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.

The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

Hans Hirschmüller and Irm Hermann in The Merchant of Four Seasons

Hans Epp: Hans Hirschmüller
Irmgard Epp: Irm Hermann
Anna Epp: Hanna Schygulla
Harry Radek: Klaus Löwitsch
Anzell: Karl Scheydt
Renate Epp: Andrea Schober
Mother Epp: Gusti Kreissl
Hans's Great Love: Ingrid Caven
Kurt: Kurt Raab
Heidi: Heidi Simon

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production design: Kurt Raab

Schlubby little (much is made of how much shorter he is than his wife) Hans Epp joined the Foreign Legion after washing out of the Munich police force for receiving a blowjob from a prostitute he had arrested, and now sells fruit from a pushcart he trundles through the courtyards of apartment houses. He is the object of scorn from his family because he never found a white-collar job, unlike his upwardly mobile brother-in-law and his intellectual sister Anna. His wife assists him in the fruit-selling business, working from a street stall, but it's clear that their marriage is troubled -- she spies on him at work, counting the minutes that he takes to deliver a bagful of pears to the woman he once proposed to. (She turned him down.) Even his mother doesn't love him: When he returns from the Foreign Legion and tells her that the friend who enlisted with him was killed, she retorts, "The good die young, but you come back." When he suffers a heart attack, his wife cheats on him while he's in the hospital, and then later lets him hire the man she slept with to take over the heavy-lifting part of the job. Despite all that's stacked against him, Hans manages to make a go as a merchant, but just as his family begins to praise him instead of dumping on him, he sinks into a deep depression and winds up drinking himself to death. If this all sounds terribly heavy-handed, it's lifted out of the suds in precisely the way Douglas Sirk made his films rise about their soap-operatic plots with sharp-eyed direction, flashes of wit, and sly social comment. The comparison to Sirk is an obvious one: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's breakthrough film was inspired by his study of the Hollywood master, whom he deliberately set out to imitate and, I think, managed to excel, if only because he wasn't handicapped by the money-making concerns and censorship of American film. There are some delicious performances, not only from Hans Hirschmüller as the sad-sack Hans and Irm Hermann as his sly helpmeet, but also from Hanna Schygulla as the somewhat sympathetic Anna. And the film ends with one of the most chilling exchanges in any Fassbinder film, as Irmgard and Harry, Hans's old Legionnaire buddy who has gone to work for him, drive away from the funeral and she proposes a business-like marriage to him. His terse reply, "Okay," perfectly sums up the emotionless, mercantile tone that pervades the film.

Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, and Ulli Lommel in Effi Briest

Effi Briest: Hanna Schygulla
Instetten: Wolfgang Schenck
Major Crampas: Ulli Lommel
Frau Briest: Lilo Pempeit
Herr Briest: Herbert Steinmetz
Roswitha: Ursula Strätz
Johanna: Irm Hermann
Wüllersdorf: Karlheinz Böhm

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Based on a novel by Theodor Fontane
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Art direction: Kurt Raab
Costume design: Barbara Baum

