RW Fassbinder: C/D, S/D, Y/DA-Y/DA

I imagine a person who wrote, starred, and directed 7523 plays and movies in a 13-year period while in thrall to pills and alcohol was a delight to live with.

I thought he was fine with Margit Carstensen bc she was an established actress (not "his" star) and was in no mood for his carry on, while irm, schygulla and caven were treated pretty brutally

Whatever

Adjudicating a dead director's personal behavior is so BORING

Only because everyone itt knows already

I always thought he was the nicest to Schygulla because she was the most conventional star or something, but maybe I didn't read enough.

his peak for me are the Carstensen Joan Crawford vehicles he made in his Sirk phase.

yeah it's the other way around, HS balked at doing World on a Wire during Effi Briest and they'd didn't work together again for 4 years. RWF, during a game of Chinese roulette on the set of Chinese Roulette, told MS "I don't have any more ideas for your face." When they did Martha he fawned over her.

(Rewatched that the other day--someone pointed out something very funny, Helmut's silk polka dot pajamas after he brutalizes Martha toward the end)

also going through all his films again I noticed the Biberkopf thing of biting a lover on the neck after kissing them, is in almost all of his movies

it's kindof weird to try and separate films like Petra Von Kant or Martha or querelle from thinking about his lunatic troupe regime and his viciousness. don't think anyone was suggesting "cancelling" them though. plenty of nicer directors whose films could go in the bin first.

well, probably there are plenty of people suggesting cancelling them, not going to Google it though!

his peak for me are the Carstensen Joan Crawford vehicles he made in his Sirk phase.

I watched Querelle the other day, and I can honestly say no other Fassbinder I've watched could have prepared me for it. The sexual viciousness mentioned above is so completely stylised into some kind of fin de siecle decadence, rendering it unreal, yet still jaw dropping. bizarre to think the lead was in the Oscar bait Chariots of Fire just before, then he's in this.

Margit is Joan, caven is Dietrich, schygulla is a Romy Schneider heimatfilm Frau, always a little confused about who irm is in the pantheon.

my film faves were p much all terrible people, don't look at me

yah querelle is somewhat unique, but I think he has other outliers. Katzelmacher shocked me the first time I saw it, a really vicious straub huillet jibe but so elegant

I thought he was fine with Margit Carstensen bc she was an established actress (not "his" star) and was in no mood for his carry on, while irm, schygulla and caven were treated pretty brutally

He was mostly horrible to his lovers, so Hanna Schygulla was never treated badly, I think he got irritated by and jealous about the fact that she was becoming 'the star', even though that's why he wanted to work with her in the first place. Also I don't think he especially horrible to Ingrid Caven - well, unless you count him sleeping with the best man on their wedding night! But, you know, why would you marry RWF in the first place!

Margit is Joan, caven is Dietrich, schygulla is a Romy Schneider heimatfilm Frau, always a little confused about who irm is in the pantheon.

... his mother!

Yeah, ^this

to give them their dues, these ladies were all, also, nuts

also lol yeah I guess

Hanna is Dietrich
Margit is Bowie
Ingrid is Irene Dunne
Irm is Angela Merkel

I only saw it once but my impression of Querelle was that it made no sense and it ruled.

haha

Haven’t seen them all (trying—if anyone can hook me up with Lili Marleen I’d be grateful) but the only RWF I didn’t like is Katzelmacher. Couldn’t finish it. Querelle is uh...something else.

got a copy of Satan's Brew for a reasonable price on eBay. the case is um, a little sticky...

John Waters writes a letter to RWF for his 75th:

I remember when I first met you at the Berlin Film Festival. There you were with Douglas Sirk! You in your dirty Levi’s and leather, he elegantly dressed in a crisp white suit. I wanted to bow down. You were both kind and welcoming to me and my early trash epics which were just getting to be known in Germany. Douglas Sirk knew what Pink Flamingos was!? I was astounded and moved and it was all because of you.

