orlovius), Peter Kern (Muller), Gottfried John (Perebrodov), Adrian Hoven (inspector, Schelling), Roger Fritz (inspector, Braun), Hark Bohm (doctor), Voli Geiler (madam), Hans Zander (Muller's brother), Y Sa Lo (Elsie), Liselotte Eder (secretary), Armin Meier (foreman), Gitti Djamal (woman in prison), Ingrid Caven (hotel receptionist), Isolde Barth. Germanyin Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst), 1977, 1978. Directors: Alf Brustellin, RWF, Alexander Kluge, Maximiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupe/Hans Peter Cloos, Volker Schl6ndorff, Bernhard Sinkel. (The following information concerns the Fassbinder segment of this omnibus only.) Screenplay: RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Juliane Lorenz. Sound: Roland Henschke. Production Coordinators: Heinz Badewitz, Karl Helmer, Herbert Kerz. Production: Film. Pro-ject Film Production, Filmverlag der Autoren/Hallelujah-Film/Kairos 35mm, color and b & w, 26 mins. Cast: RWF, Armin Meier, Liselotte Eder. The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun), 1978, 1979. Dedication: "For Peter Zadek." Screenplay: Peter Mirthesheimer, Pea Fr6hlich, from an idea by RWF. Camera: Michael Ballhaus. Editor: Juliane Lorenz. Sound: Jim Willis. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Helga Ballhaus. Set Construction: Norbert Scherer. Costumes: Barbara Baum. Assistant Director: Rolf Buhrmann. Producer: Michael Fengler. Production: Albatros Produktion. 35mm, color, 120 mins. Cast: Hanna Schygulla (Maria Braun), Klaus L6witsch (Hermann Braun), Ivan Desny (Oswald), Gottfried John (Willi), Gisela Uhlen (mother), Giinther Lamprecht (Wetzel), George Byrd (Bill), Elisabeth Trissenaar (Betti), Isolde Barth (Vevi), Peter Berling (Bronski), Sonja Neuforfer (Red Cross nurse), Liselotte Eder (Mrs. Ehmke), Volker Spengler (Schaffner), Karl-Heinz von Hassel (district attorney), Michael Ballhaus (lawyer), Christine Hopf-de Loup (notary), Hark Bohm (Sekenberg), Dr. Horst-Dieter Klock (man with car), Giinther Kaufmann (friend in car), Bruce Low (friend at conference), RWF (black marketeer), Claus Holm (doctor), Anton Schirsner (Grandpa Berger), Hannes Kaetner (registrar), Martin Hiussler (reporter), Norbert Scherer, Rolf Buhrmann, Arthur Glogau (waiters). In a Yearof ThirteenMoons (In einemJahr mit 13 Monden), 1978. RWF. Camera Assistant: Werner Liring. Sound and Screenplay/Camera/Editor: Karl Scheydt, Wolfgang Mund. Set: Franz Vacek. Production Manager: Lighting: Isolde Barth, with the assistance of Milan Bor, Walter Bockmayer, Jo Braun, Juliane Lorenz, Peer Raben, Volker Spengler, Alexander Witt. Production: Tango Film/ Project Film Production, Filmverlag der Autoren. 35mm, color, 134 mins. Cast: Volker Spengler (Elvira Weishaupt), Ingrid Caven (Red Zora), Gottfried John (Anton Seitz), Elisabeth Trissenaar (Irene), Eva Mattes (Marie-Ann), Giinther

Rainer Werner

Fassbinder:.

