Satansbraten (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976)

Kurt Raab and Margit Carstensen in Satansbraten

Cast: Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Helen Vita, Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Y Sa Lo, Ulli Lommel, Armin Meier, Katherina Buchhammer, Vitus Zeplichal, Brigitte Mira, Hannes Kaetner, Heli Finkenzeller, Marquard Bohm, Christiane Maybach, Nino Korda, Adrian Hoven. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus, Jürgen Jürges. Production design: Ulrike Bode, Kurt Raab. Film editing: Thea Eymèsz. Music: Peer Raben.

Although it was written for the screen, Rainer Maria Fassbinder's Satansbraten (aka Satan's Brew) feels stagy. Its absurdist comedy evokes Beckett and Ionesco, and especially Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, which Fassbinder more or less acknowledges by appending a quotation from Artaud as a kind of epigraph for the film. But it also harks back to Fassbinder's earliest films, the ones like Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) and Gods of the Plague (1970) that followed his involvement with the Anti-Theater in Munich. In a way it merges the often eccentric performance in those films with the florid style of Fassbinder's Douglas Sirk-inflected melodramas like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Veronika Voss (1982). The central character of Satansbraten, Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), is a poet with writer's block who, while trying to work his way out of inertia, unconsciously (or not?) plagiarizes a poem by Stefan George, and when his theft is brought to his attention decides that he is the reincarnation of George. Among other things, this leads him to explorations of his sexuality -- George was gay. But mostly the film tracks Kranz's various involvements with women, including his wife, Luise (Helen Vita), who claims that he hasn't slept with her for 17 days, as well as Lisa (Ingrid Caven), the wife of his friend Rolf (Marquard Bohm); a prostitute (Y Sa Lo) whom he interviews; a wealthy patron, Irmgart von Witzleben (Katherina Buchhamer), who has an orgasm while signing a check for him and whom he then murders; and an adoring fan, Andrée (Margit Carstensen). Meanwhile, he is also dodging a detective (Ulli Lommel) investigating the murder of Irmgart while contending with his brother, Ernst (Volker Spengler), a mentally disordered man who is fascinated with the sex lives of houseflies. It's all very silly but watchable in a "what next?" way. Efforts have been made to explicate the film as a commentary on fascism -- George was enthusiastically courted by the Nazis for his visions of an emergent Germanic national culture, though he shrugged off their approaches -- but such exegeses are kind of wobbly.

Fear of Fear (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Margit Carstensen in Fear of Fear

Margot: Margit Carstensen
Kurt: Ulrich Faulhaber
Mother: Brigitte Mira
Lore: Irm Hermann
Karli: Armin Meier
Dr. Merck: Adrian Hoven
Mr. Bauer: Kurt Raab

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Design director: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

As the title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film suggests, the protagonist, Margot, is stuck in a kind of emotional feedback loop: Her anxiety is exacerbated by the fear that she'll have another anxiety attack. As a sufferer of free-floating anxiety myself, I know the problem: Your inability to control fears that you know to be absurd undermines your sense of self, thereby arousing more fears. Fear of Fear, made for German television, is not an entirely satisfactory portrait of the problem: Fassbinder loads too much against Margot. Beautiful, model-thin, she's married to a loving but homely schlub, who is so preoccupied with passing an examination that he tends to shut her out. Moreover, they live in the same house as her mother-in-law, a homely woman who resents Margot's beauty, and constantly rates her for laziness, for neglecting her children, for not cooking wholesome meals for her family, and the criticism is only echoed by Margot's sister-in-law, Lore. Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann bring these Dickensian harpies to full life, but the element of caricature in the conception of the roles, though it adds a splash of needed dark humor, tends to undermine one's sense of Margot's plight as a real-world experience. Margot tries to escape from her ills into exercise, but she even gets criticized for swimming too much. So the other avenues of escape follow: Valium, alcohol (she guzzles cognac straight from the bottle), and sex. She begins sleeping with the handsome pharmacist across the way, partly to thank him for illegally refilling her Valium prescription when she runs out. Naturally, her dalliance is discovered, and Lore's husband, Karli, even tries to make a move on her. Finally, after being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, she goes to a mental institution where she's treated for depression. Seemingly cured, she returns home, but the film ends on a doubtful note: After learning that the strange man who stares at her and her daughter on their way home from kindergarten has committed suicide, she once again experiences an anxiety attack, which throughout the film Fassbinder has shown from Margot's point of view as a kind of rippling in the image. Margit Carstensen's performance carries the film, with the help of Fassbinder's shrewd direction, filming scenes through doorways and in mirror frames to suggest Margot's entrapment.

