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Fassbinder's own
indelible presence largely operated within a tightly knit,
even claustrophobic, group of regular colleagues. Hanna
Schygulla for one is remembered as Fassbinder's frequent
female lead to the point of eclipsing her work with other
leading directors. But she was not alone, either among his
casts or the rest of his troupe (e.g. Juliane Lorenz as
editor of the later films, or Peer Raben in charge of
music). In this sense, Fassbinder surrounded himself with a
constellation of satellite non-directing auteurs of his own
creation - the solipsistic aspect of auteurism. He was
indeed "the Balzac of West Germany" by virtue of being "its
most perspicacious and passionate
chronicler."[1]
But the weave of his dramatic tapestry featured not
recurring characters, like Balzac, but recurring
actors. [1]
Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany: history identity
subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U.P., 1996), 19.
Fassbinder took
the tension between screen and biographical personae to new
lengths, the most memorable example being his segment of
Germany in autumn (Germany 1978), the film made by
some of the cream of West German directors. With his own
nudity early on he exhibits his (personal, offscreen)
vulnerability, while positioning the viewer as reluctant
voyeur. He berates his real-life lover, Armin Meier, and
corners his mother [2]
into apparent support for fascism, both dialogues
intermixing inextricably the personal and the political.
A superficial
phenomenon links Fassbinder to auteurs like Hitchcock, and
that is his cameos within his own films. But here too there
are differences. His roles are generally more substantial
than Hitchcock's teasing appearances which seem to exercise
the very detective work his plots call for. The roles played
by Fassbinder frequently exhibit an exquisite degree of
self-laceration: the spiv black marketeer in The marriage
of Maria Braun (Germany 1978), the most unbearable of
Emmi's children in Fear eats the soul (Germany 1973),
the confrontation between screen and autobiographical
personae in his contribution to Germany in autumn.
But the further distinctive touch about Fassbinder's
authorial handling of this device is that he, the director,
stands out less than a Hitchcock, because the rest of his
cast in turn is known to be interacting with him both on and
off screen. In Lili Marleen (Germany 1980), for
example, he plays the role of Resistance leader Günter
Weisenborn. For Fassbinder, hounded by claims of
antisemitism, [3]
this must have been a piquant reversal of his demonized
role, in taking a part in which he persuades the singer of
the title song to help inmates of Polish concentration
camps.
If
Hitchcock's appearances are more akin to a painter's
signature in the corner of a canvas, Fassbinder's are like a
sideshow in the ongoing review provided by the Fassbinder
circus. [2]
See Wallace Steadman Watson, Understanding Rainer Werner
Fassbinder: film as private and public art (Columbia (S.
Carolina): Uni. of Sth. Carolina Press, 1996), 173: "The
discussion is not completely spontaneous, as some
interpretations suggest; nor does it seem completely
planned." At all events the authorial control over the film
in progress parallels the offscreen relationship of
domination with two people close to him. [3]
Most notably in his play Der Müll, die Stadt und Der
Tod (written in 1975, performed once in Germany to a
closed audience in 1985), but also, for instance, in his
unrealized plan to serialize Freytag's novel Soll und
Haben. A positive avenue
to linking Fassbinder with auteurism could come via
Naremore's plea for the concept's ongoing relevance. He
finds it far from anachronistic, salvaging its
meaningfulness through linking "author criticism ... with
cultural studies and contemporary theory in productive ways,
contributing a good deal to our understanding of media
history and sociology."[4]
A most
fertile source for this approach is the New German Cinema in
general, not confined to Fassbinder. [4]
James Naremore, "Authorship" in A companion to film
theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999), 21. The constant
obsession of the New German Cinema with the issue of German
identity, an identity which in the 1970s still had to
contend with a divided nation within a rump of pre-War
Germany, meant this movement was pleading for a kind of
culturally postcolonial status well before the fall of the
Berlin Wall. Wim Wenders of
course continually wrangled with issues of American
vis-à-vis W. German identities. But in his return to
German soil after a long absence, the transfiguring of
Berlin in Wings of desire (Germany-France 1987),
there are prominent traces of homage to European creativity,
both critical and directorial. The film opens with a hand,
as if it were an extension of Wenders' camera, writing words
on paper, surely a concretization of Alexandre Astruc's
'caméra-stylo' which so inspired the Cahiers du
cinéma group. Much later in the film, as the
camera tracks a figure crossing a road, a graffiti glimpsed
fleetingly on a wall proclaims: "Waiting for Godard". For
West German filmmakers of the 1970s there was of course a
whole preceding generation they could not use as a tradition
to build on, a further absence alongside that of a German
Godard. This rootlessness led Werner Herzog to return to the
heyday of German cinema in the 1920s. This is most apparent
in Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, a reworking of
Murnau's Nosferatu (Germany 1922). Fassbinder's
reaction to the missing generation of artistic fathers was
to intersperse his own films with iridescent references to
others', both as homage and as multifaceted evocation of a
splintered history. But he also, tirelessly, thematized the
quest for identity. The whole narrative arc of The
marriage of Maria Braun begins with scenes of those
returning from the front and those still missing - with
Maria turning up the radio volume (whose transmission of
Beethoven's Ninth is thereby interrupted) in the hope of
hearing her husband's name among a list read out. It is
completed with the false national identity at the end
through victory on the soccer field, hailed as if a
sublimation of the battle field. From the missing soldiers
of the Reich to the missing Reich about to be re - armed,
the void in identity remains. The blurring of
boundaries between high and mass art was historically
integral to the New German Cinema inasmuch as those
boundaries had been constantly contested by film as an art
in Germany, battling against the cultural canon. To defuse
dismissive criticism, German films had frequently sought
legitimation through integration of the realm of high art.
