Billy Wilder's America

Throughout his film making career, Billy Wilder has displayed an unusual appreciation for the mannerisms and slang-filled language of American culture. As a native European, Wilder's foreigner status made it easier for him to perceive the unique, to him even exotic, nature of American customs and mores. His hasty approach to learning English through radio programs, baseball games,and tabloid newspapers allowed him to develop a strong sense of how the language was actually spoken by various Americans. His early experience with destitution when he first arrived in California (for a brief while, Wilder lived in a deserted ladies room in a hotel), as well as his later wealth and success, gave Wilder a sharp Knowledge of society's highs and lows.

As much as Wilder admired his adopted country, however, he never completely abandoned either his Viennese accent or his European-based perspective. This dichotomy between the two cultures directly and indirectly infuses his films with a sensibility that often reveals new angles on common sights, an outsider's more critical view on the very things that we take for granted.

This peculiar mix of America and Europe became evident early in Wilder's life. Born Samuel Wilder on June 22, 1906, he got the nickname Billy because of his mother's fondness for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Raised primarily in Vienna, Wilder spent his childhood witnessing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ensuing social and economic chaos that followed after World War One. He became a newspaper reporter in Berlin during its most extreme period of decadence and run-away inflation in the 1920s and occasionally worked as a dance instructor and gigolo just to survive financially. His great passions, however, were American movies and jazz.

Through a lucky, and rather bizarre coincidence, Wilder was able to gain entry into the Berlin film industry and, beginning with Menschen am Sonntag (Germany 1929), he was quickly established as a major new screenwriter. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party forced Wilder, who is Jewish, to flee to Paris. There he was able to find work as the co-director of the low-budget production of Mauvaise Graine (France 1933). Wilder's preference, however, was the role of screenwriter and it was this talent that first brought him to work at Paramount Pictures in 1935.

The German director Ernst Lubitsch was at this time not only Paramount's most successful filmmaker, but also one of the most influential people at the studios and he was able to secure jobs for many Central European emigres, especially in the screenwriting department. This unusual mix of accents among the writers once led to a sign being hung on the Writers Building's door: "You must work here. It is not enough to be Hungarian." Wilder was hired to lend a sense of authentic Viennese wit to a few minor productions and was otherwise so under-used that he spent many of his days reading the Help Wanted ads. It was not until he was teamed on a script with Charles Brackett that Wilder's own best qualities came forward, The extreme differences between the two men inspired their scripts as Wilder's liberalism and European worldliness squared off with Brackett's New England-bred conservatism and idealism.

It was, however, Wilder's transition from screenwriter to director that allowed his own themes and concerns to become overt. Initially, Wilder became a director in order to protect the integrity of his and Brackett's scripts. Increasingly though, he found his directorial vision at odds with his collaborator and finally, when Wilder's macabre sense of humor took control on Sunset Boulevard (USA 1950), their work relationship ended.

The similarities and differences between Wilder and Brackett's work can be traced through the dark and light qualities of The Lost Weekend (USA 1945). Brackett had a very personal interest in the film due to his wife's own alcoholism and, in certain ways, Jane Wyman's character is a stand-in for him as she attempts to comprehend the nature of the illness. Wyman's sense of ideals and feelings is indicative of Brackett's own combination of despair and a strong sense of self. However, the film's vivid sense of degradation and madness, especially the infamous bat/mouse nightmare, was gleaned from Wilder. The increasing destitution experienced by Ray Milland's character was familiar to Wilder from his own days of extreme poverty and the nightmare scene has been described by him as a conflict between two sides of his own subconscious, a conflict in which one side feels compelled to devour the other.

Brackett's concerns in The Lost Weekend were central to the script. His intentions in Sunset Boulevard were ignored. Brackett originally conceived the idea for Sunset Boulevard as a screwball comedy. As he and Wilder repeatedly rewrote the screenplay, the narrative evolved into a dark, gothic vision that was uniquely Wilder's. Brackett continued to provide his sense of craftsmanship to the script, but he realized that he was now involved in making someone else's film. Further, his own sensibilities were now submerged beneath the weight of Wilder's propensity toward megalomania, decadence, and black comedy.

It was not so much that Wilder had changed. Instead, Sunset Boulevard represented the complete emergence of the caustic, hard-edged vision already obvious in his earlier production of Double Indemnity (USA 1944). The novel's tale of adultery and murder played out against a Southern California milieu of bright sunlight and quiet stucco houses intrigued Wilder. The ambivalent psychology and poetic texture of Cain's book were less appealing to Wilder. With the help of Raymond Chandler, he fashioned the narrative into a flinty, flippant view of corruption and betrayal, all played out against the most banal of settings. In a way, the American author Cain wrote a very European novel and the European Wilder directed an extremely American film.

