KAMIKAZE '89

Wolf Gremm, 1982

Starring: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Günther Kaufmann

Lieutenant Jansen – a police officer in a near crime-free, futuristic society with no pollution, poverty, or unemployment – is called in to investigate a bomb threat on The Combine, the country’s most important media conglomerate, who reside in the city’s tallest high-rise. He and his partner Anton learn that the threat turns is only a hoax, but the note it was printed on is very distinctive – pointing to only two dozen possible culprits – and Jansen’s investigation leads him towards an increasingly dangerous situation that might involve those behind Combine.

Fassbinder’s final performance as an actor – and one of his last creative projects in general – is this zany blend of B-movie, sci-fi film, and detective story. If you’re expecting something serious, along the lines of Fassbinder’s final masterworks like The Marriage of Maria Braun, In a Year With 13 Moons, or Veronika Voss, Kamikaze ’89 is certainly not in that category. It has more in common with Alex de la Iglesia’s Accion Mutante than it does with any of Fassbinder’s films and will only real appeal to fans of “bad” films. With that said, Fassbinder is spectacular in it and was apparently responsible for a script overhaul courtesy of his friend Robert Katz.

Gremm was not known as one of German’s finest filmmakers and Kamikaze ’89 definitely has an amateurish feel, though there are some moments of visual brilliance. It’s based on Per Wahloo’s novel Murder on the Thirty-First Floor, though Katz and Fassbinder updated this by setting it in the near future and this is certainly one of the film’s campiest, though most appealing elements. The cinematography, which alternates between Day-Glo ‘80s colors and a dark noirish flavor, is from Fassbinder’s regular collaborator Xaver Schwarzenberger, who shot most of his late-period films. It is creative and visually impressive, despite the obviously low budget and cheap sets. Probably the most memorable visual is Fassbinder himself, who sports an outlandish leopard print suit, which appears in nearly every frame of the film. But the suit isn’t all – incredibly, the same material can be found on his gun, in his car, and more.

Sadly, unlike Accion Mutante, Kamikaze ’89 lacks an abundance of action or violence and is organized around a series of conversations and interrogations. The film’s most interesting aspect is Jansen’s character. While many other science fiction works have portrayed utopias as fascist, dull, and repetitive, Jansen is the embodiment of that here. His life revolves around solving cases – he has a perfect record – and he is ultimately shown to have a lonely existence lacking any pleasures. His life is gradually revealed to be bleak and depressing – not unlike a standard noir protagonist – and there is something a little depressing about seeing Fassbinder in this role at the end of his life. He’s drunk, bloated, exhausted, and sloppy, which is ultimately perfect for the film.

Really Kamikaze ’89 will only appeal to fans of blatant Eurotrash, which this is undeniably. There are some amusing futuristic elements, such as characters basically Skyping – using the television to make video calls – and a popular reality TV show called The Laughing Contests, where contestants simply laugh for hours on end. Fassbinder and his once-lover Günther Kaufmann (as his partner Anton) get into a number of delightful situations. Early on they visit what is described as a “police disco,” with improbable swingin’ ‘60s-style dancers that clearly get on Fassbinder’s nerves. This ultimately creative and colorful film is nowhere on the same level as Fassbinder’s own sci-fil film, the excellent World on a Wire, or the latter’s source material, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. I’m still endlessly fascinated by the sci-fi/dystopian films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, most of which are far more imaginative than what we have today – either despite or because of miniscule budgets.

Of further interest to film fans will be the soundtrack from Tangerine Dream, which has wound up being more popular and enduring than the film itself. Between this, Fassbinder’s performance, and the delightful visuals, Kamikaze ’89 is worth seeing – if you can find it. It’s not currently available on DVD, though you can sometimes find it floating around on Youtube. I don’t think there’s a version with English subtitles, though hopefully it will be released sometime soon on DVD. Besides, you don’t want to miss a leopard-print clad Fassbinder humping a poster of Neil Armstrong, do you?

SHADOW OF ANGELS aka SCHATTEN DER ENGEL

Daniel Schmid, 1976

Starring: Ingrid Caven, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Klaus Löwitsch, Annemarie Düringer, Adrien Hoven

The beautiful Lily Brest turns to prostitution to support her boyfriend, Raoul, though he is abusive and wastes her money gambling. She has trouble getting clients, but is soon hired by a man known only as the Rich Jew, one of the city’s most powerful men. He discovers that she is a good listener, and spends most of their time together talking about his life. Raoul becomes insanely jealous, while others around town also begin to ostracize her. Even her parents – her wheelchair-bound mother and ex-Nazi father who is a drag performer at a local cabaret – begin to hate her. Consumed with despair, she hopes to end her life and thinks the Rich Jew may be her only way out.

This Swiss-West German co-production, directed by Fassbinder’s friend Daniel Schmid, is based on Fassbinder’s controversial play, Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (The Garbage, the City, and the Death). Based loosely on Gerhard Zwerenz’s novel Die Erde ist unbewohnbar wie der Mond (The Earth is Inhabitable Like the Moon, though it seems to be unavailable in English), the play and Schmid’s film bear much in common with Fassbinder’s deeply personal later works, In a Year With 13 Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz. With those films, Shadow of Angels shares three main themes: the commodification of human life, an exploration of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism, and a central character plunged into despair simply by trying to live in society.

The play was immediately attacked for its exploration of anti-Semitism, thanks to the fact that a character is named “the Rich Jew.” Four separate performances were banned over the years, though it has finally been staged as far afield as New York and Israel. Fassbinder was brave to attempt this, but perhaps misguided. He was deeply wounded by the backlash against the play and, in particular, accusations that he was anti-Semitic. I cannot say for sure whether or not Fassbinder was anti-Semitic, though I sincerely doubt it. His entire career revolved around depicting abused, marginalized characters, which included Germans, foreigners, men, women, gay, straight, black, white, old, young, and so on. I think he objected to the idea that there was something sacred, something inviolable, and unable to be criticized.

I think he was trying to show two things. First, that anti-Semitism lingered in Germany and had not lessened since WWII, it just became taboo to openly speak about. In his defense of the play, he said that there is an anti-Semitic character in the play – Lily’s father, the former Nazi, who admits that his role during the war was to kill Jews – because there are still people like this in Germany. Factually speaking, thousands of Nazis evaded prosecution and were reintegrated into Germany society. Secondly, that Jews — even the post-Holocaust mythic figure of the survivor — are people and are capable of selfishness, misdeeds, and exploiting others. I’ve written about this already, but more than a decade earlier, Hannah Arendt – herself a Jew and concentration camp survivor – was ostracized with Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. The situation had changed very little by the ‘70s and it arguably would not change until a post-Holocaust TV series world (it was released in 1978 and screened throughout the U.S. and Europe in the following years), when a more varied, open discourse about war and Holocaust survivors began.

Getting down to brass tacks, calling the character the Rich Jew was remarkably misguided and Fassbinder seems to have been asking for trouble (which he often openly did). The character, played by Fassbinder regular Klaus Löwitsch, is described in the dialogue – in the film and the play – as old, fat, ugly, and horrible, but this strongly contrasted with how he is depicted here. Löwitsch was one of Fassbinder’s handsomest actors and as the Rich Jew, he is ultimately revealed as the film’s only honest, sympathetic character, and comes to be the only person who genuinely cares for Lily. It is possible that the other characters call him the Rich Jew, because they know absolutely nothing else about him and they are not interested in learning. He sits at the top of the city’s financial food chain, but is also made separate from the infrastructure.

In his essay Anti-Semite and the Jew, Sartre wrote that if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would create him. He goes on to explain that the anti-Semite is primarily a conservative being stuck in the past, resisting a changing society and that he has distilled his fears and hatred into the figure of the Jew, the ultimate scapegoat. But the scapegoat in Shadow of Angels is not the Rich Jew, it’s Lily, who quickly becomes hated by every other character in the film – especially those close to her, such as her lover, her parents, and other prostitutes – by everyone except for the Rich Jew.

