Kamikaze 89

Being a lonely, sluggish, and slob-like fellow in an absurd campy leopard-colored detective outfit is probably not the way German New Cinema master auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder expected to be last remembered, but such was his fate after overdosing on cocaine shortly after his final screen appearance as the lead protagonist in the softcore dystopian cyberpunk flick Kamikaze 1989 (1982) aka Kamikaze 89 directed by Wolf Gremm (Death or Freedom, Fabian). While many have mixed feelings about Fassbinder’s final auteur-piece Querelle (1982) – a renegade cinematic reworking of Jean Genet's 1947 novel of the same name that more than hints at the fact that the ill-fated filmmaker was heading in a completely different direction aesthetically due to the film’s elaborate expressionistic sets and international star cast, Kamikaze 89 would prove to be an ostensibly depressing and even embarrassing celluloid affair; both for the fallen star (although the auteur personally enjoyed the experience and performance) and the audience. Based on the 1964 novel Murder on the Thirty-First Floor by Swedish Marxist journalist/crime novelist Per Wahlöö, Kamikaze 89 was a cinematic work where Herr Fassbinder finally got to live out his lifelong dream of being a star hero of the silverscreen and not a mere defeated victim like in his own self-directed works Katzelmacher (1969) aka Cock Artist and Fox and His Friends (1975) aka Faustrecht der Freiheit.  As Kamikaze 89 co-scriptwriter Robert Katz wrote in his biography on Fassbinder entitled Love Is Colder Than Death (1987), “while Rainer didn’t quite direct himself, Gremm rarely restrained him from doing whatever he pleased,” which is quite obvious for those that have seen it as the film essentially feels like a high-priced cinematic vehicle for Fassbinder to have fun and forget about the worries of directing serious films. Thus it should be no surprise that Kamikaze 89 is like Welt am Draht (1973) aka World on a Wire for philistines as directed by post-Polyester (1981) John Waters (had he not failed out of film school) on sunny and sardonic cyberpunk steroids. Featuring Fassbinder’s ex-boy-toy Günther Kaufmann (Whity, The Third Generation) as his sometimes sidekick and his favorite mature leading lady Brigitte Mira (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven) in another important role, as well as cameos from his friends Frank Ripploh (director of the 1981 gay cult movie Taxi zum Klo) and Juliane Lorenz (Fassbinder’s young film editor who would later become the head of the Fassbinder Foundation) and cinematography done by Xaver Schwarzenberger (Berlin Alexanderplatz, Querelle), Kamikaze 89 is the Fass-bande gone kraut Hollywood.  

 Kamikaze 89 director Wolf Gremm described his collaboration with the German New Wave Superstar auteur as follows: “When I plan a film, I often think in terms of animal images for the characters. In conceiving Kamikaze 89’, I always had Fassbinder in mind as a leopard, but I never told him this. At the first costume fitting I showed him fifteen possible futuristic detective and police costumes of very different styles. It happened like this: He came in. I was smoking a cigar. I offered him a Camel cigarette. He looked over the costumes. I smiled. Then he looked at me and smiled too. He said, “You like this leopard one.” And I said, “Don’t you?” And he said, “Let me try it on.” He looked at himself in the mirror and said, “I love me. Now I’m Lieutenant Jansen.” From this point on, we never had to discuss the style of the film.”  Indeed, the style of Kamikaze 89 is like technocratic mid-camp chic on cyber-crack as a sort of hyper-cynical science fiction flick for those that know, but absolutely loath the genre as a big-budget Teutonic brother to Slava Tsukerman's sci-fi cult classic Liquid Sky (1982).  Indeed, if you loved any of the films in The Matrix trilogy and/or any of the aesthetically sterile, sentimentalist sci-fi flicks directed by Steven Spielberg, Kamikaze 89 is most certainly not the film for you.  In fact, if you felt like a born-again humanist after watching Planet of the Apes (1968) and/or Soylent Green (1973), you're probably better off watching the latest Roland Emmerich flick than watching Fassbinder fight cyber-crime, even if the German New Wave auteur – with his bloated belly, unkempt beard, and bad acne – did resemble a sci-fi fan-boy during the production of Kamikaze 89.

 In the not-so-distant future during the year 1989, the Federal Republic of Germany is an undisputed Utopian dream on earth because, aside from being the wealthiest nation in the world, there is nil unemployment, inflation, nor pollution as “everything is right as rain” in the less than democratic nation. Of course, with the disappearance of harmful drugs and violent crime, Kamikaze 89 features a world without worry, aside from police brutalizing those that dare to drink alcohol, at least until a bomb hoax forces a rather laidback campy cop/dandy detective named Jansen (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) to take a break from his half-ass hobby of living-room tennis. Apparently, set to detonate at the main headquarters of “the Combine” – a passive-aggressive authoritarian company that controls all of television (48 broadcasting channels), news, and paper and electronic media – Jansen and his dopey and less than devoted partner/sidekick MK1 Anton (Günther Kaufmann) are given a mere four days by their commander to uncover who was behind the seemingly nonsensical hoax and in the process, meet a number of dubious queer characters that run the media empire. With an ambiguous reference to ‘Krysmopompas’ – the underground enemies of the Combine – Jansen and his black Bavarian buddy only have a couple loony leads to go by. When the Human Resources Director (Brigitte Mira) of the Combine building mysteriously falls to her tragicomedic death as the supposed first suicide in Germany in over four years, Jansen begins to suspect that there is something more malevolent going on in the socially mundane metropolis, thus sending him on a number of leads and misleads that tangle the plot of Kamikaze 89 up in a maze-like manner that is made all the more muddling by the film’s domineering aesthetics and half-serious and oftentimes satirical tone. Early on in the film, the nephew of the man that is the head of the Combine confesses that he sent the bomb threat after being influenced by a Krysmopompas comic (in a manner similar to how present-day media blames movies and comic books for the actions of lone-nut killers), but this confession is ultimately false. After catching his partner-in-crime-stopping MK1 Anton snooping in his desk, as well as an order from his boss telling him not to trust anyone (not even the boss that gave the order), Jansen is sent on a tedious trail that is all the more suspect as he weaves through the wacky wonderworld.  Battling tranny-molesters wearing ski-masks and neglecting medical attention criminal suspects (it is not the detective's style to waste time on dead-end leads), half-jaded Jansen is on his way to uncovering the hard truths of an insidious industry-run society of contrived immaculateness, but not without meeting with a blue-eye-busted ex-employee of the Combine named Weiss played by Franco Nero who worked on the mysterious 31st floor (often mentioned throughout the film as an inside joke/source of mystery) of the 30 floor Combine building.  Apparently, some egocentric elitists at the Combine were unhappy with their bosses for "murdering" their "minds" while they worked on an artistic project for the "spiritual renewal" of the Aryan nation, thus erupting in anti-Combine comics featuring pornography and Der Stürmer-esque caricatures and eventually violence against the conspiring corporation.  In the end, Jansen (or more like Fassbinder) stands all by his lonesome, smirking at the audience as the end credits role; no doubt a frolicsome farewell for the foredoomed filmmaker!