A Complete Filmography

151

Kaufmann (chauffeur), Liselotte Pempeit (Sister Gudrun), Isolde Barth (Sybilline), Karl Scheydt (Hacker), Walter Blockmayer (Soul Frieda), Peter Kollek (drunk), Bob Dorsay (man in the street), Giinther Holzapfel (Seitz's bodyguard), Ursula Lillig (cleaning woman), Gerhard Zwerenz (Burghard Hauer, journalist). The Third Generation(Die dritte Generation), 1979. Dedication: "To a true lover-and hence, probably, to nobody?" Screenplay/Camera: RWF. Editor: Juliane Lorenz. Sound: Milan Bor, Jean Luc Marie. Music: Peer Raben. Set Design: Raul Giminez, Volker Spengler. Technical Assistants: Ekkehard Heinrich, Hans Buckling. Assistant Director: Diana Elephant. Production Manager: Harry Baer. Production: Tango Film/Pro-ject Film Production, Filmverlag der Autoren. 35mm, color, 110 mins. Cast: Volker Spengler (August Brem), Bulle Ogier (Hilde Krieger), Hanna Schygulla (Susanne Gast), Harry Baer (Rudolf Mann), Vitus Zeplichal (Bernard von Stein), Udo Kier (Edgar Gast), Margit Carstensen (Petra Vielhaber), Guinther Kaufmann (Franz Walsch), Eddie Constantine (Peter Lenz), Raul Giminez (Paul), Y Sa Lo (Ile Neumann), Hark Bohm (Gerhard Gast), Claus Holm (Grandfather Gast), Lilo Pempeit (Mother Gast), Jiurgen Draeger (Hans Vielhaber). Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1980. Screenplay: RWF, from a novel by Alfred Doblin. Camera: Xaver Schwartzenberger. Editor: Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben. Sound: Carsten Ullrich. Set: Helmut Gassner, Werner Achmann. Costumes: Barbara Baum. Production Manager: Dieter Minx. Producer: Peter Miirthesheimer. Production: Bavaria Atelier GmbH, Italian Network in collaboration with Westdeutscher Rundfunk. 16mm, color, 15 Y2 hrs (13 parts and an epilogue). Cast: Gfinther Lamprecht (Franz Biberkopf), Barbara Sukowa (Mieze), Gottfried John (Reinhold), Barbara Valentin (Ida), Hanna Schygulla, Franz Buchreiser, Claus Holm, Brigitte Mira, Roger Fritz, Hark Bohm, Ivan Desny, Annmarie Dfiringer, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Helen Vita, Herbert Steinmetz, Gerhard Zwerenz. Lili Marleen, 1980, 1981. Screenplay: Manfred Purzer, in collaboration with RWF and Joshua Sinclair, from Lale Andersen's autobiography, Der Himmel hat viele Farben. Camera: Xaver Schwartzenberger. Artistic Assistant: Harry Baer. Music: Peer Raben. Set: Rolf Zehetbauer. Production Manager: Konstantin Torsch-Thoeren. Producer: Luggi Waldleitner, in association with Enzo Peri, Roxy-Rialto-Lex Film (Munich). 35mm, color, 120 mins. Cast: Hanna Schygulla (Willie), Giancarlo Giannini (Robert), Mel Ferrer (David Mendelsson), Karl-Heinz von Hassel (Henkel), Hark Bohm (Taschner), Erik Schumann, Gottfried John, Karin Baal, Christine Kaufmann, Udo Kier, Roger Fritz, Rainer Will, Raul Giminez, Adrian Hoven, Willy Harlander, Barbara Valentin, Helen Vita, Elisabeth Volksman, Lilo Pempeit, Traute Hass, Brigitte Mira, Herb Andress, Michael McLernon, Jurgen Drager, Rudolf Lenz, Toni Nelzle, Irm Hermann. Lola, 1982. Screenplay: RWF, Peter MSirthesheimer, Pea Frohlich. Camera: Xaver Schwartzenberger. Editor: Juliane Lorenz. Art Director: Rolf Zehetbauer. Costumes: Barbara

