The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

By Bergotte

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder made forty-four films in sixteen years, and then he died at thirty-seven of a drug overdose in a Munich flat in 1982, and the output is so staggering and the life so short that the mathematics alone feel like an argument — an argument that something was burning in this man at a temperature that normal human metabolism cannot sustain. What was burning was rage: a cold, disciplined, formally exquisite rage at the way societies organise themselves around the exclusion of the people they cannot accommodate, and at the particular cruelty with which love, the one force that might cut through that exclusion, tends instead to replicate it. Fassbinder made this argument in film after film with a consistency and a ferocity that has no equivalent in cinema history, and he made it in a form — the melodrama, the most derided and sentimentalised of all film genres — that was itself a provocation, a declaration that the things dismissed as trashy and excessive and too emotional were precisely the things that told the truth.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder grew up in postwar West Germany, the child of a broken family in a broken country, and the combination shaped everything he made. Germany after the war was a country that had performed a collective amnesia so thorough and so determined that it had become, in some respects, a different kind of lie from the one it had told before — a country that had decided to be new, to be economic, to be Western and democratic and forward-looking, and that had managed this transformation by simply not discussing what it had been. Fassbinder was not willing to not discuss it. He was, from the beginning of his career to the end, engaged in a sustained and furious examination of what Germany had done, what it had suppressed, what it had built its postwar prosperity on, and what the human cost of that suppression was. This examination was conducted not through historical drama in any conventional sense but through the intimate territory of love and desire and domestic life — through the bodies of working-class women and gay men and foreign workers and all the other people that the German economic miracle had ground up and swallowed and refused to acknowledge.

He came to film through theatre, founding the Anti-Theater in Munich in the late 1960s and developing, in that hothouse environment, the ensemble of actors and collaborators — Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, El Hedi ben Salem, Kurt Raab, among many others — who would form the core of his film work and whom he treated with a combination of loyalty and cruelty that was entirely characteristic. He was not a comfortable person to work with or to love, and the people who did both have said so with remarkable candour in the decades since his death. The films, which are in many ways autobiographical in their emotional logic even when they are not autobiographical in their plots, contain this cruelty as a subject — they are made by someone who understood, from the inside, how love becomes a system of control, how tenderness curdles into possession, how the person you love most is the person you are most capable of destroying.

Douglas Sirk and the weapon of melodrama

To understand what Fassbinder was doing formally, you need to understand his relationship with the American filmmaker Douglas Sirk, whose 1950s Hollywood melodramas — All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life — Fassbinder encountered as a young man and described as a revelation. Sirk was a German émigré who had fled the Nazis and found himself in Hollywood making what were officially women’s pictures — glossy, emotionally heightened films about love and loss and social constraint, marketed at female audiences and dismissed by critics as soap opera. What Fassbinder saw in them, and what has since become the standard critical reading, is that Sirk was using the melodrama’s formal excesses — the saturated colours, the swelling music, the extreme emotional registers — as a critical instrument, a way of making visible the gap between the surfaces of American society and the suffering they concealed. The more beautiful the image, the more devastating the critique. The more the form insisted on happiness and fulfilment, the more clearly it revealed that happiness and fulfilment were what these characters were being systematically denied.

Fassbinder took this lesson and radicalised it. Where Sirk operated within the Hollywood system and was constrained by its requirements, Fassbinder operated in the West German cinema of the 1970s with a freedom that was both liberating and dangerous, and he pushed the Sirkian method to places Sirk could not have gone. His colours are more extreme, his framings more theatrical, his emotional temperatures more volatile. He placed his characters inside visual compositions that are explicitly artificial — doorways that frame like proscenium arches, mirrors that multiply and distort, windows that separate interior from exterior with the force of a moral statement — and the artificiality is never concealed. It announces itself, insisting that what you are watching is a construction, a made thing, and that the making is the argument. The world these characters inhabit is presented as a set, because it is a set — a stage constructed by society for the performance of roles that some people fit and others do not, and the ones who do not fit are the ones Fassbinder’s films are about.

Ali and the arithmetic of exclusion

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, made in 1974 in fifteen days on a minimal budget, is the film that most completely realises this method and the one that makes the most direct, most devastating statement of Fassbinder’s central argument. It tells the story of Emmi, a sixty-year-old German cleaning woman, and Ali, a young Moroccan immigrant worker, who meet in a bar during a rainstorm and fall in love and marry, and of what happens to that love under the pressure of a society that has no place for it.

