Before I began reading Ian Penman’s Fassbinder A Thousand Mirrors, I wondered how I might have gone about writing about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s many films myself. Fassbinder famously filmed fast and died young, leaving behind a huge oeuvre of over forty films and three TV series, as well as directing plays and acting in films directed by other people. When I thought back on Fassbinder’s films, most of which I’d watched over a decade ago, a series of scenes flashed through my mind. My memory retained stills, set pieces or tableaux rather than plots, characters or themes.
I thought of composing a compendium of interiors: the vast stage-like hotel reception overlooking the ocean in which much of the action of Beware of A Holy Whore (1971) plays out, the glam Baroque flocked wallpapered apartment in Fox and his Friends (1975), the watery metallic turquoise of the bar in the sci-fi miniseries World on a Wire (1973). I thought about objects and textures; there were not only thousands of mirrors but hundreds of door frames and windows. Thresholds, picture frames, vases, shag pile carpets, houseplants, lamps. I thought of the stifling domestic interiors in Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day (1972), Why Does Herr K Run Amok? (1970) or Fear of Fear (1975) with their laminate sideboards, cut glass ashtrays and bulging sofas. I thought not only of spaces and things but of atmospheres: the claustrophobic dingy sepia of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), the libidinous synthetic orange of Querelle (1982), the on-edge lilacs and uncanny birdsong of Despair (1980).
Déjà vu flashes
Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (2023) is a book about Fassbinder that is constantly asking itself what a book about Fassbinder could or should be and do: ‘Is there coherence among the works? Can we arrange them into a unity?’ The answer Penman gives to these questions is an emphatic “no.” Penman abandons the synoptic in favour of the fragmentary (449 numbered fragments, followed by an appendix containing 29 unnumbered epigraph-like quotations), a disjointed style that responds to the expansiveness of its subject: an artist whose excessive appetite for cigarettes, sausages, sex, alcohol and drugs were matched only by his excessive productivity. Penman suggests that there is something about Fassbinder as an individual – ‘[a] monster of sexual indulgence and shock horror left-wing quotes and bad drug rumours’ – but also about his cinematic aesthetic – ‘gross, untidy, extortionate’ – that make him ‘[d]ifficult to canonize, difficult to mourn. Difficult to assimilate.’ The book’s opening fragment begins by proclaiming ‘the absolute impossibility of summing up Fassbinder.’
Though such remarks are scattered, Penman provides occasional flashes of insight that gesture towards a thesis on the filmmaker’s work as a whole: ‘Something unvarnished, imperfect, bursting with stained and stubborn life…’ (p. 119) There is nothing tasteful about Fassbinder, Penman perceives. The films are not exactly coolthey are definitely not warm. There is tenderness only in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) between a couple whose love is fragile, hard won and threatened on all sides. The films have a kind of glamour but it is the melancholic grimy glamour of smudged mascara, lipstick-stained teeth, and sweat patches on polyester. ‘Nature is absent, by and large, from this world.’ (p. 55). Glimpsed in the reflected surfaces of Fassbinder’s many rooms, beautiful people often look tired: they age, they writhe, they sniffle and screech. When they cry bitter tears they do not look picturesque or sound profound. Unlike in the classic Hollywood films that Fassbinder strove to emulate, his cigarettes do not exist in isolation from ashtrays or tobacco-yellowed fingertips. Fassbinder’s works exhibit a kind of ‘enervated decadence.’
The question of how to write about Fassbinder’s work leads Penman into a hall of mirrors that extends as far as the eye can see: how to write about film, about individual experience, about twentieth-century history, about accessing the past from the perspective of the present? How to understand lives that were lived inside history or to make sense of how history shapes lives? How to articulate the relationship between memory, history and aesthetics?
Penman situates Fassbinder in the context of the post-’68 West German left and in relation to his more staid auteur peers of the European “arthouse.” Although still presented as discrete numbered fragments, occasionally Penman’s jump cuts give way to something more like a chronological narrative with pages devoted to Fassbinder’s birth, childhood and family life. Such conventionally linear stretches are quickly interrupted, however. Sometimes Fassbinder disappears for pages at a time.
