the political spectator of fassbinder’s cinema

Joyce Teo | BA(Hons) Fine Art & History of Art Year II Goldsmiths | April 2011 | HT52063A Moving Image

The Political Spectator of Fassbinder’s Cinema

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Living and working in late 1960s post‐war West Germany, Rainer Werner

Fassbinder made films that contributed to what has come to be known as the

New German Cinema. With his contemporaries, they sought to create a politically

engaged alternative cinema to reconfigure the identity of a broken nation. Their

action was motivated by what they saw as a declining German film industry,

suffering the aftermath of the Nazi regime and proliferated with cheaply

imported Hollywood films. In the climate of political upheavals and student riots,

Fassbinder found in film a better platform than the streets for his ideologies. His

interest in “fomenting ‘private revolution’ [rather] than direct political action”1

led him to famously remark, “I don’t throw bombs. I make films.”2 It is

Fassbinder’s distinctive strategy to use the personal to engage with the larger

social and political context an individual is situated within. He openly admired

the popular appeal of Hollywood gangster films and melodramas and

subversively appropriates their language. Like no other of his contemporaries

who were disinterested in targeting mass audience, Fassbinder becomes a

curious case for thinking about political cinema. This essay attempts to use

Fassbinder in rethinking the position of the spectator in and outside of cinema.

Three film examples coinciding with different phases of his oeuvre would be

discussed closely– Beware of a Holy Whore (1969), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

and The Third Generation (1979).

To begin with such self‐reflexive film as Beware of a Holy Whore is to

introduce a consideration of the spectator’s position in Fassbinder’s films. Set

almost entirely within a Spanish coastal hotel, Holy Whore shows a half‐hearted

film crew waiting to start production. This supposed production hardly

materialises in the film as it suffers repeated delays from lack of funding and the

1 Watson, W. S. (1996). Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Film as Private and Public Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. p. 23 2 See Ibid.


inconsistent temperament of their tyrannical director, Jeff. Meanwhile, the crew

members loll about the hotel lobby in varying groups, mostly pairs, to observe

and participate in gossips, flirting, dancing, smoking and drinking. Other than

several irrational episodes that sporadically occur, the general plot of Holy

Whore shares with its characters, a lack of motivation. Whenever shouting or a

fight happens in the lobby, a subsequent wide‐angle shot would establish the

witnesses as contrastingly passive.

This act of looking, which the viewer is also in participation of, is

constantly foregrounded. A common device employed is to zoom in onto a

character’s face witnessing an emotional outburst instead of the outburst itself.

Alternatively, the back view of characters is shot as they watch the drama unfold

further in the cinematic space. To take a sequence as example, the first shot

establishes from back view, Jeff standing at the bar (Fig. 1). Jeff watches a

devastated Irma lament about his failure to keep his promise to marry her from

afar. He proceeds to walk towards her as the camera slowly zooms out to reveal

the other people also standing at the bar. Now a wide‐angled shot, Jeff slaps

Irma. Everyone else remains motionless as they watch Irma wail and collapse

(Fig. 2).

Besides being literally set behind the scenes, Holy Whore exposes the

constructedness of cinema in many ways. Jeff and production manager, Sascha,

often scream at the top of their lungs for other crew members outside the scene,

who unrealistically appear moments later to receive their order. This

simultaneously alerts us to what we cannot see and the fiction of this hotel space

established for us to believe. In one sequence, Jeff walks the cameraman around

the perimeter of the lobby while giving him instructions for next day’s shoot. A

medium close shot keeps pace with both characters, cropping away anyone else

in the lobby. It cuts straight back to a tight crop of Eddie ordering a whisky, then

to Hanna smooching the language coach. We assume the simultaneity of these

shots even as we see it successively. The jarring cuts indicate the camera’s

dictation of what we see and how our perception of cinematic space is then

constructed.


The incongruity of events and the internalizing of the act of looking into the

frame can be seen as Brechtian devices to “maintain the viewers' awareness of

watching a performed reality”3. In Brecht’s epic theatre, one’s viewing

experience is always interrupted or accentuated. This creates a distancing effect

that prevents the viewer from getting absorbed into any sort of spectacle.