 Featuring a technocratic metropolis with a quasi-New Romanticist aesthetic, Kamikaze 89 contains an undeniably visually enthralling world with a now-classic soundtrack by Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream), so much so that the film is more a colorfully campy cinematic cuisine for the eyes and ears than a thrilling tale of sci-fi bureaucracy gone awry, which is probably the result of director Wolf Gremm’s ineptitude at cinematic storytelling, hence why the would-be-auteur, who according to Robert Katz, “held the record for winning more frequently than anyone else the German film critics’ Sour Lemon, presented to but never accepted by the director of ‘the worst film of the year’,” was artistically excommunicated to the world of television and would never direct a feature-length studio film in Germany ever again. Still, aside from being “a footnote to film history” as described by New York Times star reviewer Vincent Canby, Kamikaze 89 is a somewhat strikingly symbolic work of cinema history that foretells the artistically sterile state of, not only German cinema, but international cinema as a whole after the tragic yet predicable death of Fassbinder and Hollywood's horrendous homogenizing effect on the world. Featuring an soul-deadening futuristic dystopia where 99.3% of households watch a twenty-four hours-a-day reality television game show entitled “the Laughing Contest” – a foul forerunner of brainless and tasteless popular 'reality TV' shows like Fox's American Idol (2002-present) – Kamikaze 89, like any worthwhile science fiction work, does manage to predict the future; a cinematically fatalistic forthcoming that Fassbinder probably would have not fared well in. Interestingly, Günther Kaufmann’s quadroon son Davy Kaufmann – a rock and soul singer of sorts like his father – would go on to become a star of Germany's "Got Talent" in 2009, thus adding some credibility to the redundant robotic retard realm that is featured in Kamikaze 89. Of course, aside from being plagued with crime, population, pathological pill-popping, adolescent alcoholism, and racial/ethnic chaos, the contemporary world also fails to feature city scenery as aesthetically alluring as those in Kamikaze 89; a virtual science fiction flick for inebriated Werner Schroeter fans.

As for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's thoughts on Kamikaze 89, his biographer Robert Katz wrote that according to director Wolf Gremm and Juliane Lorenz, the German New Cinema auteur, “loved it, especially seeing himself in every scene,” so much so that there was talk of two Kamikaze sequels and the Querelle director even, “kept the phony leopard-skin suit and wore it from time to time during the few remaining months of his life.” Fassbinder also, “developed a big-brotherly fondness for Wolf, whose easily ignited childlike enthusiasm was sunshine in Rainer’s leaden sky,” so much so that Kamikaze 89 director was staying at his filmmaker friend's house on the night of June 9–10, 1982; the nighttide hours when German New Cinema’s Superstar director inevitably perished from his own excesses. Although Gremm did not earn the much prized Sour Lemon award for Kamikaze 89, he did manage to offer Fassbinder a couple months of irreplaceable joy from his short life of controlled chaos before the filmmaker finally lost his grip over personal pandemonium.  A filmic farewell to Fassbinder, Kamikaze 89 is probably only of interest to fans of the filmmaker, but quite remarkably, like most decent films (and I am not saying it is anything resembling a masterpiece, not even a minor one), it manages to get better with subsequent viewings.

-Ty E

Like a Bird on a Wire

Among the lovely leading ladies of Fassbinder’s eclectic entourage, including the elegant and ethereal flaxen-haired Hanna Schygulla (whose Nordic beauty perfectly exemplified the Arno Breker ideal), the devilishly divine, waif-like, and ever erratic and neurotic norn Margit Carstensen, and the altogether charming yet somewhat homely and ever pre-menstrually-charged Irm Herman, there is but one leading lady, Brigitte Mira, who stands out not least of all because of her rather advanced age and thoroughly endearing gnome-like appearance, but because of the intense warmth, sweet naiveté and grandmotherly charm she so masterfully exudes—clearly all very natural, positive female traits which Ms. Mira carried over in a very fluid fashion into her rememerable roles in such Fassbinder classics as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1974). Indeed, these very traits are precisely what made Mother Mira so very likeable as an actress in nearly every role she played, and which also granted her a very special place in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sometimes very debauched and wicked heart; seeing that Fassbinder was a notoriously difficult director to work with, whose penchant for fierce and fiery arguments and childish, unrepentant displays of queendom, often driven by derisive and contemptuous cat-fights with his leading actresses (such as Hanna Schygulla, whom he once famously accused of “busting his balls,” and whose face he couldn’t stand to see anymore after she demanded higher pay on the set of Effi Briest (1972), and with whom he would not resume work again until 1978), it comes as no surprise that the ever gentle and unassuming Brigitte Mira, with her thoroughly mild affect (even in moments of anger or frustration), would arouse even in the often faggishly flustered Fassbinder only feelings of deep feminine warmth and admiration—to such an extent that he directed his very own bizarre, yet rather winsome and fun homage to Brigitte Mira, appearing as herself in the lead role in the 45-minute made-for-television film, Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht aka Like a Bird on a Wire (1975), in what is perhaps one of the most oddly campy autobiographical pieces ever committed to celluloid. 

 Named for the Leonard Cohen song “Like a Bird on a Wire” (Fassbinder apparently being a tremendous fan of the Jewish folk icon), Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht begins with a close-up shot of Brigitte (who herself, interestingly, was the daughter of a German mother and Russian-born Jewish composer despite the fact she played small roles in National Socialist era movies) mournfully singing the German lyrics to the song, juxtaposed against Leonard Cohen’s wanna-be Appalachin’ kosher hillbilly blues vocals in the background. Brigitte’s vividly blue eyes tremble and appear rather glassy in this beginning title scene, as if she is on the verge of tears, and combined with the rather melodramatic, melancholic lyrics, one can easily anticipate that the bulk of the film will involve the older actress reminiscing about the glory days of the Reich and how everything since has gone to shit (which it will, to some extent, but the film also, quite interestingly, “devolves” into something of a debauched, high camp musical later on). After joyously downing one too many glasses of vodka, Ms. Mira, in Fred Rogers-like fashion, welcomes the audience into the make-shift living room of her home (while also acknowledging it is a film set) and rather somberly recounts her youth as an operetta soubrette, occasionally bursting, almost seemingly schizophrenically, into songs about the trials and tribulations of her difficult love life, with intermittent breaks to describe each of the five men who have in their own unique and troubling ways left deep impressions on her (one of which was apparently a concentration camp survivor and also a hardened criminal, and yet another who was an export merchant and womanizer who very boldly brought his out-of-town girlfriends home to meet his wife). After describing in vivid and mournful drunken detail her long serious of failed relationships, Ms. Mira boards a train with Evelyn Künneke (a famous German singer and actress, part of the Lili Marleen generation, who went on to make several cameo appearances in films by Rosa von Praunheim, as well as several other Fassbinder films), in which the two engage in a rather unpleasant, yet typically female—catty and passive aggressive—conversation. 