The text is sprinkled with free associations on Cold War bunkers, babies, suicides, video tapes, prosthetic limbs, fairy tales. The familiar names of German men proliferate (most of them left-wing and most from either Fassbinder’s generation or the one that preceded it): Theodor Adorno, Joseph Beuys, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Richter, Klaus Theweleit, Uwe Johnson, Heiner Müller, with a bit of Vladimir Nabokov and Jean Genet (whose non-German works Fassbinder adapted for the screen) thrown in for good measure. Some observations read like discrete thoughts while others are meditations on recurring themes: time and space; camp and kitsch; dreams and nightmares. Propelled by a methodology of nocturnal Wikipedia binges and YouTube spirals, the text’s stop-start rhythm and shifts in register even seem to mimic the experience of falling asleep and waking up. It zooms in and zooms out, dilates and contracts. Occasionally it strays into stoned teenager territory: ‘What kind of being is being on film?’ At other times it doesn’t really seem to be “about” anything much at all, but stretches out to encompass the experience of living as such, reading like random pages torn from a notebook:
History returns to us in déjà vu flashes, clips and ripples, leftover dream garble. A feeling of being haunted by someone else’s reverie. Forms of psychic repossession. Tropes of rising, sleeping, dozing, waking, returning from the dead.
Anecdotes about Fassbinder’s life are combined with recollections of Penman’s experiences as a long-standing Fassbinder fan and as a person writing about artworks and living through history: he reflects on his childhood on RAF bases, on the post-punk scene in London in the late 1970s, on taking heroin for the first time on the night Fassbinder died. Penman is a generation younger than Fassbinder and began working as a music journalist in Britain in the late 1970s, around the time Fassbinder had entered his final act as a director. These digressions and disjunctions work on their own terms. It makes sense that William Harris’s excellent review of the book for Jacobin said much more about Penman as a writer and cultural critic responding to and shaped by particular historical circumstances than it said about Fassbinder. ‘The cinema screen is a strange kind of mirror to recognise yourself in,’ Penman muses, but as I returned to Fassbinder’s films I wondered whether there was something about them that the book’s form failed to reflect.
Trapped inside
After reading the book, I began to rewatch Fassbinder’s films. Following Penman’s lead, I did so in a haphazard fashion. My approach was neither chronological nor completist. Like Penman, I found the experience of revisiting these works that had been so important to me at a particular time in my life – works that I had so often proclaimed to be my “favourites” – disorientating, painful and surprising. I couldn’t get over how unremittingly despairing they were. They evoked in me something of the shame of waking up hungover and remembering something embarrassing you said the night before. They felt indigestible, nihilistic, raw, relentless. Everything ended in tears. All the characters were so differently and exhaustingly flawed: difficult, annoying, petulant, pathetic, desperate, naive. Even though I understood intellectually Fassbinder’s motivations for embracing Brechtian alienation techniques, when I tried to re-watch Satan’s Brew (1976) I found myself pausing it every few minutes because I found the actors’ constantly raised voices so jarring. And though I’d recalled loving it when I’d watched it years ago, I could not bear to sit through the overwrought heterosexual nightmare of Martha (1974) for a second time. It seems strange to describe something so hyperbolic, stylised and heightened as being “too close to home” but that is how it felt. Watching Martha felt like a slap in the face. I wanted to get out.
