A provocative current; a cocktail of creative energy and psychic auto mutilation produced what would be termed ”New German Cinema” . A social vomit and psychic bile of four centuries of German thought.Rainer Werner Fassbinder( 1945-1982) became metaphorically , a cinematic orphanage for shipwrecked and marooned ideas. He was what was revealed under a large rock when it was turned over, and the results appalled almost every segment of society forced to look back at itself. But, it was great art, harmonically not in tune with the ethos of passive consumption.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
The phenomenon of Fassbinder was created to divert attention from an artistic vision, which in its tortured and anguished way, embraced marginalities and social outcasts with a deep sensitivity combined with a ferocious assault on bourgeois society. He viewed the bourgeoisie as a state of emotional and conscious deep freeze lead like a carnival dog in a circus. His own rage properly consumed himself. Every work in process for Fassbinder became part of his own fate and determined and reinforced his psychic development. He became an instrument of his own work.
Fassbinder’s thematic was almost a reverse inside-out psychology . He posited the energy of ”alternate inclinations” and pulled them towards its inevitable conclusion which was a pathology based on the total absence of denial of the emotional side where no thought is too sensitive to be repressed . The outcome were increasingly sinister themes which parralled and, were in itself a form of institutional violence which he regarded as the ”limitations of humanity”. The themes are in a form of suspended animation since they are not anchored by clearly discernible archetypes based on fantasy, history, illusion and myth. Fassbinder represents a nihilism of the archetype .
Pre-Paradise Sorr
w...a disqueting look at how normal people can become monsters
Carl Jung wrote, ”Every creative person is a duality or synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he ( she ) is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he ( she ) is an impersonal creative process… the artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him … to perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”( 1933)
Egocentrism, active provocation and egocentrism bordering on the absurd, is it Fassbinder’s oeuvre as filmmaker and director that explains him as an artist or the myriad insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life which he attempted to resolve without compromise? The name of an early film was ”Love is Colder Than Death” and his cinematic narrative of the lies and illusions of which relationships are founded and maintained remained a constant in his life.
Fear eating at our higher spirits seems to be the outcome in his world of the bare and mechanical reality of family and working life of society, when materialism is allowed to become more important than its inhabitants. Fassbinder’s exploration of the ”Little Hitler” in all of us, unconsciously advancing the Fascist agenda within the circle of intimate relationships exemplified his authenticity as a dangerous director.
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