Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Commemorative Collection (1973-1982) [DVD]

Fear Eats the Soul, Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven and The Marriage of Maria Braun stand out amongst the very best work of New-German cinema auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This collection also includes the films Fear of Fear, Satan's Brew and Chinese Roulette, which for me, don't quite achieve the same cinematic highs as the films aforementioned, but do at least offer a further glimpse into Fassbinder's mind and way of working (whilst simultaneously rounding off what most critics consider to be the peak of his short-career).This period features many of Fassbinder's most scathing, vicious and emotionally crippling melodramas, many dealing with doomed love and the uncomfortable positions that relationships can put us is; not only with our respective partners, but with the friends and family that surround us. Many of the films also act as social-political attacks on the fabric of German society, post World War II -- taking into account the economic miracle, capitalism, the rise of the left-wing intellectual free-thinker, the Munich Olympic massacre and the rise of the disenchanted arm-chair terrorist. Many of these factors act as a backdrop to the more emotional drama that Fassbinder creates for his tortured characters; with Fear Eats the Soul and Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven in particular focusing on the negative view that certain factions of society have towards the generation that lived through the rise of the Nazis; while The Marriage of Maria Braun looks at post war decline and the eventual Wirtschaftswunder; here personified by a single-minded and determined young German woman, willing to do anything to ensure a comfortable future for her and her war hero husband.Much of Fassbinder's work draws heavily on the conventions of Hollywood melodrama, bitterly undercut by the spirit of Godard and the French new wave, and littered with disarming Brecht-ian like alienation techniques, usually involving fragmented compositions, abstract mirror symbolism and layers of sound competing for attention (though here not quite as heavily as his later films, such as In a Year of 13 Moons, Despair, The Third Generation and his segment of Germany in Autumn).All of these films are worth watching; featuring fantastic performances from Fassbinder's regular stock-company of actors as well as the director himself (he plays the lead role in Fox and His Friends, probably my favourite ever Fassbinder film alongside Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven and The Third Generation), all coupled with intelligent direction, emotionally-charged writing and the constant sense that the film serves a purpose far greater than that of mindless entertainment. Like all the great filmmakers, from Godard and Bergman to von Trier and Tsukamoto, Fassbinder is using the medium of film to present a series of ideas to his audience, backed by strong characters and an often uncomfortable sense of emotional attachment. Don't let the often cold indifference of his direction or the sniping cynicism of his writing deter you from investing in these characters; bleak though they may be, the films are fiercely intelligent and captivating on an entirely personal level.The films in this set show Fassbinder's enormous range as a filmmaker, both in terms of his handling of the different character and subject matter, as well as in his use of the basic conventions of filmmaking; cinematography, editing, production design, etc. Fear Eats the Soul is a film that is still largely inspired by Douglas Sirk and shares a similar design to his earliest masterwork The Merchant of Four Seasons; using tight close-ups, long takes and a colourful production design that jars against the bleakness of the story at hand. Elsewhere, Effi Briest is a black and white period drama based on the novel by Theodor Fontane, while The Marriage of Maria Braun explores the post war setting of the later films Lola and Veronika Voss and renders it in a muted pallet of browns and greys and a more complex approach to editing. Then we have films like Fox and His Friends, Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven and Chinese Roulette, which show Fassbinder moving towards the cold and emotionally fractured Germany of the time depicted in films like the aforementioned In a Year of 13 Moons and The Third Generation.Although it goes without saying, Fassbinder is not a filmmaker for everyone; many object to his cynicism, the torment of his characters and the spiralling despair central to many of his scripts. However, those with a true passion for intelligent cinema, and for filmmakers like Godard, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Dryer, Ozu, Herzog, von Trier, Wenders, Kieslowski, etc should find much to enjoy here. This box set, as mentioned before, represents something of the peak of Fassbinder's career, and as such, would make a great introduction for anyone interested in the man and his work.

Very good= And about the other films of Fassbinder Lola, Veronika Foss, Lili Marlen, Berlin Alexanderplatz@

I found volume 2 marginally better than volume 1. There seemed to be more of a human thread to the story telling although it felt it had been transplanted from other sources. I can't honestly say I enjoyed these box sets, but glad I took up the experience. I think in many ways Fassbinder was trying to be a cross between Rivette and Luc Godard but for me it just didn't work. In fact I feel bad for mentioning them in the same sentence as Fassbinder because he doesn't deserve any comparison with them. My advice is if you are unsure about buying these works let me help you make your mind up. Don't!

