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Katzelmacher was a revelation. One of only a handful of Fassbinder films which I had not seen before, it seems among his best, and most challenging, works.

Fassbinder’s second feature film, Katzelmacher (1969) is a tour de force of stark visual beauty and ambiguous but riveting characters. Fassbinder adapted his own original play, of the same title, which he had also starred in on stage. (The theatrical script is included in the anthology Fassbinder’s Plays.)

Shot in just nine days on a shoestring budget (DEM 80,000, then US $25,000), Katzelmacher explores the rootless but circumscribed lives of a group of young working class people. They hang around their dull Munich apartment complex, smoking cigarettes, sipping beer, exchanging banalities, and sleeping with each other – sometimes for money. But violence lies just below the surface, as we see when a Greek “guest worker” moves in and begins seeing one of the women. The men’s increasing hostility towards the “Katzelmacher” (a Bavarian sexual slur for a foreign laborer), coupled with the immigrant’s incomprehension, leads to the film’s powerful climax.

At the time of its release, it won several prestigious awards; and the prize money, which was many times more than the film’s budget, financed Fassbinder’s next films. And it decisively established its 23-year-old writer/director/actor – and editor (although he used his pseudonym of “Franz Walsch,” which he playfully defines in The American Soldier) – as a rising star of the New German Cinema.

While stylistically austere, like his other early films, we can already see his trademark interplay of social criticism and melodrama. And while Fassbinder based it on his original play, he uses purely cinematic – visual and sound – means to explore his inarticulate but richly-drawn characters. He employs visual cues from such recent works as Godard’s My Life to Live (1963) and Bergman’s Persona (1966), and perhaps even Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), but I was deeply struck by the personal vision of this film. It feels wrenched from life, not made up from earlier plays and films. The severe images (bare walls, bare lives, and sometimes bare bodies) viscerally convey not only the world which these people inhabit but their deepest natures.

Despite, or perhaps because, of its relentlessly homogeneous – even static – style, the film achieves a compelling momentum. Each scene is done in a single continuous shot; some go on for several minutes, others are just one quick, evocative image. Throughout there is no camera movement, except for a series of brief, formally identical tracking shots which punctuate the film. Even then, the camera maintains an even distance as it pulls straight ahead of two people walking in parallel, further emphasizing the flat space which confines them.

ImageExcept for a few moments between the immigrant Jorgos (Fassbinder, in a wryly understated performance) and his girlfriend Marie (Hanna Schygulla, who appeared in 20 Fassbinder films), no character ever looks another in the eye and truly speaks with them. Instead, characters talk at, or around, each other. Fassbinder even physically arranges them either in frontal views, or at 90 degree angles to each other. The characters may think that they are having conversations, but we know better. This verbal dislocation is emphasized visually by the literally fragmented shots of characters, who appear to be floating – legless – above their world. The film is one third over before we ever see anyone standing on the ground; and that happens only after Jorgos appears, signaling a momentous change.

As the picture lulls you along with its extended use of dialogue, delivered in a flat manner by people who almost never look each other in the eye, suddenly a man will strike his girlfriend. And she will let him. He may recently have given her money in exchange for sex (the divisions between love and casual prostitution are blurry, and include both hetero- and homosexual varieties). A moment after the slap, their impassivity returns.

At other times, the violence is only spoken about, as in the chilling scene between Erich (Hans Hirschmüller, brilliant in the title role in The Merchant of Four Seasons) and his friend Paul. Although Paul hustles men on the side (his “john” Klaus seems like the nicest and most emotionally stable person in the film), he has inadvertently gotten his girlfriend pregnant. Paul does not want her to have the kid. What can he do? Erich advises him nonchalantly, “Just punch her in the belly or throw her down the stairs. The baby will go.” Paul shrugs, and the two men return to the meandering conversation they were having earlier.

The bland surfaces (emotional, architectural, cinematic) and mundane conversations conceal, but barely contain, a violence waiting to erupt. Jorgos discovers this at the climax, when the “real Germans” beat him for bringing “difference” into their little world. But Katzelmacher is much more than a tract about the still-relevant issue of xenophobia. Since Fassbinder lets us uncover at least some of the reasons for that violence, we are not simply clicking our tongues in disgust at these slack “tough guys” and their “girls;” we are able to understand them. We see, more clearly than any of the characters, their inability to communicate, even as we feel their profound longing to connect.

ImageWe see, more clearly than any of the characters, that Katzelmacher’s world is not only one of bland monotony but of people’s inability to communicate – even as we see, and feel, their profound longing to connect. Fassbinder’s greatest, and most disturbing insight, is of the violence which results from these self-trapped lives.