Identification from a passive looking position is regarded as politically

unproductive when opposed to reflection in a critical thinking position.

The reason for the cinematic spectator often deemed as passive can be

briefly understood using a psychoanalytic term, suture. Suture is defined as the

moment when a subject becomes a signifier at the expense of being.4 This

parallels that when the spectator is completely assimilated, however

temporarily, into the reality of the film. Kaja Silverman explains that the camera,

in constructing cinematic coherence through means of inclusion, exclusion, cuts

and diegesis, produces a subject‐position for suture to operate.5 The viewer

identifies with a single, coherent viewpoint proposed by the camera. More

importantly, it is “a discursive position for the viewing subject which

necessitates not only its loss of being, but the repudiation of alternative

discourses.”6 This is precisely politically unproductive as Silverman quotes Anna

Friedberg, as an extreme case, “identification can only be made through

recognition, and all recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology

of the status quo.”7 The proposition is that the spectator vanishes in a cinema

that does not transform but only reiterate norms.

Following this argument, cinema is presumed as a hermetically sealed

world and Holy Whore can be read as a commentary on that. Every sequence shot

3 Gemünden, G. (1994). “Re‐Fusing Brecht: The Cultural Politics of Fassbinder’s German Hollywood” in New German Critique (No. 63, Autumn). p. 63‐64 4 Miller, J. (1977). “Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)” in Screen (Vol. 18, No. 4) quoted in Silverman, K. (1983). “On Suture” in Brandy, L. & Cohen, M. [ed.] (1999). Film Theory & Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 137 5 Silverman, K. (1983). See Ibid. p. 138 6 Silverman, K. (1996). The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge. p. 85 7 See Ibid.


outside the hotel (location of the supposed film) is an over‐exaggerated scene,

involving a grand mode of transport and melodramatic music. Jeff arrives in a

helicopter, Irma leaves on a motorboat while two other characters take a scenic

spin in a convertible. The lack of event and exasperation faced by characters who

constantly fail to get what they want can be allegorical to Fassbinder’s own

desire to reach out of/with cinema. He says,

“It’s a collision between film and the subconscious that creates a new

realism. If my films are right, then a new realism comes about in the

head, which changes the real reality, so to speak.”8

Evidently, Fassbinder sees his films as having repercussions outside of cinema.

Yet, his ambiguous political stance not rooted to any ideology or counter‐

ideology makes the notion of a political cinema unclear.

Perhaps it is useful to evoke Rancière’s theories regarding the political. By

his definition,

“Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it,

around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the

properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”9

But preceding politics, he proposes a concept of ‘the distribution of the

sensible’.10 This refers to the system that predetermines what can be said, seen

or thought; something in common that “lends itself to participation”11 in a social

world. Simultaneously, this distribution delimits who can say, see or think what

and thereby onset the political. Rancière’s politics play out in an unequal and

common field that is experienced by the senses. He then argues for “an

‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics”12, because art is capable of subverting common

8 Rentschler, E. (1984). West German Film in the Course of Time. New York: Redgrave Publishing Company. p. 13 9 Rancière, J. (2000). The Politics of Aesthetics transl. Rockhill, G.(2004). London: Continuum. p. 13 10 See Ibid. p.12 11 See Ibid. 12 Rancière, J. (2000). The Politics of Aesthetics transl. Rockhill, G.(2004). London: Continuum.


experiences while creating new ones,

“Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in

the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the

relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of

visibility.”13

Appropriated to cinema, the distribution of the sensible is most apparent in its

spectatorship. Fassbinder’s vision of a German Hollywood, in contrast to an

avant‐garde cinema limited to an intellectual audience, is an egalitarian

approach to this distribution. On similar ground, Fassbinder denies Brechtian

influence, saying that Brecht “made the audience think. I make the audience feel

and think.”14 The spectator is to engage with the social critique inherent in

Fassbinder’s stylized dramatization of the vernacular.

