The above montage of scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, set to two songs by Nina Simone, was posted on Vinyl is Heavy by Stephen Boone. I’ll let him explain:
The idea is that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is two films. The first is about two lovers dealing with the terrible, disapproving world. The second is about the two lovers, having conquered the world, dealing with what poison it has left in each other’s system. Nina sings a song for each “film.”
I’m generally a big fan of the YouTube musical montage/tribute’s ability to condense an entire film experience into a concentrated crack hit of pop-scored pure emotion. The second half of this clip especially nails the devastating strangeness of the film’s final moments.
By all accounts, Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas rocked Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s world when he first saw them in the early 70s. In “Imitation of Life: On The Films of Douglas Sirk,” a 1971 essay on Sirk included in the Criterion edition of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder presages his own late-career turn towards films centered around female protagonists by marveling at Sirk’s unique way with women. “In Douglas Sirk movies the women think,” Fassbinder writes, as if this plain realization has knocked the wind out of him. “I haven’t noticed that with any other director. With any.” He also marvels at the Hollywood director’s ability to subvert dominant society via low art, sneaking radical critique into “films that people in Germany with his level of education would have smirked at.”
What Fassbinder must have seen that those academic stiffs would have missed, was that Sirk needed the smirk in order to mask what he was “really” up to. When Fassbinder reworked Heaven’s basic plot and ideas into his own Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 18 years later, he dispensed with the beard. Refusing to allow the audience the option of wallowing in redemptive fantasy and ignoring the subtext, he brought the tragedy up to the surface where it couldn’t be missed.
God knows, I should have made a New Year’s Resolution that would have actually bettered my day-to-day quality of life, but instead, I made a New Year’s Resolution to become fully versed in the work of two filmmakers with whom my overall level of familiarity is, really, shameful: Pier Paulo Pasolini, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Because Fassbinder’s work is generally much easier to find on DVD, I’ve decided to start with him and move on to Pasolini after I’ve watched everything I can get my hands on. So as I watch his films, I’ll write about them here. I’ve made a conscious decision not to research the films before I watch them in order to offer my spontaneous impressions, so it’s probably best to look at each installment of this project as more of a close reading/viewing diary than a review, per se.
Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a “fashion designer” who spends half the day in bed meticulously adjusting her face paint and having long conversations with guests while her live-in assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann) finishes her sketches. Petra is addict-thin and a bit mannish; in the film’s first act of three (all of which take place entirely in Petra’s stifling apartment), she hides her own thin hair under a wig that’s very late-Judy Garland. Marlene has Dietrich hair and a Deitrich air, but with the face of a Marion Davies or a Clara Bow. She’s obviously slumming––she’s obviously inherently too good for housework––and from the first scene, it’s obvious that she’s chosen to be here instead of somewhere better, because there’s something about the power balance between her and Petra that Marlene likes.
In a two part series beginning at the Criterion blog and continuing on his own site, Eric Skillman breaks down part of the process of designing Criterion’s recently-released edition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (which was purchased for me as a Christmas gift, but which has still not arrived via Amazon, much to my frustration). Skillman begins with the image above, and breaks down each step along the way to the final cover image, which you can find here.
