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The Forward-looking Traditionalist
Wolfram Schütte
In the mid-1960s, when Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater dominated the German-speaking stage, Max Frisch spoke of Brecht possessing the “striking ineffectiveness of a classic.” The playwright, who agitated for social change in epic parables written for a “theater of the scientific age,” was accepted by society and integrated into it, and was thus a classic: immobilized. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who attained comparable artistic status in the German-language cinema between 1969 and 1982, and whose public image dominated the scene during those fourteen years, neither became a classic nor did he achieve outstanding success. But was he ineffective?
Looking down at the lamentable depth of contemporary German cinema from the aesthetic summit of his late works, after the 1978 DESPAIR, and from the paradigmatic validity of his “German” subjects, from KATZELMACHER to VERONIKA VOSS, one will scarcely discern anything in the ten years since he died except his disappearance: not only the dissolution of Fassbinder as a steady presence, somewhat like the basso continuo in the polyphony of the German cinema that came after him, but the general decline of all aesthetic principles that blossomed in the richness of his vast oeuvre.
Fassbinder’s oeuvre, like that of other directors of the New German Cinema, could not have come about without the cooperation of the public television stations. Yet he, as did no other, realized the implications of the specifically German production situation. His artistic productivity, which resulted in an oeuvre of forty-four film and television productions, coincided with the vigorous appropriation and exploitation of every possible source he could draw from. He alone gave exuberant life to the declaration on which the Young and the New German Cinema staked its claim, that “Opas Kino” (grandpa’s cinema) was dead. lf there was a German Autorenfilm (auteurist cinema) – and certainly the genius-cult of West German Sturm und Drang in the 1960s and 1970s did produce the works of Kluge and Wenders, Schroeter and von Praunheim, Herzog and Syberberg, Thome and Straub – Fassbinder’s far-reaching activities were at the center of it.
His genius – probably the only one of the postwar German cinema – is evident not only in his work but also in the freewheeling activity and inspirational vitality with which he combined film and film production, television and television production into a comprehensive, always expanding, retrospective, and progressive unity. His utopian vision, which he very nearly made come true, was to merge the division of labor of the studio system with the author’s personal creativity through an amalgamation of group dynamics and individualistic work processes. He was producer-tycoon and star director all in one; and to feed the artistic imagination that spurred him on, he needed to make sure that he kept both feet on the ground. This he first achieved with the team of the Action Theater, in the group which evolved from it, and later in various teams of actors, cinematographers, musicians, set designers, and studios.
The auteurist film, whose emergence accompanied the decline ofthe “producer film” that could no longer compete with television in the domestic market, was unmistakably a harbinger of the antiauthoritarian movement and an expression ofthe international student and youth revolt, which in the Paris of May 1968 had its storming of the Bastille and, shortly after, its Thermidor and Waterloo. Euphoria over a new lifestyle was rapidly succeeded by depression over its failure – more quickly, in keeping with the modern process of acceleration, than at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth Century. The socialist-liberal coalition; the ban on employment of radicals in state schools and public institutions in general; the German Director’s Theater of Peter Stein, Claus Peymann, and Hans Neuenfels; and the New German Cinema were parallel events, riddled by the ricochets of Baader-Meinhof terrorism.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his first feature film LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH (1969)
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Berlinale 1974, EFFI BRIEST
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla during the shooting of LILI MARLEEN (1980)
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