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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1982
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FASSBINDER'S FOUR DAUGHTERS GERMANY IN FILM "People here have an inner life and
an outer life, and the two have nothing to do with each other. " ─Lola in
Lola by Harlan Kennedy Rainer Werner Fassbinder: whiz-kid and delinquent. Frenetic industry; envenomed
bayings at all consensus-wisdom spokesmen, from
pressmen to politicians; clothes that ranged from paratrooper chic to
S-M leathery machismo; a love-hate relationship of unyielding demonism with
his own country and its recent history. During Fassbinder's life, many a bewildered filmgoer scratched
his head and wondered: How could a director who minted such gilt-edged
movie-images flesh forth in himself such hostility of mien and manner? One answer is that, in
the way he lived his life, Fassbinder was happy to rail
against society's camouflages – while in his movies, like any gifted artist,
he let himself fall in love with the rotten as well as the upright. Art gives
the devil advocacy as strong as the saint's, and dandles its special charms
more vigorously. Moral pamphlets teach you to stay behind the front-line of
the Good while recognizing the Bad from afar. Art teaches you to cross the war-zone: to
know and empathize with the bad, and for a brief span to share its skin and
soul. The four major movies Fassbinder made
about wartime and postwar Germany – chapter-headings in a roman fleuve
of national history and interconnected with images and
character-links – pieced together his vision of the world he lived in: The
Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen, Lola, Veronika Voss. It was a world that
first went spectacularly wrong while humanity righteously hissed and hit
back; and then, after defeat, changed course to go more subtly wrong, while
mankind applauded its "miracles." The films are the
cornerstones of a country's bildungsroman, and a charting of Fassbinder's own emotional genealogy and iconography.
They are also the best collective testimony Fassbinder
left
behind of his brilliance as a movie Expressionist. In this final quartet we can
see his ability to paint the outer tones of his films to match the inner
tones, and to let different works dovetail into each other dramatically and
thematically. §The Marriage of Maria
Braun (1979), shot in bled and pasty
color, is a film about cultural and spiritual anemia: a leeched-out society, vampirized by greed and hypocrisy, masquerading as a
postwar social miracle. §Lili Marleen (1980), set in the Nazi heyday itself, is a whirlwind
of polychrome kitsch and Ophulsian baroque: a
culture on overkill rapidly moving toward self-destruction. §Lola (1981) plunked down in the
full flush of mid-Fifties expansionism, war-traumas long scabbed over, is
given the grainy fluorescence and lollipop colors of cheaply garish German
sex films of the time. Its jejune color-palette essayed ersatz, innocence
just as the old soft-porn movies were guised as Naturist purity or
sex-education documentaries. §Veronika Voss (1982), also set in the
Fifties, Fassbinder's visual journey winds full
circle to the soul's anemia. Only this time color is gone altogether, in a
monochrome explosion of pain and dementia set in a land where sanity and
happiness are long-lost causes. ● Fassbinder put
a woman at the center of each of these films, and made her the force-field of
the action. She isn't saint or devil. Nor is she a male chauvinist's tabula rasa, to be passively imprinted by a
patriarchal society. Rather, she is a spirit of chameleon versatility; or a
moral pentathlete capable of leaping hurdles,
covering distances and executing gymnastic turns more nimbly and speedily
than men. Fassbinder's male characters are solider,
stolider. They're sculpted firm in their
fanaticism, or their honesty, or their stupidity, or their cunning. In Fassbinder's women there is no psychic predetermination.
