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Su
originalidad alcanzó con el tiempo una dimensión distinta.
Fassbinder partió de las circunstancias y las historias de vida
más próximas a las suyas y se fue alejando hacia las más
remotas, pero uno de sus mayores rasgos de genio fue comprender
que no había distancia entre la intimidad y el espacio público y
que el secreto de tantas desgracias, de tanta crueldad social e
incluso del aniquilador mercantilismo que dejaba indefensos a
los individuos estaba íntimamente ligado a la Historia. Y que
sólo el arte podía desentrañarla. En ese camino, Fassbinder
partió de la soledad y el dolor de sus contemporáneos para
remontarse primero a los años de la Alemania de Adenauer con su
reconstrucción económica al precio del silencio y el disimulo,
hasta llegar a enfrentarse finalmente con el período del
surgimiento del nazismo. Toda su obra se resignifica cuando las
calamidades históricas convergen con las privadas y esa decisión
se concentra de algún modo en los catorce capítulos de la serie
televisiva Berlin Alexanderplatz basada en la novela de
Alfred Döblin (que, de paso, prueba que una obra maestra del
cine no tiene por qué ser una película en sentido estricto). Si
se quiere representar el grado de radicalidad de la decisión de
Fassbinder, hay que pensar que su colega Wim Wenders intentó, a
partir de Las alas del deseo, mostrar una Alemania
reconciliada con los fantasmas de su pasado, mientras que
Fassbinder siempre supo que mantener abiertas las heridas era la
única esperanza de un futuro.
Un caso irrepetible
El increíble esfuerzo de Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
marcó también un límite para Fassbinder. Sus películas
posteriores mostraron, más que una declinación, a un cineasta
que empezaba a ser cooptado, que no podía desprenderse
fácilmente de los mecanismos de la fama y la publicidad, que
empezaba a hacer lo que se esperaba de él. Su reciente condición
de director célebre le restaba libertad. Con su habitual lucidez
advertía que, en adelante, se iba a parecer a la protagonista de
Lola, la prostituta que hace feliz a todo el mundo.
Godard diría de él: "¿Cómo no iba a morir joven si él solo hizo
el Nuevo Cine Alemán?" Tal vez la obra de Fassbinder fuera tan
colosal que le quedaba solamente comenzar a repetirse como una
caricatura o una parodia de su período más creativo. Es que este
titán del cine tampoco pudo con el sistema.
Si a diez años de su muerte el panorama cinematográfico mostraba
cuán imprescindible había sido su presencia, cuando han pasado
veinticinco hemos dejado de extrañarlo porque la evolución del
mundo y del cine nos convencen de que un caso como el de
Fassbinder es irrepetible. La figura del cineasta maldito, de la
estrella incandescente, del artista bohemio consumido por su
pasión pertenecen a otra época y no a la de un cine mundial más
disciplinado y profesional, de directores integrados y
previsibles. La imagen romántica de Fassbinder, con su campera y
sus anteojos negros, se ha fijado en cambio como un ícono y una
leyenda. Pertenece cada vez más a un espacio habitado por
personajes como el Che Guevara o Jim Morrison, la galería de la
revolución soñada e imposible.
El legado de Fassbinder es la increíble frescura, el insólito
vigor que conservan sus películas, mucho más que su influencia.
Esta ha sido relativa, aunque sea de buen tono nombrarlo cuando
la intimidad se muestra con un tono sórdido. A veces, cuando un
cineasta comparte con él la homosexualidad y el melodrama, se lo
señala como un heredero. Almodóvar es un ejemplo de esa
confusión, con un cine que no tiene relación alguna con la
política ni con la historia y que navega las tranquilas aguas de
la nostalgia, la integración de las minorías sexuales y la
corrección política. O Fran ois Ozon, que le declara su
admiración y ha llevado a la pantalla una de sus obras de
teatro, pero como parte de una filmografía completamente light y
pasteurizada. Por otra parte, cuando una película aislada roza
el universo de Fassbinder, suele ahuyentar al público y a la
crítica. Así, por ejemplo, el fracaso de Lejos del paraíso,
la remake de Todd Haynes de un clásico de Sirk. Así, también, el
estruendoso abucheo a Nightsongs de Romuald Karmakar, el
único de los cineastas alemanes recientes que tiene algo
genuinamente fassbinderiano. Pero existe hoy, otra vez, un nuevo
grupo de directores alemanes que, sin constituir precisamente un
movimiento, se proponen como en 1962 hacer un cine "liberado de
las convenciones de la industria establecida". Nombres como
Karmakar, pero también como Ulrich Köhler, Valeska Grisebach,
Henner Winckler, Maren Ade, Angela Shanelec y Christoph
Hochhäusler, no tienen una filiación fassbinderiana y acaso,
como suele ocurrir en situaciones semejantes, quieren
desprenderse de su influencia. Sin embargo, la audacia y la
convicción artística de Rainer Fassbinder serán el mejor ejemplo
del que pueden disponer en su carrera.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
The career and films
Controversial and prolific
German director and playwright, who attracted attention with his
politically committed and disillusioned stage plays and films.
