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Rainer Werner Fassbinder turned to color for his fourth film, a bleak portrait of middle-class banality. Kurt Raab, the plump, baby-faced art director usually cast as the director's most pathetic characters, stars as Herr R., a seemingly successful middle-class professional and happily married family man who stumbles through life like a grinning zombie. As one might guess from the title, Herr R. (an appropriately vague, undistinguished character that Fassbinder leaves unnamed to better stand in for a German everyman) is about to go over the edge, and the film shows us whyin relentless, numbing detail. At work he's an insignificant figure of ridicule; at home he escapes into endless hours of TV when not killing time with empty small talk (largely improvised by the cast), and he soon slips into a listless depression compounded by constant headaches. Fassbinder and codirector Michael Fengler don't make the experience easy for us. The film is as purposely banal as the chatty droning of the soundtrack, shot in a hypernaturalistic approach with a palette of muddy, dull colors that give the picture the quality of a faded Polaroid. There's a genius to the gesture, and the film marches inexorably to a harrowing climax, but it's not for all tastes. Even Fassbinder fans admit that this is a tough film to get through. --Sean Axmaker ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Exquisite Fassbinder demands repeat viewings
This film requires concentration and repeat viewings. Fassbinder employs exceedingly long takes and a relatively still camera to portray a man slowly being led to the end of his tether.

Herr R (Kurt Raab, a Fassbinder regular) is everyman. Indeed, each scene conveys the sheer drabness of his daily routine. Work, wife, in-laws. None of it registers. Despite the perfect middle class life--emotionally, he's stone. It has been said that he is invisible in this film. Certainly, he is not seen as something particularly dynamic or magnetic. He doesn't attract people, none of his co-workers seem interested in him personally. Likewise, he doesn't seem interested in them.

But he does feel. He's passionate about music, sings a gorgeous, heartbreaking ballad that causes him to sigh slightly and look even more wan and dejected than usual. His wife bores him, her friends irritate him. Work is a release of sorts, but he's not making any progress there. He tries to impress the right people but he ends up making a total ass of himself.

All of these factors lead him on a particular course. Hence, the title of the film. The key to answering it is careful, patient viewing. This is a brilliant example of building up evidence to support myriad theses about the motivations of a fundamental character. Just be focusing on Herr Raab's face provides essential clues as to the forces that drive him towards his destiny. Great film.

mesmerizing
This is a film that should not be too thouroughly explained prior to watching. Mostly it is a series of the every day happenings in the life of Herr R, a reticent underachiever. He is the child of a certain spiritless bourgeois existence. We watch him at his job, not quite making points with the boss, not quite winning the favour of his coworkers. We watch him try to teach his average, but slightly dreamy, son to pronounce properly. We watch his wife hosting the self-absord and catty neighbors to tea. In short, we watch an unextraordinary bit of an unextraordinary life, which is somehow familiar and for some reason completely entrancing. As one watches it can't helped but be asked why wouldn't Herr R run amok?

a fine film
A kind of documentary of madness, with the madness coming late in the film. Or is the madness everywhere? Disturbing, provacotive, if you have the patience and courage to find out, why does Herr R. run amok? ... Read more

Description

Based on his play. KATZELMACHER follows the lives of an aimless group of friends who spend their days outside their Munich apartment smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and sleeping with each other. Their lives take an interesting turn when a Greek immigrant (R.W. Fassbinder) moves in and evokes extremely hostile reactions from the men in the group who beat him up when he begins dating one of the German women(Hanna Schygukkia.) R.W. Fassbinder's biting look at prejudice and xenophobia was called one of Fassbinder's "four indisputable masterpieces" by Vincent Canby of THE NEW YORK TIMES. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Katzelmacher is a tour de force
Fassbinder's second feature film, Katzelmacher (1969), is a tour de force of stark visual beauty and ambiguous but riveting characters. The DVD transfer from Wellspring is pristine.

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 in a Munich apartment complex. Violence lies just below the surface, as we see when a Greek "guest worker" named Jorgos (played by Fassbinder) moves in and becomes involved with one of the women, Marie (played by the great Hanna Schygulla, who appeared in half of Fassbinder's films). 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. The film won several prestigious awards (the substantial prize money financed Fassbinder's next projects) and decisively established its 23-year-old writer/director/actor - and editor (using his pseudonym of "Franz Walsch") - as a rising star of German cinema.

While stylistically austere, like his other early films, we can already see Fassbinder's trademark interplay of social criticism and melodrama. And although he based Katzelmacher on his original play, he uses purely cinematic - visual and sound - means to explore his inarticulate but richly-drawn characters. Fassbinder takes visual cues from such then-recent works as Godard's My Life to Live (1963) and Bergman's Persona (1966), yet his film feels wrenched from life, not made up from earlier works. 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 minimalist 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.

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.

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.

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 tender.