Fassbinder would explore this concept of the pharmakos, the ritual sacrifice of an exile or scapegoat, many times throughout his career, including films like Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fox and His Friends, Despair, Martha, In a Year With 13 Moons, Querelle, Veronika Voss, and many more, but this is certainly an early incarnation. Ingrid Caven, Fassbinder’s ex-wife, is excellent as Lily. A mixture of tragic, alluring, and emotionally void, Lily feels like a ghostly presence haunting the film. Like the Rich Jew, she is in the world, but not of it. Early in the film, she strangles a kitten out of quiet despair. This theme of choking and strangulations prevails until her death at the literal hands of the Rich Jew, who puts her out of her misery out of love.

The film is certainly flawed and at times feels like an amateur stage production with its dialogue-heavy scenes, aphorism-reliant dialogue, and stage-like sets. I can’t help but wonder why Fassbinder chose not to direct the film, though it is likely that he was simply too busy with his own projects and wanted to help out a friend. He was also deeply affected by the controversy surrounding Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod, which was banned for decades. By contrast, Shadow of Angels went to Cannes in 1976 and was entered into competition for the Golden Palm, though, somewhat mysteriously, the film has basically disappeared and is somewhat difficult to get ahold of. I can only really recommend it to fans of Fassbinder and New German Cinema. Though it is a compelling piece and there are some wonderful moments, it fails as a cohesive whole. Still… if you want to see Adrian Hoven dressed in drag, singing cabaret songs, and spouting intentionally distasteful Nazi rhetoric, here’s your chance.

THE TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES aka DIE ZÄRTLICHKEIT DER WÖLFE

Ulli Lommel, 1973

Starring: Kurt Raab, Jeff Roden, Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven

Just after the end of WWI, Fritz Haarmann takes advantage of the poverty and widespread crime in Germany. He is hired as an informant by the police, a position that allows him to rape and murder young boys. He then sells their possessions on the black market, along with their flesh, as meat is in high demand. But strife develops between he and his longtime partner, Hans, and a nosy neighbor, Frau Lindner, suspects that Franz is up to no good and takes her suspicions to the police, just as some of his corpses are found in the river.

Based closely on the life of German serial killer Fritz Haarmann, The Tenderness of the Wolves is the third film of director Ulli Lommel, a protégé of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who acted in this film and served as producer. Out of all the films made surrounding Fassbinder (but not directed by him), this is perhaps the most significant. Lommel got his start acting in German TV movies and then in Fassbinder’s films and oddly went on to quite a diverse career. He helmed Z-grade horror films like The Boogey Man and The Devonsville Terror, but also made sci-fi films like Haytabo, Brain Waves, Strangers in Paradise, the sadly unavailable Nazi satire Adolf und Marlene, important No Wave documentary Blank Generation, a crime film with Jack Palance, Cocaine Cowboys, and many more. The Tenderness of the Wolves was one of his earliest works, but remains one of his best.

Another of Fassbinder’s close associates, Kurt Raab – one of his regular actors and art director – played a major role in the film’s development. In addition to starring in the film as Haarmann, he wrote the script and served as set designer. In his script, Raab changed few of the key details of Haarmann’s life and crimes. Known by a number of colorful epithets, including the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Hanover, or the Wolf Man, Haarmann was convicted of murdering 24 young men (though he likely killed more) between 1918 and 1924. His preferred method of killing was to bite through the throats of his victims, most of whom were homeless, jobless teenagers. The poverty and lawlessness of Weimar Germany provided a unique killing field for Haarmann. Despite his criminal record, extensive jail time, and known homosexuality, he was untouchable for a few years thanks to his role as a police informant. He sold his victims possessions or gave them away as gifts, and there is a long-standing rumor that he sold their flesh. Though this was never conclusively proven, it is known that he sold meat on the black market.

One key factual element that was changed is that while Haarmann murdered between 1918 and 1924, Fassbinder decided that a ‘20s setting would be too expensive. He was still relatively unknown in 1973 and his budgets were incredibly small by today’s standards, thus the time period was moved to the late ‘40s. Fassbinder explored this post-war period repeatedly through his career in films like The American Soldier, Lola, Veronika Voss, and others, and some of his themes are echoed here by Lommel and Raab. Haarmann is a figure of exploitation – emotional, sexual, and financial – and unabashedly drains those around him. In contrast with Fritz Lang’s M and its central killer, an obvious source of inspiration (and also based on Haarmann), Haarmann is not an outcast, he’s a central figure in the film’s urban world. Hans Beckert, Peter Lorre’s equally bald killer in M, on the other hand, is outside of the social network of Weimar Berlin, resting neither with the criminals, cops, or poor families.

Despite their shared serial killer theme and the presence of a soft-spoken, bald, wide-eyed murderer, the two films are remarkably different. While M is concerned with urban claustrophobia and a decaying social structure, The Tenderness of the Wolves is an exploration of the worst of capitalism and consumerism – also seen in ‘70s films like Pasolini’s Salo and Teorema. Lommel and Raab are not interested in providing a biography of Haarmann or in examining potential motivations for his actions; rather they follow several weeks of his murderous racketeering. Haarmann seems to annihilate his victims twice – in a parody of Nazi profiteering, he kills them, but he also sells their boots, clothing, and flesh, so that they are literally and figuratively dissolved into the post-war economy. He also fits within the larger framework of post-industrial human disposability, sweeping boys from the streets as effectively as war, urban pestilence, or factory working life.

Despite its flaws, there is something haunting about the film and Lommel infuses Haarmann with the sense that he is not an anomaly, a monster, or an evil genius, as many serial killer films choose to present murderers, but rather that he is just terrifyingly part of the norm, a manifestation of German post-war cultural anxiety that lingered throughout the ‘70s. There is a sense of timelessness about the proceedings, despite the fact that it is set in the immediate postwar years. This sense of liminal space that borders the historical and the imaged was a regular fixture of Fassbinder’s work, including his Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Bolwieser, and his masterpiece miniseries, Berlin Alexanderplatz, which The Tenderness of the Wolves remarkably resembles.

Fortunately, The Tenderness of the Wolves is available on DVD… though it is out of print and quite expensive. The film comes recommended and is a pensive, disturbing look at consumerism and greed. It’s worth seeing for Raab’s excellent performance alone, but the uniformly solid cast includes many of Fassbinder’s regulars, such as Margit Carstensen as the nosy neighbor, Ingrid Caven, Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, and a wonderfully sleazy-looking Fassbinder as one of Haarmann’s more questionable associates. This will definitely please anyone looking for a more unusual serial killer film that avoids what has become the post-Manhunter norm.

BAAL (1970)

Volker Schlöndorff, 1970

Starring: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Hanna Schygulla

Baal, a slovenly poet, briefly becomes the talk of the town before driving his supporters away. He prefers to spend his days drinking and womanizing with no concern for anyone but himself, which frequently leads to trouble. He seduces Joanna, a friend’s girlfriend, and she kills herself when Baal declares that he does not love her. He wanders through the German woods and impregnates another woman, Sophie, and then abandons her. In a drunken stupor, he kills his closest friend, Ekart, and goes on the run from the police, until he ultimately dies along, like a beast, in the forest.

Baal, based on famed German writer Bertolt Brecht’s first play, explores the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality. Writers from Byron to Jean Genet have lived in and helped create this mythic model and it is no wonder that a young Brecht was attracted to the type and perhaps saw himself in that mold. As a 20 year-old, Baal was one of my favorite plays, but revisiting it over a decade later, it’s clear that in many ways, it’s a juvenile work. Fortunately or unfortunately, this quality translates to the film adaptation.