Further, while Brackett was an idealist, Wilder was often capable of being a sentimentalist. Despite the cynicism and seeming fatalism of Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, Wilder often seems to be a pessimist with a romantic dreamer screaming to get out. That is especially evident in the contrary tendencies of Ace in the Hole a.k.a. The Big Carnival (USA 1951). The film offers a sarcastically devastating critique of American journalism and commerical exploi­tation. It also contains an abrupt sense of belated spiritual redemption through the power of emotional release. If a worldly spark of cynicism is Wilder's European heritage, then this latent streak of romanticism and sentimentality is, in part, what led him to America.

The Films of Bernardo Bertolucci: Marx and the Oedipus Complex

A long-standing, and often antagonistic, division has existed between Marxist political theory and Freudian psychology. One example of this split was the official Soviet rejection of psychoanalysis during the rule of Stalin. Likewise, there have been numerous accounts from the Hollywood blacklist period of Party members who were convinced by their psychoanalysts to "name names" as part of their therapy. For many Marxist thinkers, the subjective universe of Freud was a narcissistic rejection of scientific materialism. In turn, many psychoanalysts treated communism as a neurotic manifestation of the Oedipus complex. Within the orthodox views of both camps, no point of reconciliation seemed possible. It is within this framework that the films of Bernardo Bertolucci occupy a unique position.

Bertolucci first became prominent in Italy for his work as a poet and critical essayist. He was, however, increasingly drawn to the cinema through his friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini and his work as assistant director on Pasolini's production of Accattone (Italy 1961). Pasolini's own position as poet and filmaker, as well as his status as a renegade Marxist, demonstrated to Bertolucci that a complex synthesis of politics, art, and psychology was possible. Further, the cinematic legacy of Italian Neo-Realism gave Bertolucci a model from which he could freely borrow, even while he was rejecting much of its simpler, more sentimental vision of left-wing politics (though his 1977 production of 1900 is virtually the last Neo-Realist epic ever filmed).

From Pasolini, Bertolucci derived a sharp awareness of the interaction between the personal and political worlds, especially in the arena of sexual politics. From the previous generation of Neo-Realist filmakers, he inherited an appreciation for the formal and moral possibilities of the cinema. With his discovery of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci learned to view the cinema as a uniquely political medium. This pedigree enabled Bertolucci to mix his commitment to radical politics within a framework of psychoanalytic concern.

A recurring theme in Bertolucci's films is the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex. This theory concerning infantile sexuality, in which the child subconsciously wishes to usurp the position of the father in relationship to the mother, is traditionally presented in psychoanalysis as the primal event in a person's mental development. Further, the resolution of this conflict through the repression of the oedipal urge is viewed not only as the first step toward therapeutic adjustment but also as one of the major foundations of the social structure. Bertolucci sees the Oedipus complex as a primary component to both psychological and political awareness. He does not, however, view repression as the only correct resolution of the complex. In turn, the father figure represents more than simply parental authority, but also the patriarchal structures of the state.

The failure to resolve this conflict in either direction is part of the text of Before the Revolution (Italy 1964). Though the title of the film is taken from Talleyrand -- "He who did not live in the years before the (French) Revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is" -- the emotional tone of the work is more directly summarized by the hero's admission that for him, "life will always be before the revolution." This alienating sense of being suspended between a complacent middle-class and a radical proletariat permeates the film as its central character finds himself dissatisfied with his own class, but also realizes that he is not capable of being culturally aligned with the communist workers. He rejects the world of his father (and the affair with his aunt is a substitution for the mother), but he cannot sucessfully follow the revolutionary path advocated by his intellectual mentor, the second father figure in the film. He fails to come to any significant resolution of the crisis and, seemingly, is destined to drift.

In The Spider's Stratagem (Italy 1970), the enigmatic figure of the father still controls the son despite the father's own death years earlier. Supposedly, the father died a martyr in the fight against fascism. History, however, can be a deceptive web through which one generation is capable of ensnaring the next. The degree to which the father has imposed himself upon the son is reinforced in the film by the fact that the same actor plays both parts. Throughout The Spider's Stratagem, the romantic entanglements and political betrayls of the father systematically envelop the son, entrapping him within a personal history of deceit.