Meditative, revelatory, early Fassbinder
RW Fassbinder's second feature won't be a hot rental at Blockbuster anytime soon, but it is a rewarding film--meditative, revelatory, KATZELMACHER unfolds without urgency but envelops the audience in its characters' anomie (angst?) in 1969 Deutschland. Exploring the dead-end lives of working class stiffs (who don't seem to do much work), the story concerns the upheaval caused by the arrival of a Greek worker (played by Fassbinder) to their staid neighborhood. DVD quality is excellent, part of Wellspring's gorgeous RWF Foundation-sponsored reissues, considering the 16mm B&W source material. Hans Hirschmuller, so memorable as the title character in THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS (also on Wellspring DVD with commentary by Wim Wenders), shows much of his early promise in this film. Highly recommended to Fassbinder fans, New German Cinema fans, indie cineastes, students of film, gastarbeiters and Harry Baer lovers. Keep an eye out for THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, THE NIKLASHAUSEN JOURNEY, RIO DAS MORTES, MARTHA, WHY DOES HERR R RUN AMOK and IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS, all coming soon to DVD from Wellspring and Fantoma (who put out the excellent WHITY and PIONEERS OF INGOLSTADT). ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Visually stunning, dramatically understated film noir
Gods of the Plague (released in 1970) is a powerful, visually stunning, yet dramatically understated film noir - and pure Fassbinder; Wellspring's DVD transfer is detailed and crisp. Fassbinder himself ranked this film fifth on the list he made, shortly before he died, of "The Top 10 of My Own Films." Not only does he pay homage to some of the masterpieces of this genre which he loved (from Kubrick's The Killing and Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly to Godard's Breathless and Band of Outsiders), he brings his unique perspective, including his incisive sense of humor. This film is the centerpiece in a loose trilogy - of which each picture has a distinct dramatic and visual style (all shot in black and white by his frequent cinematographer, Dietrich Lohmann) - beginning with his debut feature, Love is Colder Than Death (1969), and concluding with The American Soldier (1970). (In 1970 alone Fassbinder made five feature films and directed three major stage productions!) Characters recur throughout the series; and they often use the same names as the actors playing them. The pivotal role is two-bit Munich hood Franz Walsch, played by Fassbinder himself in the first and third films, but (perhaps confusingly) by Harry Baer here (although Fassbinder, wearing the same black leather jacket from the first film, has a droll cameo as a different character). Baer brings some intriguing new qualities to the role, most notably a sleek, feral, yet passive, sexiness. It is also worth noting that "Franz Walsch" was Fassbinder's frequent pseudonym; he used it in the credits for the many films which he edited.

Fassbinder uses this trilogy - of which I believe Gods of the Plague is the best chapter - to explore many of the hidden aspects of the crime film, including its not infrequent homoerotic subtext, even as he expands its scope both psychologically and visually. This film alone should silence any criticism that Fassbinder is "not a visual director;" he was immensely flexible in creating the style best suited for each picture, ranging from the stark minimalism of Katzelmacher to the baroque extravagance of Chinese Roulette. Even at this early point in his career, he is a master at combining image and drama - carefully balanced between realism and stylization - to create an effect far greater than the sum of its parts. Fully as expressive as the visual design is the enormous depth of his characters. But that is revealed not so much through dialogue as furtive eye movements, the smallest of gestures, and the many riveting silences which punctuate this film. Comparing the menage a trois here (Franz, Margarethe, and "Gorilla," the affable hit man who killed Franz's brother - "It was only business" - but whom Franz loves anyway) with the one in Love is Colder Than Death (not to mention Truffaut's Jules and Jim) is fascinating. I give Gods of the Plague my highest recommendation, but if possible see it in the context of the films which precede and follow it. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Visually stunning, dramatically understated film noir
Gods of the Plague (released in 1970) is a powerful, visually stunning, yet dramatically understated film noir - and pure Fassbinder; Wellspring's DVD transfer is detailed and crisp. Fassbinder himself ranked this film fifth on the list he made, shortly before he died, of "The Top 10 of My Own Films." Not only does he pay homage to some of the masterpieces of this genre which he loved (from Kubrick's The Killing and Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly to Godard's Breathless and Band of Outsiders), he brings his unique perspective, including his incisive sense of humor. This film is the centerpiece in a loose trilogy - of which each picture has a distinct dramatic and visual style (all shot in black and white by his frequent cinematographer, Dietrich Lohmann) - beginning with his debut feature, Love is Colder Than Death (1969), and concluding with The American Soldier (1970). (In 1970 alone Fassbinder made five feature films and directed three major stage productions!) Characters recur throughout the series; and they often use the same names as the actors playing them. The pivotal role is two-bit Munich hood Franz Walsch, played by Fassbinder himself in the first and third films, but (perhaps confusingly) by Harry Baer here (although Fassbinder, wearing the same black leather jacket from the first film, has a droll cameo as a different character). Baer brings some intriguing new qualities to the role, most notably a sleek, feral, yet passive, sexiness. It is also worth noting that "Franz Walsch" was Fassbinder's frequent pseudonym; he used it in the credits for the many films which he edited.

Fassbinder uses this trilogy - of which I believe Gods of the Plague is the best chapter - to explore many of the hidden aspects of the crime film, including its not infrequent homoerotic subtext, even as he expands its scope both psychologically and visually. This film alone should silence any criticism that Fassbinder is "not a visual director;" he was immensely flexible in creating the style best suited for each picture, ranging from the stark minimalism of Katzelmacher to the baroque extravagance of Chinese Roulette. Even at this early point in his career, he is a master at combining image and drama - carefully balanced between realism and stylization - to create an effect far greater than the sum of its parts. Fully as expressive as the visual design is the enormous depth of his characters. But that is revealed not so much through dialogue as furtive eye movements, the smallest of gestures, and the many riveting silences which punctuate this film. Comparing the menage a trois here (Franz, Margarethe, and "Gorilla," the affable hit man who killed Franz's brother - "It was only business" - but whom Franz loves anyway) with the one in Love is Colder Than Death (not to mention Truffaut's Jules and Jim) is fascinating. I give Gods of the Plague my highest recommendation, but if possible see it in the context of the films which precede and follow it. ... Read more