By Charlie Fox
Ingrid Caven watches Fassbinder on television, 'In a Year With 13 Moons' (1978)
1. Rainer Werner Fassbinder knew the magical power of the list, which makes order out of chaos. Five years before his early death at the age of 37, he drew up the monumental ‘List of My Favourites’, documenting his tastes across eight separate ‘top tens’. The categories are commonplace, even if their contents are not, both eclectic and peculiar – Zeppo Marx, Jean Seberg, Elvis and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1975) all make appearances – including ‘The Best Pop Musicians’, ‘The Best Books’ and ‘The Best Films’. This sort of assiduous inscribing of taste is the activity of the lonely child and adolescent- Fassbinder endured what he called ‘an almost murderous puberty’. Lists are records of obsession, a bedroom art that arranges everything into little kingdoms with shaky hierarchies and sets the stars in private constellations.
I flirted with mimicking Fassbinder in this piece and writing my own top ten about his work, his greatest hits, his best scenes; it’s a list that’s still incomplete. Fassbinder destroying the TV in Fear Eats The Soul (1974); Herr R.’s drunken attempt to toast his boss in Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970); the crucifixion scene from the epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) … a collection of scenes that would capture the bleak climate of his films, all their loneliness, bad dreams and despair. But I decided, awkwardly, on 13 scenes, instead of 40 fragments (one each for every film he made) or 37 more (the age he was when he died). Thirteen scenes to recall his masterpiece In A Year With Thirteen Moons (1978) about the last five days in the life of a transsexual, concluding with her suicide. The list is an homage and method of praising (which is what all obsessive, idolatrous lists are) that film and its wayward shape. In A Year of Thirteen Moons is a patchwork of nightmare, fairytales, documentary, songs, tragedy, movies, a case study of a damaged mind and a weary body. Maybe I’m mimicking Fassbinder after all.
2. Cut to 1982: Citizen Kane (1941) continues its apparently unending reign atop the Sight & Sound list of the greatest films ever (meanwhile Orson Welles provides narration for a heavy metal record) Francis Ford Coppola bombs with One From The Heart , Michael Jackson releases ‘Thriller’ and on 31 May, Fassbinder dies in his bedroom in Munich of a drug overdose. His appearance on this list tilts it towards some darker territory than it would have otherwise occupied. His bleak European cinema, full of master-slave relationships, casual cruelty and tragic endings shares little with these American movies (‘Thriller’ is, of course, a horror movie set to a disco beat). Only the grim Citizen Kane feels remotely close to anything in Fassbinder’s body of work, although he probably would’ve been more interested in the decline of Susan Alexander, Kane’s wide-eyed second wife, than the last words of the media mogul. Citizen Kane is about how a life unravels and so too are many of the German director’s films. If Fassbinder looks out of place or he disturbs this list, well, good: he was always fiercely, defiantly out of place. He was a gay malcontent with a passion for the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, a self-described ‘romantic anarchist’ with an insatiable appetite for all kinds of excess (food, drugs, alcohol, sex), prone to violence: an ‘unruly beast’. Combine this with his extraordinary work rate and you have the makings of a myth and the arc for some dark hagiography: why did Herr F. Run Amok? But pursuing this would relegate the work to secondary significance, as if it was a curiosity alongside all that excess. But as Gilbert Adair pointed out: ‘Fassbinder was a true believer with an artisanal faith in his chosen medium. He made radical movies.’ And they are what’s really fascinating, even more than Fassbinder himself. In Wim Wenders’ documentary Room 666 (1982) Fassbinder makes a 40-second long appearance in a drab hotel room close to the Cannes Festival. Invited to talk about the future of cinema, he smokes, sighs and mumbles a terse response about the rise of ‘bombastic, sensation-orientated cinema’. Then he stubs out his cigarette and staggers away, radiating disdain. But Fassbinder’s work, too, is seriously committed to the supply of sensation, especially the painful or troubling. Even more, it is acutely aware of the places where sensation has been lost: the capacity for cruelty in his films is limitless.
Fassbinder’s forty second- long appearance in Room 666 (1982)
3. Another anniversary: Vivre Sa Vie (1962) one of Jean-Luc Godard’s chilliest, most austere films is now 50 years old. It consists of 12 tragic scenes from the life of a prostitute played by Anna Karina, concluding with her death. In the third, she goes to the cinema alone, and watches Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1928). What follows is an eerie, complicated evocation of cinematic enchantment and premonition. Watching Maria Falconetti weep as she learns of her fate (a monk, played by Antonin Artaud tells her she is to be burned at the stake), Anna Karina cries, too, wounded by Falconetti’s expressive power, her plight, her grief. Falconetti shakes, dumbstruck, terrified but wondrous, eager to die as a child of God, torn between ecstasy and anguish.
Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Fassbinder includes a sly quotation of this famous scene midway through_ In A Year of Thirteen Moons_. Whilst Elvira, the film’s transsexual heroine, sleeps, her friend Zora, a prostitute, is slumped before the TV, flicking from one channel to another. There are snatches of Maurice Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972), a documentary about the barbarities of Pinochet’s regime and an interview with Fassbinder, sourced from an episode of Lebensläufe (Life Stories). She remains transfixed throughout this little interlude of late-night viewing, her face set in a blank scowl. No trace of Anna’s tears. There is another echo of this scene in Veronika Voss (1982), where the screen becomes a scornful mirror, mocking the heroine as it reflects the intensity of her fall from starlet to drug addict. Behind the shuddering Veronika, who can’t bear to watch herself onscreen, sits Fassbinder. His expression, like Zora’s, is an inscrutable mixture of rapt attention and detachment. This is the gaze in all his films. Veronika runs from the cinema, Fassbinder keeps watching.
4. He appeared on Lebensläufe in early 1978. For almost an hour he’s the object of sustained study: cagey throughout, his voice weary, suggesting chronic Weltschmerz. He wrestles with the implications of certain questions and resists them (‘Am I honest? I’m honest to the extent that society allows me to be’), thoughtful, reticent. He smokes constantly, hides his face and occasionally emits a hollow laugh. The room is equally subdued, decorated in a lukewarm palette of muddy earth colors like many of the interiors in his films. Plants loom over him and the corpse of a tree can be glimpsed in the gloom outside through a misted window. He sits at a table with a few select objects to hand: a coffee cup (untouched throughout), his beloved cigarettes and a lavish book with a red, marbled cover. This is Fassbinder in a melancholy mood, which is, after all, especially German from Durer’s engravings to Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and the jaded consumptives in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924). (Melancholia persists: during a week of dreary weather in Berlin over springtime, I found two bars that played The Smiths and nothing else, both run by large men with perishing quiffs). What book it is next to him is never revealed. I wonder if it’s another potential film. It might be Céline’s A Journey To The End of the Night (1932) which he listed as number three of his ‘Ten Best Books’ or maybe, Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (number five) which he adapted into the mammoth TV series two years later, or, the source of his last, phantasmagorical film, Jean Genet’s Querelle (1953). Asked why he made so many films, he jokes, ‘it must be a special kind of mental illness’, a diagnosis that momentarily resounds in the bedroom of his doomed heroine.
5. Fassbinder is obsessive about interiors. He famously declared that ‘I would like to build a house with my films. Some are the cellar, others the walls, still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house.’ Given its size couldn’t we increase the scale of Fassbinder’s work? Not only a house, but a neighborhood, even a country- most strangely and maybe without parallel, a document of a country that no longer exists, West Germany having formally disappeared, of course, a few years after his death. (Another potential, more detached list-piece: an inventory of rooms in Fassbinder’s work: all the bedrooms, bathrooms, cinemas, abattoirs). This quotation touches on the most famous, most mythologized aspect of Fassbinder and his work: the immensity of his output, so many films, so many rooms. The first urge when you learn of all that work is hate him for making so much. What conditions would best unleash this ‘special kind of mental illness’? ‘What’s his secret?’ Hanna Schygulla remembers worrying in I Don’t Just Want You To Love Me (1992), the documentary on Fassbinder released to coincide with the tenth anniversary of his death. His manic speed, the supernatural sense of control in all his works and the dirty spectacle of his life make for an unbearably glamorous trio. Like Rimbaud, he lives on as a malicious taunt to all subsequent and future artists. ‘Go mad! You’ll never top this. I’ve beaten you in advance, with my decadence, my intensity, my work.’
6. Speed and quantity of work are not the reasons to celebrate Fassbinder, as if all he produced was just a punkish, snotty kind of provocation, part of a desire to be fast and throwaway. What should be stressed is that Fassbinder’s films are slow, their tempo gentle and carefully measured. There’s no rush, even as everything falls apart. Despite the furious speed with which they were made, they are meditative works of art. Slowness has always been cut out of cinema: everything is sped up. Querelle (1982) is especially, gorgeously slow, a hypnotic reverie of glitter, gold and perfumed smoke, sinister lustre and opiated hallucination. Querelle is one of the great embodiments of cinema as a magic spell, a system of bewitchment that slows time to a sleepwalker’s pace, all regal and unfathomable. Drifting through its dreamlike world you inhabit a space as eerily unthread from the ordinary sense of time as Tarkovsky’s Zone in Stalker (1979). You’re lured deeper and deeper in with every hushed lap of the waves against the ship, every velvety, illicit whisper from the narrator.
