Incomprehensible genius

London’s Goethe-Institut has a two-month season of films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose 70th anniversary it’s celebrating), but only five movies, each one alternating with a film influenced by him from another country. Considering that Fassbinder created about 60 films, it seems rather a slim effort. Still, half of his output is available on DVD, at no vast cost, and, having revisited many of the films in the past few days, I am more struck than ever by how great he was, and how, thanks to innumerable kinds of pressure, he only intermittently did justice to his phenomenal creativity and energy. He exasperates as often as he enthrals and moves. He seems to have been so obsessed with so many striking ideas that he could never bear not to be translating them into yet another full-length film, written, designed and directed by himself, and often with a role for him in it too. He averaged several films a year, dying at the age of 37, in 1982.

Fassbinder’s animating rage was the misery of almost everyone’s life, and the difficulty of sorting out which parts of the misery are inherent in being alive, which can be put down to the cruelties that all relationships involve, and which to the social and political circumstances in which most of his characters live, with the emphasis on post-war West Germany. Decent people enter circles of corruption, and at the behest of their lusts succumb to them (Lola); settled people suddenly feel they’re going mad (Fear of Fear); the banality of existence makes people snap (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?); society gives its members ideals which there is no hope of fulfilling (passim). In interviews, Fassbinder talked of ‘the revolution’ that must take place not on the screen but in life itself, but his recipe for the revolution was never spelled out, only the fearful state that we live in without it.