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ASSIGNMENT IN by Harlan Kennedy Dateline: None more startling,
though, than Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who this year sported
chrome-link chains across an ever-increasing circumference. The Teuton wunderkind – well, at 35, not quite a kind but still a
wunder – clump-clumped into his press
conference, charismatic and bellicose. His film Die Sehnsucht
Der Veronika Voss had just unreeled to
noisy boos and claps and was to go on to win the Berlin Golden Bear. Herr F.
was vigorously giving questioning newshounds the
impersonation they wanted: an enfant
terrible
at
bay. Veronika Voss is not, heaven knows, Fassbinder's
best. But in a merciless There may be an
allegory in Veronika Voss – a dying With a Curtís Bernhardt
retrospective
in full swing at the Astor – reports ran that Fassbinder
solicited
it as the condition for fest-premiering his own film – and with noir-ish bows
to vintage Hollywood in movies like Christ Petit's An
Unsuitable Job for a Woman and Amos
Poe's
Subway Riders, Bernhardt's work began
with flair in Germany, then fell away in The best modern
make-over of film noir and heyday Hollywoodism was ● Film noir nightmare
and As if to underline the
point, one of the mightiest spectacles at Friedrich staged
it all as a human zoo in motion. The cast is sardine-packed in a cage for the
Prologue; American soprano Karan Armstrong uncoils
from a snake-skin as Lulu; a dinosaur skeleton towers over the whole production.
And you come away wondering what growling, primal carnivore will next jump
out at you from the German jungle of atavism? Try these fine monsters! Fucking City. All right, so the lot
of us turned up wrapped in raincoats and carrying newspapers for this film
about four Berliners – two guys, two girls – and the fun they have making
home porno movies. But if we came to drool we stayed to applaud. There are no
hardcore gymnastics in Lothar Lambert's film; and if
there were you couldn't see them too well through the smear and sizzle of
black-and-white 16mm. Just a raunchy-spoken comedy full of bull's-eye truths
about the power of lust and the collisions it causes between dream and
reality, supply and demand, sense and sensuality. In sex you can't make an omelette without breaking egos, and Die Beruhrte (No Mercy No
Future). Christ-like progress through the stations of sacrificial
sex by a schizophrenic girl. Set in Director Helma Sanders-Brahms
spoke briefly about her film: "I wanted Rita
G.'s story to parallel the process of filmmaking.
She offers herself and her love to a series of different men. And in the same
way the filmmaker with each film gives herself up to something new, 'risks'
herself in encounters with something outside society's norm." There is a harrowing
scene of bloody and prolonged lovemaking between Rita
G.,
not yet recovered from an abortion, and a black gastarbeiter
she picks up and brings to a hotel room. "I knew that this scene, in
normal film terms, goes on `too long,' " says Sanders-Brahms. "But I did it deliberately. I wanted the audiences
to become caught up in the spiral of suffering, that
Rita G. is in. In real life, that lovemaking actually
lasted three hours. In my film, it's just three minutes. But the shock value,
the relentlessness make it seem more." Bolder than the film's
individual scenes or details is the way Sanders-Brahms has defined a whole
society – its bigotries, its neuroses, its authoritarianism, its passion for
superficial propriety – in the story of one tragic casualty. That there is a
potent political subtext in the film, Sanders-Brahms
leaves us no doubt. "The nightgown Rita
G.
wears and the knife she uses to cut her wrists belonged to Ulrike Meinhof." Other new German
films, steeped in reeky exotics, were a cassoulet of good and bad. Ulrike
Ottinger's Freak Orlando pushes Virginia Woolf's sex-swapping hero(ine)
none-too-willingly through a fantasyland of German history. Wacky
Barnum-and-Bailey images; steadfast elusiveness of purpose. In Unsere Leichen Leben Noch – five Best of all was Werner Schroeter's Liebeskonzil which, though ball-and-chained to proscenium formalism in its filming of a banned play by Oscar Panizza
(the Bavarian Rabelais?), has Schroeter's deadpan
extravagance and chalky, outré makeup out of the Chez Lazarus drag club. ● So there were films
dancing about and keeping their feet warm in How else could the
ill-accoutred survive such as Sweden's The
Frank Murder, in
which Gucci-clad angels help a village idiot to fight the local landowner; A
German Revolution, wherein
director Helmut Herbst tries, and gaspingly
fails, to give Georg Büchner the kiss of biopic
life; and Zoltan Fabri's
catatonic Requiem, to
which the only proper response would be the Hungarian for "Zzzz…"? What is it that sits
like an incubus on the Nonetheless, Not quite your Napoleon
perhaps, with Carmine Coppola, color tints, and
orchestral tuxedos stretching beyond the earth's curvature. But it was
another chance for silent cinema to show that it could still crow fortissimo, and for Ruttmann's day-in-the-life-of-a-city to prove itself a
marvelous whirl of movie invention. The humming flux of humanity, the wax
and wane of a working day, the Léger-like beauty and bustle of factory
machinery, the street-life asides as witty as Chaplin. If Ruttmann's
nonfiction classic was the best revival at On the screen:
parading Cozarinsky's film, shown out of
competition, delineates not so much the banality of evil as the
what-the-hell-life-goes-on accommodations people make to it. Look happy or
look down a rifle barrel. Lulu – the survivor, the toujours gai – would have
recognized the smiling jungle, the entente of life-or-death hypocrisy. Lastly, a brace of