 The remainder of the film sees Brigitte re-live her youth as an operetta soubrette, in which she dazzlingly sings a couple of German classics, including a few songs by Marlene Dietrich and Evelyn Künneke, while on stage in a leather fag bar (with her son Ingfried Hoffmann on piano) amid dozens of ball-busting bear cubs and full-grown, hirsute biker bears dressed to the nines in leather vests, tight chaps, chain mail and military hats, and in yet another scene, Mother Mira hosts an all-ladies fashion show in which she again sings a couple of numbers while fascinatingly describing her childhood years growing up during the Reich. In the penultimate scene, in what is perhaps the most interesting act of this anything but banal film, Brigitte sees herself as the sole female focus, dressed in a glamorous blue dress with a feather boa around her neck, bedecked in elegant gemstone jewelry, prancing around and singing about diamonds amid a gym full of muscular fags—one of which includes Fassbinder favorite and one-time boyfriend who later committed suicide, Moroccan Negro El Hedi ben Salem—rather unemotionally lifting weights while flexing their abdominal muscles with their semi-turgid members resting both comfortably and conspicuously in bright orange, rhinestone-encrusted speedos (clearly, the most tantalizing of eye candy for the fanciful Fassbinder, who quite conveniently couldn’t resist adding a flattering photo of himself at this jocular juncture). Indeed, this is a very enjoyable and unusual film, even coming from rather quirky and melodramatic Fassbinder, and a must-see for anyone who relishes the director’s work, this film especially being a clear and lasting homage to one of his best loved leading ladies, Brigitte Mira; a wonderful woman who would return the favor by describing the oftentimes maligned filmmaker to an interviewer as, "a gentlemen through and through." Featuring muscle-bound, banana-hammock wearing bodybuilders and leather fag clones galore, in effect being an alluring amalgamation of Mira’s drunken soliloquies and reminiscences of her past, interspersed with a cornucopia of fetishistic gay imagery, Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht has the unique characteristic of being a lasting, high camp tribute to perhaps not the prettiest of the Fassbinder femmes, but clearly the one who with her motherly sentimentality and always kind demeanor melted the seemingly incorrigible Fassbinder’s heart. 

  -Magda von Richthofen zu Reventlow auf Thule

The Laughing Man - Confessions of a Murderer

 

If there was ever a German soldier whose life vaguely resembled that of the character of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz played by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now (1979), it is most unequivocally Siegfried Müller aka "Kongo" Müller; a veteran of the Wehrmacht who emigrated to the Republic of South Africa in 1962 and became a lethal Lieutenant for "Mad" Mike Hoare's mercenary outfit during the Congo Crisis in 1964. Although Müller never developed the murderous mania that would propel the character of Kurtz into acting as a virtual God for psychotic Southeastern Asian savages and revolting against his own country, the Teutonic trooper did wallow in a world of alcohol-fueled murder and souvenir skull collecting, thus leading some to believe he hit the terminal Third World nation with a tidal wave of Teuton terror. After being first featured in the documentary Kommando 52 (1965), Müller – a supposed 'alive and well Nazi' hunting wild buck Negroes in the Congo – become an easy (with his Nazi medals and all) yet dubious icon of Western 'neo-colonialsm.' Cinephiles might remember Kongo Müller and his death's-head obsessed mercenaries from Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo masterpiece Africa Addio (1966); a devastating yet delightful documentary of discourteous death chronicling the bitter and brutal end of the colonial era in Africa. Müller was also the inspiration for the character of Henlein (Peter Carsten) from the underrated mercenary war-action flick Dark of the Sun (1968) aka The Mercenaries directed by Jack Cardiff, but unlike the fictional character created in anti-tribute to the German soldat, the real-life warrior was far from a pompous psychopath who attempted to slaughter his own multicultural compatriots as a true soldier's soldier who took care of all his men despite their continent of origin. In the East German documentary Der Lachende Mann - Bekenntnisse eines Mörders (1966) aka The Laughing Man - Confessions of a Murderer directed by Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, one is treated to a focused face-to-face interview with Siegfried Müller about his strikingly singular life as one of only a handful of men who fought on both the Eastern Front during the Second World War and saw the African colonies crumble before his vivacious eyes. Condemned as an out-and-out Nazi who never severed his relationship with the swastika due to his insistence on proudly wearing the Iron Cross 1st Class he earned from the Third Reich during the Second World War despite now siding with the United States, Müller is treated like a born-again Aryan assassin in The Laughing Man by the completely compromised East Germany communist directors, but in the end, the charismatic career soldier would have the last laugh.

Beginning the production under determinedly dubious and totally false pretense by posing as a West German TV production team, deluded documentarians Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann lost any sense of journalistic objectivity before even beginning to shoot a single frame of film for The Laughing Man, but I guess one should not expect anything less from corrupted kraut commies who masterfully massage the Slavic hands that feed them. Aptly titled The Laughing Man due to Kongo Müller’s seemingly permanent smirk, it probably would not be an exaggeration to say that the German mercenary has a grin that would cause Conrad Veidt’s character Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928) to curtail his razor sharp Comprachico-constructed grimace. The son of a Lieutenant colonel in the German Wehrmacht (army), Prussian commando Siegfried Müller was born for war and, indeed, he waged it like a rebel warrior from the postcolonial era long before the European colonies ever capitulated. As someone who fought on the Eastern Front for the better part of the Second World War, Müller disguised himself as a Polish peasant by day, thus utilizing guerrilla rebellion tactics of ‘undercover war’ before desperate yellow, black, and brown people ever had the chance to murder their masters. Müller had his “Baptism of Fire” during the outbreak of World War II in 1939 on the Silesian-Polish frontier, earned the rank of ‘First Lieutenant’ on Hitler's birthday, and would conclude with war in 1945 by being partially lamed via a bullet in the backbone at the time of the Fatherland’s apocalyptic defeat. After managing to escape from the East and becoming an American POW, Müller served with the Americans in the so-called Industrial police for two years, served with NATO in German units during the Korean war, and worked as an assistant manager at a hotel and restaurant (especially focusing on the bar as he likes a “good drink”), but the Congo was calling and he heroically answered as a European commando on permanent vacation in Africa with a special self-proclaimed interest in "revolutionary war." In the communist eyes of Heynowski and Scheumann, Kongo Müller is nothing more than a rare live killer Nazi on the loose who is bringing the same devastation to African negroes as he purportedly did to Eastern European Hebrews and their Slav compatriots. As for Müller, he believes his campaign in Africa is only similar to his tours of Europe in one manner: anti-bolshevism. Indeed, Müller makes no lie that he and his men, “are fighting in Africa for Europe” and that he it would be a “great pleasure” for him to join a Vietnam Legion and battle the Viet Cong. As a matter-of-fact kind of guy, especially when drinking his favorite alcoholic beverage (apparently, he adopted his affinity for firewater due to the “stagnant water” in Africa), Kongo Müller states quite proudly that it was, “necessary to show the blacks that white men were there, since the whites still have a fantastic name in Africa.” Aside from discussing his bloody battles against rebels and his hobby of head-hunting and totenkopf trophy-collecting, Müller also discusses his strong relationship with the Goethe-Institut (aka Goethe Institute) and the need to spread Teutonic kultur around the world. Needless to say, killer cool commando Kongo Müller is a proud kraut through and through who brought carnage and charisma to the decidedly dark continent.