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Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Brigitte Mira and Gottfried John in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven

Emma Küsters: Brigitte Mira
Corinna: Ingrid Caven
Thälmann: Karlheinz Böhm
Frau Thälmann: Margit Carstensen
Helene: Irm Hermann
Niemeyer: Gottfried John
Ernst: Armin Meyer
Knab: Matthias Fuchs
Nightclub Owner: Peter Kern
Bar Owner: Kurt Raab

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurt Raab
Based on a story by Heinrich Zille
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

It's a too-familiar story in the United States: A disgruntled employee attacks his place of work and then kills himself. It may have had a more ripped-from-the-headlines feeling in West Germany during the recessionary times of the 1970s, which is my way of saying that Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven feels a little more stuck in time and place than Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films usually do. The setup is familiar: A man goes berserk at his workplace and commits suicide, leaving his family to face the aftermath. The follow-through is predictable: People -- tabloid reporters and politicians -- flock to milk what they can from the family's pain. But Fassbinder being the satirist that he was couldn't simply play the story for conventional domestic drama. He treats the family from the outset with a sardonic tone: The soon-to-be widow does piecework, assembling electric sockets on her kitchen table, as her son and his wife squabble over their coming vacation. Helene, Emma Küsters's pregnant daughter-in-law, is given to putting on airs about healthy living, preparing salads for dinner when Emma's husband and son want meat. Ernst, the son, works as a butcher, but he is so under his wife's thumb that he submits to her every wish, including a vacation in Finland when he would really prefer to go somewhere warmer. When news comes of the crime committed by Herr Küsters, we meet the daughter, Corinna, who fancies herself a singer, but really is just sleeping with the owner of the bar where she works. When the whole family gathers, the reporters flock to get the dirt, which is immediately swept up by Niemeyer, a writer and photographer, who starts sleeping with Corinna. In the background, their initial presence never quite explained, are a well-dressed couple, the Thälmanns, who turn out to be members of the Communist Party, eager to find a recruit in Frau Küsters, who becomes "Mother Küsters" for them. And so the unsavory game of exploitation begins. The problem comes when it has to end: Fassbinder provided two endings, in both of which Mother Küsters becomes a pawn in a game between the Communists, who are really just bourgeois radical-chic types, more interested in election victories than revolution, and the anarchists, who want headline-grabbing action. But one ending, the one shown in Germany and Europe, culminates in the death of Mother Küsters -- though the bloodshed isn't acted out, but just narrated in end titles. In the other ending, shown only in the United States, the action, a sit-in in the offices of the newsmagazine for which Niemeyer works, fizzles out because nobody really cares that much. Mother Küsters goes home with a janitor who has to close up the place and invites her to join him in a dinner of "Himmel und Erde" -- apples and potatoes with blood sausage. Both endings make the point, the first by refusing to dramatize the outcome of the protest, the second more directly: There's no real political conviction anymore. I rather like that both endings are available together now, not only because they reinforce one nicely, but also because there is nothing definitive to be said about the plight of Mother Küsters in a post-ideological context. Fassbinder, that great admirer of Douglas Sirk, seems to be saying that life itself has been reduced to melodrama, and the choice of a bloody ending or a happy one is completely arbitrary. 

Filmstruck Criterion Channel