Bertolucci's most direct confrontation with the Oedipus complex is presented in Luna (USA/Italy 1979). The title symbolically refers to the mysterious qualities of sexuality contained within the figure of the mother in relationship to the ambivalent sensibilities of the adolescent male. Framed within the context of opera (the mother is a prima donna on tour in Italy), Bertolucci uses the artificial stage worlds of Verdi and Mozart as a means of reflecting the potentially destructive psychological events within the film's narrative. Like the myth that is its namesake, the Oedipus complex contains within it the brutal possibilities of tragedy, and the son's passage through his interior crisis will be critical in determining his entry into maturity. The ambiguous ending of Luna, in which the father must finally assert himself, is not so much a reconciliation as it is a brief pause in a process of psychological development that must continue long after the film has ended.

Luna recongizes that the Oedipus complex, when viewed from the position of the mother and son, contains a potential for tragedy. In The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Italy 1981), the complex is presented from the father's perspective. From this viewpoint, the complex becomes the basis for black comedy. The father is the ridiculous man of the film's title, the contradictory representative of a previous generation who must eventually be replaced by the new. The convoluted, and ultimately unresolved, mystery plot of the film is indicative of the father's inability to accept his powerlessness in resolving, and eventually manipulating, his son's crisis. In turn, he only gradually realizes that the crisis is actually his own and that he must simply accept the fact that "the son always replaces the father."

Women Film Makers: An Outline of Herstory

The history of women filmmakers in the American cinema is often most visible by its absence from the history books and movie theatres rather than by its works or artists. This is caused, in part, by Holly­wood's long standing bias against employing women as directors as well as by the traditional male domination of the film critical establishment. As a consequence, much of the work of women filmmakers has traditionally taken place on the periphery of the established film industry. In turn, much of this history has been largely forgotten due to genuine ignorance combined with willful neglect. Only recently has this hidden history been given some measure of attention and study and, in the process, been historically placed within the growth and development of the cinema.

Alice Guy Blache is generally believed to have been the first woman filmmaker. Born in Paris in 1873, she began working in France as a filmmaker before the end of the 19th-century. Her most active period of work, however, occurred in the United States where she eventually formed her own production company. From her studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, she created a series of short films and, along with Georges Melies and Edwin S. Porter, was one of the original architects of the narrative cinema. Her works range from romance to comedy to science fiction, and the few surviving prints of her films attest to her innovative approach as an early filmmaker. Girl in the Armchair (USA 1912) is especially interesting for its use of color tinting as well as Blache's expedient handling of melodramatic conventions.

The first American born woman filmmaker was Lois Weber who, with occasional collaboration with her actor-husband Phillips Smalley, wrote, produced, and directed a series of dramas that she filmed in a studio leased from Universal. These independent productions were notable for both their technical polish as well as their willingness to confront controversial social subject matter; during her career, Weber produced films in support of birth control, women's suffrage and interracial love. Not surprisingly, she had tremendous difficulty in getting some of her films distributed and, by 1927, she found it financially impossible to continue producing films.

The Blot (USA 1921) is one of the few of Weber's feature-length films that has survived intact. Like most of her films, it overtly deals with an area of social concern, specifically the need for teachers and the even greater need to provide educators with equable pay. The Blot presents its social message within the larger context of its narrative, and one of the most striking aspects about Weber's work is her ability to present overt political concerns without being either heavy-handed or didactic. If any­thing, her films display a matter-of-factness that eschews the more excessive melodramatic conventions of the 1920s American cinema.

Through her work as both a filmmaker and as a mentor figure, Maya Deren was one of the major founding figures of the modern American Avant-Garde movement. With the production of such early experimental films as Meshes of the Afternoon (USA 1943), At Land (USA 1944), and Choreography for Camera (USA 1945), Deren established the basic directions the avant-garde cinema would follow throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Her brief fall from critical grace during the 1970s was, in part, a late rebellious reaction to the enormous shadow she cast throughout the early American experimental cinema movement.

Deren was strongly influenced by the theoretical principles of modern dance as well as by the surrealist cinema of the 1920s. Her films were often autobiographical in their references as she created a cinematic form of psychodrama. In At Land, she created a set of symbolic references while pursuing a study on the illusory structure of cinematic space.

