In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

Volker Spengler in In a Year With 13 Moons

Cast: Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Eva Mattes, Günther Kaufmann, Lilo Pempeit, Isolde Barth, Karl Scheydt, Walter Bockmayer, Peter Kollek, Bob Dorsay, Gerhard Zwerenz. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Production design: Franz Vacek. Film editing: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben. 

You might need to be better versed in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than I am to give a full account of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons, but two things are immediately apparent: It's a fable about identity and desire, and it's a very personal film for its maker. Fassbinder wrote, directed, photographed, and edited the movie as a response to the death of his lover Armin Meier. The story gradually tells us about the life of Elvira Weisshaupt (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman who began as Erwin Weisshaupt, married and fathered a daughter, but after falling in love with a man decided to undergo surgery and become Elvira. Some ambivalence about her transition seems to remain: At the beginning of the film, she has dressed as a man in order to solicit sex from male prostitutes, but that ends with her being severely beaten. When she returns to the apartment she shares with her lover, Christoph (Karl Scheydt), he angrily packs a suitcase and storms out. Over the next few days, with the help of a prostitute named Zora (Ingrid Caven), Elvira seeks out a nun (Lilo Pempeit), whom she knew from her childhood in an orphanage and who tells her the truth about her parentage. She also visits with her ex-wife and her daughter, and makes her way in to see the man who inspired her transition, the powerful Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), a reunion that cannot end well. Despite the tragic drift of Elvira's story, there are ludicrous moments, as when she joins with the employees in Saitz's office in recreating a routine from a movie starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that is playing on the office television. There's also a gruesome sequence in a slaughterhouse as well as a brief interlude in which Elvira watches a man commit suicide after expounding his Schopenhaueresque philosophy of the will. This is Fassbinder at both his most enigmatic and his most heartfelt. 

Gods of the Plague (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Harry Baer in Gods of the Plague

Franz Walsch: Harry Baer
Joanna Reiher: Hanna Schygulla
Margarethe: Margarethe von Trotta
Günther: Günther Kaufmann
Carla Aulaulu: Carla Egerer
Magdalena Fuller: Ingrid Caven
Policeman: Jan George
Mother: Lilo Pempeit
Marian Walsch: Marian Seidowsky
Joe: Micha Cochina
Inspector: Yaak Karsunke
Supermarket Manager: Hannes Gromball

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production designer: Kurt Raab
Film editor: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Music: Peer Raben

The Rainer Werner Fassbinder stock company is one of the wonders of film, mixing up their roles throughout his movies in often amusing ways. This is the second film to feature Franz Walsch, a name Fassbinder took as his own sometimes -- including in the credits for Gods of the Plague, which list "Franz Walsch" as the film editor. In the first Franz Walsch feature, Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), the character, a young hood, was played by the decidedly homely Fassbinder, but in this one he becomes the considerably more handsome Harry Baer, preening his luxuriant mustache. Franz is released from prison at the film's start, and he soon becomes involved with two women, Joanna (played once again by Hanna Schygulla) and Margarethe (Margarethe von Trotta, who would soon come into her own right as a director as well as actress). Like the earlier film, Gods of the Plague takes place in the rather inept underworld of Munich, in which Franz teams up with Günther, aka Gorilla, to pull off a supermarket robbery that's doomed to deadly failure. Also like Fassbinder's other early films, it's played with a deadpan, emotionless affect by all concerned, so that you sometimes have to laugh at the disconnect of situations, events, and relationships that would be shocking or horrifying in the real world but are treated as no big deal by the characters in the film. It was obviously inspired by the attempts at coolness essayed by the characters in the French New Wave, but even Godard's delinquents seemed to be having more fun than Fassbinder's do. A difference between being French and being German perhaps? The cast also features other members of the stock company such as Irm Hermann and Kurt Raab (who doubles as production designer) as well as Fassbinder in very small roles.

Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

It's tempting to make jokes about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film, Querelle, which does sometimes look like a staging of Billy Budd designed by Tom of Finland. But for all its often overheated, overstylized, absurd moments, there is a a deep sadness at the core of the film. It was made, after all, at the beginning of the age of AIDS, from which its star, Brad Davis, would die. And even though it misses the poetry of the novel by Jean Genet on which Fassbinder and Burkhard Driest based their screenplay, it contains the essential sympathy for transgressors and outcasts that marks the work of both Genet and Fassbinder. That it no longer has the power to shock -- you can see far more outrageous images and situations on pay TV channels almost any night of the week -- almost works to its benefit. It has become a period piece almost before its time, but to say that it's "dated" is to miss the point. Querelle reflects an age of repression: The central character of the film, I think, is Franco Nero's Lt. Seblon, dictating his lust for Querelle into his tape recorder, watching the less-inhibited society of Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), Nono (Günther Kaufmannn), and the others who circle around Querelle like moths, swooping in for satisfaction and sometimes getting their wings singed. Is it a good film? No. The performances -- especially Davis's, whose line readings are sometimes amateurish -- don't measure up. The interpolated religious symbolism feels trite. The narrative, especially when it involves Gil and his double, Robert (Hanno Pöschl), is confusingly handled. But is it worth being annoyed and disappointed by? Absolutely.

Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Veronika Voss, the last film released before Fassbinder's death, is a somewhat campy melodrama with overtones of Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950). Veronika (Rosel Zech) is a faded star, whose career began during the Third Reich. There are rumors that she was sexually involved with Joseph Goebbels, which is one reason for her career decline in the postwar era -- the film is set in Munich in 1955.  She accidentally meets a sportswriter, Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), who has no idea who she is -- a fact that fascinates Veronika, who retains delusions of her celebrity. Krohn in turn is fascinated by Veronika, and sets out to learn more about her, with disastrous consequences for him, his girlfriend Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), and Veronika herself. Veronika is a virtual captive of Dr. Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer), a neurologist who keeps her supplied with morphine. Dr. Katz's household is an odd one indeed, consisting of a woman named Josefa (Doris Schade), who is apparently the doctor's assistant and perhaps her lover, and an African American GI (Günther Kaufmann), who seems to be a household factotum and wanders around the clinic/apartment singing snatches of American pop songs of the era. There is a film noir element to the movie, photographed in black and white by Xaver Schwarzenberger, although sometimes it becomes film blanc -- Fassbinder likes to revert to dazzling white sets and starburst filters, especially in scenes where Dr. Katz's villainy is manifest. The result is a film in which style often overwhelms content, but with intriguing results. There is, as I suggested, a prevalent note of camp, especially in scenes involving the doctor and her household and when Veronika sings a torchy, baritonal version of the old Dean Martin hit, "Memories Are Made of This," in the manner of Marlene Dietrich.