Fassbinder’s 77th birthday, part 2 — a trove of amazingly rare RWF-related films (anyone know a ‘fansubber’ or low-price translator?)

I don’t speak or read German. Thus, my deep fascination with the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been inhibited. I have relied over the years on the kindness of subtitlers to supply subs for his films, and am happy to report that, at the current time, you can find English-subtitled copies of every one of his features and telefilms somewhere on the Internet, except the second part of Bolweiser.

In the world of Fassbinder-lit, it’s been dire: the collections of his early writings and interviews with him have gone untranslated for a long time (18 years for the interview book so far).

Thus, you can imagine my conflicted feelings when a YouTube poster named “Raoul Révéré” began to post a host of INCREDIBLY rare films concerning Fassbinder and other German directors, albeit with no English subtitles. Révéré has posted *dozens* of very watchable copies of films made by directors whose work Americans never get to see.

The fact that they are untranslated is indeed maddening — not since the traveling festival of Fassbinder’s films in 1997 (that began as a comprehensive show of everything he directed at MoMA) has there been such a veritable flood of RWF-related material available to viewers worldwide. I thus present the following with mixed emotions, but in celebration of Fassbinder’s birthday (which is today, May 31) and in commemoration of his death (which took place on June 10).

It would be delightful if the many people who “fansub” films for free would tackle these films, but it seems unlikely. It would make sense, however, to start a sort of crowd-funding project to get these films (perhaps just one or two to start with) subtitled for Fassbinder fans who would love to see them. Count me in if such a thing can be arranged with a bilingual person who has the time and the inclination (and charges a reasonable rate for translation of movie dialogue). I can be contacted at the email found at mediafunhouse.com.

For those who would find respite in the Google “auto-translate” option for Closed Captions, I must warn you: that way lies madness. The films that do have that option on Révéré’s channel proceed — as they do in “heard” English — to produce sentences that are mere word-salad and seem to have a vague relation to what is being said (many words are “misheard” by the program), but which make no sense and ultimately undercut the viewing experience. (Read: You’re better off with whatever plot synopsis can be found online, even if it’s only a line or two.)

Back to the trove of Révéré: The specialty on this YT channel is apparent — filmmakers who follow Fassbinder in their love of Hollywood (and German post-war) melodrama and others who craft visually arresting kitsch/camp/gay imagery. The bulk of Révéré’s online trove centers around the writer-painter-filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch and Fassbinder. In the case of the latter, Révéré has posted a number of films that fit into the categories outlined above and also happen to feature members of Fassbinder’s acting ensemble in supporting roles.

Before I delve into the film directly relate to Fassbinder, here is a list of those, for the diehard RWF fan.

Directed by Robert Van Ackeren:

Harlis, aka “The Sensuous Three” (1972), with Ulli Lommel

Der letzte Schrei (1975), with Delphine Seyrig and Udo Kier

Die Reinheit des Herzens (1980), with Elisabeth Trissenaar

Directed by Achternbusch:

Die Atlantikschwimmer (1976), with Margarethe von Trotta, Kurt Raab

Die Olympiasiegerin (1983), with Kurt Raab

Rita Ritter (1984), with Armin Mueller-Stahl, Barbara Valentin, Eva Mattes

Wohin? (1988), with Kurt Raab

Hades (1995), with Irm Hermann and Rosel Zech

Das fünfte Gebot (The Fifth Commandment, 1975), directed by Duccio Tessari, with Helmut Berger and Udo Kier

“Talk Im Turm,” 1992 talk show with Helmut Berger and Fassbinder colleague (and nemesis) Rosa von Praunheim

Die Peep Show ist tot, es lebe die Peep Show! by Lothar Lambert, with Ingrid Caven and Dieter Schidor

Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht (1982), directed by Hans-Christof Stenzel, with Volker Spengler

A “missing in action” title that did have a U.S. distributor (“Promovision International”) and yet never showed up on U.S. DVD is A Man Like Eva (1984), directed by Radu Gabrea. It’s an odd picture, in that its main conceit is that Eva Mattes (who starred in Fassbinder films, including Petra von Kant and the missing (but available on the “underside” of the Internet) Jail Bait) plays RWF.

Ms. Mattes does a good impression of RWF, but the film does leave out one aspect of Fassbinder’s non-stop activity, namely drugs. One assumes Gabrea left this out to further concentrate on Fassbinder’s relationships with his performers and crew.