Later, I was so proud when New Line Cinema, the distributor of all my films at the time, announced they were going to release your movie Despair in America. I played dumb when the publicist eventually complained that she had sent you two first-class airline tickets to come to New York to promote the film and even though you had accepted and flown over, you’d never shown up to do the interviews. I had seen you out at the leather S&M bars the night before but I kept my mouth shut. I don’t snitch on royalty.

https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/r-w-fassbinder-film-stills-pp/

Fassbinder and Kraftwerk: A Marriage Made in a New Germany

A member of the same bourgeois postwar generation as Hütter and Schneider, Fassbinder had similar artistic goals of forging a new German identity. As with Kraftwerk’s music, his cinema was not merely reclaiming what had been lost but moving into the future with something unique. “I would say that in 1945, at the end of the war, the chances which did exist for Germany to renew itself were not realized,” said Fassbinder. “Instead, the old structures and values on which our state rests now as a democracy have remained the same.” The admiration between Kraftwerk and Fassbinder was reciprocal. As bandmember Karl Bartos explained, “Fassbinder loved it . . . his crew were sometimes forced to listen to Kraftwerk eight hours a day on the set. He would play Autobahn and Radio-Activity to the point where no one could stand it anymore. It was a bit like brainwashing. Flattering to hear, though.” And sometimes, after a long day at Kling Klang studio, the band would put on the director’s film or TV work.

Though Fassbinder had used “Radio-Activity” in Chinese Roulette (1976), his coked-out chamber drama that starred Anna Karenina, Margit Carstensen, and Ulli Lommel, the track’s recurrence throughout the final episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz gives it a more natural, depraved home. Both the song and the epilogue attempt to articulate that new German identity, smashing together antithetical feelings, ideas, and cultural detritus. Featuring repurposed bleeps of a Geiger counter and a mellifluous pop hook, “Radio-Activity” neatly pairs with Doblin’s source novel, a work that is narrated by the chaos of a modern city and periodically needles its protagonist with the cacophonous sounds of mass media. Snippets of Kraftwerk’s song are used as markers of torture and agony, and upend the series’ carefully constructed historical verisimilitude. The disjunctions remove viewers from a simple understanding of history as a chain of cause-and-effect relationships and interconnected events, allowing them to see the imminent danger that can lie beneath seemingly banal times.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7143-fassbinder-and-kraftwerk-a-marriage-made-in-a-new-germany

relevant to the criticism of Ian Penman on the lrb thread recently

grateful to peer raben for largely inoculating rwf from the krautrock wars. generally imagine his taste in music was limited to whatever played in Munich bathhouses in the 70s.

Don't think so. There's a lot of music in Fassbinder movies. Leonard Cohen in at least two (but probably more), Pearls Before Swine(!) in "Rio das Mortes" (opening titles), the Velvets' "Candy Says" in "Eight Hours Are Not a Day", Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop" in "In a Year With 13 Moons", plus less surprising stuff: the Stones, Ray Charles, Walker Brothers, Elvis etc. Plus Amon Duul II even appear in "The Niklashausen Journey"!

Fassbinder's Top 10 Pop Musicians

1. Elvis Presley
2. Bob Dylan
3. Rolling Stones
4. Leonard Cohen
5. The Platters
6. Kraftwerk
7. Roxy Music
8. The Beatles
9. Velvet Underground
10. Comedian Harmonists

― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Wednesday, 9 April 2014 13:31 (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, Peer Raben always acknowledged that Fassbinder was very clued up on music. The Amon Düül II clip in 'Niklashauser Fart' is erm... very much of its time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEhnCyf72-k

lol I've seen most of those and don't remember those songs being used! only thing I can remember being prominently featured is smoke gets in your eyes in bitter tears

I thought it was "The Great Pretender" in Bitter Tears? And "In My Room" (Walker Bros)!

Ha, I thought it was "Only You!"

"Beware of a Holy Whore":

The film features music from Leonard Cohen's first album Songs of Leonard Cohen and from Spooky Two by Spooky Tooth, among others.

... so that's another one with Leonard Cohen in it!

(xp) Might play all three, "The Great Pretender" is definitely in there though, for obvious reasons.

I can't think of another director who over the course of his filmography has more scenes of people actually putting a record on a turntable and playing it

Ha, exactly. There is some stuff in that one Jean Eustache movie and that one scene in Velvet Goldmine but yeah.

In the Eustache movie (The Mother and the Whore), it's the same LP over and over again - Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra!

Ha, couldn’t remember what LP it was, for some reason was thinking it was Tea for the Tillerman.

lol I have seen fox and his friends like 20 times and apparently there is a Leonard Cohen song in that one too (bird on a wire) but I can't think what scene it appears in

Haven't seen that film quite so many times as you but can certainly imagine that song being there, can't place a scene either.

I watched it the other night, he plays it in his flashy sports car when he's driving about feeling lonely and unloved.