Shirley Clarke began her career in the 1950s as both a dancer and an experimental filmmaker. She emerged most forcefully, however, as a documentary and narrative artist with such films as The Connection (USA 1960), The Cool World (USA 1963), and Portrait of Jason (USA 1967), films in which the romanticism of her early works gave way to a raw and direct look at people who existed on the edge of mainstream American society. In turn, her films achieved a sense of gritty realism rarely attempted within the American cinema. Clarke's career as a filmmaker and videographer has taken place totally outside the context of the American commercial media which has resulted in the limited amount of exposure her work has received. Yet, she remains firmly committed to this independent path which has allowed her to deal with a range of subject matter that is, for all practicable purposes, forbidden for presentation within the mainstream.

The Cool World was filmed on location in Harlem, using a cast composed of professional actors and local residents. Clarke's use of naturalistic photography and direct sound recordings was influenced by the original films of the Italian Neo-Realist movement and her non-judgmental presentation of the film's narrative forces the viewer, in part, to experience the ghetto environment and gang psychology on its own terms.

Before her untimely death, Kathleen Collins was a teacher and filmmaker of increasing critical prominence. Her work, as represented by her best known feature film Losing Ground (USA 1982), dealt with both feminist and African-American issues and concerns in ways that were both politically complex and narratively engaging.

Hitchcock: Variations on a Theme

In his nightclub routine, Woody Allen once joked that he had written a short story about his first year of marriage. No one would publish it, but Alfred Hitchcock had expressed interest in the film rights. The joke is surprisingly accurate in what it says about Hitchcock. Marriage, and the tangled relationships between men and women, is a major theme which Hitchcock would hammer away at in all of his films. While the conventional dogma of the happy ending in the traditional Hollywood film stated that marriage brought continued bliss, Hitchcock saw it as merely a transition in the tense, and usually tainted, nature of sexual relationships. In the 1964 film Marnie, the couple's ultimately therapeutic relationship is rooted in their mutually sick, pathological behavior patterns. Sabotage (England 1936) concludes with the wife stabbing the husband to death over the dinner table. The newlyweds in Rear Window (USA 1954) are, by the end of the film, on the same path to mutual hatred that had led to the murder at the beginning of the film. Instead of happiness, marriage caused paranoia, distrust, and many violent deaths.

That marriage may be built upon mutual weakness rather than strength was examined by Hitchcock in two films: Marnie and Suspicion (USA 1941). The two films bear some striking similarities. Sean Connery's obsessive love for Tippi Hedren is caused by the fact that she is both frigid and a pathological liar. Not only is his love for her sick, but his method of curing her involves a subtle use of psychological torture. In Suspicion, Cary Grant plays an amoral, pathological liar whose obvious illness makes him romantically attractive to Joan Fontaine. She, in turn, is not only exceedingly naive, but is also willing to nurse and even protect his sickness up to a certain point. Her own behavior is remarkably child like and her constant fumbling with her eyeglasses is a visual indication of her own blindness. Her love for Grant's character is largely based on her need to escape from her parents, just as his love for her is based on an innate need for nurturing, yet the only thing she nurtures within him is a continuation of his pathological behavior. The film's climax (which was not the original ending of the film) literally pushes them to the edge of their relationship, a point at which they must make the decision to mature.

Their mutual illness even takes certain mutual forms. One of the few times that Fontaine's character shows signs of great vitality is when she is horseback riding. Likewise, Grant's great passion is betting on the horses. Grant plays an immature man, and when they first meet she is reading a book on child psychology. The weakness that threatens to separate them is also the very bond that holds their marriage together.

For Hitchcock, things other than mental illness can hold a marriage together. In Rich and Strange (England 1932), the banality of middle-class life is the thread that ultimately binds. The couple in the film are bored with life and each other and their unexpected inheritance enables them to take an exotic world cruise, a trip that quickly turns into a surrealistic journey of the soul. Taking the title from a line in Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Nothing of him that doth fade/but doth suffer a sea-change/ into something rich and strange"), the film's visual strangeness clearly demonstrates the influence of Luis Bunuel on Hitchcock, but the central theme is strictly his own. The couple's escape from banality leads only to a false glamour and a realization of the precarious nature of life. The security of boredom is seen by Hitchcock as being preferable to the horrors of reality.

Spellbound (USA 1945), like Marnie and Suspicion, returns to the notion of romantic love and mutual mental illness. While Fontaine's character in Suspicion is symbolically blind, Peck's character in Spellbound is an amnesic whose loss of memory is needed to blind him to his inner sense of guilt. Ingrid Bergman's own aloof and cold personality in the film is a facade covering her own vulnerability and her protectiveness of Peck becomes obsessive.