Whereas it might be argued that in the French tradition the
European art film intrinsically belonged to this realm, the
combination was more of a paradox in Germany, even when high
art references seemingly grew organically out of the subject
matter. Alexander Kluge's The patriot (Germany 1979)
has a scene where the history teacher Gaby Teichert, ever
seeking a positive alternative version of Germany's
compromised past, literally carves up a dusty history book.
The Brechtian touch fails to conceal the literary model, the
early scene in Faust I - in which Faust, frustrated
by the limits of earthly aspirations to knowledge, rants
within his study. The Faust motif
permeates Wenders' Wings of desire more thoroughly.
At one level it can be read as inverting the baleful
consequences of a political understanding of the Faustian
pact in twentieth century German history. With Wenders the
hybris of transcending mortal knowledge is reversed, as the
angel Damiel feels deprived of the basic pleasures of
earthly existence, and longs to experience the aroma of
coffee, the spectrum of colour, and the love of trapeze
artiste Marion. The path of fulfilment does not lead to a
restless striving for transcendence, but to incarnation and
the joyous acceptance of temporality. That the cosmology of
this fallen angel is realized in Berlin, whose division is
prophetically refigured as temporary by soaring camera work
and fairytale transits through the Wall, extends the
reworking of the Faust legend to German history. Wenders
celebrates here the fusion of high and mass art which other
films of his had viewed more ambivalently, the result of
U.S. popular culture being overlayered on the culture of
occupied W. Germany. In the vertical road movie that is
Wings of desire, the lovers' meeting comes in the
lowest geographical point of the film, the Berlin
underground scene, where their union is heralded by the Nick
Cave and The Bad Seeds song "From her to eternity" (as an
inversion of the true arc of the angel, from eternity to
her). Altogether, Wenders differs from most of his
compatriots in not further blurring boundaries in his
musical choices. The use of classical music was a device
chosen by many directors of the 70s in particular. In citing
Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, or Schubert, these films both
factored in the historical reception of these composers
(often either appropriated by propaganda or else banned
during the Nazi years), and assaulted the hegemony of German
music among the German arts by assigning it with all its
historical inflections to the soundtrack of
films. This situation of
film within the German history of the arts locates
Fassbinder differently to many other auteurs. But as well as
his own claims staked in practice for the status of German
film, and his socially based, largely contemporary themes
(in this differing from much of Federico Fellini or Ingmar
Bergman, for example), Fassbinder did take on American
genres, above all that of melodrama. With his 'Federal
Republic Trilogy' (The marriage of Maria Braun,
Lola [Germany 1982] and Veronika Voss
[Germany 1982]), he elaborated a kind of historical
melodrama. Just as auteurs like Stanley Kubrick, in a string
of movies, or Jim Jarmusch (Dead man [1995]
or Ghost Dog: the way of the samurai [1999])
lend their distinctive imprint to an established genre,
Fassbinder, in Effi Briest (Germany 1974), at once
observed a tendency to literary films in West German output
of the 1970s, and exhausted it with a single definitive
statement. (Well, not quite: Martha [Germany
1973] is the sadistic anticipation of the story in some
of its motifs.) Alongside other
Fassbinder films, Effi Briest (based on Theodor
Fontane's 1895 novel) is remarkably conservative on the
surface. It forsakes colour for black and white, a patina of
historical veracity that with less successful stylists can
easily seem superimposed. Beyond that, the unimpassioned
voiceover renders perfectly the polite and ultimately
stifling exteriors of the novel, and the script (right down
to intertitles) is basically faithful to passages from the
novel. But despite these apparent restraints, Fassbinder's
rendition is totally filmic, employing many of his
trademarks (closed frames, further frames within frames,
cross hatching to produce the effect of prison bars,
virtuosic use of mirrors, a mise-en-scène that almost
totally ignores the sky)[5]
as an ongoing commentary on the narrative. Here then is an
auteur seemingly submitting to the literary text at hand,
who in fact creates precisely what eluded many of the German
films of the 70s in this vein, and many literary adaptations
altogether, namely a sense of conviction and inner coherence
in the new artform. [5]
See this section of the excellent documentary I don't
