too late for tears : Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972)

   
    Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant: ein Krankheitsfall gewidmet dem, der hier Marlene wurde = The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Janus Films; Tango Film Produktion. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1972. Kurt Raab, art director; Michael Ballhaus, cinematographer; Maja Lemcke, contume designs; Thea Eymèsz, editor. ISBN: 9781604659405; ISBN: 1604659408. The Criterion collection, 740. Disc 1: feature film; disc 2: bonus features.
   Performers: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake, Eva Mattes, Gisela Fackeldey, Irm Hermann. Summary: One of the earliest and best-loved films of this period in Fassbinder's career, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director's roots in experimental theater. This unforgettable, unforgiving dissection of the imbalanced relationship between a haughty fashion designer and a beautiful but icy ingenue is based on a sly gender reversal of the writer-director's own desperate obsession with a young actor.
   Special features: Disc 2: Outsiders (documentary features actors Margit Carstensen, Eva Mattes, Katrin Schaake, and Hanna Schygulla discussing the production of the film and their experiences working with director Rainer Werner Fassbinder); Michael Ballhaus interview; Jan Shattuc interview; Role play: women on Fassbinder (1992 German television documentary by Thomas Honickel featuring interviews with actors Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, and Rosel Zech); New English subtitle translation. Insert, essay by critic Peter Matthews.

    I discovered Rainer Werner Fassbinder rather late in life, at sixty something years to be more or less exact, and by a most indirect route. I’d seen a few snippets of his films [1], but as far as I knew nothing all the way through. And I’d heard his name mentioned in film groups, lectures and documentaries. This is quite a confession from a self-anointed film buff who prides himself on his offbeat tastes, which include foreign movies. Only later did I discover that Fassbinder was the most prominent exponent of the New German Cinema that emerged in the 1970s, and arguably the most important German director since the great auteurs of the 1920s and 1930s.

    The roundabout way I came across Fassbinder was, appropriately enough, via a Douglas Sirk movie, the 1954 weepie Magnificent Obsession. Sirk was also German by birth but Americanized by profession and career. My Fassbinder discovery moment, or more specific, the discovery of his importance, insofar as it applies to Sirk, was via the commentary track of Magnificent Obsession, in which it was mentioned that the two main factors in the Sirk renaissance of the 1990s were feminism and Fassbinder. Later I learned that Fassbinder was an admirer of Sirk's films and moreover that his Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was a kind of remake of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.
    But getting back to Bitter Tears, and even as a Fassbinder novice, for me this has to be the director’s ultimate masterpiece. The amazing camera movements, poetically incisive script, surreal set, and spot on performances he draws from the all-women cast are little short of miraculous for one of 27 years at the time, even taking into consideration that the film’s fluid visuals and high gloss look may be as much the contributions of cameraman Michael Ballhaus and costume designer Maja Lemcke as that of Fassbinder’s auteurist vision.
    As an aside, I invoke the inevitable, and admittedly facile, comparison, specifically the seemingly ever hovering ghost of Orson Welles (actually Welles was alive and kicking – and making movies – in the early Seventies and didn’t pass on until over a decade later). Anyhow I’m tempted to call Fassbinder the German Orson Welles – but I won’t. Still, and much like Welles, Fassbinder never quite repeated the pinnacle he achieved in the extraordinary early effort that was Bitter Tears (though for some devotees the true pinnacle is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). Another aside: I have to wonder, this time a Kane-esque reference: did Fassbinder have total artistic control, including final cut approval, over Bitter Tears, a control he might not have had in later efforts? Given how much of a control freak Fassbinder reportedly was, it would be surprising if he didn't demand total authority over all his productions. Whether he got it is another matter.
    Yet another Welles connection, of a sort. Both Welles and Fassbinder were reputed to be short tempered, intimidating, and domineering taskmeisters, to the point of threats of physical violence for noncompliance on Fassbinder’s part. But this reputation has to be treated with kid gloves: there are also stories that Welles at least was wonderful to work with. So who can say? Incidentally both frequently appeared as characters in their own films, usually as the villain or otherwise playing an unpleasant sort.
    Speaking of casts, the aforementioned all-female cast of Bitter Tears is a marvel and Fassbinder gets the absolute most out of his hand-picked divas, especially Margit Carstensen in the performance of a lifetime. Throughout the film she seems to be channeling Joan Crawford – and more than a pinch of Norma Desmond – with her intense acting style. As a nice contrast we have Katrin Schaake as Petra’s best pal Sidonie, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles, not least for her Twenties style hairdo. Both films were released in 1972 and the similarity may be coincidental, but considering the films’ strong German elements one has to wonder. It must be admitted, however, that Cabaret’s German-ness is achieved more by proxy (i.e. setting and era) than actual production.
    Then there’s the enigmatic, unspeaking Marlene (Irm Hermann), who functions as a kind of companion/servant/secretary and all-around Sancho Panza to Petra. But she could be many more things, and various interpretations have spewed forth. Since we see her working on Petra’s designs, and we never actually see Petra working, is she a kind of fashion design ghostwriter for her mistress? In any case it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the respective characters in Bitter Tears [2], and maybe not too much of an exaggeration to opine that these will be the roles the actresses are remembered for, quite a claim given their long and distinguished careers.
    I leave to others to sort out Bitter Tears’ socio-economic, psychosexual, existential, and even political undercurrents. And as much as Tears deals with archetypal themes like lust, betrayal, obsession, narcissism and the like, it’s still a work of its time. To wit, and strangely enough perhaps, with its close to the bone, unsentimentalized view of the human condition, Tears strikes me as similar in tone and execution (if infinitely more polished and classy) to the slice-of-life, rough around the edges movies popular in the U.S. during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Of course one could make the same claim for any number of Fassbinder films. In any case, the lack of a music score also contributes to the Bitter Tears' verismo, somewhat voyeuristic vibe. Actually there is music, of a sort. Source music, compliments of The Platters, the Walker Brothers, and Giuseppe Verdi intermittently wafts in the background.
    Whatever the film’s aesthetic or other subtexts, I prefer to appreciate The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant as pure cinema. And what cinema it is, incredibly rich, multi-faceted, beautiful to look at, and eminently rewarding of repeated viewings. In a word, everything works in this movie, and its stately paced 124 minutes never seem to drag.

