Rainer Werner Fassbinder upheld the great German tradition of Decadence.
In his time he was the best. And since we like our decadence in the Teutonic
tradition, Fassbinder succeeded abroad in a way that he never quite achieved
at home.
He was such a bad boy that his application to the Berlin Film School was
rejected. He went ahead and made films anyway, so that we had to watch him
learn his craft. It was a painful process, and the dim quality of the films
often got confused with the politics. For example, in 1970, "The American
Soldier" was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and, despite its political
naiveté and bad acting, it managed to offend the President of the
Festival Jury, George Stevens, Jr. (who should have had enough sense to
let things be). The Americans demanded Fassbinder's film be withdrawn from
the festival; German filmmakers got outraged and said, "Who's running
this joint anyway?" and were promptly told that Berlin was still an
occupied city....etc., etc. Not a good day for foreign policy.
Anyway, it was Fassbinder's wont to tell stories about whores and pimps
and the demimonde he imagined in Munich. He liked to pretend that the social
conditions he portrayed were widespread in Germany - guess again. His films
were down-and-dirty, grim and gritty melodramas, and they captured the imagination
of the kind of Americans who wrote for the "Village Voice" in
the early 1970s. Here was a gay, politicized, German filmmaker prompting
an almost unimaginable thing: us feeling sorry for Germans! That took some
kind of talent.
I find Fassbinder's early films annoying, phoney and badly made. But he
was smart, and he learned how to make extraordinary and daring movies. I
remember a cheery, beery night in a pub in Berlin when his producer bragged
that the only way he could get Rainer to make the big movies was to let
him take about a 20th of each budget and shoot some little thing that was
obsessing Rainer. "I'll probably get back to Munich on Monday and find
out he made a new film over the weekend," complained the producer.
But when he focused all of his talent on something like "The Marriage
of Maria Braun," "Lili Marlene," or "Veronika Voss,"
he was superb. He knew how to use light and was unafraid of emotional heroines
and tragedy.
His triumph was to win the Golden Bear from the Berlin Film Festival in
1982 for "Veronika Voss." To accept his award, he got out of his
customary grubby leather pants and jacket. He even washed his hair and trimmed
his fu-manchu moustache. He donned a white tuxedo and got his star to wear
a glam gold lame dress. The two of them marched on the stage like they were
about to revive the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The audience - who knew Fassbinder
too well - held its breath as he said thank you. Would Fassbinder take the
opportunity to tell everybody what hypocrites he thought they were? No.
He was as gracious as Goebbels courting German aristocracy.
The last time I saw Rainer was later that night. We were squeezed into the
bar of the old Hilton Hotel. I knew him from doing some translations for
him and from the Berlin scene, and I scooted over to sit beside him. I told
him I liked "Veronika Voss" and was glad to see him back in his
leather gear. He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.
He snorted some cocaine off the backside of his hand and knocked it back
with Chivas Regal. I said something like, "Look at you. You got all
this talent, and you're going to hell. You work too hard on top of it. This
is gonna ruin your health."
He eyed me over his refilled scotch glass and said, "Ach, you Americans
and your health, health, health. You're so healthy. You think the world
is going to be fixed by jogging. I can't stand it."
We laughed and drank some more. He died less than 4 months later, and I
was sad. He'd always been such a pain in the ass that I didn't really know
how much I liked him until he up and died on us. I'm sure he had no intention
of doing that. If I just could have got him into jogging...
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