For years, Baal was unavailable thanks to the efforts of Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow, who disliked the adaptation and had it barred from public viewing or release. Finally, in 2011, thanks to the efforts of Juliane Lorenz, head of the Fassbinder Foundation, Brecht’s granddaughter granted restoration and release rights, so that this minor, yet underrated film can finally be seen by fans of the playwright and of New German Cinema, as it involves three of the movement’s key personalities: Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Margarethe von Trotta.

Nearly everyone associated with making the film was young and several of them were in the early stages of what would amount to brilliant careers. Schlöndorff had directed three feature films before this (along with some shorts and assistant directorial work), while Margarethe von Trotta – who he would soon marry – had only acted in a handful of films and was still five years away from her first directorial assignment. Star Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who would eclipse them both with his directorial talent) was headway into his career by this point; though he just began directing in 1969, he would have seven feature films under his belt by the end of 1970. And actress Hanna Schygulla, who appears here, was slowly already on her way to New German Cinema stardom thanks to her work with Fassbinder.

Overall, Baal is insignificant in comparison to Schlöndorff’s career as a whole, which includes assistant directorial work on films by Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville, plus his own successes like The Tin Drum, Young Törless, A Degree of Murder, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, and Coup de Grâce, which should be included in any list of the best works of New German Cinema. The quality of direction and cinematography here is certainly not among Schlöndorff’s finest, but it does match the spirit of the source material. There is a certain punk and anarchistic sensibility that would linger in much of New German Cinema and in Fassbinder’s films in particular.

Fassbinder is perfect as Baal, though the role brings to mind a chicken or egg scenario. It’s hard to say how much playing this role influenced him or whether Fassbinder’s own self-mythologizing coincidentally created a Baal-like character over the years: an anarchistic artist living against society’s rules and norms with his persistent drug use, numerous male and female sexual partners, and rumors about his manipulative, cruel tendencies towards romantic and working partners alike. Baal has a homoerotic relationship with his friend, the musician Ekart, and it is his most intense, enduring relationship. Similarly, Fassbinder’s most consuming relationships were with men (though he also dated, lived with, and even married women).

Fassbinder is absolutely the reason to see this film, as he is simply perfect as Baal. His complex performance is a blend of roguish swagger, the constant threat of violence or seduction, charisma, ugliness, and a sensitivity that belies Baal’s more thuggish qualities. This adaptation plays up the character’s bestial nature in the sense that Baal is more a part of the natural world than he is of human society. In one of the film’s most thrilling scenes, he is shown comfortably running his hands through the mud, looking at home in the filth. Baal has numerous forest scenes and shots of Baal wandering through pastoral landscapes, and it is ultimately to this green world that he returns.

Baal is perhaps a forgotten curiosity among the annals of New German Cinema, but it will be a pleasant discovery for many cinema fans. It comes recommended, particularly for Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, and von Trotta devotees, though I’m not sure when it will be available on region one DVD. It screened almost exactly a year ago at Berlinale in its restored form (with von Trotte, Schygulla, and other in attendance), so I would assume that a release is on the horizon. 

QUERELLE

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982

Starring: Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau, Laurent Malet

Querelle, a Belgian sailor, lands in the port of Brest. He runs into his brother, Robert, with whom he has a love-hate relationship, who is holed up in Feria, a local brothel and bar. There, Querelle gets involved in opium dealing and murder, and has an affair with Feria’s owner, Nono, as well as Nono’s wife, and the local police chief. He also falls in love with Gil, a man who has murdered a coworker, but ultimately betrays Gil by turning him in and pinning his own murder on Gil. Querelle is also the target of a naval commander who is obsessed with him and seems to be stalking him.

Based on Jean Genet’s novel, Querelle de Brest, Fassbinder’s final film, released months after his death, is certainly a troubled one. His second English-language film and second film with an international cast, Querelle is an excellent adaptation of its source material, which is the cause of its triumphs and flaws. This incredibly personal film – one of cinema’s first widely seen examinations of gay relationships – is a departure from the blend of accessibility and art house in Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy. The striking visual world of Querelle is vibrant, yet aggressively artificial, an evolution of his work on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Martha, Chinese Roulette, and Nora Helmer.

Like Effi Briest, Bolwieser, and Pioneers in Ingolstadt, among others, Querelle is set in an imaginary time and place. However, unlike these earlier films, it does not seem to have a relationship to actual history, but exists in a dream world of the liminal impulses between sex and violence, liberation and destruction. The themes of salvation and martyrdom present in many of his earlier films appear here, as Querelle seems to be on a quest for sexual or emotional liberation that takes the path of abjection: crime, murder, drug use, cruelty, betrayal, and, above all, anal sex. That forbidden pleasure – little seen in literature or cinema, and always controversial in both – is the locus point of desire and masculine identity in Querelle. Jack Sergeant, in an article on Serge Gainsbourg’s banned and little-seen film about heterosexual anal sex, Je t’aime moi non plus (1976), writes: “If discussed at all, anal sex is seen predominately as a Sadean fixation and hardcore porn staple. Certainly it is never viewed as an act of love.”

For both Genet and Fassbinder, it is a layered act, one that evokes the feminine and the masculine, violence and intimacy, hate and love, becoming and abandonment, blood, shit, and come. Homosexuality straddles the line between understood and forbidden in Querelle; men seduce other men while discussing their attraction for women. Others play a dice game for the privilege to have sex with Nono’s wife, the brothel madam, but the losers must have sex with Nono. Some men, including Querelle, lose intentionally, but are able to save face because they are merely following the rules of the game. Anal sex is the key to both the port of Brest and to Feria, which functions as a Technicolor hell and a sexually explicit rendering of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island (and its source material, Circe’s island) all in one.

Fassbinder’s fascination with the criminal – including theft, murder, and terrorism -- and the sexually explicit, as well as his identity as a gay man, made him perhaps uniquely suited to adapt Genet’s work. But there are undeniable flaws, primarily because Genet’s novels do not lend themselves well to cinematic adaptation. All the film’s characters are ciphers that explore distant and unknowable parts of the human psyche. Querelle is fascinating, but utterly unlikable. Though Fassbinder had a number of protagonists that could be described this way – including those of Effi Briest, Martha, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Satan’s Brew, Lili Marleen, and many more – Querelle suffers the most for it. In Despair and Nora Helmer – two of Fassbinder’s other adaptations – he gradually reveals the enigmatic protagonists through their relationships with others. But Querelle’s exchanges with other characters are often reduced to the physical and frustratingly retreat into the suggested and the symbolic.

The performance of spaghetti western and Italian crime film star Franco Nero (one of my favorite actors) is a key example of this. Though he is always compelling, Nero’s performance as the voyeuristic Lieutenant Seblon is ultimately baffling. He acts as a sort of stand-in for Fassbinder, an ever-present peeping Tom who is distant from the action but comments on it through narration (a favorite device of Fassbinder’s). Unfortunately, Nero’s character lacks much narrative force and ends the film resolving very little, though he is finally united with Querelle in the potential beginning of a romantic relationship.

Another strange presence is French star Jeanne Moreau as the brothel madam, the film’s only female character. She performs a widely hated musical number – an original song set to Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem about the inexorable connection between love and death, sex and violence – that speaks to Fassbinder’s love of camp. Moreau’s black-clad performance – similar to Marlene Dietrich’s lazy, yet suggestive musical romps, especially her later years in films like Touch of Evil and Rancho Notorious – recalls the frequent cabaret songs throughout Fassbinder’s career, all of which focus on scantily clad, sexually suggestive women who cannot sing (such as Lili Marleen, Gods of the Plague, and Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven).