So the contours and convolutions and genetic thrashings of a Germany being
endlessly reborn are reflected in the tints and textures of his heroines'
chameleon skin. Indeed they can change their own camouflage at will to
persuade the ruling male order to see the world as they wish it to be seen. Fassbinder's aim isn't to
perpetuate sexual stereotypes (woman as power-behind-the-throne, the Jezebel
manipulator) or to hew new ones of his own. His women, rather, are subtly
hyperbolized, bisexualized, by being a homosexual
filmmaker's creation. At their most extreme, they are strutters
in drag: Lola's nightclub acts, bawling Dietrich
kitsch;
Maria Braun careering up her ladder, out-Crawfording
Crawford. Elsewhere they are supple androgyny conjurors, blending ornately
yielding sensuality with a steely realism and survival instinct. Though Fassbinder's four movies were not turned out in
historical chronology – the Nazi-set Lili
Marleen (1933-45) follows the mostly postwar Maria Braun –
the dramatic and chromatic parabola of the quartet is deliberate and
flawless. It moves from anemia to multicolor and back again; and from the
schematic, decade-spanning pilgrim's progress of the first heroine, through
the more curtailed meteor-arc of Lili
Marleen and the small-town writhings
of Lola, to the ultimate, shock-eyed stasis of Veronika Voss. In the trajectory from
an evolutionary narrative mode to one of virtual petrification,
form in Fassbinder's quartet exactly mirrors
content. As Germany advanced into the Fifties, he suggests, the nation began
to paint-or-whitewash-itself into a corner. Movement and moral choice become
ever more difficult, hedged round by hardening postwar hypocrisies, by
cover-ups firmly lidded, and by spurious, rigid poses of fake integrity.
What begins as an athletic moral duplicity (in Maria Braun) becomes a posture of
cynical moral automatism (in Lola) and finally a paralyzing and total
schizophrenia of mind and soul: Veronika Voss' brain is her own
padded cell, where ALL THE WORLD'S A SOUND-STAGE is writ large in neon
no-exit signs. ● To begin with, under Fassbinder's guidance, his heroines are there partly as Norns of Nemesis: to give a patriarchal world enough rope
to hang itself. Maria Braun is a Mata
Hari, who proves that the means justify the end. She
twines a man-managed society around her own will, executing its dream and
guiding it to its own ruin. Her end: to win back her jailed husband and his
love, and to bankroll their future life together. Her means: to advance
herself through bedrooms and buros
to
a rosy-rich career as an industrialist's moll and partner. The consequence: a
foredoomed moral schizophrenia, of honorable ideals attained by corrupt
actions, which ultimately hurls her and Germany back into the Gas Age with a
wrap-up explosion that makes matchsticks of her dream home. Fassbinder's Germany in Maria
Braun is wholly landscaped by war trauma. The movie's compositions are un-centered,
ungainly,
full of empty space, like the rooms and the society. It's as if the signposts
taken down in war as an anti-invasion precaution have never been replaced,
and Maria rustles sphinx-like through the land, pointing out the way for the
victims of her attention. She teaches her way to love to the black American
serviceman whom she bats her eyelids at, beds, then brains with a bottle
when her Enoch Arden of a husband returns.
And she imparts the way to wealth to the Franco-German businessman (Ivan Desny), whom she turns into
a human building-block for the German economic miracle. Hanna Schygulla, a
point-nosed sprite with cheeks like roses and a simper that kills, makes
Maria Braun and Lili Marleen two of a kind. Though
Maria is more destiny's mistress and Lili
destiny's
handmaid, both are roasted in the fire of the German war years. And, like
salamanders, they survive, at least until the token last-reel comeuppance –
Maria in her holocaust, Lili in her rejection by
both Nazi fame and her lover's love. Maria Braun gives us a heroine who
plays at being everyone's instrument, for pleasure or profit, and actually
makes them her instruments-manufactures the compost of greed and envy
on which the land will reflower. In Lili Marleen, though, the heroine is the virgin sheet – and the corrupt
land writes on it. The Germany of Lili Marleen is no land of ashes and
bomb-cracked walls, but an awesome structure of perfect, blazing symmetry.
The colors burst from the screen, assaulting the viewer's retinas – Third
Reich reds, imperial golds, gleaming silvers, and
azure blues – and Schygulla-Lili submits to their
passion like a blank wall before an ever-changing stroboscope. Lili is
a natural riser living in a world where the buoyancy is all provided for
her. She need only float up with it. In Lili Marleen, and in all the movies except for Maria Braun, the heroine is a
"performer." Human reflector, she mirrors and throws back the
dreams of her society. She binds up in the same psyche the corruption and
innocence of the prostitute – for in Fassbinder's
world, innocence is the planting-ground for prostitutions.
