Angst essen Seele auf
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)
I saw this film shortly after its original release. It was the first Fassbinder I’d seen. It’s still the only Fassbinder I’ve seen[1]. I’ve not consciously avoided him but I’ve not been drawn to him either. He was so prolific over such a short space of time that trying to catch up and keep up with his output during his lifetime would have been difficult. Since his death in 1982 (at the age of thirty-seven), I’ve never thought to seek his work out. I don’t remember well what I first thought of Fear Eats the Soul but I think it was more than nostalgia for the time when I saw it that made me want to see it again at BFI (as part of the selection of films accompanying the Abderrahmane Sissako season). I clearly can’t say it’s an unforgettable film but, on a second viewing, it’s certainly a powerful one.
Fassbinder was heavily influenced by the German director Douglas Sirk – by Sirk’s work in post-war Hollywood rather than his home grown-output (Sirk emigrated to the USA in 1937). The plot and characters of Fear Eats the Soul derive principally from Sirk’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows (about the relationship of a middle-aged woman and a younger man). The theme of interracial love and tensions draws on the later Imitation of Life (1959). These are the same sources that Todd Haynes used in his homage to Sirk, Far from Heaven (2002). As I understand it, Sirk’s 1950s melodramas came to be re-evaluated and admired because their garish stories were perceived to conceal a sharp social criticism and underlying, unresolved social and moral themes – about gender, race, and sexual orientation; and that it’s the distinctive look of the films (colour schemes, décor and costumes), rather than their narrative or development of character, that signals what lies beneath. I don’t know Sirk’s films well but I couldn’t make sense of Far from Heaven, which meticulously recreates (and enhances the beauty of) the familiar artefacts and palette of domestic Hollywood dramas of the fifties – then populates these settings with characters who come to express themselves openly about problematic sexual and racial relationships. If Sirk used visual stylisation for ironic effect – to express what couldn’t be said in dialogue at the time – what was the purpose of Haynes’s stylisation (when what was latent in the look of the Sirk originals is explicit in the dialogue of Far from Heaven)? The film seemed to me visually tautologous (as well as dramatically inert).
In theory, similar reservations apply to Fear Eats the Soul. I think they’re not only suppressed by your emotional engagement with the characters and the themes but, to a large extent, dispelled both by the locale and by the way in which Fassbinder tells the story. Applying a heightened visual approach to urban West Germany in the mid-1970s is bound to have its own distinctiveness: we don’t have a sense of a German film of this period having a characteristic, imitable look. So Fassbinder’s striking presentation of the drinking and eating places and the apartments in which most of the action takes place seems original rather than pastiche. Emmi, the sixtyish, widowed cleaning woman who is the main character of Fear Eats the Soul, wears clothes and hairdos which, although they’re more eloquent for being expressionistic, are kept within the bounds of credibility: you accept them as how Emmi might express the way she feels rather than as indicators imposed by the director. (Of course this isn’t thanks only to Fassbinder’s skill: Brigitte Mira, in the role of Emmi, is largely responsible for making these accoutrements seem reflections of the woman’s socially audacious, obstinate determination.) At the start of the film, Emmi walks into a bar to shelter from the rain. The bar is owned by a German woman, Barbara (Barbara Valentin), but its clientele looks to be exclusively Moroccan immigrant ‘guest’ workers (gastarbeiter). Emmi explains to Barbara that the (North African) music on the jukebox has drawn her to the place. The events that quickly follow – one of the Moroccans, Ali, is persuaded to ask Emmi to dance, they do so, then talk, then go back to her apartment, then sleep together – may not be believable in realistic terms. But Fassbinder gives these scenes an ineluctable quality: the characters seem to be moving towards each other in a trance. And the physical contrasts between the utterly ordinary Emmi and the extraordinary Ali – a quintessence of exotic maleness – are extremely effective in creating an ambience that causes you to suspend disbelief. He looks like a creature of fantasy, she a part of unarguably real life, and the combination is disorienting.
