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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk: Recreation of All That Heaven Allows as Angst essen Seele auf (1974)

Author : William H. Mooney

Published in: Adaptation and the New Art Film

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s All that Heaven Allows (1955) as Angst Essen Seele Auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) updates Douglas Sirk’s story of a middle-class widow who falls in love with her gardener, translating it to urban Munich in the 1970s. Influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague and avant-garde theater, in 1971 Fassbinder developed a new directness of style in response to Sirk’s melodramas. In Fear Eats the Soul, he specifically employs Sirk’s film as a template for illuminating the relationship between a Gastarbeiter and a working-class German woman. In doing so, he provides a prime example of auteurist film-to-film adaptation, opening the way to the more radical recycling of canonical film texts by subsequent art film directors in the postmodern era.

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previous chapter Introduction

next chapter Far from Heaven (2002)

Elsaesser specifies the films between Merchant of the Four Seasons (1972) and Chinese Roulette (1976), 263.

After a first mention of Fassbinder’s German titles, I will use the English ones.

Thomsen, 45–46.

Thomsen considers Garbage, the City, and Death Fassbinder’s “most explosive and original play,” and that the campaign against Fassbinder was unjustified. The play was attacked by critic Joachim Fest in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 19 March, 1976 as “left-fascist and anti-Semitic” based on dialogue delivered by characters who are, in fact, Nazis. The play was based on a novel by Gerhard Zwerenz, and in Thomsen’s account, the Jewish community in Frankfurt rushed to support Fest’s criticism because its leader, a real estate investor named Ignatz Bubis who later became well-known as President of the Central Council of Jews, was a model for the corrupt character Abraham in Zwerenz’s novel. 203–208.

Barnett, 255.

Thomsen, 47.

Fleißer was mentored by Brecht, who apparently had a hand in the production of, and scandal around, Pioneers. According to Thomsen, “Just as Fleißer would hardly have managed to make her breakthrough without Brecht, so the young Fassbinder would hardly have started to write without Fleißer.” 95.

From an interview with Corinna Brocher, in Fassbinder, Die Anarchie der Phantasie, Frankfurt am Main, 1986. Quoted by Thomsen, 49.

Barnett, 23.

49, 51.

50.

Barnett, 85.

Barnett, 9 and 17: “Regietheater was both sensual and cerebral, plumbing the text for impulses that went beyond the bourgeois functions of the theatre, such as providing cultured entertainment of education for its audience.” 125.

Barnett, 5.

Ibid., 52–3.

Ibid., 148.

Ayers.

Ibid., 78.

76.

See Elizabeth Wright, 13. She draws on material made available by Reiner Steinweg in his Das Lehrstück, 1972.

“The poetically heightened conversational style, the critique of a language of emotions perverted by jargon and cliché, and the investment in the power of speechlessness in Horváth’s plays… are much closer to Fassbinder’s early work in theater (and film) than anything Brecht wrote after Baal.” Peucker, 60.

Barnett, 6.

One account can be found in Thomsen, 2–9.

110.

Katz, 72–74. Salem’s life after starring in this successful film and being estranged from Fassbinder was troubled; in 1977 in a French prison, he hanged himself. Fassbinder found out about this only later, dedicating Querelle (1982) to him with the words “To my friendship with El Hedi ben Salem.”

See, for example, Laura Cottingham, 22.

298. Elsaesser writes this specifically in response to two projects left unfinished at Fassbinder’s death, prefacing the cited remark with: “a reading of his work that stresses the psycho-biographical links … is deeply unsatisfactory.”

Peucker, 81.

Braun, 76. See Wilfried Wiegand: Interview 1. In Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (ed.): Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Frankfurt, 1992, 75. Thomsen refers to Vivre sa vie as Fassbinder’s favorite film and describes his early short, Das kleine Chaos, 1967, as a direct homage.

For more on the Godardian side of Fassbinder, see McMahon. She finds in Katzelmacher, as in Godard’s work, “an extreme instrumentalization of intersubjective relations, emphatically showing forms of economic and emotional exploitation to be inextricably bound up with one another.” McMahon goes so far as to associate the “on screen spectacularization of Karina and Schygulla by their directors as related to a conscious production of their star personas, [such that] female stardom in this context emphatically assumes the seriality of a commodity.” Peucker, 85.

Elsaesser, 270. For his source, see note 11, 386: “Spielfilme im Deutschen Fernsehen,” ARD Brochure 1973.

45.

Hans Günther Pflaum, Ich will nicht nur, daß ihr mich liebt—Der Filmemacher Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a documentary film, 1992.