 

Moving closer to Fassbinder, Révéré has posted Heute spielen wir den Boß (“Today we play the boss,” 1981), the only theatrical feature directed by the composer of the immaculate music in Fassbinder’s films, Peer Raben. The film stars and is coscripted by Fassbinder's ex-boyfriend, star, and crew member, Kurt Raab. Other Fassbinder mainstays in the cast are Ingrid Caven, Rosel Zech, Harry Baer, Irm Hermann, and Gunther Kaufmann.

 

Raab died of AIDS in 1988. A documentary about his life appeared in 1989. Sehnsucht nach Sodom (“Yearning for Sodom”), was directed by Hanno Baethe, Hans Hirschmüller, and Raab.

 

There are seven documentaries on Fassbinder on the Révéré channel — alas, these as well are all in German and have no translation to any other language. Each one of them contains rare footage of Fassbinder interviews and shows him directing on-set. I leave out here the full-length interview filmed in his Paris apartment, as that has appeared as a supplement on U.S. DVD.

The first documentary is Es ist nicht gut, in einem Menschenleib zu leben (“It is not good to live in a human body,” 1995), directed by Peter Buchka. It can be found here.

Doc 2 is Ich will nicht nur, dass ihr mich liebt (“I don’t just want you to love me,” 1992), directed by Hans Günther Pflaum.

 

Doc 3 is Ende einer Kommune? (“End of a commune?”). Directed by Joachim von Mengershausen, it is probably the RAREST of the RWF docs. It was released in 1970 and shows Fassbinder and his colleagues rehearsing and attending the premiere of his first film, Love Is Colder Than Death, at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival.

 

Doc 4 is Der Kulturbetrieb braucht so was wie mich (“The culture industry needs someone like me”).

 

Doc 5 is Etwas, wovor ich Angst habe, setzt mich in Gang (“Something I’m scared of gets me going,” 1982).

 

Doc 6 is Der Mensch ist ein hässliches Tier (“Man is an ugly animal”). 

 

Lastly, Révéré has posted three films that Fassbinder acted in, only one of which appeared on U.S. VHS. The first is 1 Berlin-Harlem (1974), directed by Lothar Lambert and Wolfram Zobus. It contains RWF ensemble members in the cast: Ingrid Caven, Peter Chatel, Gunther Kaufmann, and Evelyn Künneke.

Fassbinder appears at 116:20, with Caven outside a movie theater. That scene is here.

Shadow of Angels (1976) is the most controversial project that Fassbinder was ever involved with. It began as the Fassbinder play “The Garbage, the City and Death,” which contains a character called “the Rich Jew.” It has been noted by critics that the character is not an anti-Semitic stick figure, but the play attracted protests and smears against Fassbinder in the press.

The film adaptation is akin to the bleaker films in Fassbinder’s canon (like In a Year of 13 Moons), but Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid handled direction for Shadow. Schmid is seen here introducing the film on German television. Online he is quoted as saying that the film takes place in “a Germany where no one is starving and no one is scared anymore, and the only two people who are still sensitive are the prostitute and the Jew, because both of them are outcasts.”

Below is the version put up on YT by Révéré. A subtitled copy of the film can be found at Rarefilmm, here.

 

The most amazing discovery for Fassbinder fans who enjoy watching him act in films directed by others is a 1971 telefilm directed by Peer Raben, Die Ahnfrau — Oratorium nach Franz Grillparzer (“The Ancestress”). The cast includes RWF, Margit Carstensen, Hans Hirschmüller, Kurt Raab, Irm Hermann, Ulli Lommel, Ingrid Caven, and Hanna Schygulla.

For those who would like to try to follow the plot without knowing the language, the plot of the 1816 play by Grillparzer is this (well, at least according to Grillparzer’s Wiki bio): “It is a gruesome fate-tragedy in the trochaic measure of the Spanish drama, already made popular by Müllner's Schuld. The ghost of a lady who was killed by her husband for infidelity is doomed to walk the earth until her family line dies out, and this happens in the play amid scenes of violence and horror.”

Raben’s stylized production of the play truly makes one wish this film did have subtitles.

 

And finally, a film that did play in the U.S. but has disappeared in the last 40 years. And for which we DO have a translation of the key portion (but not on the film itself on YT). The film in question is Dieter Schidor’s The Wizard of Babylon (1982), which shows the making of Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle (1982) but even more importantly features his last-ever interview, conducted the evening before he died at the very young age of 37.

There is another making-of film about Querelle, Wolf Gremm’s Letzte Arbeiten (“Last works,” 1982), so while Schidor’s behind-the-scenes look at the production of Fassbinder’s last film is very interesting, it isn’t unique. The interview most certainly is.