That reminds me, I forgot he did an entire film of Brigitte Mira singing Leonard Cohen songs.

it's in the gay bar

13 Moons has some nuts sonic & cinematic allusions: the opening scene uses Mahler's adagietto in a perverse parody of Death in Venice. Check out the way that the john is shot against the morning sky, it's completely Visconti. and then of course the notion of 'sublime/divine beauty' of that film is pretty much immediately destroyed when Elvira gets beat up, and the sex change is discovered right as the adagietto peaks.

Red Zora, Ingrid Caven's character, always appears on screen with the "Amarcord" theme.'

But the song that runs through 13 Moons is Connie Francis' "Schoener Fremder Mann," or "Someone Else's Boy." Big hit in Germany, not a hit in its English version. When Anton Saitz (Gottfried John) meets Red Zora in Elvira's apartment, she calls him "Schoener Fremder Mann."

The final shot of 13 Moons is one of the most powerful sequences in all of Fassbinder... they've discovered Elvira. He starts at the stairs, following his mother as the nun up. She is frisked by Gunter Kaufmann, who looks resigned and sighs before the camera slowly turns around and watches the nun walk into Elvira's room.

Camera follows, and peeks in: the nun graces Elvira's body, and walks by Saitz and Zora, both of whom have their backs to Elvira's body. We don't see their faces. We follow the nun into the adjacent room, where Eva Mattes, playing Elvira's daughter, bursts out of the shadows looking for someone, anyone, for comfort in the midst of crisis. She looks out, camera left, then turns camera right, and freezes. Camera slowly turns again, and begins its final tracking move, sliding down the hall faster than before following the nun as he descends the stairs. And of course during this scene, and this single shot, the Connie Francis song begins alongside the therapy tape of Elvira talking about her life.

The nun descends the stairs, and as soon as she disappears, the frame FREEZES and the therapy tape is cut off and the Connie Francis song comes ROARING up. "Tall handsome stranger, there will come a time one day, when all my dreams become reality..." and then that title card comes up, the day he finished, Goethe's birthday: "FRANKFURT AM MAIN / AM 28 AUGUST 1978."

And the record gets stuck, looping on the word "REALITY...REALITY...REALITY...REALITY...REALITY" drenched in reverb until the picture ex/implodes.

I've heard that 35mm prints of 13 Moons include about a minute of unexposed film at the end of the movie, conforming to the movie's recurring motif of reality and movieland coming into contact, interfering with each other, or destroying everything. Fassbinder's initial essay, written immediately after Armin Meier was found and probably one of the most moving things he ever wrote, tells Elvira's life story leading up to the movie and includes one interesting note of a piece with the Fassbinder interview that shows up on the TV toward the middle: after Christoph leaves Elvira in the second scene, she's supposed to be reading a copy of World on a Wire.

13 Moons is his most hopeful and encouraging movie to me because he not only managed to pull himself out of an unimaginably horrible personal tragedy and transmute it into a work of art that doesn't stand but flies above the others, a film shot entirely from the hip, conceived so quickly (Meier's body was discovered mid-June 1978, start date on the film is July 24, ends on August 28) that there's a power and a beauty so immediately connected to its source that dissection/construction appears impossible--it is a film that feels like it was ripped right out of RWF's chest, and it is his densest diamond.

xp oh yeah nvm yea its when hes in his alfa romeo

Take a look at the TV scene from 13 Moons, it's just fucking nuts, RWF indicts himself by intercutting Maurice Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together with the documentary on Pinochet. RWF only appears on the TV screen once, but he's heard throughout the scene: right as Red Zora is taking a sleeping pill and going to bed, he's talking about how "I will not do anything to change my personal life or its situation. If I don't meet someone tonight, things will go on just as before, and I won't force myself to change them, even if they don't work."

Channel flips back to Pinochet documentary: "The general never missed an opportunity to express his contempt for parliamentary democracy."

And then that dip to black and cut to the rooftop panorama, a clear allusion to TRIUMPH OF THE WILL...

I mean, it's just staggering. Dude was in Godmode most of his career but jesus, this movie on another level.

Thanks for this analysis. My problem with the final scene of In a Year with 13 Moons was that it was the ultimate fantasy of self-pity: a suicide followed by everyone who had ever done you wrong parading through the room to see your body.

My favourite Fassbinder is Beware of a Holy Whore, so perhaps I prefer him with a lighter touch than you do.