Directed By Magazine: Online Edition: Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Enrique Diaz

Scott Essman,
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Carsten Dau,
Editor
Print Edition

Enrique Diaz,
Editor
Web Edition

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world cinema fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Article by Enrique Diaz

If reality is in the eyes of its beholder, then the one created in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder may be the most authentic of them all. Repeatedly accused of creating melodrama by critics, film scholars, and just about anyone who has written about him, Fassbinder, a director known for never allowing more than one take, nevertheless emerges as a true original. Peter Bowen, Senior Editor for Filmmaker Magazine, says of Fassbinder, "He is so honest about life and emotions, almost brutally so, and at the same time so romantic about cinema."

Romantic, yes, but with a sensibility which combined the perspectives of fellow European directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pedro Almodovar. Fassbinder seemed to be driven by the kind of ghosts known only to those whose lives are lived in turmoil. Lesley Bird Simpson once wrote that those of us "shocked by such melodrama" should consider that "what may seem overdrawn to us" might be commonplace to its creator, and that such "naturalistic violence [as in Fassbinder’s films] is not only justifiable; it is right."

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Indeed, Fassbinder, who made 43 films, said, "I always make the same film again and again." Hanna Schygulla, who starred in many of Fassbinder’s films, once commented that "despair was the dough from which his (Fassbinder’s) cake was made.” Peter Bowen adds, "At the heart of Fassbinder’s filmic universe was an overwhelming sense of unhappiness and disappointment, and a refusal to allow cinematic fantasies to alleviate his despair."

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Despair seems to describe Fassbinder’s universe in a single word, a universe that he perhaps needed to share with others so that his personal pain might be ameliorated. If this talented and passionate director did make the same film over and over again, and if one is possibly able to glean from the bulk of his work some kind of message in a bottle tossed into the sea of film—a cry for help toward the audience—it would be that tolerance is not enough. Fassbinder wanted absolute acceptance.

Being openly gay, like Pasolini and Almodovar, Fassbinder’s sensitive nature was bound to clash
with his environment, a clash which would become the focused heart and soul of his movies, and which, as Peter Bowen puts it, "almost single-handedly reinvented German cinema."
Films like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul burn Fassbinder’s struggle and crusade into the psyche. In it, a young, working class black immigrant marries a much older upper class white widow. While the two are rejected by family and society, they are able to maintain their relationship. However, as soon as the possibility of acceptance nears reality, their feelings begin to falter.
In retrospect, it was Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle, which best captured the essence of his quest to expose his pain in a raw, but at the same time poetic and glamorous fashion.
Based on Jean Genet’s novel, Querelle seems to be the movie Fassbinder had been rehearsing to make all along. Querelle is a surreal tale about two brothers locked in perpetual, superficial conflict with each other. Yet it may be said that each brother is one multi-faceted side of the same person, struggling against himself. Jean Genet, Fassbinder, Pasolini, and Almodovar have all represented this struggle in one way or another, the struggle to determine what exactly constitutes masculinity—and can homosexuality be declared masculinity’s direct opposite? All four men have, through their works, answered a resounding ‘no’ to the latter question, but to the former, each one has offered more particular views. Querelle was Genet’s answer in novel form; it is Fassbinder’s on film.

Both the novel and the film can be as difficult to read and to watch as life can be to live. Yet, like all difficult tasks, each yields many rewards to an audience. The magic of Querelle is that, like a chameleon which changes color to blend into its surroundings, the film, as made by Fassbinder, allows the coexistence of individual interpretations no matter how far afield from each other they might be. At the same time, however, the director forces the viewer to focus on the questions at hand. Is Querelle, the sailor, in love with the beautiful woman at the bar in the Port of Brest, or with the captain of his ship, or with a fellow sailor, or with the bartender, or with his own brother—or with himself? Or perhaps he loves no one.
The ability to ask each of these questions in Querelle, as well as similar ones in his other films, and then to turn around and allow each audience member to answer the same questions for him or herself, is what made Fassbinder a legend and what ensures his immortality as a world-class filmmaker of the highest quality. His contributions to German cinema also cement his country’s reputation as one of the twentieth century’s leading film-producing nations.