films – one short, one long. Hans Sachs and Hedda Rinneberg's Camilla Horn Watching Herself Play Gretchen in Murnau's Silent Movie Faust! Magic. Fraulein Horn, aged 75 and looking not a day over
glamorous 60, played Gretchen in Faust back
in On screen she
continues watching Gretchen, now fighting her way
through a blizzard. "The sound-stage was white with a fake snow... they
started the wind machines and little sticky pieces of snow blew into my eyes,
my nose, my mouth ... but with Murnau you couldn't
stop... and it was cold to show my breath." Reels continue to unspool, the screen is lit showing Gretchen being
carried to a stake, then tied, and Camilla
Horn
says, "And now it will be finished." I hope it won't. Cinemas all
over the world, book it now as a supporting program. You have nothing to lose
but your Trout Fishing in And the feature film
from ● No sooner had the
festival closed its gates and festivalgoers
vamoosed than news whispered through the jungle of the German night that Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo was to get a quiet and
tiny screening at a preview theater. It was. I went. Herzogs Amazonian
epic, which has had the gestation period and labor pains of two elephants and
was swathed in myth long before anyone had seen it, tumbled forth from the
projector beam and hit the light of a Berlin screen. First impressions
herewith. The print was ungraded and some postsynching was shaky. But "Klaus Kinski Rules" must be
scrawled on countless jungle trees down South America way; for ex-Aguirre Klaus is
at it again, this time trading Spanish armor for the tropic-stained white
suit of the title's opera-crazy German-Irish rubber baron and ice-maker. His golden hair is all
akimbo like warring wheatfields, his mouth is gashed in an imperious sneer, as he paddles
and steams up the Amazon bringing Verdi
and
Bellini to the wilderness. He plays Caruso on wind-up
78's and makes contact with the Indians more profound than language can. His
transport is joy, his destination is communion. Kinski-Fitzcarraldo buys, repairs, and
hauls up river – and over mountain – a steamer, the Molly Aida, which becomes his very own
floating La Scala: with orchestra and
singers and a production of I Puritani played to the river and the passing jungle. Herzogs genius
lies as ever in using wild incongruity as a way into Pantheism. Extreme
opposites are yoked and the shock of the surreal startles you into a Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt together
at the mid-jungle Manaos opera-house? Herzog provides
them in his opening scenes; with the Divine Sarah wildly and wordlessly
emoting while the King of the High C's holds high the suicide dagger at the
climax of Ernani. (To pile on
colliding anomalies, Sarah in the film is played by a man, and the ultra-stylized
staging is by Werner Schroeter, Herzogs compatriot.) Everywhere in the film
irreconcilables are reconciled. There's a stunning scene later in the movie
in which the Molly Aida, purling Caruso across the ether, is
overtaken by a gliding swarm of native canoes backed by a crescendo of
toppling trees. The Indians pull alongside and gently, tickle the side of
the boat with their fingers before quietly scrambling up, drawn to the white
man in the white suit on the white boat. Kinski
holds out a nervously firm hand to shake. The silent Indians answer it with
their own greeting: a delicate scrabbling of fingertips on the inside of Kinski's fingers. Then they glide and skitter around him,
touching him, exploring him. They finger his blond hair,
peer up agog at his blue eyes. Kinski, all the
while, magisterially, preposterously aloof, pupils glaring. Fitzcarraldo is a movie about communion between worlds, the transportability
of rapture. There are no hindrances too Herculean if the will is there. One
of the film's most spectacular showpieces – its central metaphor – is the
scene of the boat being hauled over a mountain. This folie de grandeur is conceived by Fitzcarraldo as the only way he can get his floating
opera-house to his own stretch of water, and it's like a DeMille
let's-build-the-pyramid-right-here scene given a crazy centrifugal poetry. Straining ropes,
screaming winches, pole-axed pines, crushed Indians. But far from being an
expense of in a waste of soles,
it pulls the movie's plural threads and themes together in one supreme
imagistic conjunction. Music and mathematics unite,
expressions of each other. Meaning is born from surreal adjacency (of boat
and mountain). Herzog builds
his film from the raw elements – earth, air, fire, water – and melds them in
ever startling combinations. In one scene a long shot shows red tongues of
flame licking the steamer at night. Conflagration? Indian sabotage? But as
the camera moves closer, the flames are seen to be watch fires surreally
scattered on the wooden deck among the sleeping Indians. Water is the primal
element and the magical thread of Fitzcarraldo; the liquid highway which
connects worlds and cultures. It glints and snakes between green spurs of
jungle, it rolls like molten silver at twilight, it floats in pockets of
mists; it's changed into ice by Kinski and given as
a cool, solid block to the Indians; it catches the demountained
steamer in a wild and welcoming whirlpool. Fitzcarraldo is a film which takes as its protagonist the greatest hybrid
form in all art – opera – and spreads the message of its celestial
incongruity through all the fibers and fabric of its story. Caruso sings in the deepest Amazon. White men and
Indians commune, with touch and trust. The will to connect moves mountains
and makes miracles. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN THE MAY-JUNE 1982 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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