This blend of confrontational erotica, transgression, camp, and a highly artificial visual world will not be for everyone and, along with Satan’s Brew and The Third Generation, Querelle is one of Fassbinder’s most unusual, challenging films. It’s available on DVD and is a must-see for Genet fans and for anyone who appreciate Fassbinder’s more difficult, obscure works. It’s certainly not a failure, but, like Fassbinder’s early films and the later Lili Marleen, Querelle is a work of Brechtian distancing, intentional obscurity, and is deeply, uncomfortably personal film that stands as a fitting epilogue to one of cinema’s most prolific and brilliant careers.

VERONIKA VOSS aka DIE SEHNSUCHT DER VERONIKA VOSS

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982

Starring: Rosel Zech, Annemarie Düringer, Hilmar Thate

Veronika Voss, a former Nazi starlet, has lapsed into reclusively and paranoia by the mid-‘50s. She is unable to get hired by the film studio and is utterly dependent on a Dr. Katz, a greedy neurologist who drains Veronika’s bank account and keeps her addicted to drugs. But Veronika soon meets Robert, a reporter, and they begin an affair despite the fact that he already has a girlfriend, Henriette. Hoping to free Veronika from Dr. Katz’ obsessive clutches, Robert and Henriette team up to investigate the doctor, not realizing how dangerous it could be for all three of them.

Considered by many to be Fassbinder’s best film, this middle entry in the BRD trilogy, between The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola, is certainly one of his most skilled. Filmed in black and white and inspired by Sunset Boulevard — where an aged star spiraling into madness attracts a middle-aged writer and keeps him prisoner in her house, eventually killing him — Veronika Voss is based loosely on the life of Nazi actress Sybille Schmitz. In addition to appearing in some of the best films of the ‘20s and early ‘30s including Diary of a Lost Girl and Vampyr, she continuing working during the Nazi reign, despite the fact that Goebbels allegedly disliked her. After the war, she was shunned and only worked intermittently while succumbing to depression and drug and alcohol abuse. She committed suicide in 1955, which was facilitated by a female doctor who lived with her, prescribed her morphine, and stole her money.

At its heart, Veronika Voss is a film about the loss of fame, artistic relevance, and creative power, something Fassbinder possibly feared at this point of his life. He struggled with drug addiction and, somewhat uniquely, depended on cocaine to ensure his staggering creative output. It was, of course, his undoing, and he died the following year from a drug overdose, reportedly just as he planned to quit cold turkey. While it’s easy to see Veronika Voss purely a statement about the Third Reich, war trauma, and forgetting, this addiction aspect is fascinating in regards to Fassbinder’s own life. At the same time that he developed this film, he was also planning to adapt Pitigrilli’s 1921 novel Cocaine, another tale of drug use with a fascist history. It was banned in Italy in the ‘30s by both the Catholic church and the government, thanks to anti-Semitic laws (Pitigrilli was Jewish).

It’s also a film about obsession. Like plenty of Fassbinder’s earlier works and the other two films in the BRD trilogy, Veronika Voss is focused on a protagonist obsessed with an enigmatic second character. In some ways, this is framed as a detective story or mystery with the basic outline that a man (typically a writer, detective, or reporter in film noir) meets a mysterious, alluring woman who is in trouble and he seeks both intimacy and a solution to her problems. In this case, Robert (and through him, Henriette) seeks to solve the puzzle of Veronika Voss. Fassbinder turns the genre on its head somewhat, because there is no ultimate revelation, punishment, or triumph. Veronika dies and her story simply fades away; there is no book written or criminal investigation undertaken, and it is even someone else who writes about her death for the newspaper.

While this balance between infamy and anonymity is reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, Veronika Voss is informed as much by another film noir, Laura. In this classics noir, a detective becomes obsessed with a woman while investigating her murder and is haunted by a large portrait of her that hangs in her apartment. But she comes to life, as a different woman was accidentally killed in her place, and they fall in love when the detective catches her killer. In Veronika Voss, Robert is haunted by the image of Veronika Voss from her film appearances. The movie opens with Veronika (and Fassbinder, making a cameo as an audience member just behind her) sitting in a theater watching one of her own films. She is a spectator from a darker time, but she never comes to life, she merely fades away into the inevitability of her own death.

This image of the spectral past impinging on the present and the relief of amnesia is further symbolized by an old Jewish couple, antique dealers and Holocaust survivors also being treated by Dr. Katz for “nervous disorders.” They are survivors of the Nazi death camp Treblinka and welcome the relief of morphine from constant emotional pain. This suggestion that trauma is a wound healed only by death is constant throughout the film and two of Fassbinder’s other works — Fox and His Friends and In a Year With 13 Moons — share this abiding sense of personal misery and the desire for forgetting and oblivion. I can’t help but wonder if Fassbinder selection of Treblinka is intentional. In In a Year With 13 Moons, Saitz, the film’s seductive antagonist, is a survivor of Bergen Belsen, a concentration camp near Hanover (about three hours east of Berlin). It was used primarily for labor or transit and lacked gas chambers or gas vans; yet of the roughly 120,000 people who passed through the camp, around 50,000 were killed. It maintained the reputation of being one of the easier camps to survive.

Treblinka, on the other hand, located in Nazi-occupied Poland, was the site of mass exterminations. In the three years that it was open, nearly a million people were killed, making this the site of the second most number of Holocaust deaths next to Auschwitz. But unlike Auschwitz, the Germans were prepared for the arrival of Soviet soldiers and the camp was destroyed and an attempt was made to hide all evidence of the genocide. Treblinka was one of the camps to experience an uprising and as a result, roughly 70 people — 70 out of almost a million — survived the camp. Only a few of those made it past the war years and many of these men devoted the rest of their lives to telling their story to the world. Survivor Hershl Sperling gave testimony, but eventually committed suicide, as did another survivor, author Richard Glazar. Only one survivor remains today, sculptor Samuel Willenberg.

This intersection between drug overdose, survivor guilt, depression, isolation, and suicide can that can be found in Veronika Voss, Fox and His Friends, and In a Year With 13 Moons exposes main characters who are all tired, in pain, and, above all, ready to die. What this suggests about Fassbinder himself, I cannot fairly say, but it was the last film released before his death (though Querelle was the last one he made). Before Veronika Voss, Fassbinder’s most spectacular image of death was the eerie, blue subway station where Fox lays down to die in Fox and His Friends. Here, it is far surpassed by two images. First, Veronika’s own farewell party — seemingly held hours before her suicide — where she looks incredibly glamorous and sings the Dean Martin song, “Memories are Made of This.” The second is one of the most startling set pieces of Fassbinder’s career: Dr. Katz’s brilliant-white office, a waiting room that leads patients down a road towards death, rather than life and healing. It’s also reminiscent of the blinding-white room Willie enters in Lili Marleen when she is going to meet Hitler. This place of absence, forgetting, and death is a fitting final image for a director mere months away from his own death.

Veronika Voss comes with the highest possible recommendation and can be found in Criterion’s excellent BRD trilogy box set (along with a documentary about Schmidt). I can’t decide if Veronika Voss is Fassbinder’s greatest film, but it certainly in his top three or four and it is a masterwork that absolutely must be seen. The incredible black and white imagery is Dreyer-like in its splendor and this is certainly Fassbinder's most visually sumptuous, moving work.

LOLA

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981

Starring: Barbara Sukowa, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Mario Adorf

Von Bohm, a straight-laced building commissioner, arrives in the town of Coburg for a new position. What he doesn’t first realize is that corrupt local industrialist Schuckert controls the town and plans to gain control over von Bohm. Determined to change the system, von Bohm bitterly resists, but soon falls in love with Lola, the attractive daughter of his landlady. He plans to marry her, but then learns that she’s also the star attraction at Schuckert’s cabaret club and brothel. Will he go on a moral crusade against Schuckert, or will his love for Lola convince him to change his tune?

