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

Seen a couple of things:

I Don't Just Want You To Love Me (Hans Günther Pflaum, 1993)
Beware of the Holy Whore (1970)
Effi Briest (1974)

The first is a doc (and on youtube) - its a bit of a whitewash because it doesn't deal with the abuse and use and re-use of people that went on in Fassbinder's commune. The thing is defined by the talking heads that wanted to talk as much by the people who didn't (in a couple of cases that's because they were dead). Its just hinted at now and then as him being difficult. For someone beginning to get a grip with his work its a good assembly of clips from his filmography and pretty much that - except you know, the clips are majestic. Certainly wanted to re-watch Merchant.. and Effi Briest straight after (and I did watch the latter on MUBI the next day). The attempts at analysis were weak.

I was really struck as to why the abuses weren't discussed because well, Fassbinder is clear and open about what is going on. Beware of a Holy Whore (watched it at the BFI last night) was majestic while being all about that! Really one of his best. 'Jeff', played by Lou Castel, is RWF; Fassbinder himself plays Sascha (the producer - Fassbinder playing the director was perhaps a step too far idk). Anyway, I loved Balhaus' roving camera on this sea side hotel lounge, it was just such a great set-piece, and possibly painful and the source of many years of therapy for half of the crew. As the film ends you get to see snapshots of the film that was being made as a set of fragments - and fragments of what it might be to make one although its a Fassbinder film, which is unlike any other film made ofc.

This piece iirc is good, has more flesh than 'genius trumps abuse' or whatever.

Getting blond bombshell, Lou Castel, to play the director (ie, RWF himself) was amusing. In general, the casting in that film was one big in-joke played on his actors by Fassbinder.

"The only thing I accept is despair"

Indeed. That whole bit about Marlene Dietrich is great too.

Beware of a Holy Whore (watched it at the BFI last night) was majestic while being all about that! Really one of his best

otm. Get to The Merchant of Four Seasons

I saw it like 10 years ago, must've been like my first one by him (that or Ali) and in that doc you see a clip of the main character drinking himself to death.

the casting in that film was one big in-joke played on his actors by Fassbinder.

Sure - what I loved (well loved is fucking relative here) is how RWF has no bones about presenting himself as a giant turd. Because I picked up some of the detail around his crew over the years I knew quite a lot of this but to watch is another thing. That scene where the actress is now left high and dry by Jeff culminating in Jeff slapping her three times in front of everyone...its been a while I've been in a cinema and had to repress this uncomfortable laugh.

Cinema is great and also a form of hell.

I just watched a torrent of (had it for like two years and forgot till this weekend) Katzelmacher. I'm not convinced by his use of B&W, its flat. The framing feels good (he must've been a fan of Straub & Huillet) but some of the close-ups in the melodramas aren't there and you feel that (and why should it be I guess, its not from that phase). He is usually really smart with fashion and interiors, uses it to complement the colour tones well and that option isn't there, but compared with Effi Briest he is more imaginative: Irm Hermann's blacker than black dress, or the glowing white around Schygulla.

Obviously its not convincing at a narrative level either and the themes really mature by the time Ali gets made.

It is an early one - what's striking is within two years he made Beware of a Holy Whore. Practice makes perfect (I know I haven't seen enough from that '69-'71 period).

It's striking but not particularly involving except as an example of F's finding his voice. From the evidence he was trying to fuse theater blocking and film; he'd succeed with The Bitter Tears... a couple years later.

Coming soon to home video:

http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/shop/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=970

I like the brutal, spare quality of those early features. His 'voice' is there.

Michael Sicinski‏
@msicism
If Fassbinder had lived, I wonder if he'd be making good documentaries and terrible features now, like Herzog and Wenders.

Spent my Sunday @ BFI Southbank watching "Acht Stunden sind kein Tag", 5 films, shown from 12.30-10.00pm. Maybe one of his most unusual works in that it's so upbeat and optimistic. There is a lot of fairly clunky German humour and a lot, and I mean a LOT, of comedy drunkenness - there's also twinkly (slightly annoying) old people, almost too many cute kiddies to bear and even some bad people, who turn out to be not that bad after all. Lots of music - highlight being the Velvets' "Candy Says" playing in the background as a group of workers try to work out whether to split a performance bonus equally or by pay grade(!) Gottfried John is awesomely lanky and laidback, he's no looker but you can see why Hanna Schygulla falls for him (it's glaringly obvious why he falls for Hanna Schygulla). Irm Hermann is Irm Hermann to the max, but even Irm Hermann gets a happy ending in this film. In fact everyone gets a happy ending - EXCEPT for the workers still not having control the of means of production, which some of the characters realize in a real DOH! moment at the end of the last film.

I guess that will be rolling out all year in the wake of the restoration.

LOL, you know that bit in "Duck Soup" where Rufus T. Firefly says "Why a four-year-old child could understand this - run out and find me a four year old child"? Well Fassbinder actually has a character discussing industrial relation problems with a six-year old child.

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.

Fear of Fear was fantastic. Gotta hurry but I'll try and say some more when I have time.

Onto Stationmaster's Wife on Saturday!

Stationmaster's Wife never felt that together for me. I think he is beginning to deal even more directly with Nazi Germany - which he only uncannily refers to in much of his work.

Fear of Fear was so good on the issues around mental health -- its mis-understandings, diagnosis and judgments (not just on main character but also by her on others with a similar state of mind). When the main female character finally seems to be getting the right treatment Fassbinder makes the psychologist also a woman -- as my friend who I watched this brilliantly observed -- and its demonstratative of the sensitivity he brings to his scripts.

I re-watched (first time on the big screen) In a Year of 13 Moons and its as good if not better. His greatest film. I don't think he has made a more painful film (or transmitted the pain of his own life) for his audience more fully than this (an achievement I am ambivalent about - seeing something so beautiful that comes from such a place). I don't think I knew of the events around this so much when I first watched it but there is an act of reincarnation of feeling in this narrative of a transsexual lead not being able to love and live and work and simply function. I hadn't really noticed so much (and this is the value of seeing things on the big screen, perhaps) the opening, playing on Visconti's Death In Venice. The use of Mahler's music is in some ways what Fassbinder does a lot of: music that is thought of as elegant and sumptous is often played to soundtrack something that is opposite, in thia case squalid (in this case a beating in a public park).

I rewatched n a Year of 13 Moons because it'd been almost a decade, and I agree it's top tier Fassbinder: how it ambles from transsexual melodrama to this oddly paced corporate comedy with a slaughterhouse interlude complete with voice-over mystifies me even a second time. Yet even its longeurs work. And it's often funny, especially when Ingrid Caven is onscreen.

Richard Linklater has an intro in the American DVD!

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.