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06/28/10
Forty Years Ago Today: RWF’s WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK?
A stylistic exception among Fassbinder’s works
As Christian Braad Thomsen writes in his book Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Leben und Werk eines masslosen Genies (Rogner & Bernhard, 1993), WHY DOES HERR RUN AMOK?—which examines the intolerability of a seemingly fulfilled middle-class life—is one of Fassbinder’s “claustrophobic films about middle-class existence.” However, in terms of style, it is much different from his other works.
WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? has an almost documentary feel. It was directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler, with improvisation instructions instead of a script. The filmmakers wanted the dialogue to be spontaneous and the scenes to evolve in the collective. The camera recorded the scenes in a quasi-documentary style, and there was hardly any editing. Each sequence remained intact as a whole. Fassbinder later distanced himself from this type of cinéma vérité, which did not seem interesting enough to him and which seemed to expose his characters in a disagreeable way.
Nevertheless, WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? was one of Fassbinder’s first big cinema hits. Audiences were shaken. A film of this nature—concrete and direct—was unprecedented in German cinema.
The 88-minute film was shot in color on 16mm, which was later blown up to 35mm. The shooting was completed in just 13 days in Munich in December 1969. The film premiered on June 28, 1970, at the 20th Berlin International Film Festival. It was released in cinemas on February 5, 1971, and was broadcast on ARD television on December 28, 1971.
RWFF filmography on WARUM LÄUFT HERR R. AMOK
Photo, left: Kurt Raab (Herr R.), 1969 © RWFF
Photo, right: Film poster
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