The third part of Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy is this candy-colored melodrama and satire set during the economic miracle in Germany in the late ‘50s. Many of Fassbinder’s films were about the corruption, cruelty, and hypocrisy inherent in German society. Throughout his body of films, he suggests that this emerges from a rift caused by WWII, one that never healed, but was happily glossed over during the immediate postwar American occupation and the economic miracle. Most Nazis and collaborators were never prosecuted, but simply reintegrated into German society alongside surviving Holocaust and war survivors. This sense of greed, murky morality, and a desire to forget the past and forge anew is at the heart of Lola.

In Lola’s precursors – Berlin Alexanderplatz, Despair, and The Marriage of Maria Braun – Fassbinder suggests that a decent person is unable to survive in society. Lola examines this theme through the Technicolor light of Hollywood melodrama and romantic comedy, as von Bohm repeatedly struggles against the external demand that he should give up his lofty ideals and just conform like everyone else. Von Bohm’s good-hearted but ridiculous character is inspired by Professor Unrat, Heinrich Mann’s novel that was also the basis for Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930). Where the protagonists differ is the key to Lola. In The Blue Angel, Professor Rath is a respected member of the community and staunchly opposed to the local cabaret and the sexual pleasures it promises until he meets the singer Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich). Obsessed, he marries her and effectively becomes her slave and is forced to work as a clown in the cabaret. This humiliating new life and Lola’s promiscuity drive him to violence, madness, and death. Von Bohm, on the other hand, begins with the same rigid morality. But where Professor Rath – and many of Fassbinder’s protagonists – are driven mad by love and society, von Bohm simply surrenders in what is perhaps Fassbinder’s most cynical conclusions.

The concepts of rationalization and amnesia are at their brightest and boldest here. The elaborate visual world of the film symbolizes these qualities. The artificial, candy-colored lighting and set pieces has a Disney World vibe to it and continually – even during scenes set in nature – evokes the unreal, the staged, and the performed. Much like Lola herself. Though von Bohm appears to be the protagonist, she is ultimately the film’s commanding presence. Sukowa’s marvelously energetic, physical performance is full of an abandon unequaled by any of Fassbinder’s other female stars.

While Lola has much in common with The Marriage of Maria Bran – both films are ultimately concerned with a marriage, a love triangle, a business arrangement, and an assured woman who prostitutes herself for financial independence – they are drastically different in tone thanks to the performances of the female leads. Sukowa’s petulant Technicolor beauty is aggressive and confrontational. In some ways, she is more reminiscent of Rita Hayworth in Gilda than either the sultry insolence of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel or the calculating cherubic glamour of Hanna Schygulla in The Marriage of Maria Braun. Like Hayworth’s famous song and dance number, “Put the Blame on Mame,” Lola gives a parallel performance full of intoxication, sexual abandon and complete with a strip tease. Both of these performances follow a scene where the male protagonist learns that Gilda/Lola is promiscuous.

Through the relationship between Lola and von Bohm, the film examines the contrast between fantasy and perception, idealism and industry. Their courtship and eventual marriage is equivalent to the business contract Lola has with Schuckert, though Fassbinder leaves no one confused about which relationship with more important, both to Lola and in the world of the film. Von Bohm’s inexplicable obsession with her ties Lola to the other films in the BRD trilogy, The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronika Voss, and it is this irrational attachment that is ultimately his undoing.

Fassbinder doesn’t use many of his stock cast here, instead choosing relative newcomer Barbara Sukowa (she also appeared in his Women in New York and Berlin Alexanderplatz around the same time), who gives a mesmerizing performance that promised future greatness. The male leads, von Bohm and Schuckert, were played with equal, if surpassing skill by East German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl (Jacob the Liar, A Love in Germany) and Mario Adorf (The Lost Honor of Katherine Blum, The Tin Drum), both delivering two of their best performances. I firmly believe that throughout his career Fassbinder manipulated his standard cast of actors – many of whom were not particularly talented or experienced – to achieve his own ends, but Lola is a film that benefits as much from incredible direction as it does from three solid performances.

Lola comes highly recommended and is a great starting point for newcomers, as it is one of Fassbinder’s most accessible films. It is a melodrama, but one with humor, tragedy, sex, and above all it concerns a woman determined to control and enjoy her life regardless of the cost (one of Fassbinder’s enduring themes). His examination of Germany’s reconstruction built on greed, exploitation, and amorality is one of his lightest, yet most biting works. See it as soon as possible and pick up Criterion’s BRD Trilogy DVD box set.

THEATER IN TRANCE

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981

Fassbinder’s only documentary and one of the final films he made before his death in 1982 is this examination of modern theater. Set at Theater der Welt (Theater of the World), an international theater festival held in Cologne, Fassbinder holed up for a few weeks to witness more than 100 performances from roughly 30 theater companies. The end result is a perhaps uneven, but fascinating meditation on drama and art from one of 1970s theater’s biggest contributors. It’s easy to forget how much of an impact Fassbinder had on the theater world in light of his prolific film career, but he wrote 14 plays and directed more than 20 throughout his career – which began with the takeover of the Munich action-theater when he was only 21.

He also filmed several plays, including Das Kaffeehaus, Bremen Freedom, Women in New York, and Nora Helmer. And Katzelmacher, The American Soldier, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant were all adapted from his own original plays. Here is a comprehensive look at his theatrical credits and here is a book that goes more in depth and includes the texts of nearly half of his plays. Fassbinder directed his final play in 1976 – Women in New York – and it is likely that his new responsibilities as an international director of high budget films did not allow him the time to actively pursue dual film and theatrical careers after this point.

Obviously this documentary proves that the theater was still in his thoughts. Rather than providing any exposition or narrative about the festival, Fassbinder primarily edited down clips of various performances mixed with shots of Cologne, theater-related graffiti and text, and shots of festival-goers mixing and mingling. Over top of the film, he read aloud sections from Antonin Artaud’s “The Theater and its Double,” an influential absurdist manifesto on theater that Fassbinder previously mined in Satan’s Brew. The film, which is divided into 14 chapters, showcases experimental theater groups like Squat Theatre and Pina Bausch’s group Tanztheater Wuppertal, with a decide emphasis on performances related to the body.

While there is some diversity, particularly early on – such as clips of Whirling Dervishes, an afro-beat dance company, musical numbers, what looks like an emcee in a safari suit, a topless woman performing a Salome-esque veil dance, a man in drag, and so on – the lengthy shots are mostly of bodies in motion. The various performances focus on the artifice of movement and physical habits, the rituals of exercise, grooming, and mating. In a reoccurring theme, a man teaches allegedly disabled people to walk, move, and ride a bike. Some of these are rather dull, such as an extended scene of soldiers carrying a wounded comrade into and then pacing back and forth around the room. One of the most fascinating involves a woman crying over a doll that somewhat resembles her. Her piece includes projects of old films and a rear projected light so that she and another actor appear only in silhouette.

Other performances are perhaps less compelling but equally avant-garde, including a shot of Donald Duck cartoons projected on multiple TV screens with opera playing in the background, and a dance troupe depicting women adjusting tight clothing and then acting out self-defense training as if at a fashion show. As I said, much of the documentary focuses on the body and performances that work out bodily habits and movements as if they are separate from thought or consciousness. One of the only narrative performances shown in the documentary depicted women in various stages of what appears to be mental illness. They act out pain and torment at a hospital; later one woman commits suicide by sticking her head in an oven. This is accompanied by frequent use of Janis Joplin’s “Bobby McGee,” which seems to have been a favorite of Fassbinder’s.

More of a fascinating historical document than a cohesive documentary, Theater in Trance remains worthwhile for Fassbinder fans or theater lovers, but it won’t change the mind anyone who doesn’t understand the appeal of avant-garde drama. This is among the most obscure of Fassbinder’s works and is difficult to find, particularly with English subtitles. Hopefully it will eventually see the light of day on DVD or Blu-ray. My dream “Fassbinder & Theater” box set includes this, restored versions of Nora Helmer and Bremen Freedom, and Shadow of Angels, a filmed version of his controversial play Garbage, the City, and Death. The clock is ticking, Criterion.