152

OCTOBER

Baum. Music: Peer Raben. Assistant Director: Harry Baer. Set: Raul Giminez. Production Manager: Thomas Schuehly. Producer: Horst Wendlandt. Production: Rialto Film/Trio Film. 35mm, color, 114 mins. Cast: Barbara Sukowa (Lola), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Von Bohm), Mario Adorf (Schuckert), Matthias Fuchs (Esslin), Helga Feddersen (Hettich), Karin Baal (Lola's mother), Ivan Desny (Wittich), Karl-Heinz von Hassel (Timmerding), Sonja Neudorfer (Mrs. Fink), Elisabeth Volkmann (Gigi), Hark Bohm (Volker), Rosel Zech (Mrs. Schuckert), Isolde Barth (Mrs. Volker), Christine Kaufmann (Susi), Y Sa Lo (Rosa), Karsten Peters (editor), Nino Korda (TV man), Raul Giminez, Udo Kier (waiters), Harry Baer, Rainer Will (demonstrators), Andrea Heuer (librarian), Ulrike Vigo (Little Marie), Herbert Steinmetz (Pfortner), Gfinther Kaufmann (Gi), Helmut Petigk (drunk), Juliane Lorenz (saleslady), Marita Pleyer (Rahel), Maxim Osward (Grandpa Berger). VeronikaVoss (Die Sehnsuchtder VeronikaVoss), 1982. Screenplay: Peter Midrthesheimer, Pea Fr6hlich. Camera: Xaver Schwartzenberger. Editor: Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben. Set: RolfZehetbauer. Costumes: Barbara Baum. Executive Producers: Thomas Schuehly, RWF. Production: Laura Film and Tango Film, in coproduction with Rialto Film, Trio Film, and Maran Film. 35mm, b & w, 105 mins. Cast: Rosel Zech (Veronika Voss), Hilmar Thate (Robert Krohn), Annmarie Diaringer (Dr. Katz), Doris Schade (Josefa), Cornelia Froboess (Henriette), Eric Schumann (Dr. Edel), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Max Rehbein), Peter Luehr (Mr. Triebel), Brigitte Horney (Mrs. Treibel), Elisabeth Volkmann (Grete), Hans Wypraechtiger (chief editor), Volker Spengler (first editor), Tamara Kafka (woman doctor), Karl-Heinz von Hassel (doctor at asylum), Thomas Schuehly (propaganda minister), Sonja Neudorfer (saleslady), Peter Zadek (film director), RWF (police superintendant). Querelle, 1982. Screenplay: RWF, from the novel by Jean Genet. Camera: Xaver Schwartzenberger. Editor: Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben. Sound: Vladimir Vizner. Set: Rolf Zehetbauer. Costumes: Barbara Baum. Art Director: Harry Baer. Producer: Dieter Schidor. Production: Planet Film, Munich/Gaumont, Paris. 35mm, color, cinemascope. Cast: Brad Davis (Querelle), Franco Nero (Lieutenant Seblon), Jeanne Moreau (Lysiane), Laurent Malet (Roger), Hanno POschl (Robert/Gil), Ganther Kaufmann (Nono), Burkhard Driest (Mario), Dieter Schidor (Vic), Roger Fritz (Marcellin), Michael McLernon (Matrose), Neil Bell (Theo), Harry Baer (Armenier), Nadja. Brunkhorst (Paulette).

PERSISTENCEOF VISION The Film Journal of the City University of New York

CALL FOR PAPERS

The editors of PERSISTENCEOF VISION, The Film Journal of the City University of New York, request the submission of articles for the journal's inaugural issue. The theme for this issue will be "American Film of the 70s." A limited number of articles on miscellaneous subjects will, however, also be included. The journal will not be limited to any particularmethodology; rather, a wide variety of approaches-historical, aesthetic, theoretical, critical--is encouraged. Two copies of the manuscript should be sent to: Professor Elisabeth Weis Film Department Brooklyn College (C.U.N.Y.) 0312 Plaza Bldg. Bedford Avenue and Avenue H Brooklyn, New York 11210 Footnotes, if any, should appear at the end of the article and should follow the M.L.A. Style Sheet.

DEADLINE: 15 December 1982

THE DARK OF THE SCREEN. By Sidney Peterson. 174 pp. $9.50 paperback. A memoir which fuses intellectual history with the theory of cinema. Illustrated. THE ESSENTIAL CINEMA: ESSAYS ON THE FILMS IN THE COLLECTIONOF ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES. Edited by P. Adams Sitney. 380 pp. $20.95 cloth. Seymour Stern on Intolerance; Ken Kelman on Greed, Luis Bunuel, Jean Vigo, Pickpocket, Report, In the Street, and Anticipation of the Night; Standish Lawder on Eisenstein and constructivism; P. Adams Sitneyeon Arsenal, Robert Bresson, and Michael Snow; Annette Michelson on The Man With A Movie Camera; and Donald Weinstein on Swain. Includes a 120 page bibliography by Caroline S. Angell. THE PLEASURE DOME: AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1939-1979. 120 pp. $15.95. Catalogue of the exposition of American avantgarde film at the Swedish Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1980. Introductory essay by P. Adams Sitney. With 70 pages of frame enlargements. HOME MADE MOVIES: 20 YEARS OF AMERICAN 8 MM AND SUPER-8 FILMS. By J. Hoberman. 43 pp. $5.00. Catalogue of Anthology Film Archives survey of 8 mm and Super-8 films. With stills. Including film notes and filmographies. TO BE PUBLISHEDOCTOBER 1982 A MANHATTAN ODYSSEY: A MEMOIR. By Herman G. Weinberg.$20.00 cloth; $10 paperback. COFFEE, BRANDY & CIGARS. By Herman G. Weinberg. $16.00 cloth; $8.00 paperback. Both books available as a boxed set (paperback only) for $15. Complete list of publications available from Anthology Film Archives and index to FILM CULTURE, Nos. 1-71 available free upon request. Please make all checks payable to Anthology Film Archives and include $2.00 for shipping.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES 491 BROADWAY NEW YORK, N. Y. 10012 (212) 226-0010