The premise has the shape of a social-problem film, the kind of earnest, well-intentioned cinema that addresses prejudice and discrimination with the tools of realism and the assumption that showing people the ugliness of racism will make them ashamed of it. Fassbinder has no interest in this form and no faith in its assumptions. His film does not argue against racism by appealing to the viewer’s better nature. It analyses racism as a structure — as a system of exclusion that operates through the most intimate channels of daily life, through the neighbours who refuse to speak to you and the son who kicks in your television and the colleagues who will not sit at your table — and it does so through a visual language that is itself a commentary on that structure.

The frames in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul are among the most carefully composed in Fassbinder’s work, which is saying something. Emmi and Ali are repeatedly shown isolated within the frame, separated from the other characters by space and by the architecture Fassbinder places between them — doorways, windows, the empty centres of rooms that other characters have abandoned. This spatial isolation is not symbolic in any crude sense. It is precise: it shows you exactly how exclusion works, not through dramatic confrontation but through the quiet withdrawal of ordinary social recognition, the thousand small ways in which a society signals to certain people that they do not belong.

What the film does that is most extraordinary — most Fassbinderian — is refuse to let this exclusion be the simple story of good victims and bad persecutors. Emmi is not a pure figure. She has her own prejudices, her own capacity for cruelty, her own ways of using Ali — his youth, his body, his Moroccan otherness — as a form of currency in her social transactions. The scene in which she displays him to her friends like an exhibit, inviting them to feel his muscles, is one of the most uncomfortable in the film precisely because it comes from the character we have been positioned to sympathise with. Fassbinder will not allow sympathy to become identification, will not allow the audience the comfort of a moral position from which to judge. Everyone in this film is compromised. Everyone participates in the structures that destroy love. The question is not who is to blame but how the structures work, and the answer is: through all of us, all the time, in ways we barely notice until they have already done their damage.

The body as a site of politics

Fassbinder’s films are, among other things, some of the most politically serious explorations of the body in cinema history — serious in the sense that they treat the body not as an object of desire or a vehicle for narrative but as a locus where the social and the personal intersect in ways that cannot be separated. This is most explicit in his films about gay experience — Fox and His Friends, In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Querelle — but it runs through all his work, including the films about heterosexual relationships, because what interests him is always the same question: how does power operate through intimacy? How does the social order reproduce itself in the bedroom and the kitchen and the moment of desire?

In a Year with Thirteen Moons, made in 1978 in the immediate aftermath of the suicide of his lover Armin Meier, is the most personal and the most extreme statement of this question. It follows Elvira, a trans woman who had gender reassignment surgery for the love of a man who did not want her, through the final days of her life in Frankfurt, revisiting the people and the places that have shaped her destruction. Fassbinder made the film in a state of grief so acute that the making was itself a kind of self-punishment, and the film bears the marks of that grief in every frame — it is the most raw, the most formally experimental, the most emotionally unbearable thing he ever made. It is also, arguably, the most important, because it asks a question that almost no film has been willing to ask before or since: what does it cost a person to reshape their entire self for someone else’s love, and what happens when the love turns out not to have been worth the cost?

The film does not answer this question sentimentally. It does not offer Elvira’s suffering as a martyrdom or a critique or a redemptive arc. It offers it simply as what it is: a life being lived in the wrong world, a body that cannot find the form that would allow it to be at home, a person looking for love in the only ways available to her and finding that the available ways are not enough. This is the Fassbinder argument in its most concentrated form: that the personal and the political are not separate territories connected by metaphor but the same territory experienced at different scales, and that the damage done by social structures is felt first and most acutely in the body, in the skin, in the space between two people who want to reach each other and cannot.

Speed as method

The speed at which Fassbinder worked is as much a part of his aesthetic as his use of colour or composition. Forty-four films in sixteen years is an average of nearly three films a year, and several of his most important works — including Ali: Fear Eats the Soul — were made in under three weeks. This pace is generally discussed as a biographical fact, evidence of his compulsive nature and his pharmaceutical habits, but it is also an aesthetic choice with aesthetic consequences. Films made this quickly do not have the polished, finished quality of more slowly produced work. They retain the roughness of the real, the sense that what is happening in front of the camera has not been fully controlled and managed, and in Fassbinder this roughness coexists with an extreme formal precision — the carefully composed frames, the deliberate use of colour and light — in a tension that is itself expressive.

The speed also meant that Fassbinder could respond to his own life and the life around him with an immediacy that slower production schedules make impossible. When his lover Armin Meier died, he made In a Year with Thirteen Moons within months. When the German autumn of 1977 — the period of RAF terrorism and state repression that traumatised West German society — demanded a response, he contributed a segment to Germany in Autumn within weeks. His cinema is, in this sense, a form of diary: a continuous, compulsive, formally elaborate record of a sensibility in contact with the world, processing what it found there at the only speed that felt honest.