The film may now be best known for its dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali, although only a fragment of the complete sequence was actually used in the film. An element of surrealism is always evident in Hitchcock's films, but in very subtle ways, and he felt uncomfortable with the extreme artificiality of the sequence. During the forties, when he made Spellbound, Hitchcock had adopted a classical, invisible film technique more in line with Hollywood film making of the period. An important aspect of this kind of film making is maintaining the illusion of reality, and while Hitchcock was not a realist, he was fond of the illusion. His films of the forties were more subdued than either his more experimental films of the thirties or his great masterpieces of the fifties.

Perhaps one of the most under-rated films ever made by Hitchcock is Mr. and Mrs. Smith (USA 1941). Directed as a favor to Carole Lombard, the film was a late entry by Hitchcock in the screwball comedy genre. Lacking the larger subject matter of his other films, Mr. and Mrs. Smith concentrates completely on the theme of marriage. The couple in the film are a pair of egotistical, over-grown children whose behavior pattern holds them together as much as it drives them apart. They are clearly made for each other as their petty destructiveness makes them unsuitable for anyone else.

The weak critical reputation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith may leave the viewer unprepared for what is actually a genuinely funny film. Hitchcock's flair for comedy is evident in many of his thrillers. Certainly Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a minor film in that it limits itself only to this one idea, making it a sonata when compared to the grand symphony of a film like Vertigo (USA 1958). As a sonata, however, it is delightful and is especially light-hearted as opposed to Hitchcock's own darker viewpoint.

Sci-Fi: The Early Classics

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once suggested that science-fiction would in­creasingly have to deal with the immediate past rather than the future. The theory behind this thought is that the acceleration of technological advancement makes it impossible to second guess the reality of tomorrow without that gadget or gizmo appearing in the most recent issue of Time magazine. With the advent of the atomic bomb, space travel, computers, robots, and the digital watch, the future seems ridiculously close (films like Dark Star and Blade Runner are already viewing a future in which all the sci-fi gadgetry is breaking down). For this reason many science-fiction films age badly. The first lunar voyage in the pseudo-documentary film Destination Moon (USA 1950) comes too close to reality to be accepted as stylization (as opposed to the 1902 trick-film A Trip to the Moon) yet is too inaccurate to be acceptable in comparison to the actual event. Viewing early science-fiction films tells us more about the way we were rather than the way we shall be, and films like Metropolis (Germany 1926) and The War of the Worlds (USA 1953) actually are perceptive symbols of their own time periods.

The early science-fiction cinema can be divided into two periods. The first age was from 1926 to 1936, beginning with Metropolis and ending with Things to Come (England 1936). Industrial development and its consequences; the effect of World War I and the possibility of another world war; and the sprawl of urban society comprised the subject matter of this period. Fritz Lang's Metropolis set the basic themes and standards for the films that came afterwards. One of the most expensive productions of the twenties, Metropolis used massive sets to articulate its vision of a futuristic industrial society. The fact that the society in the film is industrial and not technological (the creation of the robot in Metropolis is magical rather than technological), clearly demonstrates that Lang is not concerned with the year 2000, but with the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the 19th century.

Borrowing heavily from Ignatius Donnelly's novel Caesar's Column, Lang creates a vision of an industrial society in which the working class is literally enslaved by the machines they operate. (In one scene, a worker is strapped to the erratically moving hands of a gigantic clock.) Rigidly organized masses of workers are marched through geometrically designed areas of space, emphasizing their entrapment within a system of industrialized slavery. However, Metropolis avoids political analysis and concludes with a compromise built upon nothing more than emotional response. After the rise of Nazism, Lang rejected the film as politically naive, and the fact that Metropolis was one of Hitler's favorite films caused Lang to completely reject his early masterpiece.

Four years later, the American film Just Imagine (USA 1930) would attempt to imitate the grandiose sets of "Metropolis." Part science-fiction and part musical, the failure of Just Imagine to predict what life would be like n 1980 has made the film an inadvertent camp classic. Just how seriously the producers intended their predictions to be is anyone's guess, but the visual impressiveness of the film is undeniable and many later works have referred to it — often sardonically. The film's plot, in which vaudeville star El Brendel awakens from a state of suspended animation, was also the basis for Woody Allen's Sleeper. While the society in Metropolis was grounded in the misery of the Industrial Revolution, the futuristic city in Just Imagine was a combination of American optimism and Busby Berkley.

