Congratulations! Odds are if you're an avid reader of Mr. Skin, you've outlived Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 just one month after turning 37. Now for the really depressing statistic, which is that you're also forty-plus feature films shy of making as many films as Fassbinder did in his short tenure on our planet. I've often heard Fassbinder described as an acquired taste, and that's true, at least on a surface level. To truly understand his films, you need to view his progression as a filmmaker, and I think I've put off one of these truly in-depth SKIN-depth Looks for a long time,the dreaded three-parter.
There's enough reason here for me to tackle this because, like ripping off a band-aid, sometimes you've just got to bite the bullet and get through a truly prolific filmmaker's catalog. I chose Fassbinder because he's got a dense catalog, cranking out at least two films—or one epic television series—every year from 1969 until his death in 1982. His films are loaded with sex and nudity, sometimes when the plot calls for it and sometimes when he's just feeling like an anarchic madman.
Born in West Germany in 1945, literal weeksafter the Germans surrendered to end WWII, Fassbinder often lied about his age, lowering it to better claim status as part of the post-war generation. In actuality, he was more like the father of Germany's post-war generation, born right on this side of democracy. After spending the early 60s studying acting and writing prolifically, he joined the Munich-Action Theatre in 1967 and began developing his directorial style. He then made the leap to feature filmmaking, after spending his youth making 8mm films, in 1969, bringing a bold new vision of late 20th century Germany to the world. He kept one foot in the theatrical world over the next few years, however, steeping himself in Brecht's deconstructionist minimalism.
In the fifteen years leading up to his death, Fassbinder cranked out forty-four feature films and television productions, fifteen stage plays, and went from using drugs as a way to keep pace with his hectic schedule, to the drugs overtaking and eventually killing him. His prolificness is nothing if not admirable, and how much his workaholic ways contributed to his own early death is certainly up for debate, but the body of work he left behind is both awe-inspiring and daunting as hell. Don't worry, though, we're gonna go slow.
Fassbinder lived a life of contradiction and his worst tendencies seem to come out in his earliest work. The more films he made, the more he suppressed his anger, but it was positively bursting behind the seams of all his early work. From April 1969 when he rolled cameras on Love is Colder than Death, untilPioneers in Ingolstadt completed production in early 1971, Fassbinder did not stop working for more than a week at a time. Immediately after premiering Pioneers,he took an eight month break—the longest of his entire career—and that's as far as we'll go for this first installment. He makes a sharp turn into his period spent riffing on American melodrama starting with The Merchant of Four Seasons, which will begin our discussion next week.
For now, let's go back to the early days of Fassbinder, a wild 21 months that saw him produce 11 feature films—or feature length-plus films for television. It all started with his riff on American gangster pictures of the 40s and the French New Wave...
Love is Colder Than Death (1969)
Fassbinder's debut feature is steeped in the French New Wave traditions of dangerous men in trenchcoats and fedoras, and women who will sell those men out in a moment to get what she needs. Unlike the various Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Melville films this seems to call to mind, however, Fassbinder brings a distinctly German sensibility to the film. Rather than casting himself in the cool role of fedora'd hitman Bruno, Fassbinder casts himself as Franz, a low-rent thug whose refusal to join a crime syndicate makes him the next target of the very syndicate that solicited his services.
The film is notable for introducing two of Fassbinder's favorite actors and collaborators. First is Ulli Lommel, who plays the suave but easily duped Bruno, and Hanna Schygulla, perhaps the single most important artistic partner of his career. Here, Fassbinder casts Schygulla as Joanna, a lady of the evening whose mortal sin is that she actually loves Franz. This doesn't stop her from sleeping with Bruno, planning arobbery and escape with him, and then tipping off the cops to their plight, who in turn kill Bruno. If the women in Fassbinder's films—often played by Schygulla—have anything to spare, it's dubiousness.
Fassbinder's camera is drawn to Schygulla in the same way Godard's was drawn to Jean Seberg or Truffaut's to Catherine Deneuve, and he gives her the same tender love and care his French forebears afforded their leading ladies. There's also more than a touch of Ingmar Bergmanand his camera's adoration of Liv Ullmann in there as well, and to go way, way back, von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. His camera finds her stripping nude for her lover and just lingers as she strips down, giving the audience the same joy of discovery as the characters...
Schygulla is no doubt a beautiful woman, but Fassbinder's camera gives her a sultriness and a vulnerability that might not otherwise exist in the performance alone. It's a wonderful pairing of actress and director and they would compliment each other for years to come...