Originally banned in West Germany for a number of years, The Laughing Man was quite hard to track down for many years for obvious reasons, but with the fall of the Berlin wall and 1990 German reunification, the documentary is nothing more than a curious piece of celluloid history. Essentially, directors Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann use Kongo Müller as propaganda ‘proof’ that West Germany, its master the United States, and its allies were run by crypto-fascists/capitalist-pigs with the career soldier – a man who proudly sports his Nazi Iron Cross – acting as sadist symbol of this worldwide ‘Fourth Reich’ of the free world. Inter-splicing photographs of mutilated Mandingo men and white men carrying white African skulls, the directors of The Laughing Man make it more than clear that Commie propaganda is all about Freudian projection as Müller’s battles against rebels only deserve a feeble footnote when compared to Holodomor (a man-made Bolshevik-led famine that killed upwards of 7 million Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933), Maoist famines (which killed no less than 30 million between 1958 and 1961), and the countless communist campaigns of carnage that have raged throughout the African continent during the second half of the twentieth century. Now a cult film of sorts due to influential cineaste Amos Vogel’s inclusion of the documentary in his revolutionary film history book Film as a Subversive Art (1972), The Laughing Man is now guaranteed a cinematic legacy of sorts, but, of course, being a politically radical Viennese Jew who was involved with early socialist Zionist groups as a youth and fled Austria during the National Socialist Anschluß in 1938, the film critic probably had his own personal reasons for including the documentary in his movie manual magnum opus. While Kongo Müller must have been Vogel’s most daunting daytime nightmare in documentary form, I found the infamous mercenary mini-Führer to be an engaging relic of the past that is no longer relevant in the contemporary world. A micro-statured yet marvelously murderous man’s man who found himself ill-equipped to live the civilian life after spending every single year of the Second World War battling Bolsheviks, only to see his beloved nation experience defeat, Kongo Müller naturally resumed his anti-rebel activities as a career mercenary in the Congo. If one thing is for sure, it is that Müller had marvelous taste in movies as indicated by his remark that Gualtiero Jacopetti – a man surely of greater artistic cinematic talent than Heynowski and Scheumann – is a “good director.” Still, The Laughing Man is a must-see for history buffs and it certainly features more than a couple of laughs. After all, Kongo Müller manages to finish a bottle of Pernod by the end of the documentary as a bodacious blond beast who brought the antidote to the bolshevik bug in Africa.  Unfortunately, diseases travel rather quickly in the Third World.

-Ty E

Martha

Out of all of German New Cinema auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s female Superstars, slender Nordic beauty Margit Carstensen (Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven, Berlin Alexanderplatz) was undoubtedly the best at portraying nauseatingly neurotic, schizophrenic, pathetic, hysterical, and otherwise deranged women. As a calculating and cold aristocratic lesbian who learns that love is colder than death in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), a bourgeois babe who cannot tell the difference between real sex and imagined sex in Fear of Fear (1975), and a neurotic fan-girl with no sense of self-worth who unwaveringly devotes her sad soul to her favorite writer in Satan’s Brew (1976), Carstensen is one of few actresses who, despite being blatantly bewitching, was able to make herself seem totally ugly and radically repellant due to her horrifically hypnotic hysterical screen performances, but none of these film roles compare to her majestically masochistic character in Fassbinder’s underrated and under-seen TV-movie Martha (1974); a sharp-as-a-stake-in-the-heart Sirkian melodrama about a relationship between a metaphysical master and self-sacrificing slave. Loosely based on themes from the short story For the Rest of Her Life by Cornell Woolrich, Martha was in limbo due to legal reasons revolving around the Woolrich estate and was not screened for some 20 years after its initial completion, thus making it rather ripe for a cult following among Fassbinder fans and more high-class horror fans alike. Of course, Martha – a film centering around a seemingly sterile bourgeoisie married couple – is not your typical late night horror show, but a malicious melodrama with curious comedic undertones that forces the viewer to sympathize with either a meek masochist who is afraid of her own shadow or a strikingly suave sadist who gets the job done, but nothing in between. Assembled right before Fassbinder’s early masterpiece Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Martha was naturally soon forgotten, but after over four decades, it is about time that viewers catch up with the ‘minor masterpieces’ of a prolific filmmaker who made films faster than most people could watch them. With Martha, persecution mania has never been so cinematically marvelous, thus lucidly illustrating as to why German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder was able to beat Hollywood at their own game and did it quite gingerly by utilizing the seemingly meager medium of kraut television to do so. 

 Seeming like a dramatized depiction of one of the more 'conventional' case studies from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Martha was a more personal work for director Rainer Werner Fassbinder than one would assume upon a superficial glance of the film. As Austrian actor Karlheinz Böhm (Sissi, Peeping Tom) stated in an interview for the book Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1997), “Rainer had a very fractured relationship with his father; in Martha I practically depicted his father, and, because of that film, Rainer and I talked a great deal about the man – as a psychoanalyst, then, I would understand his homosexual excesses.” Indeed, Böhm may play an arrogant sadistic scoundrel of the delightfully dapper sort named Helmut Salomon in Martha, but a clear-cut ‘black-and-white’ depiction of human evil is nowhere to be seen in the film because in the world of reckless matrimonial relationships, it always takes two to tango. It is oftentimes said that opposites attract and that is surely the case with Martha; a frenzied filmic fairy tale of sorts about one sad virginal spinster’s subconscious conquest to be eternally enslaved or at least perish pathetically trying. Martha Heyer (Margit Carstensen) is a hysterical woman and her daily doses of Valium do little to calm her all-consuming anxiety and almost surreal social ineptitude. Needless to say, when her father (Adrian Hoven) – a man she has a rather dubious relationship with – drops dead unexpectedly in her arms and states, “Let go of me” as his final words to his daughter while meeting together on a vacation in Spain, manic-depressive Martha is all shaken up, even more so than usual, and things only get worse when she discovers that her purse is stolen by a nefarious Arab-Negro (Fassbinder boy toy El Hedi ben Salem) in the process. One soon learns that Martha’s hyper-hysterical mother (Gisela Fackeldey) – a wretched woman who spares no chance to denigrate and humiliate her daughter in between popping pills and guzzling liquor – is a large source of the 31-year-old virginal librarian’s penetrating problems. An innate introvert who sought refuge in the fantasy world of book and fictional characters at a young age, Martha essentially has the emotional and sexual maturity of a mentally perturbed preteen, thereupon making her the perfect sheep for the slaughter for a predatory psychopath with patently perverse and pernicious intentions. Although initially meeting him by happenstance during her tragic trip to Spain, masochist Martha will not talk to her sadistic future husband Helmut Salomon – a man with a malicious and malevolent master plan to enslave the weak woman of his dreams and make her his absolute odious and obsequious devil’s plaything – at a bourgeois buffet with friends and family members. Naturally, hellish Helmut makes a fool of miserable Martha in front of the dinner guests, but it is his private remark, “I don’t think you’re very beautiful…and certainly not attractive and charming. You’re too thin, almost skinny. When one looks at you, one can almost feel your bones. And I have the impression your body smells,” that really turns on the under-sexed spinster, thus resulting in the first (forced) kiss between the two loony lovers and absolute disgust from the old maid’s monopolizing mother, who faints after voyeuristically spying on the demented duo as the whole fateful event takes place. With Martha no longer the slave of her malignant mommy, Helmut now reigns supreme sadist over the forlorn fecund-free female after stoically taking her shaking hand in marriage. 