Most true to that proclamation are his popular melodramas of 1971‐1979,

hugely influenced by Hollywood director, Douglas Sirk. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is

one such example. The film features the love affair of an old cleaning lady, Emmi

with Ali, a younger Moroccan car repairman that is challenged by her own

insecurities triggered by the xenophobia that surrounds her. The problem of

Gastarbeiter (guest‐worker) ostracised in German contemporary society is

interiorised by the individual life of Emmi. True to the melodramatic

“sublimation of dramatic conflict into décor, colour, gesture and composition of

frame”15, Ali begins with a metaphor‐laden sequence in the bar where the lovers

first met. Emmi’s loneliness is established by framing her isolated at a far end

with empty tables (Fig. 3). Cut to the opposing 180˚ shot of a tableaux vivant of

foreign workers, including Ali, staring at the apparent intruder (Fig. 4), the

hostile distance perhaps forebodes the problems to come.

p. 13 13 See Ibid. 14 Fassbinder quoted in Gemünden, G. (1994). “Re‐Fusing Brecht: The Cultural Politics of Fassbinder’s German Hollywood” in New German Critique (No. 63, Autumn). p. 59 15 Elsaesser, T. (1972). “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” in Monogram (No. 4). p. 2‐15


After their marriage, Ali and Emmi are continually set up together

awkwardly in space. In an al fresco café scene, both are sat across each other in

the midst of many empty yellow tables and chairs, completely exposed to the

glares of café workers standing indoors. It is also in this vulnerable set up that

Emmi confesses to a helpless Ali about her jadedness towards being judged. As in

Holy Whore, looking is highlighted and most persistently so are the disapproving

gaze of Emmi’s own children, colleagues and neighbours.

Their socially unacceptable union is harassed by gossips in the stairwell

and peering neighbours, observed through doorframes and windows. One such

sequence is when Ali first returns home with Emmi. The first shot is shot from

behind Emmi’s neighbour standing in her own house. We are watching with her

through her lattice window (Fig. 5). Ali and Emmi walk past her without noticing

until she calls out to return Emmi some money. A reverse shot shows her from

behind the lattice (Fig. 6). Notably, the last of this shot/reverse shot reveals Ali

bare without the lattice, alone at the top of the stairs, looking down at the

neighbour look at him (Fig. 7). The neighbour’s voyeurism is heightened by the

presence of the lattice screen and this may be analogous to that of the spectator

looking into the cinematic screen.

Like Sirk’s films, Ali is shot in artificially vivid colours and its linear plot

lends itself to captivation and empathy. The spectator easily identifies with the

characters and their emotions. However, it is necessary to recognise a more

complex mode of identification than the one previously disregarded with Brecht.

In this case, a spectator otherwise apprehensive of miscegenation may be

induced to sympathise with Emmi and Ali’s marriage and the hostility they

encounter. However, this sympathy is unsettled when Emmi herself ends up

exoticizing Ali while showing him off in front of her friends. Her own xenophobia

also surfaced as she, like the others, ostracise a new colleague from Yugoslavia.

Going back to the abovementioned sequence which witnesses Emmi’s neighbour

as a voyeur, the spectator is frequently confronted with a moral dilemma ‐ to

look or not to look, to partake in the spectacle of their unconventional marriage

turned warp or scorn at the bystanders for not leaving them alone. The


spectator’s constant renegotiation of who and what to identify with is where the

film’s political relevance lie.

Similarly in another argument, Silverman faults the Brechtian model for

assuming an “imaginarily coherent self”16 that can be neatly alienated from the

screen. This ideal self is also problematically polarized against otherness.

Distancing this self would only leave it all the more integrated and it can return

to colonize the others and reassert status quo. Therefore, Silverman argues in

favour for identification to complicate one’s subjectivity by encouraging new

subject‐positions. Extending from Eisenstein’s conception of political cinema in

1935, she ascertains identification as a crucial tool that is able to “catapault the

spectator out of one social order, and into one whose organizing principles are

the opposite of the first.”17 To be clear, Eisenstein was drawing from method

acting where the method actor “becomes” his or her role.18 This “becoming” of

someone other than oneself is where cinema has political resonance. Cinematic

identification enables the spectator to traverse the distribution of the sensible.

For Ali, this involves questioning not only the unconventional marriage but also

its very unacceptability.

