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FassBinder Is he Fassbinder? Fassbinder's 1979 film, The Third
Generation, carried the subtitle, "A comedy in 6 parts about parlor
games full of suspense, excitement and logic, cruelty and madness, like the
fairytales told to children to help them bear their lives unto sleep." When
asked to define the "third generation" of his film's title was,
Fassbinder said, "It refers to the three generations of terrorism, a theme
that unfortunately is very fashionable. The first generation was that of '68.
Idealists who wanted to change the world and told themselves they could do it
with words and demonstrations. The second, the Baader-Meinhof group, went from
legality to armed struggle and to total criminality. The third is that of today,
which simply acts without thinking, which has neither ideology nor politics, and
which, without knowing it, lets itself be controlled by others like a bunch of
marionettes." At about the same time, Fassbinder received,
and responded to, a questionnaire sent out as part of a school class project.
Did he look forward to the future, or did he approach it with pessimism?
"That's not an issue for me." Did he think suicide can be justified on
principle? "Yes." Did he see the mentally ill as a burden to society?
"In our society there's no one who isn't mentally ill." Did he allow
himself to be influenced by other people's moods? "Depends on the
moods." How did he visualize his professional and private future?
"There isn't any past, there isn't any present, so there isn't any future,
either." Were his scripts based on true happenings? "There aren't any
true happenings. The true is the artificial." Dieter Schidor, who had previously worked as an
actor, wanted to produce a film version of Querelle de Brest, a novel by
French writer Jean Genet. Genet, who had spent years in the criminal underworld,
was in prison when some of his writing came to the attention of Jean-Paul
Sartre. Along with Jean Cocteau, Sartre petitioned to have Genet released so
that he could continue his work as a writer. Genet chronicled his years as a
criminal, and his homosexual encounters with men in the underworld, in The
Thief's Journal. He also worked as a novelist, a playwright, and a
journalist (in 1968, he wrote about the general strike that brought France to a
halt in May, then covered the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with
Terry Southern). He also wrote an original screenplay, Mademoiselle,
which Tony Richardson directed in 1966. Jeanne Moreau played a provincial
schoolteacher whose love for a local woodcutter causes her to destroy the entire
town where she lived. Moreau's appearance in the film may have had something to
do with her being cast as Madame Lysiane in Schidor's production of Querelle. "The thought of murder often evokes
thoughts of the sea, and of sailors. What naturally follows thoughts of the sea
and murder is the thought of love or sexuality...." There is a consummate
image of Brad Davis in Querelle when Roger (Laurent Malet) hears Davis'
character, the sailor Querelle, say, "Come here," turns, and sees him,
standing on a dock (possibly a dock, since it appears to be made out of metal
plating and rivets) that looks coppery from the corpulent setting sun behind it.
Davis wears a long black peat coat, a black-and-white stripped cotton shirt, and
crisp pressed white sailor's bellbottom trousers. His lean features make his
head look like it's cocked, insouciantly, with chin up, eyes almost closed, head
tilted back until you almost cannot make out his white French naval sailor's
hat. His body seems to curve languidly from the neck down, into an inverted
"j." This is the man whom Genet described as "[a] young boy,
whose soul is visible in his eyes, metamorphosed into an alligator...." and
which Fassbinder put more simply as, "He was a boy whose soul had changed
into an alligator." Well, not quite. Fassbinder's Querelle drops
the process Genet described by which the main character had already started his
transformation before the main story begins. "In my opinion, it's not a
film about murder and homosexuality. It's a film about someone trying, with all
the means that are possible in this society, to find his identity...." Brad Davis, sinewy and charismatic, and still
fresh from his appearance as Billy Hayes in "Midnight Express," plays
the sailor whose brother, Robert, is the lover of Lysiane (played by Moreau),
co-proprietor of the Feria Bar in the French port town of Brest. Querelle
obtains and sells narcotics, cheats, steals, murders, betrays, and allows
himself to be deflowered by Lysiane's husband, Nono (Günther Kaufmann), after
losing a bet with him. Yet Querelle is thrown into a quandary when he
experiences love, instead of plain sexual attraction, for Giles, who is hiding
from the police after being accused of a murder Querelle committed. Querelle
arranges for an escape and a disguise for Giles -- the disguise makes Giles,
down to the fake mustache, look like Querelle's brother Robert. And, even though
the narration tells us of the "striking resemblance between the two
brothers" Querelle and Robert, Fassbinder cast actor Hanno Pöschl, who
doesn't look at all like Brad Davis, to play both Robert and Giles. Fassbinder was probably the only director at
the time -- maybe the only director, period -- who had the artistry, the sense,