Fassbinder's central theme was the political and social
corruption of postwar Germany. He wrote most of his plays in
1968-71 for his own "anti-theatre" in Munchen. Fassbinder
completed 41 films. Among his best-known works include The
Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Berlin Alexanderpatz
(1980), based on Alfred Döblin's novel and made for television,
and Effi Briest (1974), based on Theodore Fontane's novel
from 1894.
"To show the narrative on
film is like the author telling a story, but there's a
difference. When one reads a book, one creates - as a reader
- one's own images, but when a story is told on screen in
pictures, then it is concrete and really "complete" One is
not creative as a member of a film audience, and it was this
passivity that I tried to counter in
Effi Brief. I would
prefer people to "read" the film. It's a film which one
cannot simple experience, and which doesn't attack the
audience... one has to read it. That's the most significant
thing about the film." (Fassbinder
in Fassbinder,
ed. by Tony Rayns, 1976)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was born
in Bad Wöshofen into a bourgeois family. His father was a
doctor. When he was five, his parents divorced, and Fassbinder
was raised by his mother as an only child. In his youth,
Fassbinder started to attend movies compulsively. He dropped out
of school and worked in odd jobs. His enrollment at the Berlin
Film School was turned down. Fassbinder began his career as an
actor in fringe theatre in Munich, where founded his own theatre
company, becoming friends with Hanna Schygulla, who acted in
several of Fassbinder's films. Some of the members of the Action-Theater,
which he had joined, worked with off and on until his death. His
play, Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, was based on an actual
murder case, committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the
English moors. In Bremen Freedom, also based on
historical events, a woman systematically eliminates the men and
women who are on her way.
In the late 1960s Fassbinder
started to work with the cinema under the influence of Jean-Luc
Godard, but also the American gangster movies and such directors
as Howard Hawks, John Huston, and Raoul Walsh influenced him
deeply. Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) was a crime
film, which connected everyday oppression people experience with
criminal actions. "What you are left with when you've seen this
movie isn't that six people were murdered, that a few deaths
occurred, but that these were poor people who didn't know what
to do with themselves, who were simply plopped down as they were,
and weren't given the option - no, let's not go too far here -
who simply don't have any options." (Fassbinder in
The Anarchy of the Imagination,
1992) In his first film Fassbinder acted under the role name
Franz Walsch - referring both to Raoul Walsh and Franz Biberkopf,
who played the leading role in Fassbinder's Berlin
Alexanderpatz. Fassbinder's mother was in his second amateur
short, and later appeared in many films under the name of Lilo
Pempeit. As a creator of social melodramas Fassbinder owed much
to Douglas Sirk, who created from ridiculous scripts enjoyable
and personal films.
Much of Fassbinder's work was
financed by television. Among his over 40 full-length films are
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), The
Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981),
Veronika Voss (1982), and fourteen-part television film
Berlin Alexanderplaz (1980), Fassbinder's masterpiece.
During his most prolific period between 1969 and 1976,
Fassbinder made theatre productions in Munich, Bremen, Bochum,
Nuremberg, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, he did four radio
plays, and took roles in other director's films, including the
title part in Volker Schlöndorff's
Bertod Brecht adaptation Baal (1970). Brecht's
influence is seen in a number of Fassbinder's works, among them
Effi Briest, in which the director's aim was to create a
distance between the audience and what is happening on the
screen in the spirit of Brecht's "alienation effect". "Through
that built-in "distance," the audience has a chance to discover
its own attitude to society," Fassbinder explained.
Fassbinder created his works fast.
He operated with a group of close friends, and appeared as an
actor in several of his own films, often under the name Fitz.
"The cinema was the family life I never had at home,"
he once said. Fassbinder's friends characterized the director 'lunatico',
irresponsible, ironic, mean, and very generous. For a short time
he was married with his one of his leading ladies, Ingrid Caven.
His film scripts were unpolished, the dialogue mannered, and the
décor sparse. In spite of this, the impact of the scenes was
spellbinding. Fassbinder took his film work seriously, and was
devasted when he failed to receive the main prize for The
Marriage of Maria Brown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978.
Veronika Voss won the Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin
Festival but often the director's films aroused hostile feelings
among cinema audiences.