The last significant film of science-fiction's first era was the 1936 production Things to Come. Authored by H.G. Wells, the film was a didactic overview of future history. In this respect, Things to Come is an epilogue to Wells's massive book The Outline of History and the film is generally locked into academic observations. Wells's faith in the enlightened glories of scientific development may seem, in retrospect, too naive, and the film's explicit equation that technology means democracy would be undercut twenty years later by George Orwell. However the key scenes of Things to Come still have a strong, dramatic sweep, aided in no small part by Raymond Massey's sonorous authority figure.

The second era of science-fiction film making took place in the fifties and, superficially at least, was dominated by the special effects techni­cian's passionate desire to destroy the world in ninety minutes or less. The atomic bomb, radioactive beasties and irrepressible bug-eyed monsters from outer space repeatedly staged their own version of an apocalypse now and the creatures who weren't busy wiping out humanity were preoccupied with taking over your neighbors' brains. While the first era retained a basic optimism about the future, the fifties science-fiction films left little hope that there would be a day-after-tomorrow. Mankind had entered a cataclysmic funhouse as film goers contemplated the world's — and their own — destruction.

In Things to Come, science is mankind's last hope. In the 1953 production of Wells's The War of the Worlds, science is helpless against the Martians' attack. Divine intervention (in the form of the common cold) is the answer as the science-fiction films of the fifties became increasingly theological in their concerns. In the finale of The War of the Worlds, the survivors of the invasion seek refuge in a series of religious sanctuaries, progressively moving from a simple Protestant church to a Catholic cathedral. Science-fiction increasingly began using science not as an end in itself (as was advocated by Jules Verne), but as a device with which to structure allegorical tales.

One of the most overtly allegorical films of the fifties was Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man (USA 1957). The fear of atomic annihilation — man's ultimate helplessness against his own technology — is reduced to the poetic symbol of a mysterious, radioactive cloud. Its effect, an irreversible process of shrinking, becomes a form of impotency not just for the shrinking man but for the world in general. Science has become, in­advertently, the enemy, and the film's metaphysical finale expresses a meek acceptance of the problem rather than a solution. Everything has gone out of control and the film opts for humility and a final mystic union with the universe. In this respect, The Incredible Shrinking Man anti­cipates the conclusion of 2001: a Space Odyssey, the film which began the current era of science-fiction cinema.

Fassbinder: Life on the Edge

Rainer Werner Fassbinder became during his brief life one of the most dynamic and controversial figures in the modern cinema. Before his death in 1982, he completed over 40 film and television productions and created numerous works for the stage and radio. He performed as an actor in over a dozen other films and was one of the central artists in the New German cinema movement of the 1970s. Despite the fact that his career lasted for less than two decades, he was a torrential force whose self-destructive behavior was capable of producing an energetic degree of inventiveness and creativity. He continually led his life on the edge of a great abyss and became the poet laureate of angst, perversity, and a powerfully genuine emotionalism.

Fassbinder was born in 1945, though he would later change his birth date to 1946. His parents divorced when he was six and Fassbinder spent his childhood being moved back and forth between his aloof father and his seemingly disinterested mother. While his mother spent time in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, his father lived in Munich and was a doctor whose patients mostly were prostitutes and their clients. Except for the sporadic company of his father's patients and a few friendly relatives, Fassbinder grew up primarily alone and once boasted, "I'm my own father." If he was his own father, then the movies were his mother as he spent hours each week in darkened theaters watching American films. He was especially intrigued by gangster pictures and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. By his late teens, after displaying an indifference to school and leading a brief career as a street hustler, Fassbinder became convinced that he had to make films.

He attended drama school intermittently in Munich and, by 1967, was acting with a small group called the Action Theater. Fassbinder systematically took control of the group through the combined forces of hard work, an overmastering ego, and sexual liaisons with theater members. By the time the police had closed the theater during the May 1968 uprisings, Fassbinder had already formed the core of the Anti-Teater which he would use on stage and in film.

Improvisations and guerrilla theater tactics formed the basis for the Anti-Teater and, in 1969, Fassbinder directed the group in his first four feature films. Each film was made within a matter of a few weeks and represented a mix of experimental stylization, psycho-drama, and autobiographical details. These earliest films ranged wildly from the extremely studied and classical design of Effi Briest (West Germany 1974) to the excessive Gotterdammerung mentality of The American Soldier (West Germany 1970); yet the common ground among all the films was a focus on redefining the structure of narrative film making. Each film also exposed, directly and indirectly, glimpses into Fassbinder1s psychology.