the clout, the reputation, and the brazenness to get this film made. With
production designer Rolf Zehetbauer, Querelle was filmed in a fanatically
artificial style, with the quays and waterfront sections of the town of Brest
created and filmed entirely on a soundstage. It is also unapologetically
homosexual: phalluses jut impudently from the architecture or appear frosted on
window panes, the languid staging makes everyone look like they're cruising
everyone else, and the scenes and actors are bathed in shades of tangerine
orange and burnished gold, giving almost everything the appearance of a
tumescent California coastal sunset. (When Jean-Jacques Beineix's equally
stylized The Moon in the Gutter, with Gerard Depardieu and Nastassja
Kinski, came out in the U.S. a few months after Querelle, David Denby
described it as "a heterosexual Querelle.") Fassbinder took the
film further than any film had previously in both depicting and expressing gay
sexuality without the trappings of morality, self-loathing, condescension, or
reservation. This picture came out years before the emergence of ACT-UP, Queer
Nation, and "We're here, we're queer, get used to it." One of the
characters in the film (played by Burkhard Driest, who wrote the first draft of
the film's screenplay), a local police detective, spends his off hours wearing a
leather visor cap and vest, like one of the bikers in a Tom of Finland sketch,
while the French sailor hats, and the close-ups of Laurent Malet's delicate,
slender features, evoke the crisp, perfect, scrupulously composed conceptual
photographs made by Pierre et Gilles. (Fassbinder's mother, Liselotte, can be
spotted, dressed as a nun, in a scene where Moreau sings in the Feria bar; Kurt
Raab turns up as well, first dressed as a Roman Catholic cardinal, then, near
the end, in drag wearing a geisha wig and holding a folding fan. Fassbinder did
a silent cameo in one of the police station scenes, but this does not appear to
have made it into the final cut of film, although a photo of his appearance was
reprinted in the magnificently-produced Querelle Filmbuch that was
published to accompany the film's release.) Brad Davis, who distinguished himself as a
stage actor during the first half of the 1980s, playing Gregor Samsa in an
adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Capt. Queeg in The Caine
Mutiny Court Martial, could have probably captured the difficult shadings of
Querelle's character, but Fassbinder's approach works against the actors,
distancing us through studied staging and movement and the interspersal of title
cards which, in Brechtian style, interrupts any involvement we may have been
having with the drama and forces us to be objective and detached. Scenes fade in
and out of white, a device that Fassbinder said he used so that the audience
would remain "awake" during the film. The ending of the film even
suggests that there may have been no Querelle at all, that what we had been
watching may have been either an individual or group fantasy all along. Which brings us to another aspect of
Fassbinder's work in this film: his contribution to Germany in Autumn,
and the "postwar trilogy": the notion of forgetting. During the years
that Adenauer served as West Germany's chancellor, the country rose from a
physical and spiritual annihilation to a state with a flourishing economy, a
respectable place as one of Europe's, and the world's, leading countries, and
one where most citizens were living in comfort and could afford luxuries that
would have been unthinkable prior to the "economic miracle." (On the
other hand, there was the Berlin Wall, and the "Christiane F." series
of reports in Der Spiegel that indicated that not all was well among the
nation's youth.) Maria Braun tries to span the years that keep her apart from
Hermann by embarking upon a career which starts when she negotiates a deal
whereby Oswald's new textile plants will be able to produce nylon stockings for
Germany's women. Lola keeps her relationship with von Bohm separate from her
"secret" life as a kept woman. Veronika Voss is on the verge of being
forgotten as both a movie star and as a person, with Dr. Katz's morphine
injections helping all the way. Querelle appears in the town of Brest, affects
everyone he comes in contact with, experiences "moments of sorrow as being
those moments in which [he] himself felt the light wrinkles of forgetfulness on
his terrible body...," and then disappears like a shadow when exposed to
direct light. When Giles says ."..I'll never forget you," Querelle
replies, "You say that now. Life happens fast. You're already forgetting
me." And, at the start of the film, Lysiane, sitting at a table with
Robert, casts the tarot and tells Robert that his brother is in "great
danger.... He's in danger of finding himself." Yet when Querelle's path brings him face to
face with his superior officer on-board the ship Vengeur, Lt. Seblon
(Franco Nero, in a brave, magisterial performance) -- who has been hopelessly
yearning for Querelle from afar during the entire story -- Querelle becomes
transfixed, as if by a manifestation, as if he can suddenly see that, by
submitting to him, Seblon will lead him, "subdued, completely
subdued," to where he will find his place and purpose in the world --
through stasis, oblivion, forgetfulness. (Querelle tells Seblon, "It must
be done so that, afterwards, I can lie across your thighs like a pietá...."