There are moments in Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors that acknowledge the films’ bleakness. Penman asks if their pervasive hopelessness is symptomatic of a historical moment in which the intense politicised collectivity of the sixties curdled into the violence, exhaustion, cynicism and paranoia of the seventies. Fassbinder’s most overtly political films are among his most depressing: they contain the ridiculous bourgeois clown militants of The Third Generation (1979) and the selfish wealthy Communist Party members of Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975). Then there is the crushing Fox and His Friends (1975), in which a gay romance takes the form of exploitative class struggle ending in a tragedy without catharsis. But, as this passage in which Penman cites the German director Rosa von Praunheim indicates, there were other possibilities open to filmmakers who were working in the same time and place:
We’re both gay, independent filmmakers who worked a great deal with amateurs. But he’s very self-pitying in his films. His main message, that life sucks, found sentimental expression in every movie he made. I try to do the opposite, to show people who had a hard time throughout their lives but were able, with courage, optimism, and vitality, to continue the fight for our right to be different or other than the others…
I wondered why I had been so compelled by films whose main message is that life sucks. I guess because life really can suck: the thing that made me recoil from rewatching the films in the present is precisely what had drawn me to them in the past. Penman asks: ‘Is the Fassbinder worldview just an abyssal reflection of the capitalist one he supposedly execrates?’ What’s so seductive about staring into a mirror of society that magnifies all its pores? Why not break the glass or, as von Praunheim suggests, create something else around the edges of the frame?
Images and stories
When thinking about the peculiar way I had (mis)remembered Fassbinder’s films I thought of a line from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: ‘History decays into images, not into stories.’ After I began rewatching some of the films it seemed almost laughably inappropriate to reduce this body of work to a series of aesthetically pleasing set pieces, to transform a seething emotional mess into nice little social media-friendly screenshots. It was as if I had forgotten – repressed? – how spaces and objects function symbolically in Fassbinder’s films. As in the Sirk films he was so obsessed by, things always exist in relation to doomed characters stifled by stuff, constantly cut off from one another and themselves. Abused wife Martha encircled by houseplants, Ali and Emmi framed within doorways in Fear Eats the Soul, trans protagonist Elvira whose life is presented as a series of catastrophes split across mirrored tiles in In A Year Of 13 Moons (1978).
Penman’s book is laced with Benjamin quotations. He likens his relationship to Fassbinder to Benjamin’s to Charles Baudelaire and acknowledges The Arcades Project as a methodological inspiration. His Benjamin citations sometimes feel a bit rote, like a cultural critic on autopilot, and Penman even acknowledges this, reassuring the reader that he had first come across Benjamin before he had become an ‘omnipresent namedrop’ and admitting that the figure of the flâneur now seems ‘tired, pro forma.’ Still, he can’t resist citing an over-cited passage from Benjamin’s Theses ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940): ‘The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant it can be recognized and is never seen again.’ This might make sense in the context of Penman’s own project but it isn’t remotely apt to describe Fassbinder’s. Why cite a revolutionary argument about the capacity of the historical materialist to intervene in the continuum of history in relation to films in which images are always in the service of stories, in which time unfolds in an unrelentingly linear fashion towards a devastating conclusion?
I was more interested in an observation that Penman makes in a fragment that follows the quotation: ‘[Theses ‘On the Concept of History’] was the last work Walter Benjamin completed before a fatally half-hearted flight from Paris.’ Rather than Benjamin’s messianic theory of history, the historical fact of Benjamin’s suicide while attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France seems far more fitting to the subject at hand. A few pages earlier, Penman lists some of the endings of Fassbinder’s films: suicides, breakdowns, murders, overdoses. Death after death after death. Berlin Alexanderplatz closes with a nightmarish ‘epilogue’ in an abattoir (recalling the famous abattoir sequence from In A Year of 13 Moons). Though Fassbinder A Thousand Mirrors describes with precision the claustrophobic atmospheres and defeatist trajectories of Fassbinder’s films, its fragmentary form lends it an openness that makes it far more pleasurable to read than the films are to watch. Penman’s fragments ruminate insightfully on Fassbinder’s sensibilities but their form cannot convey the propulsive logic and pulverising intensity of the plots that drive the films they discuss. The sparks of hope Benjamin discerned in the past have been definitively extinguished by the time most Fassbinder films have reached their conclusion and there’s no angel of history around to perceive their chains of events differently.
Fassbinder’s films are not fragmentary. He was less interested in early twentieth century avant-garde montage technique than he was in Hollywood melodrama. Melodrama is closed and enclosed. As Thomas Elsaesser observes in his canonical essay on the genre, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’ (1972), 1950s Hollywood melodrama centred protagonists driven by ‘desires that always chase unattainable goals,’ who fail ‘to act in a way that could shape the events and influence the emotional environment, let along change the stifling social milieu’ and whose emotional tensions play out in an ‘enclosed field of pressure.’ Fassbinder’s output and aesthetic may have been excessive, but the excess was stuffed into plots with a constrained shape, united by a particular set of concerns:
Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of human feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It’s a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple’s relationship one partner destroys the other.