 Featuring some of the blackest hallucinatory humor to ever grace the silverscreen, Martha is indubitably a mischievous movie by an auteur with an unflattering and uncompromising understanding of human nature. In the end, anti-heroine Martha is a paraplegic – the inevitable result of her own devastatingly delusional mind – resigned to a wheelchair for the rest of her life as the indisputable perennial slave of suave fiend Helmet. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder even regarded the conclusion of Martha as a ‘happy ending,’ stating, “When Martha can no longer take care of herself, she has finally gotten what she wanted all along.” Unsurprisingly, star Margit Carstensen had a different opinion and responded to Fassbinder’s statement with the remark, “I wouldn’t go that far. I really think that this is a resignation on her part.” Whatever one’s opinion of the two unconventionally complimentary companions in Martha, it would be hard to argue that – for better and certainly for worse – Martha the masochist and Helmut the sadist are an immaculate match of mental derangement that were unequivocally meant to be. The same can also be said of Fassbinder and Carstensen, whose creative relationship was not much different in spirit from the monstrous married couple featured in Martha, so much so that the clearly agitated actress described the director as, “a wretched person” during the making of the film, thus underlying how the German New Cinema auteur filmmaker’s oeuvre was a true expression of ‘life reflecting art’ and vice versa. Featuring some of the most ruthlessly lecherous ‘love’ scenes ever captured in cinema history, including sexual arousal via severe sunburn and orgasmic ecstasy via kitten-killing, Martha is nothing short of a minor masterpiece of the melodramatically macabre and horrendously humorous, as a film that accepts the absurdity of human nature for what it is; nothing more and nothing less. The next time I hear about a woman who is finally murdered by her abusive husband after going back to him time and time again after decades of abhorrent abuse, I will always remember Martha; a brutal yet beauteous antidote to feminist folly about the need for imaginary gender equality. 

-Ty E

Interview with Ulli Lommel

 

Love him or hate him, no other actor/director can boast a life so diverse and seemingly contradictory as German-born actor-turned-director Ulli Lommel.  As the man who directed one of the greatest and most gruesome serial killer films ever made The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) aka Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe, as well as the "most hated film" ever made, Daniel - Der Zauberer (2004), Lommel certainly has experienced the positive and the negative as a filmmaker.  As someone who worked with both German New Cinema master filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and famous American 'Pop Art' leader Andy Warhol, Lommel is not exactly someone that will be forgotten by film history.  As an individual who has starred in and directed some of our favorite films, including Whity (1971), The Tenderness of Wolves (1973), World on a Wire (1973), Shadow of Angels (1976), Satan's Brew (1976), and Melancholie der Engel (2009), among countless others, Soiled Sinema is quite proud to bring you this interview with Ulli Lommel.

 Soiled Sinema: Your father was a famous comedian and your mother was an actress. What was your upbringing like? 

Ulli Lommel: It felt normal, because I didn't know anything else. And it was fun, because I grew up right after WWII and Germany was completely destroyed and all the people that survived this madness were so happy and stuck together and helped each other, there was a lot of love and sudden peace, even though we had nothing for years to come, but we were content with what we had. Today nobody seems happy, nobody seems content, with few exceptions. There is way too much of everything today. Too many songs that are terrible and too many awful movies, week after week, bombarding us and that's almost worse than being bombarded by the allies in WWII. 

SS: You originally got your start in cinema as an actor. Did you always have plans to become a film director? 

UL: Ever since I saw VERTIGO at age 12 I knew I wanted to make movies. VERTIGO had an amazing influence on me and two of my favorite films, OLIVIA and BRAINWAVES, deal with the VERTIGO trauma, the VERTIGO theme. Plus I adore Hitchcock. He and Kubrick and Peckinpah are my top three directors. 

SS: Your first feature was Haytabo (1971). How did you get involved with directing the film and what were the influences behind the film? 

UL: I had gotten tired of working as a movie actor with a whole slew of idiotic directors and I had become quite impossible to deal with, because I had such a hard time accepting their stupidity. So instead of continuing to have such an awful time as an actor I decided to make movies myself. I has just met Eddie Constantine, the star of my first movie HAYTABO, and when he accepted the role I had the financing for the film. Constantine had made several very successful films in France, including Godard's ALPHAVILLE and so it was easy to get the money for my first film.
 

SS: Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) was based on the hectic experience of making Whity (1971). As someone who acted in both films, do you think Beware of a Holy Whore features a realistic portrayal of what happened during the making of Whity? 

UL: No, not at all, it's complete fantasy, and anyway, Fassbinder was always drunk during WHITY and probably didn't remember a thing. I actually co-produced WHITY and due to Fassbinder's insane actions which went way beyond being drunk on and off the set non-stop, it almost ruined me. But I forgave him. 

SS: How did critics in Germany respond to The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) when it was released? Were you the first New German Cinema director to direct a horror film about a serial killer? What did Fassbinder think of the film? 

UL: It opened the Berlin Film Festival in 1973 and became an instant scandal. It was highly controversial with some critics adoring the film and others hating it. Fassbinder loved it, I think. Critics in London, Paris and NY loved it, and so I was invited to NY and met Warhol, because Vincent Canby, the star critic of the NY Times had written that TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES reminded him of the early Warhol films, only that it was much better. So Warhol got curious, went to a screening, loved the film and invited me to work at the Factory in Manhattan for three years, where we did Art, Polaroids and Movies (BLANK GENERATION and COCAINE COWBOYS). So in a way, TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES was my break-through. As to other German serial killer movies I believe I was not the first, there were others, but I don't remember the titles right now.

  
SS: Your third feature was Adolf and Marlene (1977). Can you describe this film to our readers? I once read the film is 'lost.' Will it ever be released on DVD? 

UL: The Fassbinder Foundation is currently restoring ADOLF & MARLENE (it's a Fassbinder production). I met with Fassbinder in Paris in 1976 in a famous brothel and told him that I had discovered the diary of Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend and Fassbinder said let's make a movie! It's a very dark comedy, Michael Ballhaus did the camera and Kurt Raab, the male lead of TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES, plays Hitler. I myself play Goebbels. The movie was compared to Ernst Lubitsch TO BE OR NOT TO BE. It's one of my dearest films. 

SS: What was your relationship like with Fassbinder? 

UL: Everything one can imagine and more, that's all I can say. He asked me to star in his first film LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH so he could get the financing since I had already become a teenage idol with covers on teen mags etc. and I was box office. I accepted and for the next 10 years collaborated on 21 Fassbinder productions. He was a true genius, with all the madness and the good, the bad and the ugly.

SS: Which of the Fassbinder films that you personally starred are you most proud of? 

UL: I love EFFI BRIEST, LOVE COLDER THAN DEATH and CHINESE ROULETTE the most. 

SS: What was your relationship like with Warhol? 