Our ideas of the movie costume drama adapted from a literary source were formed by MGM and Merchant Ivory: Lushly produced, expensively costumed, glamorously cast, but often a little askew from the original novel. So it's informative to see what a writer-director with a determinedly contemporary oeuvre that often features satiric glances at modern life comes up with when he turns his hand to adapting 19th-century literature. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Effi Briest is based on a novel by Theodor Fontane with which most anglophones (I include myself) are unfamiliar. Instead of lush, it's spare; instead of sweepingly romantic, it's stately and slow; instead of glorious Technicolor, it's filmed in a rich and textured black-and-white. But it's also fascinating and, from all accounts, steadfastly close to the source. Fassbinder even uses dialogue and narration -- he does the voiceovers himself -- straight from the novel. Scenes often end with abrupt whiteouts that some critics liken to turning the page of a book, and there are intertitles in Fraktur, the font used in German books well into the 20th century. It's a film that demands attention -- especially because some of the dialogue and commentary were meant to be read and not spoken, so that they can sometimes feel a little oblique and stilted -- and reflection upon its themes, which center on moral rigidity and the pursuit of social status. Yet Fassbinder also makes it highly cinematic, particularly with his characteristic framing of figures in doorways and mirrors. There is, for example, a key conversation between Instetten and his friend Wüllersdorf that's glimpsed mostly in an ornate mirror with beveled mirrors in its frame, so that we get a fragmented, almost cubist take on the figures seen in it. The story is about the failure of the marriage of lively young Effi to a man who is twice her age when they wed, and her removal from a cosmopolitan household to one in a provincial backwater. The analogous stories are those found in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, among other famous novels, but Fassbinder turns his tale of adultery into a sharp indictment of German respect for authority and class -- the time is the late 19th century, but you can clearly see the attitudes that plunged Germany into two world wars. I wouldn't recommend Effi Briest to anyone who isn't already familiar with Fassbinder's work -- it's not a film that reaches out and grabs your attention eagerly -- but I would rank it among his best.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Wrong Move (Wim Wenders, 1975)

Peter Kern, Hanna Schygulla, Rüdiger Vogler, Nastassja Kinski, Hans Christian Blech in Wrong Move

Wilhelm: Rüdiger Vogler
Laertes: Hans Christian Blech
Therese Farner: Hanna Schygulla
Mignon: Nastassja Kinski
Bernhard Landau: Peter Kern
The Industrialist: Ivan Desny
Wilhelm's Mother: Marianne Hoppe
Janine: Lisa Kreuzer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Peter Handke
Based on a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Film editor: Peter Przygodda

With his presence in Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road (1976) Rüdiger Vogler became as essential to Wim Wenders's films of the mid-1970s as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese's work in the late 1970s and the 1980s. His homely everyman face is perfect for the self-centered loners of the first and the third films in Wenders's "road trilogy," men who find themselves having to come to terms with a world -- or at least a Germany -- they can't fully accept. But Vogler feels miscast in the middle film -- too old to be playing the young writer out to discover himself, a character drawn by screenwriter Peter Handke from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and thrust into modern post-Nazi, post-Wirtschaftswunder Germany. There is no naïveté left in Vogler's face, there are no illusions to be lost. Yet Wenders sends his 30-year-old Wilhelm on the voyage from northern to southern Germany, from Glückstadt to the Zugspitze, and into encounters with the world of art and politics that might have disillusioned a 20-year-old. Which is not to say that Wrong Move is a failure. It remains a film that tantalizes with its non-realistic narrative, its sense of of a world grown alien to people who think and feel, and of a country haunted by its desperation to escape from a terrible history. No surprise that a good part of its dialogue consists of people telling one another of their dreams, for the film itself has a liminal dreamlike quality. Would a fully awake and aware Wilhelm really pay the train fare for the con artist Laertes and his mute traveling companion Mignon? Do people really fall in love when their eyes meet between trains traveling on different tracks, and then somehow manage to get together after all? Do strangers really decide to travel together and wind up by mistake in the mansion of a suicidal industrialist? Or does all of that happen only in dreams? Wenders's film is touched by the mysterious angst that afflicts the characters in Antonioni's films -- the scene in the concrete caverns of Frankfurt evokes the bleak modern Rome of a film like L'Eclisse (1962), for example. In the context of a film so beautifully shot, so eccentrically put together as Wrong Move, even the miscasting of Vogler feels like not so much a mistake as a provocation.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Love Is Colder Than Death (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ulli Lommel in Love Is Colder Than Death

Franz: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Johanna: Hanna Schygulla
Bruno: Ulli Lommel
Woman on Train: Katrin Schaake

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Music: Holger Münzer, Peer Raben