Great collection 1973-1982. Bought this for my partner who says she'll watch them on her own cause they are depressing but fantastic!

ok

Great if you like Fassbender which I do.

The New German Cinema is alive and well on DVD, at least when it comes to the ‘Big Three.’ Werner Herzog is well represented by two boxes of his key work courtesy of Anchor Bay, while Wim Wenders has all his output available cheaply via Axiom Films. Rainer Werner Fassbinder enjoys perhaps the best circulation of all, all his work carefully curated by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation based in Berlin and New York and run by his surviving partner Juliane Lorenz. All his films are available on DVD, and these two remarkable Arrow boxes collect together almost all his early films (1965-79) at an astonishingly cheap price. Box 1 has 9 films (1969-72) while Box 2 has 10 (1965-79 including the two shorts, The City Tramp [1965] and The Little Chaos [1966]) and I picked up both several years ago for a tenner a piece, that is roughly a pound a film. I see the price has gone up since then, but these are still two boxes of exceptional films cleanly transferred and replete with copious extras (including feature-length documentaries) which are mandatory purchases for anyone interested in cinematic modernism. It’s difficult to recommend one box above the other. For non-specialists perhaps Box 2 is more easily approachable, but if you don’t buy Box 1 you will miss out on The Merchant of Four Seasons and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant which are two of Fassbinder’s very best. My advice is to buy both. The discs are well presented in slim cases held together by two sturdy outer cardboard boxes which enhances the attraction.For once the over-used word ‘phenomenon’ is completely appropriate for Fassbinder whose star blazed fiercely for around 15 years before he passed away fashed and fagged on cocaine and barbiturates at the age of 37. In that short time he made 40 feature films, 2 TV series and 28 plays for theater and radio. He did a lot more than just direct. He acted in 37 films for others as well as for himself, wrote or co-wrote all his scripts, composed music, photographed, designed, edited and even managed theaters. He was a ferocious workaholic dynamo who made every other filmmaker around him seem lazy by comparison. The quality of his films is extremely high. The sheer speed at which he worked does compromise some of them, but this is countered by a constant desire to reinvent himself and push the boundaries of what film can do. He didn’t believe in making the same film twice (though he did in effect do this at the beginning with Gods of the Plague and The American Soldier) and challenged a number of different genres from the gangster film (Love is Colder than Death) to the Western (Whity), from the film about filmmaking (Beware of a Holy Whore) to science-fiction (World on a Wire), from political polemic (The Niklashausen Journey) to period novel adaptation (Effi Briest). He eventually settled on melodrama as his preferred genre, but he used it very differently from film to film.To get to the core of what Fassbinder was all about we must understand that he hated all middle class institutions and used his art to make people aware of what he saw as the layers of repression that surrounded them. His films question and attack and incite the audience to question and attack as well. A man of the left, his work amounts to a persistent assault on consumerism, on family, on institutionalized prejudice (racism, ageism, social snobbery), on marriage, indeed on the very fabric of postwar German society. His most commercially successful film The Marriage of Maria Braun is an undisguised attack on the economic miracle of the 50s in which Germany rose phoenix-like from the ashes of World War Two in the shape of a beautiful woman who sails through adversity to profit but at the loss of any sense of moral decency. His films are at their most heart-breaking when dealing with the needs of the working class (The Merchant of Four Seasons, Fear Eats the Soul, In a Year with 13 Moons) and at their most acidic and caustic when dealing with the rank evil of the middle class (Chinese Roulette, Fox and his Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant).The sheer anger and frustration seethes off the screen in ferocious torrents in film after film which demonstrate the fascism of daily life, of marriage relationships, of business and of friendship itself. The various forms of repression at work in society at large is Fassbinder’s target and he nails it again and again.Fassbinder’s anger is quite transparently explained by the circumstances of his childhood. He was born into a middle class environment, the son of a doctor, but he grew up effectively homeless and deprived of love, his parents divorcing when he was 5. His father barely spoke to him and when he did it was just to attack. Even his mother ignored him, getting rid of him daily while she did her translation work. He spent