During a pre-production meeting, Fassbinder told Dieter Schidor, "Querelle
must be a film about the Passion of our Lord.") Querelle also
ends with a coda that was not in the original script: "His birth
certificate states: Born on the nineteenth of December, 1918, at ten o'clock in
the morning. Mother: Gabrielle Genet. Father: unknown. Apart from his books, we
know nothing about him, not even the date of his death, which to him seems
near." The reference is to Jean Genet, who never knew who his real father
was, and who rose from obscurity to become a famous and celebrated author. Fassbinder wanted to premiere Querelle
at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1982, where it would be appearing along
with new films by Wim Wenders (Hammett) and Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo)
-- making it the first time anywhere where the Big Three of the New German
Cinema movement would be showing their latest works at one event. But Columbia Pictures, which was distributing Querelle
in the U.S., demanded that Fassbinder cut the film down to two hours or less, or
it would be shuttled off into limited "arthouse" engagements instead
of receiving a wide release. Dieter Schidor expected Fassbinder to explode over
the news. Instead, he simply shrugged and said, "Well, I guess I'll have to
do my 'hat trick' next year." (As it turned out, Columbia would cut
thirteen more minutes out of Querelle and shuttle it off into an "arthouse"
release, anyway.) Fassbinder did go to the Cannes Festival anyway; participated
in Wim Wenders' Chambre 666 project, where various film directors entered
a Cannes hotel room and recorded, singly, their thoughts about film and
filmmaking; and wrote an essay about how wonderful it was to attend the event
when you don't have a film in competition. Querelle was portentously advertised as
being "Fassbinder's final statement." It was not, nor was it ever
intended to be. Filming was all set to start in June on I Am the Happiness of
This World: Harry Baer had found a club that could serve as the film's main
location not far from Peer Raben's flat in Munich. Fassbinder was thinking of
putting Rosel Zech into a remake of the Joan Crawford movie
"Possessed." There were several literary adaptations, including one of
Georges Bataille's 1957 novel, Le Bleu du Ciel (The Blue of Noon:
Sample passage from the novel: "She was aroused by me, she aroused me, but
all we managed to do was nauseate one another." If anybody could make a
movie out of this material, it would be Fassbinder.) He had also been making
notes for several years on doing a film either based on the life of, or on one
of the works by, Unica Zürn, the ill-fated, early twentieth-century Swiss poet
and Surrealist. And there was also still the possibility of filming the
Pitigrilli novel. Further installments in the "BRD"
series of films about the German Federal Republic were planned. There was
certainly material to be found there: the espionage scandal during Helmut Kohl's
chancellorship, the comparative European and American responses to the outbreak
of H.I.V., the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the high emotion over the
reunification of Germany, the rise of the Russian Mafya, the resurrection of the
Ufa studio complex, the Holocaust-denial movement and the openly neo-Nazi music
of Rammstein, and the construction of a new Reichstag building which, designed
by a British architect, would have a domed glass roof that would make it
"open" to the public view. Fassbinder was giving filmed interviews to Wolf
Griem for a documentary Griem was making, The Wizard of Babylon, and had
played the lead in Griem's cockeyed detective film, Kamikaze '89. (Fassbinder
liked the leopard-spotted clothes that he wore in the film so much that he was
allowed to keep them, and wore them the day Andy Warhol visited the set of Querelle.
Warhol designed the poster for the premiere of "Querelle.") Fassbinder had also been talking with Jane
Fonda about her appearing in a film about Rosa Luxemburg, who formed the
Spartacus League and attempted to start a worker's revolution in Germany during
the early years of the twentieth century. The film star had answered one of
Fassbinder's telephone calls to her by saying, "This is Jane Fonda
herself." Thereafter, Fassbinder answered one of Dieter Schidor's calls to
him by saying, in English, "This is Fassbinder himself." Early on the morning on June 10, 1982, Juliane
Lorenz let herself into the penthouse apartment Fassbinder was living, on
Clemmenstrasse, carrying freshly-made rolls from an all-night bakery. She went
into Fassbinder's room to wake him. The room had a mattress on the floor, a
telephone with a private unlisted number separate from the residential line, and
a T.V. and V.C.R. loaded with a tape of the movie 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing.
Currency bills were scattered about the floor, not an uncommon sight in
Fassbinder's residences. Juliane turned off the T.V., which was still on, and
opened the curtains. Fassbinder was lying on the mattress, apparently asleep,
until Juliane noticed that he was sleeping soundlessly. Fassbinder was an
inveterate snorer. After checking Fassbinder, she phoned for an
ambulance and woke up Wolf Griem, who was sleeping in another part of the
apartment. When the ambulance arrived, a paramedic walked into the apartment,
into Fassbinder's room, and knelt by the mattress. After examining the
filmmaker, he stated, "This man is dead." Adding, "Is he
Fassbinder?"
Sources for this article include:
Eighteen of the director's films will be re-released, theatrically and on home video by Winstar Communications in 2002. |
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