Effi Briest is a close adaptation of Theodor Fontaine's 19th century novel which was, in turn, a variation on Madame Bovary. When developing some of his previous adaptations of novels to film, Fassbinder simply neglected to read the novel. In producing Effi Briest, he deviated from this practice, actually reading the book, and quoting directly from it throughout the film. The narrative of Effi Briest attracted him as it provided a compelling delineation of Fassbinder's own overwhelming need for love, his inability to achieve it, and the underlying sadomasochistic pursuit of power that can so easily dominate the emotions.

Brutality as a substitute for love is part of the subtext of the early gangster trilogy including Love is Colder Than Death (West Germany 1969), The Gods of the Plague (West Germany 1969), and The American Soldier. In these films, he created a Teutonic underworld of smoke and shadows in which preposterously laconic hoods kill and are killed amid the bathrooms, bars, and supermarket aisles of modern Germany. Sex is reduced to a ritualistic game of power and the characters behave with the somnambulistic motions of "B" movie automatons.

Indirectly, the films in the gangster trilogy express Fassbinder's own ambivalence concerning his sexuality and his artistic methodology. Fassbinder had an enormous and even, perhaps, desperate need to be loved, yet he would eventually reject virtually every lover he had, and psychologically drove two to suicide. Likewise, despite the fact that his method of work relied heavily upon the contributions of his cast and crew, he would periodically "punish" them in films like Satan's Brew (West Germany 1976), one in which many of the film's characters are caustic caricatures of the cast members. Fassbinder even parodied part of himself in the form of the film's half-demented poet.

The ambivalent characteristics and attitudes that surfaced in Fassbinder's personal life also permeated his political perceptions of modern Germany as well as his directing practices. He viewed Germany as still being a proto-fascist state and his political beliefs were ostensibly committed to the collective ideal as formulated by the original Anti-Teater group. However, the Anti-Teater group was never a collective in its actual method of operation: Fassbinder ruled as a "Fuhrer" figure, a manifest contradiction between his actions and beliefs which he recognized and lampooned in Satan's Brew. Similarly, he was extremely ambivalent about the radical terrorist movements of the 1970s, although some of the original members of the Baader-Meinhof gang were his acquaintances.

In his production of The Third Generation (West Germany 1979), Fassbinder set forth the conclusion that terrorism and the modern security state fed upon and needed each other in order to exist. He viewed his contemporaries as a lost generation doomed to "act in danger but without perspective." Likewise, he suspected the state of using terrorism as a pretext in order to justify its own repressive policies. With the vitriolic satire of The Third Generation, Fassbinder attacked the growing nihilism of power politics.

Despite his outpouring of bitter commentary on the modern state, a combination of decadence and nihilism were becoming increasingly obvious in Fassbinder's own life. His omnivorous sexuality was proving increasingly destructive to his friends and lovers; his consumption of drugs and alcohol was reaching life-threatening proportions; and he was rapidly gaining weight from compulsive eating. The recurring line in Berlin Alexanderplatz (West Germany 1980), "There is a reaper and his name is death," became a virtual leitmotif for Fassbinder. He had always lived on the edge, but increasingly he seemed to have been dancing on his grave.

In many respects, In a Year of Thirteen Moons (West Germany 1979) was Fassbinder's most personal film. Written, photographed, edited, and directed by him and starring only his closest associates, including his ex-wife, mother, and several ex-lovers, the film was Fassbinder's curious act of contrition for the suicide of his most recent male lover. The film's highly experimental structure and conflicting blend of pathos and black comedy reflected Fassbinder's own confusion over his contradictory emotional drives. In a way, Fassbinder was both a seducer and a spurned lover, a man who was ruthlessly incapable of accepting the emotional needs which he compulsively sought to fulfill. The title of his first film, Love is Colder Than Death, would prove to be prophetic of his real role throughout his career.

His sudden death in 1982 did not come as a real surprise to those who knew him. Fassbinder's overindulgence in virtually everything consumed him and he died, ironically, while in bed. His battered felt hat still on his head and a clinched cigarette in his hand, watching an old American film on the television set. His final epitaph surfaced inadvertently in the documentary film The Wizard of Babylon (West Germany 1982), the filming of which had ended earlier that day. One of the policemen who were originally called to the death scene later commented to reporters, "Even Fassbinder's just a man." His own mortality which he had tested and challenged during the final years and finally won out.

