The Marriage of Maria Braun
Love Is Colder Than Death
West Germany 1978. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny, Gottfried John, Günter Lamprecht
West Germany 1969. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ulli Lommel, Hans Hirschmüller, Peter Berling
“A work of genius” (Jay Scott, Globe and Mail), the marvellous Marriage of Maria Braun is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most famous film and was his greatest popular success. It also exemplifies his clever, cunning use of conventional melodrama — derived from Hollywood films in general, and those of Douglas Sirk in particular — as a vehicle for critiquing the social and political state of post-World War II Germany. The sprawling soap opera plot concerns a young German woman who marries near the end of the war, only to lose her husband at the Russian front. Reduced to dire poverty in the war’s rubble-strewn aftermath, she improves her fortunes by taking up with an American soldier, but things take a deadly turn when her husband unexpectedly returns. The postwar rags-to-riches tale of the eponymous heroine is meant to parallel West Germany’s so-called “Economic Miracle.” Hanna Schygulla’s towering, sexually-charged performance in the title role drew comparisons to Marlene Dietrich, and earned Schygulla the best actress award at Berlin in 1979. “Schygulla is the luminous focus of the film’s beauty and scathing intelligence; the movie is unimaginable without her” (Richard T. Jameson). Colour, 35mm, in German with English subtitles. 120 mins.
Love Is Colder Than Death was Fassbinder’s first feature — and is therefore one of the most important debuts in the history of cinema! Its title also aptly summarizes one of the major themes of his prolific career. Very much of the director’s early gangster/Godard period, the film has Fassbinder himself as Franz, a small-time pimp who refuses to join a crime syndicate. Ulli Lommel is Bruno, the dangerous thug sent to change Franz’s mind — and whom Franz loves. Fassbinder diva Hanna Schygulla is Joanna, Franz’s hooker girlfriend. A nasty series of betrayals and double-crosses ensues as the B-movie plot plays itself out; occasional interludes of tour-de-force comedy and tongue-in-cheek genre send-up serve to lighten what is otherwise a darkly pessimistic, emotionally detached study of another key Fassbinder concern: “characters as victims of an impersonal, alienated society, who blindly, often violently, lash out, defending themselves as best they can against forces beyond their control” (Anna Kuhn). Dedicated to “Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub, Linio and Cuncho” (the latter two are misspellings of characters in Quien Sabe?, a 1966 spaghetti western by Damiano Damiani), Love Is Colder met with a hostile reception at the 1969 Berlin fest, where Fassbinder was booed. Dissenters championed it as a debut of Breathless-like proportions. B&W, 35mm, in German with English subtitles. 88 mins.
(Die Ehe der Maria Braun)
SUNDAY, JULY 1 – 4:00 PM MONDAY, JULY 2 – 8:15 PM WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 – 8:15 PM FRIDAY, JULY 6 – 6:30 PM
DOUGLAS SIRK’S
All that Heaven Allows
USA 1955. Director: Douglas Sirk Cast: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead, Conrad Nagel, Virginia Grey
Douglas Sirk’s glossy, glorious melodramas of the 1950s were a huge influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cinema. This 1955 tearjerker, starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, was remade by Fassbinder in 1973 as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Todd Haynes, a devotee of both Sirk and Fassbinder, fashioned his own masterful remake in 2002’s Far from Heaven. Wyman plays a lonely, middle-class, middle-aged widow whose love affair with her younger, “bohemian” gardener, played by Hudson, scandalizes her class-conscious family and friends. In one of the film’s most famous (and unnerving) scenes, her grown-up children, having persuaded her to ditch the inappropriate beau, attempt to placate her with a new television set instead. All That Heaven Allows is brilliantly shot by cinematographer Russell Metty in gorgeous Expressionistic colours and elaborate compositions that further the subversive Sirk agenda; beneath the slick melodramatic surface, this is a devastating portrait of middle-class American shallowness, snobbishness, and intolerance, and of a woman trapped by repressive bourgeois mores. Wyman and Hudson were also the principals of Magnificent Obsession, Sirk’s blockbuster success of the year before. “A masterpiece by one of the most inventive and recondite directors ever to work in Hollywood” (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader). Colour, 35mm. 89 mins. SUNDAY, JULY 1 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, JULY 2 – 4:30 PM