just want you to love me: the filmmaker Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (Hans Günther Pflaum, Germany
1992). This aspect is
highlighted in this brief overview because it is the least
treated in the Fassbinder literature and yet is crucial to
understanding Fassbinder's depiction of history. In relation
to music, the director's name will often be used in the
following remarks as shorthand for what is of course a
cooperative venture with Peer Raben. Raben not only
contributed his own original compositions to the majority of
Fassbinder's films, but also moderated the choice of
preexisting music used. (Though at least in four of the
pre-1976 films, according to Hans Günter Pflaum's
interviews, Fassbinder mostly came to his films with fairly
fixed ideas on this score. The placing of Raben's original
music within a film was a far more collaborative venture,
with decisions coming only at the mixing
stage.)[6] [6]
H. G. Pflaum/R. W. Fassbinder, Das bißchen
Realität, das ich brauche: wie Filme entstehen
(Hanser; Munich, 1976), 128. Raben's musical
choices perfectly complement Fassbinder's narratives, with
his parodic twists to light entertainment (in places, an
outright indulgence in conscious schmaltz), or else
mock-dramatic music. In the opening sequence of The
marriage of Maria Braun, [7]
nothing less than an inversion of the primacy of the visual
and the soundtrack is achieved. Sounds of course can be just
as deceptive as images. But one way out of the suspect
capacity of audio-visual media to "represent the forces at
work in the historical process"[8]
is the soundtrack, at least its evocation of cultural
memory. The most probing student query I can ever recall
fielding was whether the Beethoven excerpt at the beginning
of The marriage of Maria Braun was perhaps a
recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler (the conductor whose
career was deemed to typify issues of art and morality under
the Nazis). [7]
See Roger Hillman, "Narrative in film, the novel and music:
Fassbinder's The marriage of Maria Braun," in
Fields of vision: essays in film studies, visual
anthropology and photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux and
Roger Hillman (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 181-95. [8]
Elsaesser, 134. The prominence of
sound throughout this film (e.g. the staccato effects of
jackhammers and typewriters, reminiscent of the
anti-aircraft fire from the opening sequence), in particular
the viewer/listener's bombardment in the first and last
sequences, creates an acoustic framing effect similar to
that of his many visual devices. About halfway through this
film there is a scene in which Maria and Oswald
(characteristically framed visually) are conversing in the
background with a piano prominent in the foreground, while a
Mozart piano concerto on the soundtrack functions seemingly
as high art mood music. But Fassbinder confounds the
standard conventions of such music - our expectation that
it's audible to us but not to the onscreen characters - by
having Oswald sit down at the piano and play a couple of
phrases (with notably tinnier piano tone). These synchronise
perfectly with the non-diegetic Mozart (and without any hint
of its source being a recordplayer in the same rooms), the
gesture of a highly creative auteur. Via Raben's
constant variations of each successive entry of the
title-song in Lili Marleen, the film becomes a
one-song musical in which performances momentarily halt not
just the immediate dramatic action but, according to the
film's conceit, the world-stage of conflict, as soldiers
from both sides listen in thrall to its regular evening
broadcast. Fassbinder's styling of Hanna Schygulla on the
Marlene Dietrich of The blue angel (Germany 1930) is
never stronger than here. But the allusions extend to the
soundtrack too in his private archaeology of film history
and film as history. Alongside the performance of Lili
Marleen's title song for troops on the Polish front,
another singer whips up the audience with "Veronika, der
Lenz ist da" ("Veronica, the spring is here"), a signature
tune of the Comedian Harmonists, as featured in Joseph
Vilsmaier's film about their rise and fall in Weimar
Republic Germany, The Comedian Harmonists (Germany
1998). In other words we
hear a song whose reception, like that of "Lili Marleen" in
Fassbinder's film, fluctuates according to the lavishing or
withdrawal of political favour. The entertainment function
is submerged beneath ideological debate, and the song cannot
ultimately be "just a song" any more, as Willie pleads for
her own. A further reference to exiled German artists (like
the disbanded Comedian Harmonists) comes with the acoustic
torture scene, where Robert Mendelsson is confined to a cell