In
Lili Marleen's early scenes, Hanna Schygulla is
constantly shot next to greenery or plants: a spray of palm behind her head
in a doorway, a tracery of grass or moss seen through the skylight of her
first nightclub. But nature's innocence recedes as political parasitism
takes over, converting her to a war-machine. She is steely in silver, garish
in gold, metallic, armatured. A parallel chromatic
thrust is visible in the use of red in the movie. It seeps into Lili's sweater to match the Swastika flag at the
frontier, when she meets her Jewish lover (Giancarlo
Giannini). It ever-more-loudly incarnadines her lips. It leaps onto the stage as red roses for applause
while Fassbinder intercuts
bodies
flying in war explosions. At the end of the movie the color seeps away again
– as Lili's role in Nazi history fissures, just a
few fragments of time before Nazism itself. Maria Braun and Lili Marleen allow a glimpse of movement
and hope and, in the traditional sense, character development. Lili Marleen gives us the false and
harlot hope of Nazism, Maria Braun the real but frail hope of a
postwar moral miracle. With the narrative
mobility of these films goes a visual style that is fluid and
quasi-reportorial, at least for Fassbinder. Especially in Maria
Braun, he adopts
an almost neo-realist aesthetic: he lets the actions lead the camera. It's at
the service of his players' impulses and movements; it doesn't fix or
"compose" them within the frame. Even the poised, empurpled
glories of Lili Marleen do not prohibit fluent
camera movement, as lush tracking-shots purr in the heroine's wake along the
gold or marble corridors of Imperialism. ● As hope dwindles, and
the postwar moral clay hardens around Germany's feet, the style of the last
two movies takes on a brilliant and tragic rigidity. Frozen tableaux create a
land of despair, binding-contract hypocrisy, the dismal fettered romance of
nostalgia. Schizophrenia is the soul's fixation locked into a reality from
which it cannot escape by real movement, only by recourse to mental delusion.
Fassbinder finds its cinematic correlative in a style
that plunders from the lost baroque of old cinema – Douglas Sirk in Lola, Michael Curtiz
in Veronika Voss – yet reworks that beauty and makes it
howl with a present pain. Lola, the third of the
German quartet, seems to me the best of the four movies and Fassbinder's masterpiece. It's as concrete and
built-to-last as an Ibsen play (with the writers
of Maria Braun, Pea
Frohlich and Peter Martesheimer,
delivering a more organic, closer-knit screenplay this time), and it's
directed by Fassbinder like a firework
display of the soul. Barbara Sukowa is Lola, a sultry,
husky-voiced, small-town chanteuse with white-wedding aspirations. Fassbinder's vision of a sundered Germany – so suckled
on hypocrisy that it's become a habit and even a kind of innocence – trills
with chromatic intensity. It's as if the mind's workings have burst out onto
the screen and the "mild" Expressionism of Lili Marleen has now taken on a
strobe-lit fury. Color filters rake the
characters. They pick out nightclub Lola
in
mauves and pinks and raspberry-ripple reds. They bathe her off-duty lovelorn alter
ego in rinsing lemons and virginal whites. They halo and blue-keylight her beloved, the honest building commissioner Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who
brings a daft, Ibsenite uprightness to the
nest of municipal corruption. Lola is certainly
the most sourly funny of Fassbinder's four films
about Germany. The dialogue is a constant kick-around of sexual cynicism.