The last film to be discussed is The Third Generation, made in response to

Germany’s left‐wing politics’ resort to terrorism and the state’s subsequent

retaliation with a heavy‐handed surveillance network. This satirical film shows a

group of bourgeois terrorists who juggle day jobs, including a history teacher,

housewife, secretary and record shop salesperson, amidst executing their

amateur conspiracy plans. The group is lured into kidnapping a computer dealer

to create public alarm, unknowingly part of a plan to thereby increase demand

for computer surveillance equipments. Fassbinder explains the title:

“The third generation is today’s, who just indulges in action without

thinking, without either ideology or politics, and who, probably

without knowing it, are like puppets whose wires are pulled by 16 Silverman, K. (1996). The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge. p. 90 17 See Ibid. p. 91 18 See Ibid.


others.”19

A particular scene is telling of this empty terrorism he speaks of. Bernhard, a

nervous character of “noble descent”20 with “innocent eyes”21, arrives at the

terrorists’ headquarter (a typical bourgeois home) with a suitcase of books after

being released from the navy. Out of jest, the terrorists picked up one of his

books by the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, and began to toss it around, taking

turns to parody political quotations while Berhard angrily chases after around

the apartment. This childish act is probably metaphorical to the terrorists’

disregard for any theory or political ideology.22

Overall, Third Generation reflects this mocking tone. One member wets

himself after a close shave during an operation, a few sit and have cake while in

hiding, one of them is unrealistically misogynistic and another is too kind. As

characteristic of Fassbinder, complex power relations develop within the group

filled with infighting, betrayal and exploitations. In this film, however,

identification seems impossible with the absurdity of characters and events.

Fassbinder appropriates elements of detective and gangster films so

stereotypical that it is as if the amateur terrorists learnt how to lead their

double‐life from these films.

The film cuts urgently from one location to another, following the

monotonous routines of each character interspersed with their secret duties.

Here, Fassbinder uses a formal language that almost irritate. Throughout the

film, found toilet graffiti serves as arbitrary intertitles superimposed onto the

moving scene and a persistent radio transmission noise often overlay the

dialogue. What we see and hear is directly interrupted; a strategy more forceful

than in the previous two films which carefully sets up the gaze.

19 Elsaesser, T. (1996). Fassbinder’s Germany – History Identity Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. p. 38 20 Film quote from The Third Generation (1979) 21 See Ibid. 22 Thomsen, C. B. (1991). “Terrorism and the nuclear family” in Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius transl. Chalmers, M. (1997). London: Faber and Faber. p. 270


That said, Fassbinder seems to have shifted focus away from establishing

cinematic reality, but this is not to be mistaken for the anti‐illusionism

championed by Brecht. The latter is problematized by Gerd Gemünden for being

based on a notion of reality that no longer seems valid in today’s media age.

Paraphrasing Elsaesser, he explains that for an event to be recognised as

political, it is inevitably first made a spectacle‐ an image in film, television or

photography.23 The last sequence of the film seems poignant to this point. The

terrorists have successfully kidnapped the computer dealer, P. J. Lurtz and

proceeds to make a hostage videotape. In an overly cooperative environment,

they rehearse and adjust, as if making a film. Finally, we see both Lurtz being

filmed and the live feedback of him from a television screen (Fig. 8). Zooming in,

the film ends with a grinning Lurtz behind the same image on television, who

believes this is still part of his masterplan to boost sales while the equally

ignorant terrorists have their own purpose in mind (Fig. 9). It is a spectacle of

the kidnappers in colourful costumes (it was Shrove Tuesday) and a displaced

company executive as a black and white image on screen. The convoluted film

leaves no one knowing any better, all preoccupied with self‐interests. This is no

doubt a wry comment in the specific context of contemporary German politics.