with a constantly unresolved section of the song repeated
indefinitely as if the needle were perpetually stuck in the
groove. The model was surely Billy Wilder's One, two,
three (US 1961), in which the lyrics "It was an itsy
bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini" are meant to
soften up a man being interrogated before the accusing
question (in German) implying he's an American spy. Or still
further back, Fritz Lang's Scarlet street (1945) has
another scene with a needle stuck in a groove. Wilder and Lang,
as émigré directors, link well with
Fassbinder's theme of the transportability of "national"
art, as well as consolidating auteur-driven cinephilia. But
the latter is never an insider's art for art's sake: it
links social critiques of German history to other artists'
approaches to other, but related, moments of that history.
When in Lili Marleen the Nazi functionary Henkel
twiddles with a world globe, Fassbinder draws on a
celebrated scene in Charles Chaplin's The great
dictator (US 1940). All these film references in Lili
Marleen go beyond its oft cited general allegiance to
the UFA style of the 1930s and 1940s. They also stake out an
alternative path for German film history, both in provenance
and in themes. And they simultaneously relate back to
Fassbinder's central preoccupations in his own film in
creating a kind of parallel between German history and the
song's history: constant in their subject matter (at the
level where the song is "just a song"), but wildly
fluctuating, sometimes within the one audience, in their
reception. In his classic
article on the family melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser stakes out
the broad background of the American cinema as "determined
(...) by an ideology of the spectacle and the spectacular,
(...) essentially dramatic (as opposed to lyrical - i.e.,
concerned with mood or the inner self) and not conceptual
(dealing with ideas and the structures of cognition and
perception)..." [10]
In films of the New German Cinema it was virtually
impossible to bypass the conceptual, and not to deal with
ideas arising from one's national history and particularly
recent history. Lili Marleen, for instance, while
certainly not lyrical (the weakness of its love-strand) but
beholden to the spectacular - outright pandering to
Fassbinder's Hollywood aspirations, its critics claimed -
nonetheless retains a concern with the conceptual. And this
link to history is what perhaps characterizes Fassbinder
most among the contemporary European directors with whom his
name is linked as auteur. [9]
The melos of melodrama is largely neglected in
connection with Fassbinder. An exception is Caryl Flinn's
treatment of the important topic of "Music and the
melodramatic past of New German Cinema" in Melodrama:
stage picture screen, ed. Jacky Bratton et al. (London:
B.F.I., 1994), 106-18. [10]
Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of sound and fury: observations on
the family melodrama", in Film theory and criticism:
introductory readings, ed. Gerald Mast et al. (New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 523. The past
revisited might be the musical past as well, often invested
with an ideological overlay, and still shaping the current
cultural climate. This is the subversive aspect of many of
the musical quotations in Fassbinder, whether from art or
popular music. In Fear eats the soul, the Arab music
that draws Emmi to the Gastarbeiter (guest workers)
pub in the first place is an escape from all familiar
associations. For these reminders intrude everywhere: Emmi
was a member of the Nazi Party ("like almost everyone", she
claims), and of all the restaurants in Munich her wedding
feast alone with Ali takes place in Hitler's favourite
haunt. The counterpoint to the Arab melody is a German song
on the jukebox whose text intones: "Come, you black gypsy,
play something for me..." "Black" of course is transparently
applicable to Ali, and his subsequent restless wandering -
back to the much younger pub owner - matches the stereotype
of "gypsy". In a film
invoking the Nazi shadow cast on the present this just might
create a continuity of attitude between the forced labour of
concentration camps and the ostracized guest workers: what
it beyond doubt alludes to is a solidarity of bourgeois
rejection. So strongly does the unlikely pair
feel their pariah status that at one point in the film both
become "gypsies" in simply fleeing, but the 19th century
topos of retreat into a private idyll is no longer
representable and this stage of the narrative remains a
dramatic gap. Whatever simple affect the song's text might
once have had, it has lost, and any momentary immersion of
Emmi's self can only come through totally unfamiliar music.