Two possible endings
In Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975), the eponymous working class heroine is widowed after her husband shoots his supervisor at a chemical factory before killing himself, an incident she initially hears reported on the radio. In the aftermath of the killing, the press circle like vultures and her adult children abandon her. Her singer daughter welcomes the press attention as an opportunity to further her career and soon moves in with the journalist who had betrayed her mother’s trust. After her husband’s funeral, Emma Küsters is befriended by a wealthy couple active in the Communist Party. They convince her that her husband’s act was a rational if misguided response to an exploitative system. She joins the Party and delivers a heartfelt speech to a meeting, declaring that she has come to see that her husband was ‘a man who hit back because he was beaten all his life’. Following the meeting she is approached by an anarchist who convinces her that the Party will not take action on her behalf. She agrees to join him and his comrades in a confrontation with the newspaper editor who printed false stories about her husband but is shocked when the anarchists draw guns on the newspaper staff.
As with so many of the other Fassbinder films I re-watched, this film’s plot is propelled by selfishness and betrayal. Individual characters have been shaped by the exploitative capitalist society in which they live. Injustices are laid bare but no justice is achieved. Even those who claim to fight on behalf of the oppressed turn out to be venal and untrustworthy. Emma herself is the only sympathetic character (played by Brigitte Mira who, across her many roles in Fassbinder’s films, exudes a warmth unusual among his ensemble). In the version I watched, the film ends in the newspaper editor’s office. The script’s ending flashes over a freeze frame of Emma’s face, revealing that she is shot in the crossfire of a police shoot out, along with the anarchist and the editor.
Penman’s penultimate appendix gathers quotations from a Fassbinder essay on Sirk published in translation in New Left Review in 1977. Many of Fassbinder’s descriptions of Sirk could equally apply to his own ‘incredibly pessimistic’ films, in which ‘everything is bound to go wrong’:
I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film.
Everything is so completely finished that everyone might as well give up and get themselves buried.
What these movies are about is the way people kid themselves.
Nothing but defeats. This film is nothing but an accumulation of defeats.
The one character who got everything she wanted was destroyed by it. Does this mean that in our society people are only accepted if they are always chasing something, like the dog with its tongue hanging out?
Fassbinder writes of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) that the ‘world around is evil’ and the characters’ love is thwarted by external conditions, but in Sirk’s Second World War romance A Time to Love and a Time To Die (1958) he catches a glimpse of something less despairing: ‘Love isn’t where the problem’s at. The problems are all happening on the outside. Inside two people can be tender to each other.’ He describes weeping at the conclusion of Imitation of Life (1959), whose characters’ cruel circumstances and behaviour were understandable but seemed impossible to change: ‘Unless we change the world. At this point all of us in the cinema cried. Because changing the world is so difficult.’
Rumoured to have been a response to the film’s first audiences who found the original too harsh, Fassbinder shot an alternative ending to Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven for the North American release. In this version the anarchists get bored of occupying the newspaper offices and leave. Emma meets the building’s caretaker who has also lost a spouse and he invites her to join him for a dinner of ‘heaven and earth’ (apples and potatoes). In a 1977 interview, Fassbinder claimed that he preferred this gentler, less intellectual ending because it exerted more of an emotional impact on the audience. ‘Inside two people can be tender to each other.’ This affective quality, he claimed, made it counter-intuitively ‘tougher’ than the original. What Fassbinder’s films show is how difficult it is to change the world and how difficult it is to live in it. Animated by the logic of the mirror, problems happening outside also usually play out between people inside. Even fleeting moments of tenderness can seem impossible in an evil world. But if sparks of hope are often extinguished in Fassbinder’s films, perhaps they can still be ignited in the audience which finds their remorseless cruelty intolerable.
Hannah Proctor is a writer and researcher. She works at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.