Take One (Jul 15, 1979)

off a gas explosion which destroys the marriage, the past, the future... and the last illusion of romantic bliss. The following article is reprinted—in a slightly edited version—from ‘berlinaletip’ the official bulletin of the Berlin Film Festival. It’s a rare dialectic indeed which can combine a rampant misogyny with an all-encompassing compassion for women as society’s—and sexism’s—victims. Yet it's a balancing act which Fassbinder has sustained with an acrobatic skill from his feature film debut back in 1968, when he first observed that love was colder than death. He proved the point by having Hanna Schygulla— beaten, used and abused by himself in the role of her pimp and dubious protector—seize the opportunity for a brief moment of power by betraying to the police, and to death itself, the elegant, cool killer (Ulli Lommel) for whom Franz / Fassbinder had displayed sympathy and affection. Already in this film, not only the dialectic but the remorseless chain of cause-and-effect lying behind it were plainly demonstrated. From that film’s opening sequences, in which Franz beats up a lesser gangster, is beaten by the syndicate and returns home to demonstrate his authority by giving his girl (Schygulla) an authoritative slap and snarl, the connections between power, powerlessness and violence are spelled out with the simplicity of a kindergarten lesson. We are also shown the pecking order—big gangsters (already failures in terms of the truly powerful society which remains inaccessible to them and invisible to the audience) take out their pent-up frustrations by brutalizing lesser gangsters, who in turn work out their aggressions on the still lowlier race of women. The women’s reaction to an unsatisfactory condition is, in effect, a double betrayal of the present moment, and of the reality of their situation. They retreat into fantasies of future security (nearly all the whores in Fassbinder’s films are saving up for a home and family). They resort to devious schemes in a vain attempt to turn these wishful fantasies into substance. And Fassbinder as auteur has tended to denounce this deviousness with almost as much vigor as he denounces the social injustices which occasion it. Unlike the book of Genesis, he does not assume that deviousness is an inherent characteristic of the female, but he does reveal it as one which is rapidly acquired. Many of his heroines (Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Effi Briest, Nora Helmer) start out as open and innocent. Even though the degree of his sympathy for them varies, none of * them are allowed to stay that way. Women’s unfounded faith in the possibility of a future destroys, in film after film, the few possible moments of present happiness. Those few women (foremost among them, Petra von Kant) who seek to escape this vicious circle of cause-and-effect invariably’ do so by acquiring ‘male’ characteristics just as My ; & A moment interruptus. Schygulla as Maria Braun. Hannah The ever-pensive Fassbinder on the Maria Braun set. lamentable as the deviousness of their weaker sisters. Since Mutter Kusters’ journey to heaven, women have played a relatively minor role in Fassbinder’s recent films, taking second place, not only to the male characters but also to the onscreen expression of the director’s homosexuality. Maria Bruan therefore marks a return of the Fassbinder heroine. And, most specifically, of Hanna Schygulla who, before splitting from the Fassbinder group after Effi Briest, has been used by Fassbinder to incarnate the dominant aspects of the female personality as he sees and defines it: a radiant but slightly dumb sensuality swiftly distorted by its owner's determination to employ it in the service of long-term material goals; a somewhat transparent cunning; a rapidly tarnished innocence (preserved intact only in the fairytale soap-opera world of Eight Hours Don't Make a Day). Schygulla has, in Fassbinder’s films, played both the whore and the shining innocent—but invariably, these two extremes have converged before the final reel. Against this generalized background the title role in Maria Braun, even though not scripted by the director, represents both an elaborate synthesis of Schygulla’s previous work with Fassbinder and another textbook demonstration of the processes and institutions which determine that innocence must be corrupted and that women must eternally be denied a moment of presenttense fulfillment, or rather, two such moments. Very much in defiance of the outside world (war as a social deter TAKE ONE 11