To some critics, Fassbinder's death practically marked the end of narrative film making in the New German cinema. Fassbinder's demise did mark the closing of a unique and extra-ordinarily vital chapter in the modern cinema. He remains an audacious and combative figure and his work retains the power to shock and offend. Yet, his stylistic control and diversity are virtually unequalled in the cinema and his boldness of vision and purpose railed against the increasing banality of the modern screen.

The New German Cinema

During the 1920s, Germany was the center for one of the most artistically ambitious cinemas in the world. Such artists as F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Georg Wilhelm Pabst created a body of work unsurpassed for its boldness, originality, and expressiveness. The rise of Nazism, the ensuing war, and the protracted period of reconstruction, however, left the German cinema in shambles. By the early 1960s, the German cinema consisted largely of pseudo-English detective mysteries and mediocre film versions of Karl May's Westerns.

This artistic vacuum made the rise of the New German cinema especially unique. An entire generation grew up without any immediate film heritage except that of Hollywood movies and American rock 'n' roll. The pre-war culture seemed distant, aloof, and essentially meaningless, while the period prior to the American occupation was rarely discussed. Because of this, the New German cinema had to formulate an aesthetic response to the gap in German culture. As Wim Wenders stated in Kings of the Road (W. German 1976), the Americans had colonized the German sub-conscious. The roots of this New German cinema is, in part, a response to this colonization.

Nowhere is this influence more evident than in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. An incredibly prolific director, Fassbinder's work is remarkably diverse, yet the influence of Douglas Sirk pervades his style. Sirk used the conventions of melodrama to produce films which were critical of the American society of the 1950s and many of Fassbinder's films operate with a calculated sense of melodramatic excess.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (W. German 1969) represents an important early statement of one of Fassbinder's major themes. Fassbinder essentially sees society as a dehumanizing set of structures and institutions which are designed to deny an individual's need for love and affection. The alienated, and ultimately psychotic, figure represented by Herr R. is simply the logical result of a society which crushes a person's basic capacity for affection and sense of self-worth, and the film's title is rhetorical. For Fassbinder, the mystery of Herr R.'s behavior is that it should be mysterious to anyone in the first place. What else could one have expected?

While Fassbinder adapted certain American influences, Werner Herzog created his own unique form of film language. Reaching back to the Germanic Romanticism of the 19th century, Herzog's protagonists are either obsessed by a singular, overwhelming vision (as in his recent Fitzcarraldo - 1982) or else driven mad by it. In Signs of Life (W. German 1968), a landscape filled with wildly twirling windmills is, like the landscape in all of his films, elevated to the level of visionary experience. Proclaiming that "I am my films," Herzog does not make films about madness, he champions it instead. Unceasing circular movement, traditionally a symbol of chaos, is Herzog's recurring motif.

Though not as well known as either Fassbinder or Herzog, Volker Schlondorff is nonetheless of equal importance as a director. His best films, such as The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (W. German 1970) and Coup de Grace (W. German 1977), delved into the repressive nature of traditional German society. While these films are unremitting in their critical nature, Schlondorff has been remarkably successful at producing a more commercial form of film making. A Free Woman (W. German 1972), retains its integrity even while operating in a more conventional manner than some of his other works. A Free Woman, like many of his other films made in collaboration with his wife Margarethe Von Trotta, intricately examines the problems faced by an ordinary woman in contemporary German society.

While Schlondorff's subtle commercialization makes him more immediately accessible to American audiences, Reinhard Hauff often works within the conventions of extremely Germanic genres. Primarily a social realist, Hauff's films contrast sharply with that of his fellow artists. The Brutalization of Franz Blum (W. German 1974) rigorously details the everyday, banal cruelties of life in prison. Striving for authenticity rather than dramatics, Hauff's camera work is often flat and matter-of-fact in its presentation. This authenticity is further accentuated by Burkhard Driest who based his screenplay on his own experiences after serving five years for bank robbery.

Of all the filmmakers in the New German cinema, undoubtedly the most difficult and experimental is Jean-Marie Straub. Along with his wife and co-director Daniele Huillet, Straub has created some of the major works of structuralist cinema. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (W. German 1968) was constructed by Straub not to be a biography of Bach and his wife, but a series of sound and images, attempting to preserve the integrity of Bach's music. The musical performances are interspersed with calmly composed visuals and the reciting of letters written by Anna to her husband. By not predetermining the film in advance (as happens in a narrative film), Straub allows the audience to construct the film themselves and to do so by way of Bach's own work.