UL: Warhol was the opposite of Fassbinder. While Fassbinder tried to jail you in his own prison of the mind, Warhol gave you the key and set you free. I owe Warhol more than I will ever be able to imagine, not to mention the few pieces of Warhol Pop Art I have in my possession and Warhol Polaroids. Warhol was and is out of this universe for me. 

  
SS: You worked with Warhol on Cocaine Cowboys (1979) and Blank Generation (1980). How was he involved (aside from acting)? What were his thoughts on the films? 

UL: Warhol was very much involved in his own way, his quiet way, he told people that Ulli Lommel was his favorite new director and that opened all the doors for me. he raised the money, he acted in both movies, I was his "Soup Du Jour" for several years. And when some people trashed my films Andy said so what, they trashed mine too and look what happened, where are they now and where am I? I kind of feel the same. I love and adore Andy Warhol!!! BLANK GENERATION and COCAINE COWBOYS have become cult classics, selling over and over again and again world-wide with audiences loving it and critics as well, it's so much fun to be so closely connected to these two films. Andy rules!!!

  
SS: Did you expect The Boogeyman (1980) to be such a hit? What inspired you to direct the film? 

UL: After the first sneak previews where audiences went crazy we knew we had a winner, but that it would be THAT big, nobody could've ever expected. What inspired me were the Brothers Grimm and their dark fairy tales. Boogeyman to me is a fairy tale. Next year I'm making BOOGEYMAN 4D - why 4D? It plays in the forth dimension, Sci-Fi /Adventure genre and not R-rated but PG-13. Budget $24 million to be filmed in 3D. 

SS: You made a number of films, including Olivia (1981), BrainWaves(1982), and The Devonsville Terror (1983) with your then-wife Suzanna Love. What was it like directing your own wife? 

UL: Oh, we had such fun! She was perfect in all those films. Ten great years and ten wonderful movies. Wonderful to make and enjoy. Wonderful times. Unforgettable... 

SS: Your underrated cult musical Phantoms of Paradise (1984) seems to be a more ‘personal’ work. Do you agree? What was the inspiration behind the film? 

UL: We just completed the German version and it should come out in Germany later this year. Yes, it's very personal, political, rebellious…I think. I love this film and I loved making it.

SS: You worked with popular German pop singer Daniel Küblböck for your film Daniel – Der Zauberer (2004). How did that collaboration come about and what was it like to work with Küblböck? 

UL: He was hated by millions of Germans and I was fascinated by that type of hate towards such an innocent young man and I decided to defend him and stand up for him and make a movie to set the record straight. Needless to say, the haters voted it worst movie ever made, hahahahah! But I like it a lot. Always will. And it got some great reviews too. So what the hell, right? And it made money. Hahahahah!!!

  
SS: You dedicated Absolute Evil - Final Exit (2009) to Fassbinder. Is there any particular reason why? Are you still planning to direct an “Absolute Evil Trilogy?” 

UL: Because Fassbinder's madness was similar to Carradine's. After his death I stopped thinking trilogy. RIP David and RIP Fassbinder. 

SS: Out of all the films you have directed, which ones are you most proud of? Why? 

UL: Proud is a word I don't know what to do with. But I love almost all the films I made, just like they were my children. 

  
SS: You still make films in Germany from time to time. Do you prefer working there or in the United States? 

UL: I love making movies in America, especially LA, which is my favorite place. I love LA, I made over 40 films in LA. Germany is different, more dark and analytical and stuff, right now I'm making theater in Berlin combined with 3D movies, almost like a new genre. It's called FUCKING LIBERTY which means fucking great or fucking beautiful and it's 500 years America in 100 minutes with lots of music and dance celebrating "my" America. 

SS: How has filmmaking changed since when you first started? Where do you see cinema heading in the future? 

UL: When I started it was much more precious with far less films coming out every week and I much prefer that. The future is something I rarely speculate about, I love memories, I love the past, it's all we have. The present is only an illusion and the future has not arrived yet, we can only dream about it. But every split second the future turns into the past, without ever stopping in the present.

SS: The movie genre that you always come back to is horror. Did always have an interest in horror? What are some of your personal favorite horror flicks? 

UL: I don't go to the movies much more any longer. Plus I do not consider my films horror films, for me they are experimental films, maybe that's why some hate my "horror" films, because they're disappointed that they didn't get a horror film. And maybe it's Lions Gate's fault to market and sell them as horror films, just made people mad I think. Some at least. Sorry for that...

SS: You appeared as an actor in German horror auteur Marian Dora’s Melancholie der Engel (2009). How did you get involved with the film? Have any of your films had an influence on Dora?

UL: I think Dora likes my films, he's a very cool guy. And when he asked me to do him a favor I said yes. 

SS: What can we expect from you in the future (be it film or otherwise)? Do you plan on writing an autobiography?

 UL: My biography came out in Germany two years ago and it's a huge success, it's called "Tenderness of the Wolves", how fittingly, right? Other than that I'm working on a bio pic and of course BOOGEYMAN 4D. Cool questions BTW. Thanks!

For more info on Ulli Lommel, checkout his official website UlliLommel.com

Story of a Junkie

 

“It’s like a good love affair…It’s nice when it starts…then it becomes fucked” or so says North American Aryan junky punk skate rat “Gringo” (John Spaceley) regarding his wild and wayward relationship with heroin in the pseudo-documentary drama Story of a Junkie (1987) aka Gringo directed by Polish-American documentarian auteur Lech Kowalski (Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?, On Hitler’s Highway).  Featuring real-life heroin addicts really shooting up in 1980s East Village NYC, Story of a Junkie is more of a candid documentary than a drama/docudrama in its wretched and raunchy rawness as a portrait of a drug-addled 'anti-hero' who was born to lose, even if he knows how to score a couple bags of smack each day so as to appease his haunted soul. A bleach blond dope fiend sporting an iconic eye patch, Gringo is a scavenging and sidewalk-surfing opium-pirate who is just looking to find another fix so as to temporarily dissolve his pain while carelessly cruising the superlatively seedy streets of New York City. Opening with newspaper headlines of various white-collar figures who got busted or overdosed on heroin and/or cocaine, Story of a Junkie briefly highlights these high-profile individuals' influence on society as a whole and the countless unknown addicts they have helped spawn. Story of a Junkie does not feature the fag fantasy opium den of trust fund junkie William S. Burroughs' novels nor the phantasmagorical dream realms of French poet/filmmaker Jean Cocteau, but a matter-of-fact depiction of the physical and moral degeneration that is heated and hellish H addiction. Featuring authentic footage of jaded junkies shooting up, dubious drug dealers sharing their insights on the tricks of the trade, and the overall sterile yet 'unconventional' loser life that is opium addiction where no scam is too small and where no form of self-degradation is too devastating for one to get their next hit, Gringo sums up the diamorphine maniac life as follows, “heroin is a cruel mistress…a brutal overseer, man…it wakes you up early in the morning and takes you and makes you do things you would never do…and, uh, you just don’t have time to worry about other things, things that you maybe should be worrying about…facing reality sometimes is a hard thing to do.” A sad and sarcastic slave of the dealers (who are many times slaves of their own addictions), Gringo must show off his many track marks to prove his genuine 'junk status,', which he is rewarded with a bag of dope and the super sound piece of advice, “don’t OD now” by an outstanding businessmen. Psychopathic semites and a couple amphetamine-addled Anglos may run Wall Street, but in junkie-land nefarious Negroes and hopped-up Hispanic homeboys run the seemingly derelict drug trade, thus making “Gringo” (a named bestowed upon him by his curious and oftentimes callous colored friends) – a man who has no problem sporting a Benito Mussolini t-shirt – a special target in Story of a Junkie; a severely sordid cinematic tale about the trials and tribulations of selling one's soul for a temporary fix.