Between the years 1977 and 1979
Fassbinder directed three of his most personal film, that
touched his own problems and the situation in Germany, when
terrorism was rising. He saw New Germany heartless,
materialistic and intolerant. Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
told the story of Ali, a lonely Moroccan mechanic, and a lonely
widowed cleaning lady, Emmi, who is much older than he. Despite
the hostility that surrounds them, they marry and face the
racial and other prejudices. Deutchland im Herbst (1978)
showed how terrorism grows from disappointments in private life,
In einem Jahren mit 13. Monden (1978) focused on the
transsexual Erwin/Elvira; it was a desperate cry in life when
death in the only solution, and Die Dritte Generation
(1979), in which a computer sales man finances a group of
terrorists. Fassbinder's own opinions about terrorism were
ambivalent - he showed understanding to their political goals
but criticized their desperate acts.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
was a fifteen-and-a-half-hour epic made for
German television. Alfred Döblin's famous novel had been
performed as a radio play some years earlier, in 1976. The story
traced the life of Franz Biberkopf, who tries to lead what he
thinks is an honest existence. He is surrounded by thieves,
whores, pimps, killers, and Nazis. Elisabeth Trissenaar, Hanna
Schygulla, and Barbara Sukowa were his girlfriends, the elegant
score was by Peer Raben and cinematography by Xavier
Schwartzenberger.
Fassbinder dealt with relations
that are based on violence, falseness, and oppression. Although
he was homosexual, he is perhaps best remembered by his
fascinating female figures, played by Schygulla, Caven, or
Barbara Sukowa. Women were for him symbols of different social,
political and ideological situations. Veronica Voss, Lola, Maria
Braun and others reflected the director's view that women are
ruled the men and their values. According to Fassbinder, the
stronger exploit the weaker, and "love is colder than death".
Hanna Schygulla was Fassbinder's diva, Marlene Dietrich, whom he
put up on a pedestal and who rose into world fame from his
films.
Fast living and fast working
Fassbinder died of drug overdose in Munich, at the age of 36, on
June 10, 1982. He was completing the cutting of Querelle,
based on Jean Genet's play. In the story a French sailor
discovers his true homosexual nature in an infamous whosehouse.
The film was rejected even by Fassbinder's admirers. His death
marked symbolically the end of the most experimental period of
the German cinema since the 1920s.
For further reading:
I Fassbinders spejl
by Christian Braad Thomsen (1975);
Fassbinder, ed. by
Tony Rayns (1976); 'Reading the Writerly Film' by William R.
Magretta in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of
Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta
(1981); Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
Filmemacher by Kurt Raab and
Karsten Peters (1982); Rainer
Werner Fassbinder by Christian
Braad Thomsen (1983); Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, ed. by Peter Jansen
and Wolfram Schütten (1983); Die
Anarchie der Phantasie, ed by
Michael Tötenberg (1986); Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Plays,
ed. by Denis Calandra (1992); The Anarchy of the
Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes by Rainer Werner
Fassbinder et al (1992); Television, Tabloids, and Tears:
Fassbinder and Popular Culture by Jane Shattuc (1994);
Fassbinder's Germany
by Thomas Elsaesser (1995);
Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film As Private and
Public Art by Wallace Steadman
Watson (1996)
Filmography:
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Der Stadstreicher, 1965
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Das kleine Chaos, 1966
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DIE LIEBE IS KÄLTER ALS DER
TOD, 1969 - Love is Colder Than Death
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KATZELMACHER, 1968
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GÖTTER DER PEST, 1969
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WARUM LÄUFT HERR R. AMOK?,
1970
-
RIO DAS MORTES, 1970
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DAS KAFFENHAUS, 1970
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WHITY, 1970
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DIE NIKLASHAUSER FART, 1970
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DER AMERIKANISCHE SOLDAT,
1970
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WARNUNG VOR EINER HEILIGEN
NUTTE, 1970
-
PIONIERE IN INGOLSTADT, 1971
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HÄNDLER DER VIER JAHRESZEITES
- The Merchant of Four Seasons, 1972
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DIE BITTEREN TRÄNEN DER PETRA
VON KANT, 1972
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WILDWECHSEL, 1972
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ACHT STUNDEN SIND KEIN TAG,
1973 - Eight Hours Are Not a Day - five-part TV series
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BREMER FREIHEIT, 1972
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WELT AM DRAHT, 1973
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MARTHA, 1973
-
NORA HELMER, 1973 - TV
version of Ibsen's play Et Dukkehjem
-
ANGST ESSEN SEELEN AUF, 1974
- Fear Eats the Soul
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FONTANE EFFI BRIEST, 1974
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WIE EIN VOGEL AUF DEM DRAHT,
1974
-
MUTTER KÜSTLERS' FAHRT ZUM
HIMMEL, 1975
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ANGST VOR DER ANGST, 1975
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FAUSTRECHT DER FREIHEIT, 1975
- Fox and His Friends
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CHINESISCHES ROULETTE, 1976 -
Chinese Roulette
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ICH WILL DOCH NUR, DASS IHR