rZi 40

: ?a ~:

FASSIBINDER

Essays Cormick, view tensive tion paper Tanam

Peter

by with

the

filmography information

on

40

and

by

including al films;

White

Street,

-Mc-

Ruth

Wiegand, Schutte; Wiegand;

Wolfram Wilfried 93

photographs.

hardcover New

York,

inter-

an an

and

synopses

$7.95,

(smythe-sewn) Press

Wilfried

Iden, Kasunke filmmaker

Yaak

$15.95,

produc-

postpaid NY

10013

New in Paperback

Film

Essays,

and

a

Lecture

Sergei Eisenstein

Edited,with a New Introductionand ExpandedBibliography, by JayLeyda

Sergei Eisenstein'sgreatness lies not only in his films or his contributions to the technique and art of the cinema, but also to his contributions as a theoretician and philosopher of the art. Likeno other filmmaker, Eisenstein could transform principles into films and films into principles. This edition includes a new translation of Eisenstein'sessay on Orozco. Illus. $5.95 (Cloth, $20.00)

Princeton University Press 41 William St. * Princeton, NJ08540

.

ex-

Harvard

unlocks

the

secret

of

her

smile.

Worlds Invented

TheMind's BestWork

EllenWinner

creative thinking

ThePsychology oftheArts Anewpsychology of What drivesanartisttocreate? What makesanaudience respond? sofascinated by Whyarechildren andsongs? pictures Thisbookunlocksthesecretshiddenintheartformsofpainting, music, andliterature. Apsychologist andartistherself, Winner of probesa broadspectrum inartandpsychology, theories boththeartistic exploring process andaudience Shealso response. theartofchildren andthe examines mentally disturbed. Theresultisa newvisionofour artistic nature. Onethatwillbevitalto and educators, artists, psychologists, anyoneinterestedin theartistic

D.NPerkins

Inthisintriguing book,Perkins thecreative demystifies processby howthemental faculties explaining usedincreating greatworksarethe weuseindoingthe samefaculties mostordinary activities. "Adelightful book,easytoread, withintriguing andjammed amusing for 'personal experiments,' puzzles intocreathereaderthatofferinsights Itis avaluable tivethinking. book becauseitsummarizes welltheresults ofrecentinvestigations andeffectively ofcherished debunks avariety myths... Readthebookforfun.Readittofind outwhatpsychologists areupto." - Martin Gardner,

NewYorkTimesBookReview process. "This is thebooktoreadforapro- $18.5032lineillus. vocative of andcomprehensive survey

WriteforournewCognitive thepsychology of the - arts." E.Gruber Psychology Howard Brochure 75lineillus. $25.00 45halftones,

orthrough atbookstores Available

Press Harvard University Garden Street 79 Massachusetts 02138 Cambridge,

THE NEW

BYJOHN SANDFORD', the

"In

films

in

last the

fifteen world.

the

first

has

Germany

years

book

Sandford's

the

produced speaks

ambitious

most

and

thoroughly

them.' In

this,

Sandford

book

provides

Fassbinder, achievements

to

political

history figures

known

volume in

reference

the

world

library

the

this

vital,

most

'

daring,

Kauffmann

John

Rainer

Werner

jorgen Jean,-, Syberberg, their Schlbndorff-rolating the and 'documentaries, With

itself. and

bibliography, on

dr"ama,

Trotta

von-

annotated

Hans-

-about

awhole,

as

directors-

seven

television, Germany

contemporary

Margarethe and

-filmography,

in

Cinema

Volker

and

Kluge;

developments of

of

Wenders,

Wim

Herzog, Alexander

Straub,

German

New

study

film-by-film

a

Werner

Marie

the

examine

to

of

group

perceptively -Stanley

Erika

wide-ranging and

lesser-

sketches.of

Runge,

a

history accomplished

glossary, is

a

one-

cinema

today.