The BRD trilogy and the view from history

In the last years of his life, Fassbinder produced what is generally considered his masterwork: the BRD trilogy, three films — The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss — that together constitute the most sustained examination of West German history and society in cinema. The trilogy follows three women across the postwar decades, using the melodrama form to illuminate the relationship between personal life and historical circumstance with a precision and a bitterness that no more conventionally historical approach could have achieved.

The Marriage of Maria Braun, the first and most celebrated of the three, stars Hanna Schygulla as a woman who rebuilds herself from the ruins of the war with a pragmatism and a ruthlessness that the film refuses to judge because it understands: this is what survival requires, and the Germany being built around her is being built on exactly the same foundations. The film’s final shot — the explosion, the image of Germany’s postwar chancellors on the radio, the ambiguity of whether what has happened is accident or intention — is the most precisely political ending in Fassbinder’s work, and one of the most precisely political endings in all of European cinema. It does not explain. It accuses. And the accusation is aimed not at the characters but at the structure — the economic and social structure of postwar Germany that turned survival into complicity and prosperity into amnesia and called the result a miracle.

What Fassbinder made possible

Fassbinder’s influence on cinema after him is as pervasive as it is difficult to trace directly, because what he contributed was less a style than a set of permissions — permission to use genre as critique, to treat formal excess as a critical tool, to make the political visible through the personal without reducing either to the other. Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven is the most explicit homage, a direct reimagining of Sirkian melodrama through a Fassbinderian lens. Pedro Almodóvar, who shares Fassbinder’s love of melodrama and his interest in the bodies of people who do not fit, has acknowledged the debt. Wong Kar-wai’s treatment of desire and exclusion and the architecture of longing owes something to Fassbinder’s spatial language. And the entire tradition of queer cinema — from Derek Jarman to Gregg Araki to Xavier Dolan — is unthinkable without the example of a filmmaker who placed gay experience at the centre of serious art cinema and refused to apologise for it or explain it or make it palatable.

But the deepest influence is harder to quantify. Fassbinder changed what it was possible to feel in a cinema — changed the register of political emotion available to film, demonstrated that rage and grief and love and critique could coexist in the same frame without any of them cancelling the others out. He made films that are simultaneously beautiful and ugly, tender and cruel, formally rigorous and emotionally explosive, and the combination is not a contradiction. It is the point. The world is all of these things simultaneously, and a cinema that can only hold one of them at a time is a cinema that is lying about the world.

The cluster complete

The conversation between Cassavetes, Pialat, and Fassbinder is now audible in its full complexity. Cassavetes discovered that feeling was the subject. Pialat distilled that discovery into something quieter and more merciless. Fassbinder took it and placed it inside a historical and political argument that neither of the others was interested in making — not because they lacked the intelligence but because their territories were different. All three refused comfort. All three refused resolution. All three treated the camera as an instrument of honesty so demanding that the films it produced could not be mistaken for entertainment, even when they used entertainment’s forms.

Start with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Watch it as a love story and watch it as a political film and notice that you cannot separate the two, that the love story is the political film and the political film is the love story, and that this inseparability is not a technique but a truth. Then go to Cassavetes and find the same insistence on the real in a completely different register. Then go to Pialat and find it again, quieter, more devastating, at room temperature. By the time you have done all three you will have been in the presence of a standard of honesty that most cinema cannot approach, and the approach will have changed you.

That is what this cluster has been arguing, from the beginning. Not that these three filmmakers are important — importance is a category for film historians. But that they are necessary. That the world they show us is the world we live in, and that the showing, however uncomfortable, is an act of love.

Sources and further reading

Robert Katz and Peter Berling, Love is Colder Than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1987) — the most thorough biographical account in English, vivid and unsparing about both the life and the work.

Wallace Watson, Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film as Private and Public Art (1996) — the most useful critical introduction in English, attentive to both the formal qualities of the films and their political dimensions.

Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, eds., The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes (1992) — Fassbinder’s own writings and interviews, essential for understanding the intellectual framework behind the films.

Fassbinder Foundation, fassbinderfoundation.de — the official archive, with comprehensive filmography, stills, and documentation of the ongoing restoration and distribution of his work.

For first-time viewers, the suggested order: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) first — the most accessible and the most complete statement of his method. Then The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) for the historical dimension. Then Fox and His Friends (1975) for the autobiographical dimension. In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978) last — the most extreme, the most personal, and the one that will stay with you longest.