Even at this early point in his career, Fassbinder is an artist who can transform such raw, painful, and deeply personal material into a visually arresting film, which is at once fiercely unsentimental and strangely tender.

1.96GB | 1h 29m | 790×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/F69271A7CEEE371/Katzelmacher_(1969)_-_BluRay_576p.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English, French

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Katzelmacher (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

From Jim’s Reviews:
Disclosure: I have written the liner notes for Fantoma’s DVD release of this film. With a few changes, that essay appears below.

Image”You hear the one about the guy goes into a bakery, orders a loaf of bread? ‘White or black?’ the baker asks. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ the guy says. ‘It’s for a blind person.'”

How do we move from these opening words of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? – one of five rapid-fire jokes delivered by Herr R.’s co-workers – to its climactic killing spree? Like the title, that’s another gnawing, and resonant, question.

This is one of Fassbinder’s most powerful and original works. Although he gave a co-writing and co-directing credit to his friend, Michael Fengler, its vision is pure Fassbinder. It grew directly out of his experimental theatre work and earlier films. It raises themes – about the problematic connections of the individual to society and himself – which he’ll explore from many angles in his later features. In a way, it’s an extension of his minimalist classic Katzelmacher, about a group of aimless young people whose lives alternate between stasis and violence (Herr R. could be one of them, ten years on and with a white-collar job). It also connects to an exceptional later film, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, about the effects on a family when the father goes on a killing rampage at work. But in style and feeling, this film, like Herr R. himself, stands alone.

ImageWhy Does Herr R. Run Amok? was Fassbinder’s fifth feature, and one of five films and three plays he did in 1970. That was a typically prodigious year for an artist who directed forty-one features and three-dozen theatrical productions in fourteen hyperactive years, before dying at age 36. This film was shot in 16mm by Dietrich Lohmann (who photographed most of Fassbinder’s early pictures) in the winter of 1969/70 in Munich, premiered June 28, 1970 and went into general release the following February. Like many of Fassbinder’s early films, it appealed to only a handful of adventurous cinephiles, but it was critically acclaimed, and won major prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival and the German Film Awards. Today, Fassbinder is cited as a major influence by many directors, including Almodóvar, Jarmusch, Kiarostami, Van Sant, and Von Trier, who owes a special debt to this film which anticipates by a quarter century virtually all of his Dogme 95 movement’s ultra-naturalistic rules.

ImageAs Herr R., the mousy draftsman who finally reaches the breaking point, Kurt Raab gives one of his most unnerving performances. It seems more richly-layered with each viewing, as you search for more clues to his obscure nature. Raab worked on virtually all of Fassbinder’s productions, usually as production designer, but sometimes as actor. He was unforgettable as the lead in Satan’s Brew and The Stationmaster’s Wife, and in many juicy featured parts, including an over-the-top Bishop in The Niklashausen Journey (the only other film which Fassbinder co-directed with Fengler).

[SPOILER ALERT – specifics about the film’s climax are revealed below.]

Although there was scant clinical research on family murders, or familicides, in 1970, Fassbinder intuited much of what subsequent studies have found. Besides the acts themselves, these increasingly common homicides are so shocking because they are usually committed by ordinary men, out of the blue. That is exactly the effect Fassbinder achieves with his radical structure: for ninety-five percent of the film, we inhabit Herr R.’s excruciatingly uneventful life at work and home. When in the next-to-last scene he listlessly bludgeons to death his neighbor, wife, and sleeping son, it is all the more visceral, although the fatal blows are delivered outside of the frame and we see no blood. These astounding final minutes force us to reassess everything that’s come before, everything we thought we knew about this well-groomed, pleasant little man. It is no coincidence that this is Fassbinder’s only title in the form of a question: “Why…?”

ImageHe raises the most frequently cited clinical reasons for family killings, including jealousy. Herr R. kills the neighbor (Irm Herrmann) during her nattering monologue about a ski vacation when she worked her boyfriend into a jealous rage by flirting with an instructor. But there is no evidence that Herr R.’s wife (Lilith Ungerer) is unfaithful, unless you count the one time she sat next to a handsome neighbor (Hannes Gromball). Another common motive for such murders is a history of abuse, but Herr R.’s parents seem genuinely “nice,” chatting with their daughter-in-law and doting on their grandson. At the firm’s threadbare Christmas party, the boss (Franz Maron) embarrasses Herr R. by refusing to join him in a drunken toast to their (non-existent) friendship. Humiliation is another explanation for familicide, but again Fassbinder shrugs off a reductive explanation.