I love Turner Classic Movies for its occasional programming surprises, but I have to wonder what its regular viewers thought if they stayed tuned to that channel after whatever Hollywood classic from MGM or Warner Bros. was over and started watching Love Is Colder Than Death. For the audience for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first feature film largely consists of (1) hard-core Fassbinder fans; (2) professional film scholars; and (3) compulsive film-bloggers. (Since I don't belong to either of the first two groups, I guess I have defined myself into the third.) The rest of the usual TCM viewers probably gave up on Love Is Colder Than Death after a few minutes of the minimally staged, flatly lighted, tonelessly acted opening scenes, which look like a documentary of a performance in an experimental theater. (Like, for example, the Antiteater in Munich that Fassbinder helped found.) If they lasted through these scenes, which are about the attempt of the mob to recruit Franz and his first meeting with Bruno, they may have bailed out during an enigmatic conversation between Bruno and a woman he meets on a train, or shortly afterward, during Bruno's search for Johanna, the girlfriend Franz pimps out, a long sequence that consists largely of views of the nighttime streets down which Bruno is driving. Eventually, however, Love Is Colder Than Death comes together into the story of the ménage à trois formed by Bruno, Franz, and Johanna, and an ill-fated attempt to rob a bank. At this point it becomes clear that Fassbinder is mimicking and perhaps parodying the French New Wave. The ménage is very much like the ones in Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964) and François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962), though entirely lacking the joie de vivre of either. In a somewhat shabbier way, Bruno emulates the gangster chic attempted by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (Godard, 1960) and mastered by Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967). There's some of the larky post-adolescent lawlessness of Breathless and Masculin Féminin (Godard, 1966), as when the trio shoplifts sunglasses in a department store or Johanna and Bruno filch things in a supermarket, though Fassbinder's characters never seem to have much fun doing it. But there are touches throughout the film that might be called more Fassbinderish than Godardian. The supermarket scene is accompanied by several bars from a duet in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier that have been looped endlessly into a kind of insane Muzak, giving an eerie, almost feverish note to the scene. For much of the film, Fassbinder avoids pans and zooms and other camera tricks, but when he uses them it's noticeable, as in the scene in which Franz is being held by the police for interrogation: The camera glides regularly back and forth along a steady track, without holding for a second on the person speaking -- it's like moving your head back and forth during a tennis match without focusing on the ball. It can't just be the absence of a budget for blanks and blood squibs that makes the several scenes in which people are shot so lacking in conventional movie realism: In each case, we hear the sound of the shot without seeing either smoke or a muzzle flash from a gun, and the victim falls down dead, like a kid in a playground pretend gunfight. And even the ending, which fades to white instead of black, seems like Fassbinder making fun of movie conventions. I don't know of many other movies that manage to be so derivative and yet so original at the same time.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)

Fassbinder's inspiration was the Hollywood "woman's picture," which made stars of Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis in the 1930s and '40s, but more specifically the 1950s version directed by his fellow German, Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck). Sirk brought a distinct style, including vivid Technicolor and high fashion, to his tales of women struggling to assert themselves in a decade usually known for its backlash against liberated women. They were vehicles for actresses like Jane Wyman (Magnificent Obsession, 1954, and All That Heaven Allows, 1955), Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone (Written on the Wind, 1956), and Lana Turner (Imitation of Life, 1959). Hanna Schygulla evokes all of them and more in a bravura performance in The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which she gets to suffer through World War II and its aftermath, and to triumph in the postwar German Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and '60s. It's a sardonic story about a woman who claims to be faithful in her fashion to Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), the soldier she married during an air raid in 1943, despite her affairs with a black American soldier (George Eagles) and a French industrialist (Karl Oswald). In Fassbinder's hands, the story of Maria Braun becomes overlaid with the history of Germany after the war, including scenes in which the dialogue is often partly obscured by radio speeches by German politicians like Konrad Adenauer, the architect of German recovery. "I prefer making miracles rather than waiting for them," Maria proclaims at one point. Fassbinder's portrait of Maria is occasionally elliptical: We don't know, for example, whether she aborted the child she conceived with the American soldier or lost it in childbirth, partly because she seems indifferent to the fact, and Fassbinder leaves it up to us to decide whether the explosion in which she dies at the end is an accident or suicide. The screenplay by Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer was based on an idea by Fassbinder, who also contributed to the dialogue. The cinematography is by Michael Ballhaus.