The leitmotif in this film, a recurring snippet, was penned
by Fassbinder himself as yet another facet of the auteur:
[11]
he called it "Eine kleine Liebe". [11]
Herbert Spaich, Rainer Werner Fassbinder : Leben und
Werk (Weinheim : Beltz, 1992), 256. Early on in
Chinese roulette (Germany 1976), the viewer hears a
section close to the end of Mahler's Eighth Symphony. The
lush fullness of the music, nearing its long-delayed finale,
contrasts starkly with the barrenness, the lack of visual or
emotional opulence, of the film's opening frames, with the
emotional void sustained to the end (midst coruscating
camera work and virtuosic mise-en-scène which,
without an emotional referent, emphasize the vacuum all the
more strongly). There may be tenuous connections to the plot
of Fassbinder's film - his characters are called Angela and
Gabriel; the text to the Mahler is the end of Faust
II complete with angelic hordes - but basically this is
music distanced from its "earlier contexts, identities or
fantasies."[12]
It is used here substantially as (ironically totally
inappropriate) mood rather than in the sense of being a
cultural marker. [12]
Flinn, 115. It's worth
mentioning that Fassbinder claimed Mahler's Eighth was his
most personal piece of music, the music which best expressed
himself, [13]
which might support a totally eclectic view of his use of
the classics. The same has been claimed for, or rather
levelled at, Peter Weir. Certainly Fassbinder does use music
across films, e.g. the final duet from Der
Rosenkavalier both in Angst vor der Angst
(Germany 1975) and The marriage of Maria Braun. But
in both cases the libretto ("ist ein Traum, kann nicht
wirklich sein", "'Tis a dream, it cannot be real") is
factored in with poisonously satirical effect. He can use
gesturally melodramatic art music as "mood" - e.g. the Bruch
Violin Concerto no. 1 in Martha and Veronika
Voss. Character constellations are sketched through
musical tastes, as with Helmut's imposition of Orlando di
Lasso (here seemingly equated with bloodlessness) on his
wife as part of her unsentimental education in
Martha, and the preference of the same film's title
figure for Lucia di Lammermoor, which also takes on
narrative significance in presaging her own mad scenes.
Further instances show contrapuntal connections between
music and film action. In Rio das mortes (Germany
1970) a conversation between two women is underpinned by the
celebrated Albinoni Adagio, and the sole appearance of a
landlady asking for the rent sees her go back to warbling
Puccini with unabated gusto once her mission has proved
unsuccessful. But in a context like the plot of Lili
Marleen, whatever the degree of conscious programming by
Fassbinder and/or Peer Raben,
Mahler's
Eighth (conducted towards the end by Robert) takes on
additional overtones. As cultural spectacle it sets up a
high art parallel to the song "Lili Marleen", while as
validation of the film's ironies, it belongs to the postwar
corpus of Germanic music, within its most characteristic
genre, the symphony, despite its composer having fallen foul
of Nazi racial politics. This sort of
example illustrates how Fassbinder can, at least on
occasion, go far beyond the more idiosyncratic side of the
auteur, to juggle cultural icons in sovereign fashion and
release new energies from their potentially clichéd
reception. This is where Fassbinder succeeds in transporting
Hollywood to Germany. But the German dimension, especially
throughout the final sequence of The marriage of Maria
Braun, where a non-German audience is privy through
subtitles to the banal dialogue of the reunited lovers but
not to the implications of the increasingly raucous radio
broadcast of the World Cup Soccer final, can be seen as
Fassbinder's final blow for national identity. For these
significations remain insider ciphers: as ambiguous, through
their Hollywood packaging, as the assertive subtitle of
Reitz's Heimat (Germany 1984): "made in Germany". In
English in the original, this slogan paradoxically
advertises a quality German product, in a general context
going well beyond this film. The finding of identity, after
all, is in the language of the occupier, the language of
Hollywood. [13]
Hans Günther Pflaum, Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
Bilder und Dokumente (Munich: Spangenberg, 1992),
76.
4054 words
Abstract
| Printer
version
Fassbinder and
auteurism
Fassbinder in
the context of post-war German filmmaking and
culture
Fassbinder's use
of sound and music
Music and
melodrama in Fassbinder [9]