It’s not all that long, but the film begins (for 6 minutes) and ends (for 11 minutes) with this last interview. The important thing to know is that Fassbinder is not out of his mind on drugs. He does not look like he is dying — he simply looks very, very tired. (Which makes sense, given the output of films, plays, TV work, and writing he created from 1969 to 1982.)

His answers are extremely coherent and quite eloquent. I will include two here:

Schidor: Rainer, you’ve just concluded your 41st film, Querelle, based on a novel by Jean Genet. What made you film this radical novel by Genet after your feminist films, Maria Braun and Veronika Voss? Or, why did you postpone it for so long? 

RWF: Well, I didn’t shoot feminist films but films about human society. Querelle is a utopian draft in contrast to society. That’s what it’s in contrast to, it isn’t feminist film as opposed to men’s film. These films were to describe a society as well as possible. It’s easier to do this with women. Querelle is the draft of a possible society… which, judging by all its repulsiveness, is wonderful. Therefore, they don’t contradict each other but complement each other.... 

Schidor: You started to create a kind of German Hollywood with Lili Marleen and Querelle, which were both extremely big studio productions. 

RWF: That was once an expressed thought of mine. What I’d like is a Hollywood film, that is, a film that’s as wonderful and as easy to understand as Hollywood but at the same time not as untruthful.

The full translation of the interview was featured in the press notes put out by New Yorker films. The interview and a short essay by Fassbinder on Querelle can be found here.

So now, with the re-entry into public view of a “lost” Fassbinder documentary and its key sequence translated into English, I can conclude my celebration of the 77th anniversary of RWF’s birth.

 

Thanks to superior cineaste Paul Gallagher for his help with this piece. Thanks also to Jon Whitehead of Rarefilmm.com for letting me know about this YT channel and in discovering the print materials about Wizard of Babylon. Rarefilmm.com is here.

Fassbinder 77th birthday, part 1: ‘Last Train to Harrisburg,’ Udo Kier as director-star (with Fassbinder as narrator)

Female Udo in "Last Train..."

When YouTube kicked into high gear in the mid-2000s I was flabbergasted. I knew of it as a “viral videos” site, but suddenly friends began sending me links to clips from cult British acts (most notably the Bonzos and Cook & Moore) that were being posted by fans with crazy video collections. During that time there were two Rainer Werner Fassbinder-related clips that went up quickly and went down even faster. I didn’t know how to save anything from the site that early on, but now, years later, I have been able to rewatch both of the clips, and I offer the second one to you in celebration of the 77th anniversary of Fassbinder’s birthday today (May 31).

The first one is the magic act that Fassbinder did with Hanna Schygulla (as promotion for Lili Marleen, still unreleased in the U.S. on disc!), tucked away in a German documentary on Fassbinder. The second is a more complex creation that needs explaining and unfortunately is up with no English subs on YT — but at this point I’m so glad to resee the item that I’m okay with it in any condition.

The video in question is a short b&w film directed by and starring Udo Kier called “Last Train to Harrisburg.” Now, anyone who has followed film in the last nearly four decades knows Udo, and knows of his power to steal scenes away from higher-paid stars. (His bit as the angry wedding planner in Melancholia is just one of dozens.) He can literally make a film worth watching even when it is terrible – and he has admitted that just a small percent of his films were actually good, and an even smaller percent were great.

Udo Kier
and RWF.

However, “Harrisburg” is a very special case. It’s a short that has reportedly only been shown theatrically three times, in film festival settings. It is also the only directorial effort by Udo, and it contains him as 2/3rds of the cast, playing both a man and a woman having a fevered conversation in a train. If that isn’t enough to make the film incredibly special (and wild, truly wild), it moves from must-see to “Wow, that actually happened?” when one finds out that male-Udo and female-Udo in the film are both lip-synching to the voice of another artist — namely Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who participated in this short by reading apocalyptic passages from the Bible.

In the case of “Harrisburg,” though we do not have subtitles, we do have a document written by a film historian who saw it at a film festival that sheds some light on its making and its contents.

Roberta Hofer, a professor of film at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, wrote an account of the film’s screening at the 2012 Munich Film Festival that was shared by the /slash Film Festival in 2018, when they were showing “Last Train.” Udo had appeared at the Munich fest with Ed Lachman, who shot the film and is a master-d.p. who has worked with Wenders, Herzog, Schlondorff, Shirley Clarke, Paul Schrader, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Haynes, and Robert Altman. The credits say that “Last Train” is "a film by" Kier, Lachman, and filmmaker Bernd Brummbär, but then the direction is credited to Kier alone.