Yet, more broadly, the film’s saturation of the screen with text and noise

can be examined as potential political devices. In writing about Sirk’s films,

Fassbinder says he learned from him to make films not about something, but

with something.24 It can be implied that Fassbinder reproached didacticism in

film. The filmmaker does not teach the spectator, instead, their common

experience act as his material. This egalitarian approach is in sync with

Rancière’s imagination of an emancipated community.25 Rancière evocatively

questions the value we have placed on action in opposition to looking, and on

making political change as mutually exclusive to films as entertainment. Such

dichotomies are evident of a distribution of the sensible, as naturalized set of

23 Gemünden, G. (1994). “Re‐Fusing Brecht: The Cultural Politics of Fassbinder’s German Hollywood” in New German Critique (No. 63, Autumn). p. 64 24 Fassbinder, R. W. (1971). “Imitation of life: On the films of Douglas Sirk” in Töteberg, M. & Lensing, L. A. (eds.)(1984). The Anarchy of the Imagination. London: John Hopkins University Press. p. 77 25 Rancière, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator translated by Elliot, G. London: Verso


rules and positions one is suppose to take and he labels them as “embodied

allegories of inequality.”26

This leads us to rethink the position of the filmmaker along with that of the

spectator. The responsibility on the former to incite political action in his

audience is to reemphasize a distribution of the sensible and construct a distance

between the two. It condescendingly assumes an unequal spectator incapable of

action. To that, Rancière usefully points out the distance inherent in artwork

itself – a third party separated from the artist’s ideas and spectator’s

interpretation. A film draws from common experience to create new experiences

for both spectators and filmmakers. This takes innovation from filmmakers

never encountered before, such that interpretation cannot be anticipated and

together, “a new intellectual adventure”27 is constituted.

Emancipation thus begins by destructing the distribution of the sensible.

To do so, Ranciere recommends understanding viewing as “also an action that

confirms or transforms this distribution of positions.”28 Politics is no longer

pedagogic, otherwise it can only be used by already dominating powers. In a

generously democratic tone, Ranciere says, “[a]n emancipated community is a

community of narrators and translators.”29 Relating back to Third Generation,

this act of translation is expected of the emancipated spectator.

By now, the constructedness of cinema need not be rehashed, since in our

hyper‐reality, the filmmaker does not know any better than the spectator. The

screen can be saturated with materials for spectators to negotiate. Despite a

small sample of his prolific films, it is evident Fassbinder constantly searches for

a contemporary “new idiom”30 that makes the screen an experimental ground

where he meets his spectator as equal participants of society.

26 Rancière, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator translated by Elliot, G. London: Verso. p. 12 27 See Ibid. p. 22 28 See Ibid. p. 13 29 See Ibid. p. 22 30 Rancière, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator translated by Elliot, G. London: Verso. p. 22


[3086 words]


Fig. 1 Back‐view of Jeff watching Irma, Beware of a Holy Whore (1969)

Fig. 2 Wide‐angle shot of the rest watching Jeff slaps Irma, Beware of a Holy Whore (1969)


Fig. 3 Emmi enters the bar on her own, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Fig. 4 A group of foreign workers stares at her, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)


Fig. 5 Emmi’s neighbour watching them through a lattic window, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Fig. 6 A subsequent reverse shot still behind lattice screen, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Fig. 7 Final shot reveals Ali without the lattice screen, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)


Fig. 8 The kidnappers film P. J. Lurtz, The Third Generation (1979)

Fig. 9 Zooming in to Lurtz and his own television image, The Third Generation (1979)


List of References Elsaesser, T. (1996). Fassbinder’s Germany – History Identity and Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press Elsaesser, T. (1972). “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” in Monogram (No. 4) Gemünden, G. (1994). “Re‐Fusing Brecht: The Cultural Politics of Fassbinder’s German Hollywood” in New German Critique (No. 63, Autumn) Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488475 [Accessed on 9 Jan 2011] Rancière, J. (2000). The Politics of Aesthetics transl. Rockhill, G.(2004). London: Continuum Rancière, J. (2008). The Emancipated Spectator transl. Elliot, G. (2009). London: Verso Rentschler, E. (1984). West German Film in the Course of Time. New York: Redgrave Publishing Company Silverman, K. (1983). “On Suture” in Brandy, L. & Cohen, M. [ed.] (1999). Film Theory & Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press Silverman, K. (1996). The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge Thomsen, C. B. (1991). Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius transl. Chalmers, M. (1997). London: Faber and Faber Töteberg, M. & Lensing, L. A. (eds.)(1984). The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes: Rainer Werner Fassbinder transl. Winston, K. (1992), London: John Hopkins University Press Watson, W.S. (1996). Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Film as Private & Public Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press

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