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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 1, 1987)
y t o t * __________ _ Fassbinder as Addict Savant Fassbinder s imagination did not soar. It writhed. B Y W . C . M c_ R A E en years ago, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the toast of the inter national film industry Today. Fass binder is out of fashion along with other vestiges of the 1970s — poppers, disco, sex, drugs. The German director had made, at his death in 1982 at age 37 some of the most provocative films of the 1970s and early ’80s Now thev seldom, if ever T appear on the art film circuit Aftet reading Robert Katz's fine gutter eye-view biography. Love Is Colder Thun Death (Random House, cloth. $19 95), I understand why Fassbinder’s stock has alien so precipitously. To read about his life and to remember his films is to look back to another age: Fassbinder is about as tar from “ just say no” as Berlin is from the Betty Ford Institute. These differences aren't measured in years, but in ideology. An only child. Fassbinder grew up in post-World War II Bavaria, in a then- normal irregular family Adenauer’s economic miracle notwithstanding, Fass- inder spent his adolescence in a raffish leighborhood of prostitutes, transvestites, md itinerant workers. During the Sixties, assbinder became involved with an avant garde theatre in Munich Using actors from this repertory, Fassbinder began to write and direct films, often with his male lovers cast in leading roles He gained European acclaim by 1970, when he was 25. Fassbinder brought to films a taste for melodrama, an appetite for despair and the kinky, and an incredible energy In 1970, he completed seven films and he vowed to finish his thirtieth film by his thirtieth birthday (he missed his goal bv three films). A Fassbinder film typically sets a weakened or abject character against indif ferent forces, or isolate*- an individual in a nexus of power relationships Fassbinder focused on the suffering of the character however, he refused to invest his victim w ith any moral worth or value. The cultural soporifics that we benevolently worship ir our secular humanist temples — love, uni versal brotherhood, peace, the family — are exposed as depravities and deceptions. In Fassbinder, the moral dimension exists only as a venue for duplicity and the exer cise of power. “ Love.’ Fassbinder claimed, “ is the best, most insidious, most effec tive instrument of social repression." With their stylized despair, it is no sur prise that Fassbinder's cinema of cruelty finds no audience in the anodyne 1980s In .4 Year with Thirteen Moons, a man who changed his gender to better suit his male lover, only to be then further spumed, con entwined with his creative process. One of his lovers committed suicide with drugs, another hung himself in jail. Fassbinder was a tyrant to his actors. Katz recounts in unjudging detail the drugged, drunken wallowing in the temptations offered for sale to habitues of the international art/gay scene. Katz doesn't reveal a new Fassbin der; he simply exposes more of the old. However, Katz avoids drawing easy morals from Fassbinder s life and early death by overdose. Katz instead presents Fassbinder as an Add. :t Savant against a backdrop of the times drugs were de rigueur, Germany wa? repulsed and fascinated by the radic ;! chic of the Baader-Meinhoff gans. New York cla mored to Andy Warho and slunk about in black leather; fisting w is just another souvenir from America Paris was caviar | and champagne: wealti meant a chartered iet just to fly in cocaine templates his life and commits suicide In Fassbinder's life an- films message Chinese! Roulette, a young physically dis abled girl uses guile to lure her callous and messenger, now s* m symptoms of a parents, with their respective lovers, to a i decade that no one wa cs to exonerate: too country chateau, where nasty parlor games soon the fin de sieclt -fiit our repugnance lead to suicide In Veronica Views, a do- at Fassbinder’s over-abuse — of despair good journalist attempts to aid a former of drugs, of anger — j s much a symp Nazi film star held in drugged bondage by tom of our age. as the c ver-indulgence wa* an unscrupulous doctor, with suicides as a symptom of the 1970s To draw a moral the unfortunate result “ I detest the idea from Fassbinder's life would be to fall into that love between two persons can lead to a trap that the entire oeuvre disclaims: salvation," said Fassbinder. “ All my life I There is no edifying moral lesson to be have fought against this oppressive type of drawn from individual experience. In the relationship." vale of tears that is Fassbinder, there are Not surprisingly, his life was no prettier only varying degrees of oppression. Given than his films. Fassbinder's drug addiction this philosophy, self-oppression with and alcohol dependency were both truly drugs becomes self-determination, and a monumental, and seemingly inextricably tentative personal freedom • Enjoy forever the Quietness sailing. . . is LEARN to SAIL 283-0160 50 N.E. Tomahawk Is. Dr. In 16 hows o f C excitement that r. makes it ü C.aAa, ü n c. happen. ¿ S a ilin g C en t ix Sailing Consultants for Catalina - Cape Dory - Montgomery - Pearson Rentals - Brokerage - Charters JUNIOR SAILORS ALSO WANTED 8 to 14 Portland Parks & Recreation (796-5193) Learn to Sail $45°° Just Out. 2 2 July. 1987 I