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf)
West Germany 1973. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Cast: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Irm Hermann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fassbinder’s “racy” reworking of Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodrama All That Heaven Allows (also screening July 1 & 2) won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes in 1974, and remains one of the director’s most celebrated films. Beautifully stylized in the Sirkian manner, and scathing in its critique of German social and political values, Fear Eats the Soul has Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a widowed cleaning woman and ex-Nazi, falling in love with Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), an Arab immigrant worker twenty years her junior. The two are drawn to each other because of shared loneliness — because, as Emmi says, “No-one can live without other people” — but their romance meets with outright hostility and racism from family and friends, and they must also face the very real age and cultural differences between them. The film marked Fassbinder’s big breakthrough with foreign critics; he began to be championed by the likes of Vincent Canby of the New York Times, among others, as “the most original talent since Godard.” “A masterpiece ... not to be missed” (Andrew Sarris). Colour, 35mm, in German with English subtitles. 93 mins. SUNDAY, JULY 1 – 8:15 PM MONDAY, JULY 2 – 6:30 PM FRIDAY, JULY 6 – 8:45 PM
(Liebe ist kälter als der Tod)
WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, JULY 9 – 8:50 PM
Fox and His Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit)
West Germany 1974. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Cast: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Chatel, Karlheinz Böhm, Rudolf Lenz, Adrian Hoven
“The most honest film I’ve made up to now... I think it’s incidental and beside the point that the story has to do with gays” (Fassbinder). Fassbinder cast himself in the lead of this merciless comedy of manners about a working-class homosexual who is ruthlessly manipulated by a group of upper-crust gays after he wins a small fortune in a lottery. Fox and His Friends has been called the male mirror image of the earlier Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant; its protagonist’s name, Franz Biberkopf, is lifted from the Alfred Döblin opus Berlin Alexanderplatz, which Fassbinder would later film as a 15-hour miniseries. The film’s chilly denouement is eerily prescient of the director’s own untimely demise. “A lacerating portrait of class exploitation and sadomasochism, Fox is one of Fassbinder’s finest” (James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario). “A work of brilliant intelligence. And the director himself is superb as the none-too-intelligent hero” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). Colour, 35mm, in German with English subtitles. 123 mins. MONDAY, JULY 9 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JULY 11 – 8:50 PM
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant)
West Germany 1972. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Cast: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Eva Mattes, Katrin Schaake
“A tragi-comic love story disguised as a lesbian slumber party in high camp drag” (Molly Haskell), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is one of Fassbinder’s most audacious and stylized films. Petra von Kant, a successful fashion designer who uses and abuses the love of her livein secretary and slave Marlene, finds the sadomasochistic tables turned when she enters into a humiliating relationship with Karin, a beautiful young model. Adapted from the director’s own theatre piece, the feverish film is set entirely within the hothouse confines of an absurdly extravagant apartment, decorated with white mannequins and an enormous Titian-like mural, and dominated by a brass bed. A prowling camera and stunning compositional groupings define and enclose the characters, while the odd dialogue and exaggerated acting heighten the sense of artificiality. The soundtrack combines Verdi and The Platters. The film has been variously described as “Fassbinder’s version of Death in Venice” (Reinhard Baumgard), “an unloving look at male power struggles in lesbian disguise” (Jay Scott, Globe and Mail), and “one of the great love stories of modern cinema” (NFT/London). Colour, 35mm, in German with English subtitles. 124 mins. WEDNESDAY, JULY 11 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JULY 15 – 8:30 PM
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