RW Fassbinder: C/D, S/D, Y/DA-Y/DA

AND there's a Martin & Lewis clip.

AND "Frankie Teardrop".

Lili Marleen and Lola being screened tonight - might see one or both (weather might be too good to merely spend it inside a cinema) *chucks cinephile credentials in the bin*

Saw both - Marleen was really flawed. I think it went on the assumption that Schygulla (Fassbinder really loved dressing her up) and RWF in a big-budget production were some kind of unbeatable winning ticket. Reality is the extra cash didn't add up to much: the scenes at the front seemed creaky to me (he is almost always a man of enclosed spaces or medium-sized spaces where grime and dirt are about - the hotel lobby, a club or a whorehouse) and the concert halls for her performances were kinda Citizen Kane parody. The story isn't that compelling - its kinda like a light romantic thriller - but also you can see why Fassbinder didn't do Nazi Germany in this direct way. The hate must be half-hidden, just at the surface, sometimes breaking out then pulled back to only break out again at some point. The story of a love not surviving the war just didn't have any kick.

Lola otoh was great. It went back to those small spaces: bedrooms, boardrooms and slightly bigger ones like the whorehouse/club and then the way this looks - here is neon-lit Fassbinder, what the 80s might have bought had he lived. The story is a Fassbinder remix - surfaces are back! As is happiness in quotation marks. And in Sukowa he found his next star.

Lola's lighting knocked me out 35 years ago, p sure the first of his i saw

Has anyone here ever seen "I Only Want You to Love Me"? I saw it, like, 20 years ago and then saw it again last night and I'm convinced there must be two different cuts - there's one specific scene, which helps explain a large part of the plot, which seems to be missing from this latest (restored, I think?) cut. It's a scene where the main character goes to the theatre and sees his father with another woman.

Had never seen 'I Only Want You to Love Me' before, just watched the 'restored' version on DVD. There is a scene set in the theatre, where the main character thinks he sees his father in the bar with another woman, but who turns out to be a stranger (in another scene he also momentarily mistakes the landlord - who he later kills - for his father.) Then there's a scene where the main character's mother talks about the father's 'whore', so it's here we learn that his Dad has a mistress.

^Spoiler alert. I don't suppose I'll ever find out whether there are different versions! The landlord is meant to look like his father, of course, this is one extremely Freudian film.

Ira Sachs on Fox and His Friends (which I finally saw yesterday, and really liked)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfMLbSHU-Wg

Watched the recent DVD of Kamikaze 89, which I generally found tedious... Included in the supps are radio ads for it done by John Cassavetes, in which he uses a shticky German accent. "Whoo eez zis FASSBINDER, with hees LEOPARD COAT?" Nutty.

https://scontent.fman1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/22885912_10155930940581518_8798680130442846199_n.jpg?oh=932328c82e8d7addb5b7bc8c351c630f&oe=5AA680B2

#trueDat

The Merchant of Four Seasons just floored me. Absolutely astonishing

8Hrs roundup (opens in NY today)

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5465-a-rare-fassbinder-melodrama-makes-its-theatrical-premiere

Sped through parts one through four of EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY, at least a solid hour of which is just people getting unbelievably tanked.

— Vadim Rizov (@vrizov) March 15, 2018

Indeed, see my impressions upthread.

He did ppl getting tanked well, unsurprisingly

the bit in petra von kant where she shouts at her assistant "TEN BOTTLES OF GIN" is great

Just read your post upthread - I watched it earlier this year and was also taken aback by how good-natured and upbeat it was for the most part xxp

apparently the 2 concluding segments he never got to shoot were going to lower the boom?

Some debate over that tbh, it certainly got canned despite apparently being enormously popular.

Oh shit that makes sense haha xp

He does rather hastily stick some Marxist theory in right at the end of the last (filmed) episode.

90 minutes to go on Eight Hours... Is this the least neurotic character ever played by Hanna Schygulla?

What comes across in the less distanced/Brechtian performance style is how good and versatile all these actors are.

Also I find Gottfried John ridiculously sexy.

And I wasn't expecting sitcom-template scenes like the famil(y/ies) fighting for time in the bathroom.

GJ is quite scary and horrible in 'platz, even his nervous stutter isn't disarming.

making my way thru the early fassbinder eclipse box and thinking of watching Gods of the Plague tonite, what do y'all think?

A bunch of those early ones blur in my mind with their pitilessness. Is that the movie-set-centric one?

Gods of the Plague is one of my favourites.

More beautiful than Love Is Colder Than Death and not as silly as The American Soldier.

