In the late nineteen-sixties, when the West German film industry was moribund, the young Rainer Werner Fassbinder more or less single-handedly rejuvenated and re-energized it. This isn’t meant to minimize the importance of Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, or others who formed something of a German New Wave (albeit one far looser in its personal relationships than the French one), but Fassbinder’s ambition was distinctive: he sought to document a wide range of contemporary German lives in all their ordinary agonies—and he did so with an eruptive rapidity. For instance, between 1969 and 1974, the year of “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (which I discuss in the clip above), Fassbinder directed nineteen feature films as well as a television series, and his characters came from the streets and the factories, the bars and the bedrooms of the day.
In an age without studios, he became something of a one-man studio, with his own theatre company—the Anti-Theatre—providing the recurring cast of actors, and his working methods also borrowed from classic movie traditions: he was a master of melodrama who was inspired, in large part, by the films of Douglas Sirk (born Claus Detlev Sierck, who began his career in Germany in the nineteen-thirties before emigrating to Hollywood). The connections are explicit in “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” which borrows both its plot and some key motifs, narrative and visual, from Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows.” There, Jane Wyman plays a well-to-do suburban widow who begins an affair with her gardener (Rock Hudson), a younger man who works with his hands, thereby scandalizing her neighbors and her collegiate children. In Fassbinder’s version, the older woman is working-class herself (she’s a cleaning woman) and something of an outsider (her husband was a Polish immigrant), and the younger man she marries is a Moroccan guest worker whose German is expressive but imprecise (the film’s German title, “Angst essen Seele aus,” is in Ali’s pidgin German).
The film’s opening epigram, “Happiness is not fun,” is another cinematic reference—to a line from a film by another German émigré director, Max Ophüls’s “Le Plaisir,” from 1952. Fassbinder’s historicism is a crucial aspect of his modernism: he didn’t just make use of prior forms, he quoted them, and derived from them the ironies implicit in his melodramatic styles—his condensation of an intensely critical sociopolitical view of modern Germany into the terms of private emotion.
Fassbinder died in 1982, at the age of thirty-seven, by which time he had made forty features, including the fifteen-hour mini-series adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz”—which, in its crushingly intimate view of the Weimar inferno as it gave rise to Nazism, is absolutely essential DVD viewing.