Lone junkie punk ranger Gringo (Spaceley) has come a long way since his more youthful years as a momma’s boy and a teenage hippie degenerate. A self described “anarchist” who has “never filed income tax,” Gringo is a fierce fuck-up without a cause except heroin. Gringo may be all about the three terribly tempting counter-culture sins of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, but heroin is indubitably his one true love, albeit an exceedingly erratic one that oftentimes forces the junky punk to beg for money from his mom, stalk the streets for naive individuals who he can hustle a couple bucks from, and fight with fellow dope fiends. Shooting up and fucking up make for one ominous and overwhelming odyssey where death is around every corner and every friend is a potential – both literal and figurative – backstabber. Dope sick sex is the nearest thing to romance for a junky in love, but as Gringo the Great discovered, being horny on heroin can eventually result in bloody miscarriages and mini postmortem fetuses, but luckily he does not live too far from a dumpster so as to dispose of such unwanted progeny. Gringo may not have a job, but he still wears a uniform of post-adolescent punk rock conformity. When jaded on junk, gainful employment is not an option because looking for a new fix is a career in itself that comes with its own benefit package, including (but surely not limited to) STDs, track marks, liver damage, a short life expectancy, vagrancy, prostitution, quasi-narcolepsy and a complete heroin chic physical makeover. When not getting his skateboard stolen by small and ancient teddy-bear-like negroes, Gringo is hanging out with a junky chick that looks and sounds like “Buffalo Bill” from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) who has a funny fetish for hoarding peculiar packs of pets, including rabbits, rats, mice, and tarantulas. As Gringo explains throughout Story of a Junkie, his lethally lecherous lifestyle consists of one bloody beat down after another, including a blinding incident with an anally retentive drag queen who brought deleterious destruction to the junkie’s eye, hence his trademark eye-patch. Gringo may be a pathetic fighter and an impotent lover, but he has the strut of an elderly jigaboo on crack as a crazy character with the sort of unconventional charisma that can only come from a contrived chemical high. As depicted quite soothingly and scenically at the conclusion of Story of a Junkie, especially in comparison to the rest of the film, when it really comes down to it, Gringo truly lived by an ethos of “skate or die.”  Unfortunately, like most of the real-life junkies featured in Story of a Junkie, John Spaceley ultimately perished doing what he did best.

John Spaceley was far from a seasoned street fighter, even if he was battle-scarred and spent a good portion of his life in the gutter, but, at the very least, he could kick the shit out of fellow NYC junkie Johnny Thunders – rocker of the New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers – as depicted in Story of a Junkie director Lech Kowalski’s subsequent documentary Born To Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie (1999). The documentary also features Spaceley, who no longer has his bleached blond hair, dying in a hospital bed in 1992 from AIDS that he contracted via junkie business. Apparently, as mentioned by Story of a Junkie producer Ann S. Barish, Spaceley got clean for a number of years (even rejecting caffeine and wine), got an acting agent, and even attempted a career in acting, including an uncredited (but quite memorable) cameo appearance in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and as a Chelsea hotel resident in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy (1987), but would inevitably get back on the junk as a ‘true’ gutter punk. As starkly and unsentimentally depicted in Story of a Junkie, director Lech Kowalski is not some sort of moralist, even once stating in an interview, “I think that it’s good to try and destroy yourself because that’s what life is all about…trying to destroy yourself to find out who the real person is.” Judging by Kowalski’s philosophy, John Spaceley was a self-destructive fellow who was totally incapable of living anything resembling a normal life as a man who could only find solace in skateboarding and heroin.  Needless to say, the latter killed him, but at least he left Story of a Junkie as his legacy of lechery as a decidedly daunting document infinitely more potent than any D.A.R.E program or miserably melodramatic after-school special in its less than glamorous portrayal of a dumpster-diving drug addict's non-life. Forget opium romanticizing big-budget cinematic works like Trainspotting (1996) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), Story of a Junkie – a work distributed (but not produced) by Troma of all film companies – is the real junky deal; a disgusting, degenerate, despoiling, and devastating gritty celluloid affair. 

-Ty E

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Movie miscegenation has been blatantly beaten-to-death for quite some time in Hollywood, yet the Tinseltown agents of melodramatic agitprop have yet to produce a race-mixing propaganda piece nearly as provocative, true to life, and ripe with subversive strife as German New Cinema master of melodrama Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s masterpiece Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) aka Angst essen Seele auf; an uniquely uncompromising look at a decidedly doomed love affair between a lonely 60-year-old widow and a 30-something-year-old Moroccan immigrant worker of less than meager means. Part subversive homage to Danish-German auteur Douglas Sirk’s intensely idiosyncratic Hollywood melodramas All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul proved that Fassbinder learned much from his spiritual cinematic guru, but not without transcending the elder director's studio-system-shackled sense for cinema by giving it a revolutionary West German twist. Starring Fassbinder’s then-boyfriend El Hedi ben Salem – a poor Moroccan-born immigrant who lived with his family (a wife and two kids) in a French Arab ghetto before becoming a Fass-bande Superstar – as the colored guest-worker who finds unlikely love and warmth in the form of a socially naive German widow, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul carries a certain audacious, if not exaggerated, authenticity to it that was even more brutally reflected in real-life with both actor and auteur being six feet under less than a decade after the release of the film that would prove to be their greatest collaboration with one another. While Fassbinder’s friend Werner Schroeter – the greatest ‘dandy’ of German New Wave Cinema – held the filmmaker partly responsible for El Hedi ben Salem's death due to his belief that, “he had let down a friend who, to a certain extent, was not his equal. Salem was not an educated person; he was not at all sure of himself,” the auteur certainly displayed his sensitivity to his exotic lover’s precarious plight in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; a striking cinematic work that, although coming from an ostensibly ‘far-leftist’ perspective, if not a rather distinctive and highly individualistic one, demonstrates that all ‘forbidden loves,’ especially racially mixed ones, are predestined to social ostracism and, more likely than not, inevitable obliteration. Filmed in two weeks in between shooting Martha (1974) – another early Sirk-influenced film – and the black-and-white epic period piece Effi Briest (1974), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul proved to be just another reason as to why Rainer Werner Fassbinder is probably the most prolific German filmmaker who ever lived as an absurdly active auteur who made more cinematic masterpieces in a year than most filmmakers make in a lifetime. 