"We go to bed early here," says the snooty wife of the corrupt
building contractor Schuckert (who owns the
nightclub-brothel and monopolizes Lola's favors). "That's so we don't
get home late," chuckles Schuckert. And the
few un-cynical townspeople
in the movie are frozen into characters as stark, weird, and vivid as Jonsonian humors: Von
Bohm's spinsterly
secretary, gaunt in bird-wing hats and buck teeth; Rosel Zech (soon to be Fassbinder's Veronika
Voss) as
Frau Schuckert. But the true novelty
of the movie is the way the complex plots and supple heroines of Maria Braun and Lili Marleen have been strung into
a surreal moment glacé, where everything is explosively
compacted. The film is like a figurative action-painting. Splashes of color
chronicle the drama. When the decent,
priggish Von Bohm
falls
in love with off-duty Lola, not knowing her
nightclub other-self, he's suddenly, subtly garlanded with green motifs – Fassbinder's benediction of nature. He wears a
green-brown suit to work; he's framed against the play-strewn, green-glowing,
glassed-off corridor that lines one side of his office; he's brought flowers
by his gooey secretary. And when he discovers Lola's dread secret, the colors
flee from him in the shell-shock of ensuing scenes, and his office is snagged
into stark, fierce geometric tropes and abstractions. The message of Lola is lucid
and brutal. If you are not a member of the cabal of hypocrisy that is the
ruling class in postwar Germany, you are a freak, an outsider, an endangered
species, a holy fool. Romance is fake, cosmetic. (Even the radiant sunshine
of the church where Lola and Von Bohm court is subtly edged with the mauve of the
nightclub. ) Idealism is doomed and parodied even as it gives voice. (Von Bohm's rebuilding
conferences are held in a room with bomb-pockmarked walls amid cigar-smoke
that's like the debris-dust after a blitz.) And hope for the future is
enshrined in the youngest character, Lola's illegitimate daughter (by Schuckert), whose name harks back to the first film of
the quartet: Mariechen, or Little Maria. Veronika Voss takes us on into the promised hinterland of madness that
is the only possible next stop after Lola.
It
features a heroine, ex-Ufa film star, frozen into
rigid postures of schizophrenia, kept almost sane by the dubious ministrations
of a private drug clinic; a knight-errant newspaper reporter (Hilmar Thate), whose delving into scandal shows that the quest
for truth in postwar Germany is rewarded with hostility and obfuscation; and
a visual style that combines heyday Warner Bros.
black-and-white
with the topsy-turvy baroque of Citizen Kane. Austrian actress Rosei Zech gives her albino
beauty and ghostly elegance to the main role, making Veronika look
like Delphine Seyrig trapped in a life-sentence
Marienbad of narcotic nostalgia. "Light and dark,
those are the two secrets of cinema, did you know that?" she says to the
reporter, and Fassbinder defines the society
with the aesthetic. It's no longer merely the all-over wounded pallor of Maria
Braun, bled of
bright colors; now it's a riven, two-tone society
of wild public acclaim and spotlights on the one hand, dark private agony on
the other. The reporter sells his
story's fascination to his editor with the words: "It's a tale of
famous film stars; in the limelight yesterday, in the dark today." The
famous film stars are Germany herself: raking her psyche for past greatness,
scarred by past tragedies (though skillful cosmetic surgery disguises them),
and self-anaesthetised so long against real emotion
that it's a challenge now even to fake it. Confronting her big emotional
scene in a comeback movie, Veronika has to be squirted
with humiliating glycerin. ● In using four
different heroines to personify four different Germanys, Fassbinder worked
the age-old convention of the damsel-in-distress – from Biblical Ruth amid
the alien corn to Lana Turner agonistes in Sirk's films – for infinitely
pliant variations. Is she victim or villain? Manipulator or manipulated?
And if she is a persecuted beauty in bondage, might it not be that no one
really wants to free her, that they prefer their country bound,
blindfold, gagged, infinitely compliant? See no evil, hear no evil, allow all
evil. Non-Teuton heads may puzzle over why West German filmmakers,
from Kluge to Schlondorff, as well as Fassbinder, have had such a field-day bad-mouthing their own country.
Perhaps the evil of Nazism sunk its roots so deep that distrust of authority
has never been exorcised since. Today, a political frontier cuts Germany
clean in half. The result is that political schizophrenia has become a way of
life, and dialectical ponderings on different but adjacent ideologies a way
of thought. But if this
culture-climate helped form Fassbinder,
it's
worth stressing that his talent as a filmmaker did not lie in his prowess as
a political commentator of Germany today (or on the Forties or Fifties). It
lay in his extrapolation of personal fears and furies, loves and losses,
tragedies and trials, conflicts of value and vision, catalyzed by a national
history unequaled in this century for gruesome vitality and switchback
evolution. —RAINER
WERNER FASSBINDER COURTESY T.P. MOVIE
NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN THE SEPT-OCT 1982 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved |
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