You could never dream up a more cartoonish odd couple: Fassbinder the Bear and the Warhol the Friendly Ghost, but there are correspondences between the two, superficially opposed though they might be. As with Fassbinder, it’s easy to represent Warhol’s work in terms of speed and mass, particularly when thinking about his films. It would be easy to say that what happened at the Factory was just endless nights of speed-freak mischief, taking shape as quick as a Polaroid (incidentally one of Warhol’s favourite inventions), pursuing manic productivity at the expense of meaning, but it’s no accident one of his most famous films is Sleep (1963). ‘I really like slow time’, he said, and this is a taste he shared with Fassbinder. It all drags on: nothing happens, spaced-out kids mutter, come and go, sleep stretches out, speech slows down, it alters ever…y…thing. Watching Edie Sedgwick in a screen test wakes the same anxiety as seeing the two-hour torment of Petra Von Kant. How long can this go on for? But ‘slow time’ in films is intoxicating because it’s so fraught with pain. Look at this carefully, you can’t flinch, you can’t hide. Georges Perec described this feeling in his story of ‘slow time’ in A Man Asleep (1968), the sense that ‘you can do nothing, you cannot escape yourself, you cannot escape your own gaze, you will never be able to’.
7. Whenever an artist dies we wonder about their lost or dreamt-of projects that never materialized. Is this necessary with Fassbinder? After all, he did so much. And equally, if they die (relatively) young, their work is scoured for premonitions of their fate. Fassbinder, though, didn’t sense this ending so much as he leapt into its arms. Asked once how he pictured his old age, he responded ‘I don’t expect to experience it’. He died of heart failure brought on by the fatal interaction of sleeping pills and cocaine. Even if it’s ghoulish, ‘fatal interaction’ feels like a slyly suitable term for describing the relationships in his films. They are full of ‘fatal interactions’ between the trusting and demonic, loving and despicable. Think of Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold in Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fox and his treacherous friends, or Veronika and her doctor, who supplies her with morphine. These are films about the toxicity of other people.
8. Veronika: You brought me much happiness.
Doctor Katz: No, I sold it to you.
There’s an outline for an unmade project amongst his collected writings titled Cocaine. It’s more a hymn to the powder than anything else, indiscreetly mapping the desired trajectory of his life. ‘The cocaine user will experience this shorter life span significantly more intensely [and] more imaginatively […] The decision in favour of a short but fulfilled life or a short but unaware and on the whole alienated existence will be left entirely up to the audience.’ What Fassbinder favoured is obvious throughout, even as he partially obscures his praise through a layer of feigned medical authority. ‘Cocaine freezes the brain’, he writes, ‘freeing one’s thoughts of anything inessential and thereby liberating the essential, the imagination, concentration, and so on’. Fassbinder enjoyed for cocaine for the same reason as Sigmund Freud, who similarly adored its ability to unleash ‘passionate pleasure and tireless work’. In the projected film ‘everything will appear covered in hoarfrost, glittering ice, whether winter or summer’. His last films maintain this intoxicated gaze, all consist of entrancing, shimmering surfaces. Elsewhere, he appears more pained and dependent. A brief scene from Germany in Autumn (1978) features this grim dialogue between Fassbinder and his lover, Armin Meier, just after Fassbinder has ordered some cocaine over the phone.
Armin: I thought you’d quit.
Fassbinder (quietly): I thought so, too… (suddenly distraught, howling) But I don’t know! I’m depressed, I don’t know how to work anymore! (quiet again) It makes me feel good… it helps… (he weeps)
The film critic Serge Daney settled for a more poetic way of explaining his death. ‘He wore himself out constructing a place to house his dreams’.
9. First death scene: At the end of Fox and His Friends (1974), the title character (played by Fassbinder), a gay carnival worker who has won the lottery and suffered nothing but unhappiness since, takes an overdose of Valium and collapses in an underground train station. As he dies, thieves sweep over his body, steal his watch and then flee. The critical temptation is to read this bleak scene as a haunting example of Fassbinder rehearsing his own death but perhaps, more obliquely, something else is taking place. Fox is a man ‘suicided by society’, just as Artaud wrote in his essay on Vincent Van Gogh (number one on Fassbinder’s list of ‘The Ten Best Books’). He is abandoned and betrayed by everyone around him. Or, another more dreamlike cause: he dies of a broken heart. Loveless and lost, he’s like Elvis in ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, in the end ‘so lonesome I could die’.