Katzelmacher (1969)
Fassbinder's second film is even more incendiary, and a much clearer precursor to the work of filmmakers like Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark. The film is basically an aimless couple of days spent with working class West German guys and gals that gets disrupted by the arrival of Jorgos (Fassbinder), a Greek immigrant. At first, the men in town take to Jorgos, but when he begins dating Marie (Hanna Schygulla), their opinion of himwarpsas he represents the change they fear. More immigrants will soon arrive, they fear, and take their women and their jobs, and the mob mentality eventually overwhelms poor Jorgos.
It says something of Fassbinder's immense self-loathing that he would cast himself as theperson that every man in town hates. The portions of the film before Jorgos arrives on the scene, though, play out not unlike a Larry Clark movie, with sexy ladies like Lilith Ungerer hanging out in bed topless, begging their men to come back to bed...
Also, before Jorgos becomes a perceived threat, we see what poor Marie's sex life is like, and it's not pretty. She gets roughed up by a guy who promised her money to sleep with him. We get a nice look at Hanna Schygulla's breasts, all while building up tremendous empathy for her character...
It's all very avant-garde and free-flowing before Jorgos shows up, at which point it becomes much more like what one would expect a Fassbinderfilm to look and feel like. It's obviously an intentional shift in tone, but he tends to favor the tone of the latter half of the film as his career progresses. The experimental style fades, it gets moved to the back burner, but thankfully it never goes away.
The American Soldier (1970)
Fassbinder completed three more films before coming back to nudity for this, his fourth of five films in 1970. This one is right in that same vein as Love is Colder than Death, a gangster movie with fedoras and pressed suits and something that, on the surface anyway, glamorized that lifestyle. Vietnam vet Ricky (Karl Scheydt) assassinates people for a living, but while in Munich on a job, a seduction attempt by one of the men he's after backfires. When one of Ricky's marks sends his wife Rosa (Elga Sorbas) as a distraction, but she ends up falling for Ricky instead.
This is the main crux of the film, but a lot of it is about the day to day of being an assassin, what that life is like. How casual one has to be in the business of taking lives and how accepting most people are of the notion that their lives are almost over. Fassbinder loves film noir and French New Wave films and combined the two in brilliant fashion once again, in a probably more wholly successful fashion than his first attempt.
Elga Sorbas, who passed away in 2018, made several more films with Fassbinder, including The Merchant of Four Seasons the following year. Here he lovingly shoots her gorgeous naked body as she strips down to get in bed with her man...
Whity(1971)
Fassbinder's first period piece—set in the Southwestern United States in 1878—this flick was set in America, shot in Spain, and starred mostly Germans. Hanna Schygulla is in it, too, and you'll never guess what she plays in the movie? Man, you said prostitute on your first guess without even thinking about it. You really do know your Fassbinder!
The title character is a mixed-race butler played byGünther Kaufmann, and when the family's patriarch dies, his two sons begin to demean and belittle poor Whity. Little do they know that he's actually their half-brother, courtesy of their father sleeping with the cook, Whity's mother. Fassbinder's first attempt to dig into a social outrage outside of his native Germany is uneven at best. Whity's friendship with Hanna (Schygulla), the prototypical hooker with a heart of gold, is what ends up saving him from a life in which he is still more or less enslaved.
Hanna Schygulla does her thing, as usual, and playing a hooker named Hanna no less, but she makes the best of it by flaunting her fun bags when they just refuse to stay inside her corset...
Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)
We wrap up the first part of our discussion on Fassbinder with his eleventh feature film in just over two years, a twisted film-within-a-film puzzle thatbecomes more complexthe more you attempt to dissect it. It begins with a Pirandello-esque set-up, wherein a group of actors have assembled to make a film but cannot find the director or any of the crew. The actors begin to get to know one another over the course of a couple of unsupervised days that find them bed hopping and partying to excess. When the director shows up, we're left to wonder if this was a social experiment or just the logical extension of what happens when you leave actors alone with no guidance.
Who knows for sure? It could be both of those things and about fifteen others, all at the same time. Fassbinder's main interest at this point in time is just prodding his characters like a scientist would mice in a maze. He's pushing all of them into various corners, knowing that they won't help but crash into one another again soon enough, and that's what is going on for most of this film's running time. The film-within-the-film's star is Eddie Constantine—from Godard's Alphaville, among many other things—playing himself, or at least a version of himself. He gets to bed Hanna Schygulla—once again playing a character named Hanna—and she walks nude out of the room as he takes a phone call, flaunting her ass, and plenty of sass, all the way out of the bedroom...
In the same year he collaborated with Robert Altman on McCabe Mrs. Miller, Leonard Cohen's music found an entirely new audience thanks to its use here by Fassbinder. Five songs off Cohen's first album, including "Suzanne" and "So Long Marianne," are used in the film, just making it that much cooler. Fassbinder's about to burn out, however, and American melodrama is coming to his rescue. Join us again next week for part two!
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Non-nude images via IMDb