I would like to order a copy of THE NEW GERMANCINEMA 0-306-80177-9/-180 pp., 53 photos/$10.95 paperback My check enclosed Master Charge Charge: Diners Club _

American Express Bank Americard/Visa

Account no.

Signature

Name Name City & State

Free mailing and handling charges on pre-paid orders.

Da Capo Press 233 Spring Street

Street Street Zip

New York, NY 10013

-

MX"

?1 /1

M2,1

,

iR E

I

,m 010,

le m?

j E

M

m

RON

'MIN

MO/w.W17.,JIM!, ",

"O'N. I;f

"NE

0

X

A

-,X

N.",

?l MEMO'

..IR I..IN MT

MAIN,

NxSWE, III gex,

1AERNEOU

PI Praxis#6: Art and Ideology (Part 2) Michel Pecheux, Language, Ideology and Discourse Analysis: An Overview Douglas Kellner, Television, Mythology and Ritual Nicos Hadjinicolaou, On the Ideology of Avant-Gardism Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Postbourgeois Ideology and Visual Culture Marc Zimmerman, Francois Perus and Latin American Modernism: The Interventions of Althusser Fred Lonidier, "The Health and Safety Game" (Visual Feature)

Forthcomingissues: Praxis #7: Antonio Gramsci

Praxis #8: Weimar and After

Subscription (2 issues): $8.00 Single copy: $4.95 Makecheckspayableto "theRegentsof the Universityof California" Praxis, Dickson Art Center, UCLA,Los Angeles, CA 90024 USA

Now bi-monthly! September/October1982 Sexandspectatorship: the FemaleSpectator Theorising EDUCATION 'The SCREEN INCORPORATING Eyesof LauraMars' TheMalePin-up 'Outof the Blue'&Intothe Black Fashion'n'Passion 1982 July/August Filmhistory: EarlyCinema SovietSoundFilms Postersof the '30s &'40s Hollywood TrevorGriffithson Reds

Single Copies ?2.50 ($7) p&p60p ($1) Subscriptions?13 ($34) individuals ?18 ($45) institutions

1982 May/June Theliteraryadaptation: JamesM.Cain Classicson TV

Distributiondetails from:

SEFTLtd,29 OldCompton Street, London W.1.

The HistoryMan

Ambulantes

Los

of Guatemala The Itinerant Photographers

PhotographsbyAnnParker*TextbyAvonNeal

j .

.

.

.

. . .

.

.

.

.

A fascinating,well written,and trulyimportantcontributionto photography.... -Beaumont Newhall The Parkerand Neal documentationis unique," x 19 color $35 00 164 89 duotones, plates pp 9%/8 103/4

ie

M

IT

T

Pre

28 CarletonStreet,Cambridge,MA02142

(Credit card orders accepted

by phone 617-253-2884)

Michael Walsh

E

Mimi White Uas Deborah Mistron

odas

Mortes

Larry Crawford W Bruce Murray C toCommercial Pamela Falkenberg

Cthe

4W XMary Beth Haralovich 0 Cathy Root Klaprat Mary Ann Doane 4W 0Inscription West