LILI MARLEEN

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981

Starring: Hanna Schygulla, Giancarlo Giannini, Mel Ferrer, Karl-Heinz von Hassel

A German singer, Willie, and a Swiss Jewish composer, Robert, are involved in a passionate love affair and plan to get married, until Nazism and Robert’s family get in their way. Though they are safely hiding out in Switzerland, Robert regularly sneaks back into Germany to help out the Resistance. Willie, wanting to be a bigger part of his life, helps him, but is not allowed back into Switzerland — thanks to Robert’s family, who don’t think she’s good enough — and Willie is refused a return visa. Forlorn, she takes a job in a cabaret and sings one of Robert’s songs, “Lili Marleen,” which suddenly becomes an overnight success. To her delight, she becomes a sought-after Nazi icon, but she risks her life to carry on a secret affair with Robert.

Based on the autobiography of German singer Lale Andersen, Lili Marleen is, in every way, a product of the success of The Marriage of Maria Braun. The latter was one of Fassbinder’s most internationally popular films and was lauded for its blend of art house style and accessibility. Lili Marleen is in this model, also stars Hanna Schygulla, and is also set in Nazi Germany. It is inspired more by historical fact, as Lale Andersen was skyrocketed to fame for her war-time performance of “Lili Marleen.” She was banned from performing for nearly a year thanks to her friendship with a number of Swiss-Jewish artists and attempted suicide.

But Fassbinder’s fictional “Lili Marleen” singer, Willie, is more a product of Hollywood melodrama than of history. With this film Fassbinder clearly attempted to harken back to the days of Technicolor splendor, while also exploring what was so appealing about the pomp of National Socialism. While Maria Braun’s life paralleled the transition from war-time poverty to the German economic “miracle” of the ‘50s, Willie’s life simply happens to cross wires with the height of Nazi power. Unlike Maria Braun, Willie is not fundamentally changed by this encounter. When she becomes famous enough to warrant a meeting with Hitler, his office doors open to reveal a blinding white light. Willie should have emerged from it altered – many of Fassbinder’s other protagonists experience a defining moment that permanently transforms them – but she does not. Perhaps what makes Willie (and the film) so fascinating, yet flawed, is that she remains untouched by and seemingly unaware of the monumental events and disturbing violence unfolding around her – despite the fact that her lover is Jewish and she is helping him smuggle footage of concentration camps.

Like the real-life Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied,” “Lili Marleen” and Willie’s association with it is built on a lie, a fiction. Horst Wessel, an SA officer and the author of the song named for him, was martyred by the Party after he was shot, likely over a financial dispute. Willie’s fame is similarly a tool of Nazi propaganda, a convenient fairytale marred by her love affair with a Jewish man. But this is where Fassbinder subverts the Hollywood melodrama: the love story between Robert and Willie becomes a side plot or an afterthought with nothing of real substance to supplant it. The film’s romantic heroes — Robert and Willie — fail the audience. Willie does attempt to commit suicide when her fame is snatched from her and Robert’s life is threatened by the SS, but she soon reconciles with her Nazi handler.

Robert is even more troubling. He effectively allows his prestigious family to ostracize Willie because she is neither wealthy nor Jewish. After he is freed by the SS – his father exchanges him for the film of the concentration camp – he seemingly sheds his wartime experiences, marries a more convenient woman, and becomes a famous composer. Willie comes to find him and is devastated that he has so enthusiastically abandoned her for this new life – or rather, for the old life he previously ignored. Like Willie, though perhaps more disturbingly so, Robert is unchanged by his experiences.

Fassbinder was once criticized for being anti-Semitic, thanks to the play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod, later turned into the film Shadow of the Angels. In it, a rich, old Jew is one of the film’s villains, a miser who ultimately murders the female protagonist. This misunderstanding deeply wounded him and caused the play’s early cancellation, but the same theme re-emerges here. What these audiences failed to understand is that Fassbinder spent his career examining the perpetrator as victim and the victim as perpetrator. His constant attempts to show that humanity is often stripped away in the face of survival and self-preservation can also be found in Holocaust literature like Primo Levi’s If This  is a Man or documentaries like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.

Perhaps Lili Marleen’s most subversive element – its insistence on presenting everything on a moral grayscale – is also its primary flaw. It’s refreshing that the film refused to follow the rank and file of postwar, post-Holocaust films that depict Jews and other Holocaust survivors as automatically heroic. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when WWII became a massively popular subject for narrative and documentary filmmakers alike, it was still taboo to suggest that Nazis could be anything other than embodiment of evil and Jews could be something darker than martyrs or survivors. For example, two decades earlier, in 1961, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem caused a firestorm of controversy when she claimed that the concentration camp organizer was not evil, but merely following the inevitability of thoughtless, compassionless bureaucracy. Despite being a concentration camp survivor herself, she was harshly criticized by friends, colleagues, and strangers.

It is no wonder then that Fassbinder tread lightly with this theme after Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod. The restraint shown in Lili Marleen, paired with its lack of character depth, unfortunately left me feeling cold. In some ways, this is an extension of the BRD trilogy – The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss – with a similar amount of style, but a strange lack of substance. It is nearly as colorful and stylish as Lola and exhibits Fassbinder’s love of mirrors, glass, frames, and art deco set pieces. It remains a flawed but fascinating look at what I think was a thesis in development, not at its conclusion. Fassbinder stated that The Damned was one of his favorite films and spent much of his career working out the issue of personal fascism, totalitarian brutality in every day society. He had only begun to explore National Socialist Germany later in his career, which was unfortunately cut short by his early death. It would have been fascinating to see where he took this theme begun in Pioneers in Ingolstadt, The Stationmaster’s Wife, Despair, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Despite its flaws, the film comes recommended, thanks to the wonderful style and solid performances from Hanna Schygulla and European art house heartthrob Giancarlo Giannini, among others. It’s not currently available on region 1 DVD, though a German disc exists. Hopefully a release with English subtitles will be on the horizon for 2015. If you’re planning to download it, beware: the subtitles were so terrible, that I wouldn’t have understood much of the film without a reasonable grasp on German.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980
Starring: Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Gottfried John

Franz Biberkopf is released from prison, where he served time after killing his girlfriend. He’s sent back into 1930s Berlin without many hopeful prospects. He meets up with an old friend, Meck, at a local bar and takes his old apartment. Women come in and out of his life and he takes a series of odd jobs: selling neckties, Nazi newspapers, and shoelaces. He has trouble adjusting to life outside of prison and has breakdowns and alcoholic binges. His old girlfriend, Eva, who he used to pimp out, has great affection for him and tries to support him financially and emotionally. She introduces him to Mieze, a young woman who becomes the love of his life, but their happiness is troubled by Reinhold, a local criminal who deeply fascinates Franz.