his childhood in cinemas watching sometimes 3 films a day. He was passed around his family, sent to boarding school from which he escaped without taking his exams and became fiercely independent and uncontrollable at a very young age due (I think it’s fair to say) to emotional deprivation. Born in 1945 he later saw himself as a postwar child (he liked to say he was born a year later in 1946) who grew up contra to everything around him. His mother Liselotte Pempeit suggested he try his hand at acting in Munich. He met Hanna Schygulla and soon got involved with the radical left-wing Munich Action-Theater which he eventually led but which was eventually destroyed by a co-founder jealous of Fassbinder. This pushed him into forming the Anti-Theater which is where he assembled his ‘family’ of creative people who would remain faithful to him throughout his career, especially Kurt Raab, Peer Raben and Harry Baer in addition to Irm Hermann and Schygulla. Either present from the beginning or joining the stock company later were Ingrid Caven, Margit Carstensen, Ulli Lommel, Karl Scheydt, Hark Böhm, Volker Spengler, Gottfried John, Margarethe von Trotta, Marquand Böhm, Brigitte Mira, Karlheinz Böhm, Ulrich Faulhaber, Günther Kaufman and Juliane Lorenz. Even his mother (calling herself ‘Lilo’ Pampeit) appeared in 20 of her son’s films demonstrating that she must have felt guilty on some level for not giving him enough love when he was a child.Fassbinder is known as a gay filmmaker and his films (even the ones which do not feature homosexuality) have been taken up by many as gay statements. But I do wonder. Through his life women always remained very important to him. He had a long relationship with Irm Hermann at the end of which she turned down his marriage offer. He did marry Ingrid Caven for two years and then at the end of his life he was living with Juliane Lorenz. I think it’s more accurate to see Fassbinder as a bi-sexual who because of a childhood deprived of love spent his whole life looking for love in people he met whether they be male or female. In 1976 he made I Only Want You to Love Me which really says it all about a man who suffered more than his fair share of grief. El Hedi ben Salem (the immigrant in Fear Eats the Soul) and Armin Meier were two lovers who ended up killing themselves over him and Fassbinder opened himself quite dangerously, for example to Günther Kaufmann who enjoyed the attention (and gifts) lavished on him without return. No wonder one of the main themes of Fassbinder’s work is that the one who loves the most is always the weakest. Fassbinder certainly didn’t help himself by not drawing a line between his work life and his private life. He cast family, lovers and friends in all his films and often there is a sense of characters within a film sharing some kind of inner dynamic which only those in the group can really understand. For example it is said that though The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is essentially a lesbian threesome (there are no men in the film) it is also about three men – Fassbinder is Petra, Günther Kaufmann is Karin and Kurt Raab is Marlene. Highly significant I think is that especially in the first ten anti-theater films, the same actors appear again and again, but in different roles. Also they work on the film behind the camera as well – on the music, in the wardrobe room, on the script. The anti-theater was all about collaboration and when it broke up with Satan’s Brew the air of close camaraderie persisted right through to his final films. Through all his films no matter how corrosive or cynical they are, there is always the sense that Fassbinder is reaching out for love among his colleagues and that makes his films fundamentally warm, certainly if we compare his work with Luis Buñuel who attacked the middle class with equal savagery and even more brilliance, but never with the same tenderness.The films of these two boxes can be split into two groups with the point of change coming between Beware of a Holy Whore and The Merchant of Four Seasons. From the beginning we can see the main influence on Fassbinder as being Bertolt Brecht, either straight from the man himself or filtered through the films of Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet and especially Jean-Luc Godard. Like the French New Wave directors (especially Godard’s A bout de soufflé [1959] and Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist [1960]) Fassbinder started off making gangster films (Love is Colder than Death, Gods of the Plague and The American Soldier) and many films seek to answer Godard film to film. The Niklashausen Journey is closely informed by Week-End (1967), Beware of a Holy Whore is a riff on Les Mepris (1963), Effi Briest plays on Vivre sa vie (1962) and World on a Wire plays on Alphaville (1965). More overt is the shared Brechtian language (the language of alienation) which informs Godard and Straub as much as it does Fassbinder. Katzelmacher is a typical example made ‘one scene-one shot’ in a series of