the marriage of maria braun (w&d fassbinder. w. pea fröhlich, peter märthesheimer)

Fassbinder’s rambling movie is gloriously chaotic, barging its way through the German postwar years like a drunk stocking up in a supermarket at closing time. Everything happens fast, then it doesn’t, then it does again. Maria is married! Her husband is dead! She starts sleeping with a GI! She’s pregnant! Her husband is alive! She’s not pregnant! She’s a businesswoman! Her husband is in prison! She’s sleeping with her boss! He’s free! He’s gone! He’s back! Two hours of seismic narrative beats and zooms. It’s an erratic but entertaining journey, which offers a commentary on modern West Germany which is hard to follow, so many years later. (Does anyone remember Helmut Schmidt, whose photo occupies the closing frame?) However, the sheer energy of the filmmaking seems to compensate for the spinning compass of the narrative needle.

The opening sequence, in bombed, post-war Germany, tallies with a biography of Nico I have just finished, and strangely, as my father flirts with death, (successfully keeping it at bay for now), I am given a window on the life my grandmother would have lead in the aftermath of the war, the life my father was born into. The generations that lived through the complete destruction of most German and Polish cities are ebbing away. Someone born today is not far short of a century from those times. (I was born in ’66, so the equivalent retrospective time journey from my birth would take me to 1886, a date which seems to belong to another consciousness altogether.) Fassbinder captures those years, the desperation they provoked and the way the drive for survival overrode pre-war’s social codes and quaint bourgeois morality. He relishes in the chaos and energy that those years inspired, with Maria Braun becoming a rambunctious anti-heroine, stepsister to the desperate Christa Päffgen. 

the american friend (w&d wim wenders)

Wenders’ films are indeed like old friends. They seem to fit the viewer’s hand like a glove. The enigmatic tone, the waspish humour, the flirtation with melodrama, the pseudo thriller tone. People will die, hearts will be broken, but life will go on. HIs choice of actors seems to reflect this: figures who seem almost too knowing for their roles: Harry Dean Stanton, Rüdiger Vogler, Kôji Yakusho. And here, again, Bruno Ganz, whose sympathetic features and tendency to smile wryly seem to speak to a world beyond the screen the film is set in, a life lived by his character with pleasures and sufferings we will never know. Wenders is neither slave to narrative nor afraid of it. His films contain stories that hold them together, but he seems more interested in the detail: the angle of the frame that Ganz’s character, a picture framer, is holding, or the tilt of Hopper’s hat, or the worry on the face of Lisa Kreuzer, rewarded by one of the film’s rare close-ups. Yet, this concern for the image is never permitted to become self-indulgent, and the pace is maintained by the zesty edit of Peter Przygodda.

It would be interesting to speculate on what inspired the director to tackle this story. If anything, the juxtaposition of the raddled cityscape of New York, contrasted with the high industrial orange hues of Hamburg and its port, might be the film’s most arresting element. That and the chance to juxtapose the broad tones of Hopper’s acting with understatement of Ganz. At the very end, Ganz appears to gain a kind of revenge via his melodramatic death, outdoing Hopper’s baroque beachside barbecue. These tonal contrasts fire the film, they give it an edge that transcends what might otherwise have been a generic mafia tale. 

cross of iron. (d. peckinpah, w julius j. epstein, walter kelley, james hamilton)

Peckinpah’s films represent an apex macho worldview, which is so macho it permits the existence of weakness. Cross of Iron feels like it might be the apex of this apex. It takes a squadron who are perhaps in the worst situation any humans could possibly find themselves in, a German battalion on the Eastern front, (once again Crimea), as the front collapses. Peckinpah’s grand conceit, apparently financed by German money, is to have these doomed characters be German. The enemy becomes heroic, with the uber American, James Coburn, playing the fearless squadron leader. Steiner. Hence the characters are transformed into everymen, and the film lays bare the irreversible cruelty of war, no matter which side of the fence you belong to. The capacity of mankind to inflict suffering on mankind transcends historical divisions. The film itself struggles to hold up, with the director making the most of his tank and explosion budget, but its intentions feel entirely honourable. 

woyzech (d. herzog, w. büchner)

Herzog’s Woyzech is a faithful treatment of the play, which is notable for two reasons. One is the way in which the naturalism of cinema permits the story to be completely immersed in the world it emerged from. The small German town with its tavern, town square and nearby fields represents Büchner’s world in the way the theatre never can, for better and for worse. The second is the acting of Kinski, who could have been born to play the part.

The naturalism is actually quite strange, as Büchner’s text is famously unnaturalistic. Woyzech is one of the first great anti-heroes of the 19th century, stepbrother to Raskalnikov. His brain is disordered, he doesn’t fit within the bucolic constraints of provincial life. Büchner emphasises this via the strangeness (the unnaturalness) of the play’s dialogue. The inner workings of Woyzech’s mind are placed on display and spoken out loud. There are moments when the prettiness of Herzog’s pictures jars with this, as though the strangeness is seeking a way to get out, to make its presence felt. The only real outlet is Kinski himself, and the actor’s wild mannerisms feel suitably out of keeping with the idyllic surroundings.

A side note. I think the first time I saw this play was in Stratford, directed by my friend Sean Holmes. He was permitted to stage it in a large barn which was being used for more experimental work for a while, I believe. I have a memory of it being a brilliant white space, which he informs me it wasn’t, and the action playing out in a series of vignettes scattered across the space, which we looked down on from above. I recall it having an alt brilliance to the banal stagings of the RSC. (Living in Montevideo people eulogise the RSC but back then it seemed like it produced the most banal theatre imaginable.) In the cast were a future Hollywood star and other young actors who were clearly relishing the opportunity to do something a bit more leftfield. (Yes, gentle reader, for the RSC, Woyzech was still leftfield back then and probably still is.) Also in the audience on the night I saw it was Sarah Kane.