WORLD ON A WIRE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

Made for West German television, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 3½-hour Welt am Draht is based on American novelist Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 Simulacron-3. Resembling Edward Albee’s astounding play Tiny Alice, which was first produced the same year as Galouye’s novel was published, Fassbinder’s legendary science-fiction masterpiece revolves around Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch, convincing and compelling), technical director at the Institute for Cybernetics and Futurology, who comandeers Simulacron-3, a state-sponsored computer project aimed at creating a “miniature artificial reality,” ostensibly to predict various trends in society, such as in consumerism and transportation. However, the question arises, once some headway has been made, which is the original dimension and which is the copy, which the “reality” and which the “replica.” To put the question differently, is “virtual reality” an invention or a discovery? Strange things, let me tell you, have been going on at the Institute, where Stiller’s predecessor—well, who is to say what happened to him? He dematerialized—disappeared.
     Leaning, stylistically, beautifully (although less romantically) on Jean-Luc Godard’s immemorial Alphaville (1965), and on colorless color rather than gorgeous, haunting black and white, Fassbinder never takes a false or cheesy step; we aren’t in the trash-land here of The Matrix or Avatar. This ride is engrossing, immeasurable fun, sparked by brilliant mise-en-scène that plays visual jazz with mirror-images, for instance, beginning in the “reflection” and withdrawing the camera to reveal that what we might have thought was “substance” isn’t. Indeed, Fassbinder repeated his labyrinthine, evocative mirror-imaging, as well as his propensity here to shoot through glass, in his Despair (1978), from Nabokov. Receding multiple reflections in Welt am Draht pay sparkling homage to the Hall of Mirrors in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).
     Are we mere “identity units” in a computerized “reality”? Stay tuned.

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THE STATIONMASTER’S WIFE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977)

In Bavaria in the late 1920s, Xaver Ferdinand Maria Bolwieser (Kurt Raab, pitch-perfect), railroad stationmaster and Nazi Party member, finds himself miserably married to Hanni once he learns of her (it turns out, serial) adultery. Tried and sentenced for perjury he had committed for Hanni’s benefit at her trial for adultery with the local butcher, Bolwieser explodes with misogynism. Hanni has “ruined” him, he insists. But, as with Professor Immanuel Rath vis-à-vis Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), Bolwieser’s misogynism may not have been caused by Hanni’s behavior; rather, it may be what drew him to Hanni in the first place. Bolwieser, after all, contributed the masochism to their sadomasochistic marital relationship.
     Ninety minutes shorter than his 3⅓-hour version for West German television, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Oskar Maria Graf’s 1931 novel Bolwieser revolves around this marriage, finding in one partner’s cold cruelty, and the other’s subservience and self-pity, promptings for both Nazism and growing public acceptance of it. Hitler’s lunatic party exploited Germany’s economic woes and decimated prestige as a result of its First World War defeat.
     Largely, it is one of Fassbinder’s slackest films. However, it is not without interest. The screeching of the caged pet in their home—a cockatoo, I believe—parodies the Bolwiesers and projects a sense of Germany’s distress. Shots of the couple, or of one or the other, through windows and in mirrors suggest life, obstructed and distorted, at a remove from its own existence: another index of the national mood and personality. Considerable darkness points to Germany’s postwar humiliation and the far more traumatic period Germany was entering. Silken camera movements are shredded by sculpted compositions: shots of the couple, one person behind the other, each facing in a different direction.