Fassbinder’s triumph, possibly the greatest masterpiece of a prolific and intense career, is this 14-part made-for-television miniseries. Based on Alfred Döblin’s novel of the same name, Fassbinder long obsessed over the book and considered it one of his favorite works. Its influence can be felt throughout his career and his life; for instance, he regularly used Franz (and even Franz Biberkopf) as a reoccurring character name in his films. His adaptation is relatively faithful and, clocking in at over 15 hours, lengthy. With the exceptions of the first episode at 82 minutes and the last at 112 minutes, the episodes are each 58 or 59 minutes long. The incredibly poetic titles are as follows:
1. "The Punishment Begins"
2. "How is One to Live if One Doesn’t Want to Die?"
3. "A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul"
4. "A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence"
5. "A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord"
6. "Love Has Its Price"
7. "Remember — An Oath can be Amputated"
8. "The Sun Warms the Skin, but Burns it Sometimes Too"
9. "About the Eternities Between the Many and the Few"
10. "Loneliness Tears Cracks of Madness Even in Walls"
11. "Knowledge is Power and the Early Bird Catches the Worm"
12. "The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent"
13. "The Outside and the Inside and the Secret of Fear of the Secret"
14. "My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin, An Epilogue"

The suggestion of the first episode title, “The Punishment Begins,” is that Franz’s real suffering is not to be found in prison, but in daily life. This is a theme expressed in every single one of Fassbinder’s films – that life is painful, hostile, and isolating, particularly bourgeois life.  Franz’s attempts to lead an honest life and leave behind prostituting his girlfriends, theft, and criminality, are met with constant setbacks. For example, the only consistent, well-paying job he is able to find is selling a Nazi newspaper. Even though he doesn’t share their beliefs, he is forced to wear a swastika armband. He is soon ostracized by some of his Jewish and communist friends and eventually quits. The specifics of Berlin Alexanderplatz’s plot is far less important than this attempted journey towards expiation and goodness, which is constantly met with resistance, failure, and hostility.

Franz essentially becomes a spiritual figure and his tale a religious allegory. He is bound up between two figures: the angelic, innocent Mieze and the dark, diabolical Reinhold. In many ways, Reinhold is the film second key character. He represents a sense of impossible, destructive passion that marks many of Fassbinder’s films, including Despair, Fox and His Friends, In a Year with 13 Moons, Martha, Veronika Voss, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and so on. Fassbinder’s protagonists, particularly his male protagonists, have a magnetic attraction for another man. While Fassbinder was bisexual, his relationships with men were most often dramatic at best, destructive at worst. Franz and Reinhold inexplicably love one another, but enact this love by sharing women. Reinhold has a deep-seated need not to be alone, but tires of women quickly. Until Mieze arrives on the scene, he gives them to Franz. This love-by-proxy has a violent underbelly and results in Reinhold murdering Mieze when she refuses to become part of the exchange.

Mieze, played by the angelic yet imperfect Barbara Sukowa, is at once erotic and childlike with her bobbed hair and childlike dresses. She screams, squeals, and giggles, and she and Franz routinely play childlike games as foreplay. She represents the innocence of love, rather than the violence of sex, and the comfort and contentment of home. The transformation of Franz’s flat occurs when she enters his life. What was a semi-clean place of dirty dishes and hanging laundry becomes a place of music (through the bird chirping), flowers, sunlight, and laughter. Fassbinder previously used a caged bird motif in earlier films in a negative light, such as Bolwieser, but here it is a sound of gentleness and hope.

With or without Mieze, Franz’s apartment is a place of depressing repetition. Franz moves between eating, sleeping, and having sex. There are episodes where he leaves the apartment to look for work, but he is primarily found at either the apartment or the local bar. Mieze and the other women are not generally shown eating or drinking, but move between cleaning for Franz and having sex, a similar if gendered routine. As Franz can only hope to return to a life of crime, the women in his life suffer similar fates: Eva, the most solid, dependable female character (and also the most beautiful) is a successful prostitute. Mieze takes up this profession to support Franz when he loses an arm.

The loss of his arm – and ultimately the loss of Mieze – is a sacrifice of, again, religious proportions. Reinhold, Franz’s devil and his Judas, convinces him to take part in a job for his gang. But during the operation, Reinhold becomes overwhelmingly paranoid and is convinced that Franz has informed on him. He pushed him out of the back of a van, causing him to be run over by another car and lose his arm. This loss of limb, during which Franz nearly dies and is believed dead by all his friends, is his final transformation. A normative, bourgeois life is no longer possible thanks to his disability.

This loss of flesh, which soon includes the murder of Mieze at the hands of Reinhold and the loss of Reinhold thanks to his prison sentence, results in Franz’s ultimate descent into the hell of his internal world. In what is perhaps Fassbinder’s finest work, the epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz deviates the most from the novel, but is a work of pure genius that blends of existentialist angst, absurdist humor, surrealism, and expressionism. While there are some of these elements throughout the series, particularly in Fassbinder’s frequent voice overs, where he reads sections of the novel in quiet monotone, the epilogue is an Inferno-like descent into the subconscious of Franz – and 1930s Germany. Much of it takes place in Franz’s dream world, where his car accident and crimes are acted out over and over again, mixed with charnel house scenes that blend into orgy. It’s also easy to compare the pile of naked, sometimes bloodied limbs with Holocaust photography. This is also the culmination of the novel’s religious themes, as Franz is eventually crucified and accompanied by angels that look like they stepped out of a Derek Jarman film. The baby Jesus, of course, wears a vivid swastika armband.

What Berlin Alexanderplatz perhaps does most elegantly is to chart the movement from freedom to totalitarianism experienced by the Germans of the 1930s – and by Döblin himself. He was forced to flee Germany when the Nazis burned his books in 1933, which led him on a decade-long nomadic lifestyle, as he traversed Europe, England, and America trying to find employment as a writer. He eventually returned to Germany, where he died in a sanatorium. Both his masterwork and Fassbinder’s adaptation of explores the degeneration and disintegration of society, one that Döblin personally experienced and Fassbinder also felt he was living through in postwar Germany.

Berlin Alexanderplatz comes with the highest possible recommendation. It’s available in a wonderful, restored DVD set from Criterion and, as I’ve said, is likely Fassbinder’s greatest achievement. While I would also place Veronika Voss, Fox and His Friends, and In a Year With 13 Moons in this category, Berlin Alexanderplatz represents the literal best of his achievements. It has the greatest performance from his entire catalog and certain one of the best in all of German cinema: that of  Günter Lamprecht as an absolutely perfect Franz Biberkopf. It also includes almost all of Fassbinder’s major performers: actresses Barbara Sukowa, Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Brigitte Mira, Lilo Pempeit, and actors Günther Kaufmann, Gottfried John, Volker Spengler, and Harry Baer, among others. The soundtrack – ranging from classical to pop and electronica – is his best, as is the set design, and so on. Much has already been written about this towering achievement of ‘70s cinema, but you should just experience it for yourself.

THE THIRD GENERATION aka DIE DRITTE GENERATION

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979

Starring: Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Eddie Constantine

A group of ineffectual terrorists hatch a plan to kidnap an industrialist, P.J. Lurz, whose business selling computer security systems is suffering. His secretary, Susanne, is one of the terrorists and sets off a plot with her friends – a ragtag group of middle-aged, middle-class wanderers including their leader, August Brem, Susanne’s husband Edgar, a feminist history professor, a housewife, and a record store clerk, among others – to set in motion his kidnapping. But Susanne’s father-in-law, with whom she is having an affair, is a police inspector and has Lutz put under protection, and it seems that Brem, the leader, is a double agent.

Closest in style to Fassbinder’s underrated triumph of the absurd and the abject, Satan’s Brew, The Third Generation has much in common with it: they are both anarchistic black comedies with plenty of the grotesque and these are really the only two Fassbinder films to focus on an ensemble – most of his other works focus on an individual protagonist. This incredibly fast-paced and often hilarious film is packed with actors from the troupe Fassbinder used throughout his career, including Hanna Schygulla, Volker Spengler, Margit Carstensen, Harry Baer, Gunther Kaufmann, and others, namely international star Eddie Constantine (Beware of a Holy Whore, Alphaville) as the industrialist with a plan of his own.

Though The Third Generation was initially negatively received, it has become regarded as one of his best films. The controversy is likely due to the fact that Fassbinder effectively made an irreverent comedy about terrorism at a time (much like now) when the issue was at the forefront in Europe, Germany in particular. The RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) was a violent terrorist group that killed more than 30 people in ‘70s Germany. When some of their leaders were arrested, the remaining members of the group kidnapped and murdered a wealthy businessman (and former Nazi), and also hijacked a Lufthansa flight in order to free their compatriots. The three leaders allegedly committed suicide in prison, though it was believed to be murder (two of them were shot to death). While this subject matter was covered in the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (with Fassbinder’s participation), it obviously deeply affected him.