MICHT LIEBT, 1976
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SATANSBRATEN, 1976 - Satan's
Brew
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BOLWIESER, 1977
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FRAUEN IN NEW YORK, 1977
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DIE EHE DER MARIA BRAUN, 1978
- The Marriage of Maria Braun
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EINE REISE INS LICHT, 1978 -
Despair
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DEUTSCHLAND IM HERBST, 1978
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IN EINEM JAHR MIT 13. MONDEN,
1978
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DIE DRITTE GENERATION, 1979 -
The Third Generation
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BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, 1980 -
based on Alfred Döblin's novel
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LILI MARLEEN, 1981
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LOLA, 1981
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THEATER IN TRANCE, 1981
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DIE SEHNSUCHT DER VERONIKA
VOSS, 1982 - Veronika Voss
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QUERELLE, 1982 (based on Jean
Genet's play)
Actor:
-
TONYS FREUNDE, 1967, dir. by
Paul Vasil
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DER BRÄUTIGAM, DIE
KOMÖDIANTIN UN DER ZUHALTER, 1968, dir. by Jean-Marie Straub
-
ALARM, 1969, dir. by Dieter
Remmel
-
AL CAPONE IN DEUTSCHEN WALD,
1969, dir. by Franz Peter Wirth
-
BAAL, 1969, dir. by Völker
Schlöndorff
-
FREI BIS ZUM NÄCHSTEN MAL,
1969, dir. by Korbinian Köberle
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MATHIAS KNEISSL, 1970, dir.
by Reinhard Hauff
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DER PLÖTZLICHE REICHTUM DER
ARMEN LEUTE VOM KOMBACH, 1070, dir. by Volker Schlöndorff
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SUPERGIRL, 1970, dir. by
Volker Schlöndorff
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VARGASMEKNING, 1973, dir. by
Uli Lommel
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I BERLIN HARLEM, 1974, dir.
by Lothar Lambert, 1974
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SCHATTEN DER ENGEL, 1975,
dir. by Daniel Schmid, based on Fassbinder's play Der Müll,
die Stadt und der Tod
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ADOLF UND MARLENE, 1976, dir.
by Uli Lomml
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DER KLEINE GODARD, 1977, dir.
by Helmuth Costard
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BOURBON STREET BLUES, 1978,
dir. by Douglas Sirk, Hans Schönherr, Tilman Taube
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KAMIKAZE, 1981, dir. by Wolf
Gremm
Plays as director:
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LEONCE UND LENA, 1967,
written by Georg Büchner
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DIE VERBRECHER, 1967, written
by Ferdinand Brucker
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ZUM BEISPIEL INGOLSTADT,
1968, written by R.W.F. and Marieluise Fleisser
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KATZELMACHER, 1968, written
by R.W.F.
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AXEL C. MAARTMAN, 1968
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MOCKINPOTT, 1968, written by
Peter Weiss
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ORGIE UBUH, 1968, written by
Alfred Jarry
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IPHIGINIE AUF TAURIS VON
JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE, 1068
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AJAX, 1968, written by
Sofoklen and R.W. Fassbinder
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DER AMERIKANISCHE SOLDAT,
1968, written by R.W. Fassbinder
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CHUNG, 1968
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DIE BETTLEROPER, 1969,
written by Fassbinder, based on John Gay's play
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PREPARADISE SORRY NOW, 1969,
written by Fassbinder
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ANARCHIE IN BAYERN,
1969,written by R.W.F.
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DAS KAFFEHAUS, 1969, written
by R.W. F. and Carlo Goldoni
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WERWOLF, 1969, written by
R.W.F.
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DAS BRENNENDE DORF, 1970,
written by Lope de Vega and R.W.F.
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PIONIERE IN INGOLSTADT, 1971,
written by R.W.F. and Marieluise Pleisser
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BLUT AM HALS DER KATZE, 1971,
written by R.W.F.
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DIE BITTEREN TRÄNEN DER PETRA
VON KANT, 1971, written by R.W.F.
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BREMER FREIHEIT, 1971
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LILIOM, 1971, written by
Ferenc Molnar and R.W.F.
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BIBI, 1973, based on Heinrich
Mann's work
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HEDDA GABLER, 1973, written
by Henrik Ibsen
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DIE UNVERNÜFTIGEN STERBEN
AUS, 1974, written by Peter Handke
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FRL. JULIE, 1974, written by
August Strindberg
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GERMINAL, 1974, written by
Yaak Karsunke, based on Emile Zola's work
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ONKEL VANJA, 1974, written by
Anton Chechov
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DER MÜLL, DIE STADT UND DER
TOD, 1975
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FRAUEN IN NEW YORK, 1976,
written by Claire Boothe Luce
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