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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 5, 2003)
September 5. 2003 » I t's difficult to think of a more original queer Bitter tears i cinema voice than that of the late, great Ger man auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He directed 41 films before his untimely death (related to dnigs and stress) in 1982 at the age of 37, during post-production on his adaptation of Jean Genet’s “unfilmable” novel Querelle. Fassbinder was a notorious personality— demanding of himself and others, prone to excess in all areas of his life and a sexual radi cal who galvanized and offended. Although a very publicly self-described gay man, he mar ried women. (His boyfriend was best man at his second wedding.) The director’s reputation and influence are far-reaching. In the ’70s, canonical feminist film critic Laura Mulvey wrote many an ecstat ic word on Fassbinder’s juicy narrative style and astute social observation (class, race, gender, age and sexuality are omnipresent factors affecting every relationship and interaction) and the profound influence upon ’50s melodrama-meister Douglas Sirk. Mulvey and her academic colleagues fused their admiration of Fassbinder and revisionist appreciation of Sirk, joining the two names for ever in the annals of film history. More recent ly, from a very different point on the cinematic spectrum, well-respected mainstream filmmaker Michael Mann ( The Insuler, Ali) has said, “Fassbinder was everything.” fust M t 43 New DVD releases of the late, great Rainer Werner Fassbinder by C hristopher M c Q uain Fassbinder has, of course, been a perennial touchstone for our best queer filmmakers. John Waters declared him “the most talented director of his time,” and both François Ozon (Sufrnmmg Pool) and Port land’s Todd “ It’s so hard to change the world” : Rainer Werner Haynes (Far from Heaven)— two of the Fassbinder’s (above left) 1970s queer films were most interesting gay directors working astute social commentaries about much more than today— are clearly Fassbinder devotees. being gav. Above right: Fox and His Friends. Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning R( k I< s Right: The Hitter Fears of Petra von Kant. was from an unfilmed Fassbinder script, and Haynes’ exposure to Fassbinder as a wrote, “It’s clear that the gay activist communi college student had a profound and recurrent ty must extend its solidarity to all oppressed impact upon his work. groups within society...Fassbinder’s films, with In 1976, queer film scholar Thomas Waugh their perspective of a whole range of society’s outcasts, victims and exploited classes, are an inspiring affirmation of this principle.” » REVIEW T Demonstrators protest the South African government’s A ID S policies in State of D enial Shadow of AIDS Economics, culture and politics collide In State of Denial by L isa B radshaw n South Africa, 4.7 million people are HIV- positive. There are 2,OCX) new infections a day. By 2010, 7 million will have died of AIDS. President Thabo Mbeki does not believe HIV causes AIDS, and he holds the key to widespread use of antivirals in the country. This cultural and political clash of wills and theories is expertly documented in State of lDenial , part of public television’s POV series. South African New Yorker Elaine Epstein, whose direction usually takes the form of pub lic service and HIV education videos, traveled throughout her native country during a period of two years, recording the lives of various HIV-positive children and adults, their inabil ity to pay for A ID S drugs and the president's refusal to fund the distribution o f these drugs, insisting "more study" must be done. Meanwhile, Epstein interviews doctors and aid workers desperately striving to find ways to improve and lengthen the lives of their patients. Leaving no stone unturned, she cov ers activist Zackie Achmat’s Treatment Action Campaign, visits HIV support groups, eavesdrops on arguments in Parliament and interviews white South Africans who can afford drug treatment. Epstein also explores how South Africa's cultural and political history has partially enabled widespread infection. Notes the for mer director of A ID S Policy, “This shadow is just going to undermine everything that so many millions have sacrificed their lives for.” State of Denial , which will air at 3 a.m. Sept. 17 on OPB, is truly a comprehensive look at South Africa’s plague— one that is spreading through many developing nations at an alarming rate. JFI he recent spate of Fassbinder DVD releases affords the home viewer an excellent opportunity to be so inspired. The most deluxe of these is The Criterion Collection’s two-disc release of 1974’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which concerns the marriage of Emmi, a sexagenarian German cleaning woman, to Ali, a much younger Moroccan immigrant, and its consequences at the hands of xenophobic and ageist neighbors, children, co-workers and “friends.” This romance of the frowned-upon variety, revealing the hypocrisy and prejudices of an apparently benign milieu, mirrors Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, a film mirrored in turn by Todd Haynes in last year’s Far from Heaven. In fact, one of the best supplementary features of the Ali set is “From Fassbinder to Sirk and Back,” a 20-minute video introduc tion by the always-erudite Haynes, which, along with a BBC documentary on German cinema and other extras, makes this extensive, meticulous release something of a film school course in a hox. O f the many less deluxe (but still very nice ly restored) Fassbinder DVDs released by the Wellspring company, two are of particular interest for their probing explorations of queer lives: 1972’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and 1975’s Fox and His Friends. Fox is probably Fassbinder’s “gayest" film. The director himself stars as the title character, a poor, carefree carnival worker who, when the carnival is shut down and his boyfriend is jailed, falls in with a group of upper-class gay men. When Fox realizes his dream of winning the lottery, his new boyfriend, Eugen, proceeds to teach him how to emulate his superiors by shopping for antiques and wearing tailored clothes; he also allows Fox to purchase them a posh apartment and financially bail out Eugen’s family’s bankrupt business. Fox is trapped in the mutable, status- dependent acceptance o f his lover and his community, hut Fassbinder doesn’t paint him as an entirely passive victim or the bourgeois gays as mustache-twirling villains; they’re merely participating in a power structure that encompasses everyone. The filmmaker knew that the oppressed are, sadly, quite capable of oppressing others; there’s always a hierarchy, and his illustration of that inevitability through Fox’s experiences is rivet ing, provocative (particularly in the under standably defensive post-Stonewall climate of 1975, when his complex worldview was often mistaken for muckraking by queer viewers and press) and heartbreaking. In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, it’s the love between two women— Petra, a brittle, vulnerable, ultra-successful fashion designer, and Karin, her beautiful runway-model pro tégé— that’s shattered by underlying social structures. Petra seduces Karin by offering her career opportunities and the trappings of wealth; Karin conceals, with cruelty and infidelity, her disgust with herself over using Petra. Elsewhere on the class fcxxl chain, Marlene, Petra’s per sonal secretary, is obviously in love with her but, as a servant, is persona non grata. Marlene is treated badly by both Petra and Karin and suffers all literally without a word. (The dialogue-free Marlene becomes a spectral Greek chorus figure in Petra and Karin’s tragedy.) Bitter Tears is highly stylized, is one of Fassbinder’s most visually stunning films (Michael Ballhaus, cinematographer on both Petra and Fox, now frequently works for Martin Scorsese on films like The Age of Innocence and last year’s Gangs of New York) and has an entirely unexpected liberating ending. Fassbinder espoused the idea that a film itself cannot change the world— it can only, in a spirit of hope, present the audience with a recognizable world in need of changing. His need to show us, through consummately enter taining stories, the mechanisms of society as they affect individuals is best summed up in something he wrote in an essay on All That Heaven Allows, saying of its unhappy lovers: “You can understand both of them, and both of them are right, hut no one»will ever be able to help either of them unless, of course, we change the world. We all cried over the movie, because it’s so hard to change the world." JH C hristopher M c Q uain is a Seattle free-lance writer.