4WAnn

Sandy Flitterman

0

Dudley Andrew John O'Kane

O

David Bordwell Tom Conley Marie Claire Ropars 0Writing:IOr C Mary Yost (Paris

Stuart Cunningham Robert Burgoyne C

0

Maureen Turim WOshima's Deborah Linderman

(

0

@

e

ffy Ec

Subsegmenting the Filmic Text: The Bakersfield Car Lot Scene in Psycho Mutter Krausens Fahrt in G Gliuck: An Analysis of the Film as a Critical Response to the "Street Films" of the Film Industry The Third Term is not always Father: Women and/as the "Paternal Function" in Destry Rides Again Marked Woman and Jezebel: The Spectator-in-the-Trailer Caught and Rebecca: The of Femininity as Absence A Textual Analysis of Lady From Shanghai Nursery/Rhymes: Primal Scenes in La Maternelle Meet John Doe Style, Space, Ideology in Boudu Saved From Drowning Textual Analysis, Etc. Apocalypse Yesterday The Graphic in Filmic A bout de souffle, The Erratic Alphabet Qu'est-ce que le m&canisme du rel? Notes on Clair's qui dort Stock Shock and Schlock Narrative Overture and Closure in 2001, A Space Odyssey Rituals, Desire, Death in Ceremonies Oedipus in Chinatown film double issue $8

CSpecial

C

Out of the Past: The History of the Subject The Birth of A Nation: History Pretext The Role of Myth in Antonio

lu lUtMinneapolis,

200 Folwell Hall

9 PleasantSt. S.E. MN 55455

The editors of OCTOBER wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Pinewood Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and the New York State Council on the Arts. Trusteesof the Institute for Architectureand Urban Studies Armand Bartos, Honorary Chairman A. Bruce Brackenridge, Chairman Charles Gwathmey, President Douglas H. Banker Colin G. Campbell Walter F. Chatham Peter D. Eisenman Ulrich Franzen Frank O. Gehry Gerald D. Hines Eli Jacobs Philip Johnson Paul Kennon Edward J. Logue Gerald M. McCue Robert M. Meltzer Amanda M. Ross Paul Rudolph Edward Saxe Carl E. Schorske Frederieke S. Taylor Massimo Vignelli John F. White Peter Wolf

OCTOBER 22 & 23 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Documenta7

Nick Browne

The Films of C.-T. Dreyer by David Bordwell

Arthur Danto

Pursuits of Happiness by Stanley Cavell

Fredric Jameson

Hitchcock by William Rothman

Rosalind Krauss

The TrashmanCometh

Perry Meisel

The Political Unconscious by FredricJameson

Annette Michelson

De Sti'l and the Social Text

Linda Nochlin

The De-Politicization of Courbet

Christopher Philips

TheJudgment Seat of Photography

October journal No.21 Summer (1982) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder

October journal No.22 Autumn (1982)

October journal No.13 Summer (1980)

October journal No.2 Summer (1976)

October journal No.9 Summer (1979)

October journal No.5 Summer (1978) - Photography

October journal No.49 Summer (1989)

October journal No.45 Summer (1988)

October journal No.33 Summer (1985)

October journal No.41 Summer (1987)

October journal No.37 Summer (1986)

Dr. Dobb's Journal (October)

October journal No.17 Summer (1981) - The New Talkies

Fassbinder: Film Maker

October No.23 Winter (1982) - Film Books

Werner Volker

Werner Centennial

1982)

Rainer Maria Rilke

1982

October journal No.4 Autumn (1977)

October journal No.15 Winter (1980)

October journal No.3 Spring (1977)

October journal No.8 Spring (1979)

October journal No.No.55 Winter (1990)

October journal No.50 Autumn (1989)

October journal No.27 Winter (1983)

October journal No.18 Autumn (1981)

October journal No.19 Winter (1981)

October journal No.21 Summer (1982) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder

October journal No.22 Autumn (1982)

October journal No.13 Summer (1980)

October journal No.2 Summer (1976)

October journal No.9 Summer (1979)

October journal No.5 Summer (1978) - Photography

October journal No.49 Summer (1989)

October journal No.45 Summer (1988)

October journal No.33 Summer (1985)

October journal No.41 Summer (1987)

October journal No.37 Summer (1986)

Dr. Dobb's Journal (October)

October journal No.17 Summer (1981) - The New Talkies

Fassbinder: Film Maker

October No.23 Winter (1982) - Film Books

Werner Volker

Werner Centennial

1982)

Rainer Maria Rilke

1982

October journal No.4 Autumn (1977)

October journal No.15 Winter (1980)

October journal No.3 Spring (1977)

October journal No.8 Spring (1979)

October journal No.No.55 Winter (1990)

October journal No.50 Autumn (1989)

October journal No.27 Winter (1983)

October journal No.18 Autumn (1981)

October journal No.19 Winter (1981)

Recommend Documents