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

Perhaps it is the confinement to a single room and adjacent spaces in one two-floor apartment that accounts for writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s achievement of such creative, captivating mise-en-scène in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, based on his play. The claustrophobia of the set—fashion designer Petra von Kant’s apartment, although richly dressed, is cramped—may have spurred Fassbinder to “create space” by careful attendance to the objects and characters we see, their arrangement for the camera, including startling juxtapositions, as well as diverse camera angles and subtle camera movements. In a film that also “creates space” by the use of mirror-images, it becomes clear that this “opening up” of rigidly confined space implies its exact opposite by underscoring the confinement that requires this visual manipulation; and all this suits Fassbinder’s theme of curbed or severely restrained freedom—if you will, the illusion of freedom that Fassbinder makes correlative to the illusion of space.
     It is Petra von Kant’s bedroom where the film’s principal “action” unfolds—but a bedroom that doubles as living room and studio work space. Its centerpiece, covering a wall whose vast though insufficient size has required its being cropped, is a photographic blowup of Poussin’s painting Midas and Bacchus, and the centerpiece of that is the nude Bacchus, whose frontal view indicates the idea of power that permeates everything that the film shows us. Fassbinder’s blend of photo-mural and other elements of the mise-en-scène, including the characters (themselves flattened images), constitutes the richest use of a painting in all of cinema.
     Additionally, all the main visual and dramatic elements, including who is doing what for whom and who appears more prominently in the frame, help us to understand who holds particular power at a given moment. When on her birthday Petra reveals to her visiting mother her lesbian relationship with the young companion (Hanna Schygulla, beauteous, craftily ambiguous) who has abandoned her, there is a stunning shot of Mother’s standing legs in the right foreground; Petra, who worries she will lose her mother’s love over this disclosure of lesbianism, is in the background of the shot.
     Thus jilted by Karin (and on her birthday!), Petra lives alone except for Marlene, her co-designer, whom she treats as an abused servant as compensation for the abuse that she feels life has dealt her. (Marlene remains a mute character throughout the film.) Gaby, Petra’s daughter, was born months after her father, Petra’s first husband, died in a road accident; Petra has recently divorced her second husband, who abused her, including sexually. It is friend Sidonie who introduces Petra to Karin Thimm, who has abandoned her spouse in hopes of becoming a fashion model. Impermanence is the one constant for Karin, whose father murdered her mother before committing suicide. Thus controlled by their pasts, lovers Petra and Karin each desires freedom, but Karin, because she is so much younger and more beautiful, is far better equipped to indulge the illusion. Petra feels emotionally bound to Karin and their relationship, and Fassbinder unerringly charts the shift in power from Petra to Karin. Emaciated, alcoholic, overplaying her hand for fear of losing it, Petra comes to resemble the nude mannequins that are strewn about in the apartment—a shimmering symbol of female disadvantage in a male-dominated society, and of gay disadvantage in a straight-dominated society. There can be little doubt that notoriously abusive, caustic Fassbinder finds an alter ego in Petra von Kant.
     German Film Awards: best film, actress (Margit Carstensen, Eva Mattës—as Petra and Gabriele), cinematographer (Michael Ballhaus, whose colors and use of deep focus are vivid).

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THE AMERICAN SOLDIER (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Concluding writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s early gangster trilogy, Der amerikanische Soldat is a near-masterpiece whose continual reference point is Jean-Luc Godard’s five years-earlier Alphaville. Also in gorgeous black-and-white, Fassbinder’s film creates a noirish landscape; although its Munich necessarily fails to be as romantic as otherworldly Alphaville, a futuristic Paris-and-beyond, it, too, is a place of dark, semi-delirious dreams. Ricky, its protagonist, has a German mother, an American father; after serving in Vietnam, he has come for a visit. Hired as an assassin by three cops, he continues doing what the U.S. military trained him to do. One of his hits, at point-blank range, is the woman in his arms: a stunning hommage to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).
     Ricky briefly visits his mother and infantile younger brother, whose homosexual infatuation he brushes aside—again, the feeling is. But we can see, even if Ricky cannot, that Ricky perpetually denies his own rigidly suppressed gayness as he cuts a ridiculously exaggerated heterosexual figure. With Ricky, misogynism could be either the odd element “in” or “out,” the behavior either insisting upon or contesting his heterosexuality.
     The final shot is brilliant. Ricky is shot to death at a train station when the unexpected appearance of Ricky’s mother and brother, to say goodbye, distracts him, giving his two captives a chance to turn tables. In hilariously, painfully protracted slow motion, Ricky falls, whereupon—the slow motion continues—his brother descends upon Ricky’s corpse with a brace of embraces. Because Ricky’s mother remains absolutely still in the background of the shot (visually, her son’s death has frozen the life out of her), the slow motion possesses the illusion of belonging, being intrinsic, to the action to which it was subsequently applied.
     Time, it appears, has the last image.

THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971)

Händler der vier Jahreszeiten filters most everything through economic arrangements. One might assume that something suiting this description would be dry, offputting, schematic; yet writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film is humane, moving, rich. It ends with a veiled suicide, a night’s drinking by a man whose recent heart attack requires him to refrain from alcohol; Hans Epp feels an utter failure because both wife and mother seem to adjust their sense of his worth according to how much money he makes. Hans, beautifully played by Hans Hirschmüller (best actor, German Film Awards), is a street fruit peddler. He was once a police clerk but lost that job in disgrace when he was caught being lewinskied by an arrested prostitute—a haunting figure thereafter. Hans was further degraded in the Foreign Legion, when his whipping outdoors by a black Arab—played by El Heïdi ben Salem, Fassbinder’s lover—wasn’t halted by two fellow soldiers until he was about to be shot to death. Apparently they were indulging their sadism at Hans’s expense. “We couldn’t come any quicker,” these buddies feebly explain. Hans, humiliated: “Why didn’t you let him kill me?” One wonders if the Arab was paid by them to do just what he did—which, if so, means he was not really paid for his own murder. The event provides the film with a stunning, disquieting late flashback.
     Irm Hermann (best actress, German Film Awards) is a bit wearying as short Hans’s tall wife, Irmgard; but Hanna Schygulla is both robust and kind as Hans’s sister, Anna. One wishes that her part were more extensive.
     Hans’s most complex relationship, however, is with Harry, his “friend” from the Legion, who will be co-opted by the widow when she needs a new mate.