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

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.

Beware is pretty nasty! But I know what you mean, the stakes are much lower: the death of a film/film collective vs. two hours of death and suicidal gutter philosophy. all of his films have their funny bits, it's something Europeans are so much better at mixing in. Like the bank scene in Fox and His Friends--it's total screwball. "Cash?" "Yes!" "Cash?" "Cash! Yes!" And that zoom in on the bank teller once they've left: "Cash, cash, cash. You say something enough, it loses all meaning." Even Hans smashing the record toward the end of Merchant of Four Seasons is funny.

Beware also has a key line for all of Fassbinder imo, and I think he says it himself: "Isn't it a shame being anti-bourgeois when you realize how bourgeois you are yourself?" That conflict is present in all his films, at least in the way Morbs put it in the Godard vs. Fassbinder thread: RWF was just better at and more interested in synthesizing the commercial and the avant garde. He was certainly more successful in that regard than Chabrol! Though I love him, too.

The Perfect Storm and Querelle are an obvious double feature. Only question is who's on top? 😳 pic.twitter.com/dyHveMK5uF

— Nicky Smith (@nickyotissmith) December 10, 2020

Whoa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOpOIHBjZAI

Uploaded 2 weeks ago

oh amazing thanks for the heads up!

Fucking jackpot! Theater in a Trance, his only documentary, uploaded as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhwIhFeKBLA

mount cinema?

oh yah thats good

Like a Bird on a Wire is so cool, as someone on Letterboxd said, the second half with the mirrors and bodybuilders seems to presage Lola & Querelle (altho it reminded me of Godard's segment in Aria).

Schoener fremder mann/"handsome stranger" pops up in so many of his films prior to the climactic use of the Connie Francis song of the same name in 13 Moons... check the early Antiteater films... "Handsome stranger" is one of the stock responses...

Fassbinder filming the slaughterhouse sequence in In a Year with 13 Moons, summer 1978 pic.twitter.com/LCJhT23bm8

— Nicky Smith (@nickyotissmith) February 24, 2021

Not sure the white suit was a great idea.

i saw this first during a period where it seemed like every second film i watched had an incredibly explicit animal slaughter sequence. of these i think touki bouki was the worst.

the wake in fright kangaroo hunt traumatized me, i basically can't watch animals being killed in movies any longer.

I think for me it was the horse and cow in the long cut of Andrei Rublev. I don't remember anything like that from Touki Bouki.

interesting to hear the various reactions to these things--they all come to mind, though one that got me just tonight was rewatching Godard's Weekend, when the pig is sledgehammered on the head. The other one that I close my eyes for is the seals being clubbed in The Devil, Probably. I saw Wake in Fright years ago at a revival and remember nothing of the slaughter, just that it's in there somewhere. Roar is worth seeing for the reverse situation, actors being slightly to mediumly maimed by lions and shit. it's cool. I just watched Touki Bouki last week, they skin and cut a deer or something iirc. the colors are really saturated in that movie

but the slaughterhouse in 13 Moons is his most explicit depiction of the holocaust

Is that what it was meant to depicting?

A chunk of the monologue is about Anton Saitz growing up in Bergen-Belsen

Some more pictures from the making of 13 Moons. I like to think that RWF wore this white suit for the entire 35 day shoot. pic.twitter.com/5Iv6ymgwJb

— Nicky Smith (@nickyotissmith) March 2, 2021

He'd been wearing the white suit since 1970!

haha I know I know, he wears it in back to back films (American Soldier / Beware of a Holy Whore). Amazing he was able to keep it so clean in those 8 years. Then again, according to Kurt Raab, RWF "took more baths than the average German."

With Ingrid Caven, 1974.

https://img.welt.de/img/icon/partnerschaft/mobile174506691/2972503117-ci102l-w1024/Conrad-JENNINGS-Rainer-Werner-FASSBINDER-und-Ingrid-CAVEN-1974.jpg

Anyone have opinions on the new biopic?

Didn't know there was one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfant_Terrible_(film)?wprov=sfti1

It’s showing in DC soon but on a midweek

I saw this biopic last night. A lot of the anecdotes were familiar from the book Fassbinder Film Maker, by Ronald Hayman, which I read ages ago, and I've seen all the films they depicted. I thought the main actor was very skillful, capturing him at his kindest and cruelest, and the film captured the relationships among his troupe too. The visual style is expressionist, with lots of pools of blue and red light in the darkness, and no exterior scenes, but it nodded to Fassbinder's style without ever being cute or clever about it.
It's certainly better than Le Redoutable, the pointless Godard/Wiazemsky film that came out a few years ago, apparently the only biopic about a film director I've seen.

Finally watched Martha, a rather sour Sirk pastiche with hints of Gaslight.

It’s awesome—Fassbinder called it a sadist and a masochist finding the ideal partner. Is it on DVD?

And of course there’s this dynamo of a shot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiS2kJCLhgA

Yes, I saw it on DVD.

It's on Criterion Channel too.

Id put it into the second-tier because the first half faffs around a bit.

Gets more and more hysterical as it goes on.

what kind of freak gets in the front seat of a taxi

It's not top-tier RWF, sure.

I don't know, it's pretty damn good!

Exactly -- good not great!

Good, not Querelle

a milkshake?