Love is Colder than Death (1969); Götter der Pest (Gods of the Plague, 1970); Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier, 1970); and Rio das Mortes (1971).

Fassbinder frequently used in film credits the pseudonym Franz Walsche, a mash-up of Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz and Raoul Walsh.

Wir haben von der Produktion des neuen deutschen Films konkrete geistige, formale und wirtschaftliche Vorstellungen. https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/fileadmin/Kurzfilmtage/Kurzfilmtage_allgemein/Manifest/heller_ob_manifest_text.jpg.

xv.

Fassbinder, though not a signatory of the Oberhausen Manifesto, became the movement’s most prolific and controversial participant, inevitably a leading voice because of his visibility. With Wim Wenders, he was among the founders of the Filmverlag der Autoren in 1971, which attempted to address the challenges of distribution for the work of the New German Cinema directors.

xv.

3–4.

Monogram, No. 4, 2–15.

xv.

Michael Töteberg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Rowohlt e-book, Kindle.

Reprinted in Anarchy, 77–89.

Anarchy, 42.

275.

50.

Cited by Peucker, 5. McMahon’s chapter focuses on Godard’s influence in the early films.

Fassbinder may have been influenced by the strikingly similar conclusion of Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965).

For analysis of how Fassbinder’s use of color routinely differs from that of Sirk, see Brian Price, “Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority,” in Peucker, 159–180.

56.

50.

51.

50. From an interview with Norbert Sparrow in Cineaste VIII/2, 1977, 20.

“A character’s false consciousness became the vehicle for showing up a world of insincerity and bogus values, where the deformation of subjectivity—say a mother’s harsh disappointment in her son or a shrewish wife—merely mirrored the deformation of social reality.” 51.

51.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) was a similar attempt to adapt a canonical novel for television; it was a failure at the time—by then Fassbinder’s public reputation had been tarnished, the book was difficult and less familiar than Effi Briest, and the film’s lighting and cinematography made the images on the television screen difficult to discern.

What is Cinema, 142.

Special Features, The Criterion Collection DVD, 2001.

Anarchy, 11–12.

Anarchy, 80.

Anarchy, 78–80.

81.

This dimension of Sirk was clearly recognized by others at the time, for example Halliday, writing that “Heaven, along with Imitation of Life, 1958, represents Sirk’s most sustained dissection of pretense connected with class, fakery which has accumulated historically and now caked into ideology.” Halliday, Monogram, No. 4. London: Monogram Publications, 1972.

Anarchy, 42.

Euripides especially is frequently evoked; see for example Halliday’s Sirk on Sirk.

Home, 76.

81. Provocateur that he was, Fassbinder immediately countered this expression of sympathy for women by continuing dryly: “That’s something you’ve got to see. It’s wonderful to see a woman thinking. That gives you hope. Honest.”

Ayers, Jessica. Vanderbilt University Theater. Notes for a production of Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/goodperson/brechtian-acting/.

Barnett, David. Fassbinder and the German Theater. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Bazin, André. What is Cinema? volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Braun, Theodor. “The Helplessness of Immersion: Melodrama, Vivre sa vie, and Veronika Voss.” Spectator (USC), Vol. 8, issue 2, 1988.

Corrigan, Timothy. New German Film: The Displaced Image, Revised edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Cottingham, Laura. Fear Eats the Soul. London: British Film Institute, 2005.

Elsaesser, Thomas: Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996.CrossRef

Fassbinder, Reiner Werner. The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Fassbinder, Reiner Werner. Angst Essen Seele Auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974). Criterion Collection DVD, 2003.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Vivre sa vie (1962).

Halliday, Jon. Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Christine Gledhill, ed. London: British Film Institute, 2002.

Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, second edition. London: Routledge, 2013.

Katz Robert, and Peter Berling. Love is Colder than Death. London: Paladin Books, 1986.

Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Leo, A. Lensing. “Literature between Cinema and Life.” In Peucker, 53–66.

Mayne, Judith. “Fassbinder and Spectatorship.” New German Critique, No. 12 (Autumn, 1977), 61–74.

Peucker, Brigitte, ed. A Companion to Reiner Werner Fassbinder. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968.

Sirk, Douglas. All That Heaven Allows (1958). DVD, The Criterion Collection, 2001.

Thomsen, Christian Braad. Fassbinder, The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Töteberg, Michael. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1992. Frankfurt: Fischer Cinema, 1992. (Kindle).

Verevis, Constantine. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.CrossRef

Wright, Elizabeth. Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Title: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk: Recreation of All That Heaven Allows as Angst essen Seele auf (1974)
Author: William H. Mooney
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Adaptation and the New Art Film
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62933-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-62934-2

Copyright Year: 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_2