He shows us the human fallibility built into medical and psychological professionalism. The doctor who diagnoses Herr R.’s headaches is perfunctory and ineffectual: just quit smoking, he says, and the problem will go away. (With the cast constantly lighting up, cigarettes must have figured prominently in the microscopic DEM 135,000 budget.) More disturbing than the physician is the well-intentioned but by-the-book elementary school counselor, who calls in Herr and Frau R. to hear the litany of their son’s academic and social problems. As Herr R. listens silently, his body slightly contorted, we – and perhaps he – can imagine that the son is already turning into the father.

Fassbinder’s refusal to diminish the complexity of lived experience is what keeps this film riveting from the start. Through his pitch-perfect cast, we have the voyeuristic thrill of eavesdropping on seemingly real people. In fact, virtually everyone uses their actual name, including Kurt Raab. He’s referred to repeatedly as “Kurt” or “Mr. Raab” but never as an allegorical “Herr R.” I use that form because it’s the convention in writing about the film, but also because, for all of his authenticity, Herr R. is also a resonant symbol of alienated modern man, a pudgy Travis Bickle with a T-square.

ImageInstead of reducing Herr R. to a case study, Fassbinder reveals him in a deeper, and more disturbing, way through his filmmaking. A man who could murder his own wife and son is a man who sees the world as a bleak, frozen, endlessly drab place, a prison without bars. Herr R.’s inner world, of too-quiet desperation, is what we see projected onscreen.

Although Fassbinder employs a documentary-like style, with many hand-held shots, the result is intensely subjective. The long static takes, interrupted by jerky pans into invasive, even leering close-ups (why are we staring at the secretary’s face now?), encapsulate Herr R. Even when he’s among co-workers or has neighbors visiting, the camera angles to isolate him. He sits alone, slightly hunched, against a flat background. He is often framed as he sees himself, relegated to the margins. This asymmetry is especially foreboding in light of his job as a draftsman; he’d be fired for such askew perspectives. For Herr R., this film is a repressive eternity crammed into eighty minutes. The murders are no less shocking for feeling horribly inevitable.

While that is an extraordinary visual and psychological achievement, especially for a 25-year-old filmmaker, there is more to this film than meets the eye.

The film’s narrative technique, in twenty-two scenes, reinforces the visual design, and hence Herr R.’s character. Scenes are often lengthy, with largely improvised dialogue. Surprisingly (at least until the end), the film is punctuated with some violently abrupt cuts. By contrast, there is a lot of giggling. Around Herr R., most of the people are telling jokes, laughing and having a pretty good time. This is effective in different ways. It both tightens the screws on Herr R.’s alienation and, from the audience’s perspective, keeps the film (weirdly but credibly) buoyant. Who can forget those two giddy teenage girls in the record shop, who find the rigid Herr R. a total hoot? You can almost see why some people classify this film a comedy.

ImageThe laughter, like the dialogue, works because it feels spontaneous. But on a deeper level, Fassbinder uses all of the dramatic and visual elements to convey his theme. It’s no coincidence that the film’s first words, the black and white bread joke (told by Harry Baer) quoted above, reference the colors of the funereal three-piece suit that Herr R. wears throughout. This was Fassbinder’s first film in color, yet ironically – and aptly – it’s as oppressively monochromatic as his earlier pictures, with revealing titles like Love is Colder Than Death.

Let’s take a look at the opening scene’s five jokes, which by the end we realize serve as a kind of thematic overture for the whole film. The bread joke is about blindness; the horse-seating-eight gag (Peter Moland) is about cluelessness; the mouse and elephant story (Lieselotte Eder, Fassbinder’s mother) is about inferiority; “swimming to America” is about futility (Harry Baer again); and the one about the man murdering his wife (Peter Moland again) is all too prophetic. Taken together, those themes delimit Herr R., although part of his tragedy is that he lacks the objectivity to see it. Also note Fassbinder’s use of space and color, from the first shot, to suggest Herr R.’s inner world. The three laughing co-workers – and the silently grinning Herr R. – step out of their office building into a narrow, gray, frozen alley.

ImageWhile this is perhaps Fassbinder’s most hyper-real picture, it’s also among his most richly ambiguous works, mysterious to the bone. The allegorical title suggests that he has symbolic intentions, but he never forces a narrow this-means-that interpretation. As in all of his films, there are no simplistic “heroes” or “villains,” let alone “monsters.” Herr R., like everyone else we meet, is just a person caught up in a system that pushes him over the edge, or that allows him to push himself over. In his later films Fassbinder will dissect what makes society tick, but here we see what happens when the ticking fatally stops for one man.

Why does Herr R. run amok?

Perhaps Fassbinder is really asking, under what circumstances might you?

1.23GB | 1h 28mn | 720×540 | mkv
https://nitro.download/view/72C28CDCCF5EA3D/Why_Does_Herr_R_Run_Amok.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? AKA Why Does Herr R. Run Amok (1970) first appeared on Cinema of the World.