Hofer’s account notes that the film was shot at Ostbahnhof, a railway station in Berlin. Kier was in Munich to make a film for the author Wolf Wondratschek with Fassbinder actress (and one-time wife) and renowned torch singer Ingrid Caven. Wondratschek dropped the project two days before it was to start. Hofer continues: “But Udo Kier had already arrived, so Wondraschek left him all the material, including the cameraman. Kier had to improvise. He was ambitious, he smirks, wanted to be a producer, director, and actor all in one.”

Male Udo in "Last Train..."

Kier’s age during the filming is given as being “in his early Thirties” so we can assume (given that he was born in 1944) that it was shot in the late Seventies. The final date given for the film at film festivals is “1976–1984,” presumably because Kier finally put the finishing touches to it in ’84.

It is stressed that the title for the film was to reflect the meltdown at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “A voyage to extermination,” said Kier, according to Hofer. Fassbinder was then recruited to provide a narration (and thus, dialogue) for the film. At first RWF wanted to read from Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, but that could’ve created copyright problems, so it was decided he would read from the Bible. Kier said (via Hofer): “And then we found some really nasty things in it. The hands of merciful women cook their own children. Things like that are in there, you wouldn't believe it. We thought, we will surely get an award from the Catholic Church."

At this point Hofer describes the film, which consists of an opening with a man in a Biblical outfit (read: fur pieces on his shoulders, arms, groin, and legs) who kills a sheep in what looks to be an empty slaughterhouse. Then we see Kier in his dual roles as both a man and a woman (American soldier and dignified lady) who are seemingly not a couple (or were long ago) arguing in a railway compartment. The film finishes with the man who killed the sheep going up to a lectern to speak. Throughout we do hear RWF reciting Bible passages (although his voice turns to that of a young boy toward the end of the train sequence).

Udo Kier in
Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Here is where the translation of Hofer’s document and the Bible quotes mentioned in the film (which, yes, I followed, dimly, using the ridiculousness that is the Google “auto-translate” feature on Closed Captions in YT) might lead the way to decipher when the film was actually shot (as well as a second element I will go into below). Although Kier dates the film as beginning in 1976, it would seem from both the title — which refers to an event (the Three Mile Island accident) that occurred in 1979 — and the Bible quotes mentioned, that Kier made his film after Berlin Alexanderplatz (in which he appears in a small role), which is narrated by Fassbinder and in which he reads passages from Alfred Doblin, and at points other elements creep in, such as Bible quotes.

Hofer states that the man and woman are quoting the Book of Revelation to each other (with Kier, again, lip-synching to Fassbinder’s voice). The first passage she quotes, though, is from Jeremiah: “Wild donkeys stand on the barren heights and pant like jackals” (14:5-6). Jeremiah is also read from in the narration of Alexanderplatz (Jeremiah 17: 6-9) as noted here. Was it perhaps the case that Fassbinder did his narration for Kier’s short film while also doing the narration for his own epic masterwork? (Or did he give Kier outtakes from the Alexanderplatz audio recording?)

Hofer’s account of the film also provides a quotation that definitely comes from the book of Revelations 8:8: “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood.” A final quotation, starting “Cursed be the day I was born!” come from Jeremiah 20:14. Hofer then notes that, after the screening ended, Kier thanked RWF for his work on the film. He is asked when he last saw the film and answers, “Twenty-five years ago.” (1987) Hofer concludes, “Kier's voice breaks, he turns away. He doesn't want to succeed in sounding casual now.”

From Berlin Alexanderplatz.

From "Last Train
to Harrisburg."

A final note on a discovery that I couldn’t find any mention of online. The footage of the man killing the sheep in the empty slaughterhouse appears in Berlin Alexanderplatz, episode 4 from 33:36 to 34:38. Kier and/or Lachman “flipped” the image, as the footage in Kier’s film is a mirror image of the footage from the Fassbinder original. (And also in b&w.)

This ties Udo’s film even closer to Fassbinder at the time of Berlin Alexanderplatz and makes me wish he had officially released the film online and discussed its making at some length. It’s a compelling piece, even untranslated as it now sits on YT. And it certainly is an interesting footnote to Fassbinder’s filmography.

 

Thanks to superior cineaste and friend Paul Gallagher for finding the Hofer document and saving the video clip for me, for further perusal.