barely-linked tableaux with actors simply declaiming their lines with no attempt to become their characters, the camera staying still staring 90 degrees at the bored group standing in front of a fence. Sometimes we see what happens inside their apartments. Sometimes two characters walk towards the camera to music, the camera backing away. The film’s subject is what happens when a Greek gastarbeiter enters their community, raising sexual interest in the women and racist feelings among the men. Brechtian alienation is felt in us being made constantly aware of the artifice in watching ‘a film’, watching actors who are ‘acting’ in this film. The distance is coldly there for all to see and the effect is to erect a barrier between us and the film, and between the film and us. What happens in Katzelmacher epitomizes Fassbinder’s early style and while critics were largely appreciative (Katzelmacher actually won awards), audiences avoided the early films like the plague. Fassbinder saw an error here and that error lay in the Straub/Huillet ingredient. In films like Not Reconciled (1965) and Chronicle of Anna Magdalene Bach (1968) Straub/Huillet established a fiercely intellectual integration of Brecht which made audiences work really hard to get the meaning. Esoteric to the extreme, the films are admired by many, but seen by few. Fassbinder said, “Films from the brain are all right, but if they don’t reach the audience, it’s no good…[Straub] tried to be revolutionary and human in an inhuman way.” He dramatized the impasse in his work in Beware of a Holy Whore which is quite the angriest film I’ve ever seen about filmmaking and which finishes with the whole cast and crew ganging up on the director (Lou Castel the Fassbinder surrogate) while Fassbinder himself plays the producer looking on and learning, presumably that from now on audiences mustn’t be provoked in the same foolish way. Films need audiences.Fassbinder saw the best way of connecting with an audience in the deployment of melodrama and from The Merchant of Four Seasons through to Veronika Voss he replaced Huillet/Straub with Douglas Sirk. Sirk was the master of the Hollywood woman’s melodrama and in the 1950s he had churned out a series of lush films for Universal Studios including Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1958). Fassbinder took the subjects and themes of these melodramas – family intrigues, grand friendships, cross-race/class love, despondent women and idealistic men, doomed love and crumbling business concerns with all the hyperventilated emotions all of this entails – together with the tacky lurid primary color artificial plastic mise-en-scène and executed a series of films which parody and re-tell familiar stories in a different social context. The merchant in The Merchant of Four Seasons is basically the Robert Stack character in Written on the Wind who is trampled on by a family who doubt him and is crushed by the presence of a surrogate son (Rock Hudson) who usurps his power and manhood. This is not to say that Fassbinder sold out to commercial cinema. Rather, he recognized the coded radical attack on American values and various forms of repression therein (the values and forms of middle class consumerism everywhere) and saw he could use Sirk’s audience-friendly language to continue his own radical attack only he didn’t have to code the message as Sirk was obliged to by Hollywood. The most obvious example of this is Fear Eats the Soul which re-works All That Heaven Allows. The Sirk film attacks the prejudices stirred up when a rich woman (Jane Wyman) falls in love with her gardener (Rock Hudson), but of course has to soften the ending so that love finds a way. The final scene replete with clichéd deer looking in through a window has Wyman attending the sick Hudson at his bedside with hope for their future obviously in the air. Fassbinder transposes the film from upper class to working class and from rich/poor to black/white (the old/young dynamic is the only one retained from Sirk) and finishes his film with the old woman (Brigitte Mira) tending her immigrant husband (El Hedi Ben Salem) in a hospital bed with no deer and absolutely no hope for their future, the doctor assuring her that Ali will just return again and again until he dies.Fassbinder said: “Melodramatic films are correct films. The American method of making them, however, left the audience with emotions and nothing else. I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is thinking.” It’s clear that although the Sirkian influence makes the later films easier for audiences to watch, he is still intent on distancing the audience through methods learned from Godard and Brecht. Narratives are still split up into cold tableaux which observe the story as much as tell it. Effie Briest is a masterclass in how to adapt a novel with omnipresent voice-overed narration and a series of superbly pointed tableaux which focus on the various elements of this story of a 19th century woman caught up, twisted and broken by her social milieu. The focus