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. 

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.

The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Karl Scheydt in The American Soldier

Ricky: Karl Scheydt
Rosa von Praunheim: Elga Sorbas
Jan: Jan George
Doc: Hark Bohm
Cop: Marius Aicher
Chambermaid: Margarethe von Trotta
Gypsy: Ulli Lommel
Magdalena Fuller: Katrin Schaake
Singer: Ingrid Caven
Ricky's Mother: Eva Ingeborg Scholz
Ricky's Brother: Kurt Raab
Prostitute: Irm Hermann
Police Chief: Gustl Datz
Franz Walsch: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Film editing: Thea Eymèsz
Music: Peer Raben

Is The American Soldier an hommage to American film noir or is it a satiric glance at the ongoing European fascination with that genre? I like to think that it's the latter, Fassbinder's snarky take on the movies' hard-drinking anti-heroes who, like Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) for one example, affect trenchcoats and fedoras as they go about their murderous business. Surely Ricky's sharply angled hat and his omnipresent bottle of Ballantine's are tongue-in-cheek allusions to those cinematic predecessors. The American Soldier isn't up to much else. Fassbinder is playing around with his usual company as well as giving himself another opportunity to play a character named Franz Walsch, which he did in Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) before handing over the role to Harry Baer in Gods of the Plague (1970). The film's real highlight is its loopy, nonsensical ending, in which Ricky's brother wrestles with the dying Ricky as their mother looks on impassively. Otherwise, it's really for Fassbinder completists.

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.

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.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Peter Chatel in Fox and His Friends

Franz Biberkopf: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Eugen Thiess: Peter Chatel
Max: Karlheinz Böhm
Philip: Harry Baer
Hedwig: Christiane Maybach
Wolf Thiess: Adrian Hoven
Eugen's Mother: Ulla Jacobsson

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Hohoff
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

I have a feeling that Fox and His Friends seems much less exotic or sensational to viewers today than it did in the mid-1970s, given the steady movement of depictions of gay men into mainstream entertainment culture. At the time it created outrage, not just from defenders of the heterosexual norm but also from the gay community, which found much of it distorted and unflattering. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder's story is not about being gay, it's about being exploited, about mistaking predation for love. Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf, known as "Fox" from his gig as "Fox the Talking Head" in a sleazy carnival act, is a classic naïf who is taken for all he's worth -- which is the 500,000 Deutschmarks (a bit under $125,000 in the day) he won in the lottery. Fassbinder the director doesn't make it clear that the well-dressed guys Franz meets after one of them, Max, picks him up outside a public lavatory, are intentionally trying to fleece him, until Eugen, whose father's printing business is in financial trouble, sees a way to persuade Franz to rescue the company with a sizable investment and promises of part ownership of the firm. It could be, of course, that Eugen just gets a kick out of sleeping with the working class Franz. But he throws over his current lover, Philip, and takes the rough-hewn, slightly homely Franz into his home and bed. Is Eugen telling the truth when he tells Franz that he's being kicked out of his apartment for being gay? It would be entirely plausible in the day and time. Or is it a lie that gives Eugen an opportunity to persuade Franz to buy a posh new apartment, and to furnish it with opulent antiques from Max's shop. And to go along with Franz's new image as a haute bourgeois businessman, he of course needs new clothes from Philip's fashionable shop. None of this exploitation feels premeditated except in hindsight, as Franz becomes Eliza Doolittle to Eugen's Henry Higgins -- though with less overt success. The resulting film is a superb tragicomedy, one of Fassbinder's best films, I think. Fassbinder turns out to be as good an actor as he is a writer and director, giving Franz just the right blend of naïveté and street smarts. I think the ending of the film is a shade heavy-handed, but the rest of it is full of extraordinary satiric moments: The horrifying scene in which Eugen brings Franz to dinner with his parents. The vacation in Morocco, where the man* Eugen and Franz pick up on the streets is refused entrance to the Holiday Inn Marrakech -- though wouldn't a pretentious bourgeois like Eugen have chosen a tonier hotel? -- because it doesn't admit Arabs. (The employee refusing the entrance, himself an Arab, suggests that if they want boys, he could provide some from the hotel staff.) And the moment of truth in which Franz realizes he's been conned is shattering. Michael Ballhaus's vivid color cinematography is complemented by Kurt Raab's production design, especially in the garishly overdressed apartment which includes a chandelier hanging so low that guests have to walk around it, that Eugen puts together with the most expensive pieces from Max's antique shop. Only after Eugen and Franz break up does Eugen reveal that he hates the place: He has clearly condescended to what he thinks an uncouth working class guy would think is the height of fashion.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

*Played by El Hedi ben Salem, the star of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), who had been deported to Morocco after a bar fight in Germany. Brigitte Mira, ben Salem's co-star in that film, also has a cameo as the shopkeeper who originally denies Franz admittance to her store to validate his lottery ticket until the suave Max flatters her into it.

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