 In an essay he wrote on Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder remarked regarding the curious conclusion of All That Heaven Allows – the film that the German New Cinema auteur loosely remade as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – that, “Then later Jane goes back to Rock, because she keeps having headaches, which happens to all of us if we don’t fuck often enough. But when she’s back, it isn’t a happy ending, even though they’re together, the two of them. A person who creates so many problems in love won’t be able to be happy later on…Human beings can’t be alone, but they can’t be together either. They’re full of despair…” And naturally, such is the world of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but Fassbinder takes things to more misanthropic and even nihilistic extremes. The main difference between the younger filmmaker and his filmic father figure is probably best symbolically summed up in two different yet similar scenes from each respective filmmaker's films involving adult children and a lone television. While a TV is used as a soulless bourgeois gift so as to appease their mother, who has just broken up with her younger lover (played by Rock Hudson) and is quite lonely and melancholy, by the conspiring children in All That Heaven Allows, the son of the female protagonist of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul kicks in his mother’s boobtube and another son calls her a "whore" after his mommy reveals she has married a young Arab. Working in arguably the most revolutionary period in German filmmaking history, Fassbinder was able to depict a sort of hopeless honesty in his films that Douglas Sirk never had the privilege of, at least while working somewhat servilely for the monetary-inclined money-men of Hollywood. 

 One rainy night after getting off after a tiring day of work, 60-year-old Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira) – a widowed cleaning woman from a working-class background who was once a Nazi party member – finally decides to investigate the exotic foreign music (Al Asfouryeh by Sabah) coming from a local bar that has always intrigued her on her nightly walks home, so she goes inside the somewhat seedy saloon and meets her soon-to-be-husband Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) by happenstance. Inside, she encounters a couple German women, one of which being the bar owner and Ali’s sometimes-lover Barbara (Barbara Valentin), and a handful of Arab men. Ali’s “cock is kaput,” so he turns down the sexual offer of a haggard kraut whore, but he does agree to dance with “the old woman” Emmi after his racial compatriot tells him to do so in a somewhat heckling manner, thereupon ushering in the unconventional relationship between the ignorant, half-literate 30-something-year-old Moroccan guest-worker and the lonely widow who does not have a bad word to say about Uncle Hitler. Although Emmi and Ali face derision and denigration from the bar patrons, it is nothing compared to the virtual hell on earth they will experience from the gentle German woman’s family, friends, and neighbors after getting married on a wild whim. Emmi’s grown-up children essentially disown her (despite the fact that their father was a Polish foreigner himself) and her neighbors cruelly gang up on on her like a bunch of conniving bitches in heat seeking to sever her soul, in part due to their jealousy of her newfound happiness, and it even gets so bad that the owner of the local grocery store refuses to serve the couple despite the weary wife’s many years as a loyal patron. Initially facing seething hatred and social ostracism due to their unconventional mixed blood marriage, the extraordinary odd couple still attempts to prove “love conquers all” and Emmi theorizes that taking a long vacation will provide for a nice change of scenery and that when they come home, everything will return to normal. Magically, when the couple returns from their short sunny sabbatical, Emmi’s wish is granted and suddenly everyone has ‘accepted’ the two rare lovebirds, albeit in a most condescending, two-faced, and even parasitical sort of way. Finally relieved she has been once again accepted among the petty Teutonic proletariat, Emmi ignores the fact that they treats Ali as not an individual, but as a perennial foreigner and novelty quasi-Negro-Arab Übermensch of immense strength and sexual potency, even showing his strength off to her crudely curious friends like he is a monkey doing tricks and forcing him like a virtual slave to move objects around for her neighbors. Clearly hurt, Ali goes back to his ex-lover Barbara for sex, comfort, and couscous (a native dish Emmi now refuses to eat/cook for her homesick husband as she wants him to learn to eat sauerkraut). Emmi eventually comes to her senses, but it seems too late as Ali shuns his rather worried wife, even pretending not to know who she is when she randomly shows up at his place of employment where his work pals describe her as his, “Moroccan grandmother.” It is only when the two dance to the same song at the same bar where they initially met that the two can reconcile their differences and once again feel the particularly ‘platonic love’ (as indicated by Emmi's remark that she does not care if over-anxious Ali sleeps with other women) that brought them together in the first place, but Ali’s health takes a turn for the worst due to a bursting stomach ulcer, thereupon leaving his body temporarily kaput. As Fassbinder once stated in an interview, “Of course, the ending’s meant to take this private story, which I’m crazy about and also happen to think is very important, and give it a thrust into reality, including in the mind of the moviegoer.” 

 Indeed, a lot has changed since the release of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but Fassbinder’s cinematic depiction of the social turmoil and cultural suicide that is globalization and “multiculturalism” – an oxymoronic word if there ever was one – has only proved to be all the more true nearly four decades after the film’s initial release. While the ‘Nazi Generation’ – Fassbinder's mother's generation which he many times cinematically criticized – has all but totally died out, only to be replaced by ethnomasochistic Germans with nil sense of kultur nor community, the foreign guest workers of Ali’s generation have spawned kids who are less keen on work and more prone to criminality (even making certain sectors of Germany “no go zones” for indigenous Germans) and hostility to the adopted anti-homeland that pays for their existence. It is worth noting Ali remarks to Emmi regarding kraut-towelhead relations during their first conversation, “German master…Arab dog,” because although the foreigners from the South might still be seen as unsettled savages even by 'well-meaning' blockhead liberals, they have now began to bark and bite while their pathetically passive Aryan masters become elderly and emaciated. After all, no matter how rich or powerful the elderly master is, he is no match when cornered in his home by a pack rabid canines who have been kicked one too many times. In real-life, Fassbinder essentially brought El Hedi ben Salem out of the ghetto and turned him into an international cinema Superstar, thereupon going from literals rags to designer clothes, only to turn his back on him when the filmmaker no longer needed/desired him. While drunk, Salem ended up violently stabbing three people and was subsequently deported to France where he killed himself by way of hanging in 1982 while in prison, thus marking the second suicide of one of Fassbinder’s ill-fated lovers/stars, another to whom he would dedicate one of his films.  In an interview with German auteur Frank Ripploh (Taxi zum Klo), Rainer Werner Fassbinder – a homosexual man of many calamitous love affairs – admitted that filmmaking was a substitute of sorts for love, stating, “When I was very small I already knew I was supposed to make many films. I can only tell you that when I shot my first take it was more fantastic than the most fantastic orgasm I ever had. That was a feeling, indescribable.” With that in mind, it should be no surprise for those that have seen Ali: Fear Eats the Soul that the film is more than an imitation of life as a reflection of Fassbinder’s idealized empathy for a minority lover that he could not express to any notable degree in real-life. Although Fassbinder was buggered by a seemingly non-gay brown-man from a gutter, for which he returned favor by humanizing him and his people via cinema, he ultimately kicked him to the curb just like the common latent-Nazi Germans he portrays in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.  Still, while a black Hollywood star like Will Smith does not add up to much more than an artistically-vacant Hollywood affirmative-action case on showbiz steroids, El Hedi ben Salem has been secured a place in cinema history that few melanin-strong actors can boast as the archetypical 'unknown foreigner' with strengths and aspirations, but also with flaws and failures, thus being given a 'human' form, although I am sure he was more thrilled about being the first man – be it black or white – to do a nude sex scene with buxom blonde beastess Barbara Valentin.

-Ty E