is always on the repression which suffocates her, and yet we are still moved by her plight as we also were by Godard in Vivre sa vie (the film which Fassbinder took as his model). Fassbinder will conjur up the hothouse atmosphere of an Ingmar Bergman in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant which stays claustrophobically in one space and even apes the famous two faces scene in Persona (1966), but the costumes and tacky mise-en-scène are exaggerated Sirk and the story revolves around three crisis points which are all freeze-framed to distance and stop us identifying too much with these characters. We feel the emotions, but then we find ourselves observing them as well. The long 70 second freeze frame nervous breakdown sequence is shown as an aria (the music is Verdi) on breakdown in which the politics of spectatorship become equally as important as the politics of sexual relationships. Also part of the distancing is Fassbinder’s careful way of framing characters within further frames – doorways, windows, picture frames and so forth. Petra’s sudden found emotional stability is undercut at the end of Bitter Tears by Fassbinder framing her through a partition as she tells Marlene to tell her about herself. The distraught middle class housewife paralyzed by fear in Fear of Fear is forever trapped and framed behind windows and doors as is poor Fox in Fox and His Friends who is ‘framed’ by his ‘friends’ into parting with all his money. Doors play a big part as he is systematically locked out of the world, his sister’s apartment and then his own. Heterosexuals will also read the persistent campiness and stress on homosexuality as another form of distancing, alarmingly so in Satan’s Brew which is a very odd confection indeed.Perhaps the thing that makes Fassbinder so interesting can be found in his refusal to allow his characters to learn anything from their experiences. There is no liberal sentimentality at play in his work. He reveals social exploitation and repression on all levels and counterpoints it with the promises of false security which are the perennial preserve of melodrama. The melodramatic code invites us in, softening us up to expect that stories will pan out as per the usual route – the merchant in The Merchant of Four Seasons will revive himself through friendship and diligent work, Petra will get over her infatuation with Karin in Bitter Tears, the couple will live happily ever after in Fear Eats the Soul, Fox will fight back and regain what is his in Fox and His Friends, the housewife will get her husband’s name cleared in Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, the housewife will regain her mental health in Fear of Fear and the monstrous child will be reconciled to her parents in Chinese Roulette - but Fassbinder denies us what we expect (and want) at every turn. He whips the rug away from under all of these expectations by alienating us from the narratives and forcing us to confront the repression and exploitation inevitable in the capitalist system within which all of us have to live. He doesn’t offer a way out (that is what Hollywood melodrama does), rather he simply forces us to see, to question what we see and then apply what we see to our own lives. That is as much as a great artist can ever hope to do.FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Angst essen Seele auf, aka Ali) *****(1974, Germany, 89 min, color, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)THE CITY TRAMP (Der Stadtstreicher) ***(1965, Germany, 10 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)EXTRAS: Fassbinder in Hollywood (documentary, 57 min), Life Stories: Fassbinder in conversation with Peter W. Jansen (50 min), Todd Haynes on Fear Eats the Soul (15 min), Theatrical trailerEFFI BRIEST (Fontane Effi Briest) *****(1974, Germany, 135 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (Faustrecht der Freiheit) *****(1974, Germany, 119 min, color, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)FEAR OF FEAR (Angst vor der Angst) ****(1974, Germany, 88 min, color, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)MOTHER KUSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel) ****(1975, Germany, 113 min, color, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)CHINESE ROULETTE (Chinesisches Roulette) *****(1976, Germany, 82 min, color, aspect ratio: 16:9 FHA, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)SATAN’S BREW (Satansbraten) ***(1976, Germany, 106 min, color, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (Die Ehe der Maria Braun) *****(1979, Germany, 115 min, color, aspect ratio: 16:9 Full Height Anamorphic, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)THE LITTLE CHAOS (Das Kleine Chaos) **(1966, Germany, 9 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame, audio: 2.0 Stereo, English subtitles)EXTRAS: Fassbinder Frauen – The Women of R. W. Fassbinder (documentary, 45 min), Fassbinder Familia, Florian Hopf on R. W. Fassbinder (documentary, 35 min), Theatrical trailer

Fassbinder is a genius!