His treatment of the terrorists in The Third Generation is both tragic and comical, a farcical look at armchair politics and the consequences of impulsive action without thought. The different members of the group are portrayed as stupid, cruel, and even bored. As with the communists in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, they are middle class and have never suffered or starved. This emotional and intellectual immaturity blended with pseudo-philosophy and armchair politics is a dangerous combination. Like his earlier works, he bitterly pokes fun at bourgeois society, but also at the aimless leftists, careening into German life like a bull in a china shop.

This is also one of Fassbinder’s key explorations of crime, something he investigated throughout his career in Love is Colder Than Death, Gods of the Plague, The American Soldier, Jail Bait, Nora Helmer, Fox and His Friends, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Despair, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and others. As opposed to his films about violence in domestic spaces, these combined works represent a complex thesis about the origins of crime in society. In his early films, clearly influenced by American film noir and Jean-Luc Godard, crime is cool. It’s a viable alternative to bourgeois society, a way to rebel and to fulfill one’s dreams without entering into the capitalist grind. Middle period films like Jail Bait and Nora Helmer posit that crime is somehow inevitable, despite the perpetrator’s good intentions. In Despair, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Berlin Alexanderplatz, it is simply a product of living in bourgeois society, where citizens are driven to private acts of fascism and exploitation, violence, and even murder.

The characters of The Third Generation exploit each other relentlessly and, like Fassbinder’s early characters, their attempt at crime and clumsy and bumbling. They remain out of prison because of the equal ineptitude of the police (this law enforcement failure was actually the real reason that the RAF’s kidnapped business man remained imprisoned). No members of the group are trained in combat, except for one new arrival that turns out to be a rapist and is soon killed. But Fassbinder suggests that the worst crime is betrayal, which occurs twice. The group’s leader, Brem, has been working for the police the entire time and not only leads members of his group to certain death, but seems to delight in framing them. Worse yet is the fact that Lurz, the industrialist they plan to kidnap, is in on the scheme (without their knowledge) and willingly participates in the hopes that it will be a successful marketing strategy for his company. This sort of icy avarice – which lacks regard for human emotion and even life – is a theme that developed throughout Fassbinder’s career from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant through to Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Marriage of Maria Braun.

Somewhat of an acquired taste, the anarchic black comedy and cruelly political satire of The Third Generation is a relative rarity among Fassbinder’s works. Though similar themes are found in Satan’s Brew, these two films represent some of Fassbinder’s most daring work and might appeal to anyone who dislikes his sojourns into melodrama, madness, or domestic strife. Available on DVD, it is well worth watching for anyone interested in political art house cinema, though you’re unlikely to find anything to compare it to. It's an incredibly rich film -- one of Fassbinder's most layered -- and there are many elements I didn't have the space to discuss, such as his use of bathroom stall quotes, philosophical pondering, games, costumes, and much more. It certainly remains fresh and thought-provoking when compared to current debates about democracy, capitalism, terrorism, and protest.

THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN aka DIE EHE DER MARIA BRAUN

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979

Starring: Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny

Maria and Hermann Braun are married as bombs are falling on Berlin. They have barely any time together before he must return to the front. Though she is devoted to Hermann, Maria is told he has been killed and merely tries to find a way to survive in postwar Germany. She works as a hostess in a club for American soldiers and begins an affair with one of them, while also learning English. Hermann comes home to find she and the soldier undressing and they get into a fight. Maria accidentally kills the man, trying to break it up, but Hermann takes responsibility and goes to prison. Meanwhile, still trying to survive, Maria begins working for a wealthy industrialist who soon falls in love with her.

One of Fassbinder’s most difficult and expensive productions beset by going over budget (allegedly due to the director’s costly cocaine habit that kept him working all hours of the day and night) and legal trouble with his long-time producer who oversold shares of the film, The Marriage of Maria was also his most popular film to date. It struck a balance between art house style, accessibility, and popular themes that led to international appeal and much sought acclaim from German audiences and critics. Thanks to its success, he went on to make three more triumphs: Berlin Alexanderplatz and the two other films of his BRD (Bundresrepublik Deutschland or the Federal Republic of Germany) trilogy, Lola and Veronika Voss.

In addition to the fact that they are all set in the immediate postwar period, this trilogy has a number of things in common. Each film follows the decay and destruction of a successful woman. Maria Braun and Lola, a version of Lola Lola from The Blue Angel, are incredibly similar: they are both hardworking women building towards a better future and financial independence, and they are not ashamed to use their sexuality as a resource or a weapon. Both women essentially sell fantasies and illusions, in particular the illusion of love. Both flirt with prostitution. While Lola is a cabaret singer and dancer who occasionally entertains wealthy gentlemen, Maria trades sex for things of increasing value: cigarettes, stockings, a secretarial job, a respected position in the company, expensive clothing, and a large house.

Where Lola and Maria differ is that while Lola deludes others, Maria deludes only herself. The nature of romantic fantasy leads to tragedy as Maria persists in her self-delusion. She is obsessed with Hermann, despite barely knowing him, and holds him as an ideal for a true, pure love. On the other hand, she treats Oswald cruelly and makes it clear that she is using him for money, social advancement, sex, and even entertainment… but never love. Fassbinder frequently examined themes of emotional cruelty and what could be described as a sort of insidious, personal fascism at work in daily society. As she becomes more successful, Maria certainly exhibits this. She treats Oswald, the office secretaries, the accountant, and even some of their clients abysmally, like a stereotype of the professional “dragon lady,” a corporate femme fatale that will go to any ends to achieve financial and personal success. Because of this, she is something of an anti-heroine, a figure that is flawed, if not outright tragic, but also sympathetic.

SPOILER ALERT: Maria is unable to ultimately succeed not because she is doomed or evil, but because of the inherently corrupt nature of society. Hermann, the love of her life, accepted a deal from Oswald where he essentially sold Maria – he agreed that he would leave the country until Oswald’s death, at which point Hermann and Maria would become the sole heirs of Oswald’s considerable estate. When Maria discovers this news, she kills them both, blowing up her beautiful house by leaving the gas on and lighting a cigarette. Even before she learns this news, Hermann’s homecoming is awkward and anxiety inducing. He wants to kiss her – or consummate their marriage – but she insists that he eat or bathe, that she change her clothes first, seemingly desperate to avoid a moment of real intimacy. In the film, their deaths are ambiguous, but in the original script, she intentionally drove them both off of a cliff.

This original ending is taken almost directly from Otto Preminger’s film noir Angel Face (1953), though Fassbinder’s original inspiration was Mildred Pierce (1945), another film about a woman who learns to survive and becomes successful in the postwar years. She is also separated from her husband, but her betrayal comes from her money-hungry daughter. Mildred Pierce is obsessed with her daughter’s advancement and effectively turns the child into a spoiled femme fatale, a selfish being with no regard for consequences for human life. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, a film that begins and ends with explosions, the axis rotates around Hermann and Maria’s obsession with him. This enigmatic figure symbolizes her hopes and dreams for a better, brighter future, but when he is shown to echo her greed and ambition, it destroys everything.

The Marriage of Maria Braun comes with a high recommendation and if you’ve never seen a Fassbinder film, this is a great place to start. Hanna Schygulla, one of his regular stars, gives the performance of her career, a nuanced portrayal of a complex woman trying to survive in a changing, postwar world, amidst the rubble of war. The only way to really see the film is in the Criterion box set of the BRD trilogy, which is a critical collection of three important films. Due to Fassbinder’s early death, he was never really able to fulfill his dream of a German Hollywood, but here he comes closest.