Scene from Fox and His Friends (1974)
10. Gus Van Sant offers a slightly more hopeful revision of this scene in My Own Private Idaho (1991). At its end, Mike (a narcoleptic prostitute played by River Phoenix, similarly lovesick and lonely) collapses on a highway, struck by another sleep attack. A car rumbles towards him, two men climb out. They stalk round the prone body (it’s difficult not to think of Phoenix’s fatal overdose two years later), do the ritual checking of pockets, find nothing again, and with a sort of spite familiar from silent films, steal his boots. They jump back in their car and drive away with their pathetic loot. But, look, salvation! Another car stops soon afterwards, another driver climbs out, and gathers up the sleeping Phoenix, gently placing him in the vehicle. A hopeful ending, troubled by a little ambiguity; there is no room for such kindness in Fassbinder’s films… Fassbinder in Hollywood, a fantasy in Technicolour. If he had gone to America, as he long-promised, what would’ve happened, not only to him but to filmmaking, too? Imagine a Fassbinder film with Winona Ryder as a wayward heroine, her husband a vacant sadist played with spooky serenity by Mickey Rourke. Like many of his characters, Fassbinder longed for a (supposedly) better life that never arrived. He died just as the catastrophe of AIDS hit. What films would he have made about the plague years?
Scene from My Own Private Idaho (1991)
11. Second death scene. In A Year of Thirteen Moons: Elvira takes Zora to the slaughterhouse. In a long tracking shot, we watch the systematic killing of livestock. They are stunned, strung up from the ceiling, eviscerated, bled dry and skinned. Precisely because it is done so matter-of-factly, with such detachment, little else in cinema is so horrifying. On the soundtrack, an extract of a monologue from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (1790) read in gasps and shrieks, manic, despairing, like an aria in mid-flight ‘…to lead me to the altar like a sacrificial beast! So, on the final day, they lured from me my poem which was my sole possession…’ The screen is crowded with several lurid carcasses suspended from the ceiling. A nasty echo of Francis Bacon’s voice, boozy, jubilant and warm, comes to me when I watch: ‘How marvelous these extraordinary carcasses are, hanging… hanging from the wall, how amazing their colour was, how beautiful they looked.’ Fassbinder and Bacon make a better couple than him and Warhol. They were two gay men who shared a certain worldly pessimism, a passion for excess and endured equally tempestuous affairs with other men (both had lovers who committed suicide after being spurned). Watching this scene, Bacon’s visceral tableaux are inevitably invoked. His lifelong fascination with carcasses, butchery, or as he simply put it, ‘flesh’, is apparent throughout his work from Painting (1946) and Figure With Meat (1954) to Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey (1980). Just as Bacon translated his grief at the suicide of George Dyer into his ‘Black Triptychs’ (1972-4), here Fassbinder is expressing his agony after the death of Armin Meier. In A Year of Thirteen Moons is Fassbinder’s ‘poem’ in the form of an exorcism, casting himself as the sacrificial beast whose sufferings become a terrible spectacle.
12. Fassbinder’s contribution to Germany in Autumn (1978) is an equally astonishing expression of anguish. A portrait of the filmmaker as a monster is provided, alongside an elliptical evocation of a country in a state of panic, reeling in the aftermath of the Red Army Faction’s attacks. Fassbinder plays himself as a drug-addicted, paranoid and pathetic creature across 15 minutes of increasing claustrophobia. The rooms in his apartment (all seemingly windowless) purposefully recall cells, like those in which three of the RAF’s members committed suicide. Every scene is a wound: he bullies and attacks Armin, joylessly does lines of coke and rants at his mother. Trapped, his legendary industry lost, he falls, sobbing and distraught, into his lover’s arms. There’s nothing amorous about this embrace, a consoling bear-hug with the faintest trace of rocking to it, as if Fassbinder were a child, being soothed after a nightmare. Strange to think that Fassbinder would outlive the man holding him. Armin committed suicide two months after the film was released, on Fassbinder’s birthday.
13. In an interview not longer after this, Fassbinder likened his film The Third Generation (1979) to a set of ‘fairytales you tell your children so they’re better equipped to live their lives as people buried alive’. Perhaps all his films are about these people, for whom the uplifting endings we’re used to are nowhere to be found.
‘List of My Favorites’ from The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992)