I liked The Merchant of Four Seasons best from that Eclipse box.

that's not in the Eclipse box, Merchant of Four Seasons has its own release. But it's my favorite Fassbinder film by far, of the 6 or 7 I've seen.

Eclipse box is Love is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher, Gods of the Plague, The American Soldier, and Beware a Holy Whore.

I think the early films box and World on a Wire are the only Criterion Fassbinder releases I don't own.

If it hasn't been mentioned, Eight Hours has the Janus logo on it, so look for a CC by year's end I guess.

Eclipse box is Love is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher, Gods of the Plague, The American Soldier, and Beware a Holy Whore.

― flappy bird, Monday, March 26, 2018 12:09 PM

Right! I'd rank them:

BAHW
GOTP
Love
TAS
Katzelmacher

somehow Mother Fassbinder's short role in 8HDMaD sailed right by me! one of the grocery gossipers, i think.

ugh I rematched The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant, which I bought on Blu-ray a couple years ago – I found it tedious as hell.

I expect my relationships with movies to change.

I'm off tomorrow, gonna watch Eight Hours.... See you next week!

they played the whole thing at a theater here last week but i missed it. but im not spending 8 hours in a theater. they're also spreading it out over three non consecutive nights but i can't make the first night so i guess i'll just wait for the Criterion/Janus/whatever reissue.

Halfway through Eight Hours. I don't know who I like better, Grandma or Gregor--they're like the funniest movie old-people since Aunt Lotte in Stranger Than Paradise. (I know--TV, and they came first.) I wonder if Fassbinder considered shooting it in Cinemascope, just to accommodate Gottfried John's eyebrows.

I was a little apprehensive about seeing this. There was the length, obviously, but more in relation to my own sleep deprivation and whether I'd hold up. But more than that, I saw a dozen-plus Fassbinder films before I was 25--he was the guy whose every new film you rushed off to see if you were studying film in the early '80s, his and Scorsese's--but, except for Berlin Alexanderplatz a couple of more times--I never went back to anything after that. I just didn't know how his idiosyncrasies would hold up; some of those films I remember positively, some I doubt I'd have much use for today.

Really glad I followed through--liked pretty much the whole eight hours. The wedding party, in particular, was masterful, and there was so much humour. Of all that I could single out, I'd put Gottfried John's unwavering affection for his grandmother at the top of the list. Great soundtrack, too--I'm off in search of the Spooky Tooth song he used.

I've been on a Fassbinder binge recently. I liked the Berlin Alexanderplatz miniseries, but it was very very hard going, it was so depressing (not that many of his movies aren't, just that there was 14 HOURS of this). At this point I think I would say my favorite Fassbinder films, of those I've recently seen, are

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (maybe his best film?)
In a Year with 13 Moons
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Veronika Voss
Love is Colder than Death

there are some I haven't seen in many years so can't remember that well (Querelle, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Effi Briest). I still haven't seen Eight Hours Don't Make a Day

also liked Beware of a Holy Whore, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Fox and His Friends, Lola

check out The Third Generation, it is awesome and hilarious. one of his very last

thanks I will

Gods of the Plague was also pretty good

The events in Berlin Alexanderplatz are depressing but I am not sure it hammers you with it for 14 hours straight. I'd give it another watch in a few years, for sure.

Third Generation is really really great. Only other time he made a straight political statement to the events of the day was in his section of Germany in Autumn which is really good as well.

the epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz was so shockingly surreal, just amazing

all of Fassbinder's films warrant a rewatch, definitely

just saw that Kanopy is streaming The Marriage of Maria Braun and Effi Briest, two I haven't seen recently, planning to watch those next

8 Hours now out on Criterion

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5972-eight-hours-don-t-make-a-day-the-utopia-channel

Started it the other day... Morbius OTM re: Hanna Schygulla's least neurotic role. I love all the zooms! The fast zoom onto Joachim's face when Marion says she's single is hilarious. Great theme song, too.

Querelle is such a fascinating failure that I don't really know how to feel about it. The art direction and cinematography are magnificent; the set decoration reminded me of an X-rated version of the Sweethaven from Altman's Popeye, and the whole thing is shot in rich Technicolor-evoking tones that eroticize even the film's ugliest moments (of which there are many). But the story is such a muddle of dangling plot threads and characters introduced and then never paid off that its frustrating and ultimately tedious. It is well known that the studio cut a half hour from the film that Fassbinder's editor presented to them, so maybe this accounts for some of the film's mess. Less charitably, but just as likely, is that Fassbinder was in the throes of addition and was taking an approach to the Genet novel which made sense only in his drug-addled mind, and which he didn't really have the opportunity to fully realize anyway.