If you don’t, at any level, believe what you’re seeing as a result of this opening sequence, it’s unlikely that what follows will seem any more credible. The whirlwind romance of Emmi and Ali leads to marriage. The first half of the film describes how the other people in their lives deprecate and, in different ways, oppose their relationship – Emmi’s three children (and her son-in-law – played by Fassbinder), the cleaners she works with, the other women in the apartment block, the shopkeeper she’s patronised for many years. Sitting with Ali at a table in an outdoor eating area (all the other tables are deserted) and watched with implacable disapproval by the restaurant staff, Emmi breaks down and says that she and Ali must go away for a while. She adds desperately that, when they come back, everyone’s attitude will have changed. And it does: after their return from holiday, Fassbinder schematically shows each of the individuals or groups that reviled or rejected Emmi in the first half of the film behaving very differently when they find themselves wanting her to do them a favour. As the people around them come to accept their union, however selfish their motives may be, Emmi and Ali start to experience strains in their relationship. Perhaps increasingly anxious that the marriage can’t survive or perhaps relieved that other people are coming to tolerate him, Emmi starts to show Ali off. He resumes a physical relationship with the bar owner (partly because, unlike Emmi, she’ll make couscous for him) and walks out on Emmi. At the moment of their reconciliation in the bar where they first met, Emmi and Ali dance again and he collapses, moaning in pain. The final scene is in a hospital ward (the BFI note explained that this echoed the ending of All That Heaven Allows). Emmi is visiting Ali, who’s suffered a burst stomach ulcer. The doctor explains that this is a common complaint among gastarbeiter, a result of incessant hard work and the stresses of living in an alien and unwelcoming society. Ali will survive but the long-term prognosis, the doctor says, is ‘pretty hopeless’.
The film is set in a specific time and place. The prejudices of people in that time and place are believable (and the gastarbeiter malaise is medical fact); the acting is naturalistic; but Fassbinder (who also wrote the screenplay) orchestrates these elements in a thematically concentrated way that gives Fear Eats the Soul the quality of a morality tale. In realistic terms, it’s implausible that Emmi is always shocked and distressed by the hideously negative reactions of her family, neighbours and work colleagues. In the moral and dramatic scheme of the film, it’s essential that she suffers and absorbs these blows. The other cleaning women’s prejudices against Arab immigrants are delivered in a choric style (the first concludes ‘All they’re interested in is sex’, the second ‘All they’re interested in is money’). Every so often, a scene ends with the camera on a character or characters in mid-distance, often framed by a doorway. Each of these shots is held for a long time; it seems an obvious technique but is an effective way of allowing you to reflect on what has gone on in the ‘chapter’ of the film now concluding.
What’s remarkable is that Fassbinder creates a synergy between the realistic and theatrical facets of the piece so that the two aspects are mutually fortifying. The racism seems more hateful because it’s delivered both realistically (in the way the actors speak the lines) and in a symbolically relentless sequence. The pairing of Brigitte Mira as Emmi and El Hedi ben Salem as Ali epitomises Fassbinder’s blending of the film’s two aspects. Mira and Salem both succeed in creating strong and convincing characters – but from very different points of departure as performers. Mira was a highly experienced stage and screen actress (she was sixty-four when the film was made). She has the looks and technical skills to make Emmi both humanly believable and dramatically extraordinary. Salem, although he appeared in other Fassbinder films, doesn’t have the same kind of technique but the contrast between his startling physical presence and his tentative, uninflected line readings is not only highly expressive: it realises movingly the sense of Ali being a man defined, in the society in which he finds himself, in purely physical terms – a man whose personality, because he is foreigner incarnate, will go unnoticed by most of the Germans with whom he comes into contact. (Emmi is of course the exception.) In the course of the film Ali/Salem’s physicality seems to make him not so much imposing as trapped in his body – we see more and more clearly a deeply melancholy spirit.
It’s racial prejudice rather than the more than the twenty years age difference between Emmi and Ali that seems the dominant, or at least the more explicit, cause of hostility towards them. Fassbinder plays on the audience’s assumptions that ‘authority’ figures will be part of this hostility, by making these minor characters – Emmi’s landlord, the police who respond to complaints from the other tenants about the noise of the foreign music coming from Emmi’s apartment – relatively accepting of the relationship (or, at least, not openly condemnatory). Fassbinder is less convincing in the way in which he presents the reaction of the other North African men. The one other woman among the regulars in Barbara’s bar is vehemently abusive of Emmi (her antipathy may be informed by both racial hostility and a feeling that this German ‘whore’ is an ‘old whore’). I didn’t believe – even within the terms of the film – that Ali’s male friends would accept Emmi so easily. Fassbinder’s essential antipathy towards his fellow Germans and sympathy with the gastarbeiter causes him to deny the Moroccan men their own prejudices – and this seems condescending. But it limits only the characterisation of the men as a group – not the way in which he develops the character of Ali. That is not his real (full) name: it’s what he’s come to call himself because it’s what his German hosts will think of him as. The literal translation of the film’s German title is not ‘fear eats the soul’ but – in the broken German in which Ali speaks (and speaks these words, early in the film) – ‘fears eats soul’.
Footnote: El Hedi ben Salem, who was one of Fassbinder’s lovers in the early 1970s, hanged himself in a French jail in 1982 (there’s no indication, either in IMDB or Wikipedia, of how he got there) – shortly before Fassbinder’s death. Brigitte Mira died in 2005, at the age of ninety-four.
4 December 2008
[1] Postscript: No longer the case – see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Effi Briest (1974).