     1 To date I’ve only seen a minimum of his considerable oeuvre: Lili Marleen, Bitter Tears, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Faustrecht der Freiheit in their entirety, and snippets of Veronika Voss, Despair, and Berlin Alexanderplatz.
   2 The stunning Hanna Schygulla takes the role of the beautiful ingenue Karin, whom Petra, Pygmalion-like, decides to mold into a top fashion model. Here we see echoes of Hitchcock and his control over his icy blonde actresses, as well as the makeover(s) – first by Tom Helmore and later by James Stewart – of Madeline (Kim Novak) in Vertigo. Then again, Petra’s brutal dismissal of Karin – “no, she’s not talented, she just sells herself well” – might be an unconscious self-indictment. Perhaps it’s Fassbinder’s sly way of reminding us that there’s a thin line between ‘genius’ and salesmanship. An interesting bit of trivia: Margit Carstensen was only three years older than Hanna Schygulla, though the characters they portray seem to have a much greater age difference: Karin is perhaps in her early twenties and Petra fortyish.

guilty until proven innocent: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975)

    Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum [DVD] = The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum; Volker Schlöndorff, screenwriter, director; Margarethe von Trotta, co-director. Criterion collection, 177 [2003]. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1975. Based on: Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, by Heinrich Böll. Performers: Willi Benninger, Angela Winkler, Mario Adorf, Heinz Bennent, Jürgen Prochnow, Karl Heinz Vosgerau.
   Summary: In the period of several days, Katharina's privacy and her honor are destroyed, first by the police who terrorize her, and then by the yellow press, which creates in her name the image of a politicized Mata Hari. Bonus features: interview with directors Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta; interview with Jost Vacano (cinematographer); excerpts from Ivo Barnabó Micheli's 1977 biographical film on Heinrich Böll (in German with English subtitles).

   Margarethe von Trotta’s and Volker Schlondorff’s 1975 classic is a cautionary tale of the human costs of sensationalist, irresponsible journalism working in concert with a fascist-minded, law-and-order state: a timid woman (her friends call her ‘the nun’) spends a romantic night with a man the authorities suspect of being a terrorist. As a result her private life is mercilessly infringed upon by both the police and the yellow press. Dating from the edgy 1970s in Germany, Katharina Blum’s half century vintage hasn’t dulled its message for our own, eerily similar, current climate. If anything the film is even more relevant today. In an interesting and ironic aside, in today’s world, concerns about domestic terrorists, at least in the U.S., focus on the radicalized right. A half century or so ago it was the extreme left that caused all the huffing and puffing, both in America and Europe.

    In any case the New German Cinema’s socially conscious gestalt is presented front and center in Katharina Blum, in which an otherwise blandly ordinary woman is made the target of vilification by a tabloid press. Among the tricks of the trade said press employs: distorting the woman’s own statements, publishing photographs that make her look guilty, and digging up supposed dirt on her through interviews (subsequently highly embroidered in print) with those close to her, including relatives, employers and an ex-husband [1].

    “is the state unable to protect you against this garbage?”

    Katherina Blum has been called ahead of its time in the trends it anticipated a half century prior. True, up to a point. But it certainly didn’t get there first: self-serving, sensation mongering media have been around, well, for a long time, perhaps most blisteringly depicted cinematically in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, in which an ambitious, ethically challenged (to put it generously) journalist, and not the victim, is the main character [2]. But the film that reminds me most of KB, because of the similar subject matter and era, dates from three decades and change later, and that’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, a brilliant film to be sure but somehow lacking the sharp edge of KB. This is perhaps because Katharina Blum is historically authentic – it actually dates from the era – while Baader Meinhof is retro, almost a nostalgic period piece, if you like. Moreover, Katharina Blum has a certain rough around the edges quality that contributes to its intensity and unease, as opposed to Baader Meinhof’s more polished product [3].  

  
Whatever its many aesthetic merits and few shortcomings, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is just plain painful to watch (while the thuggish police browbeat Katharina relentlessly, I kept wondering: where’s the damned lawyer, for heaven's sake!). However, the story has its humor, if that is the word, perhaps most pointedly driven home with Kafka-like absurdity in the scene in which a bizarrely costumed police force conduct a grotesquely excessive SWAT-team like raid on the poor girl’s apartment, culminating in an insultingly invasive interrogation, which includes a strip search, by the way all done with nary a search warrant in sight. Indeed the police antics, brutal and heavy-handed as they are, sometimes seem more Gilbert & Sullivan than Gestapo or Stasi.

    Indeed, most of the violence done to Katharina is not physical but rather psychological and emotional, and arguably not done by the police as much as the tabloid press. In an ironic twist it is Katharina who commits more physical violence than her tormenters ever inflict upon her. Somehow I couldn’t help thinking of the case of actress Jean Seberg. Hounded by her own government, along with an acquiescent press that helped spread innuendo, gossip and outright lies, Seberg, like Katharina, had few friends among the powerful she could call on. Alas, she eventually resorted to suicide. Mirroring Seberg, Katharina resorts to a kind of metaphorical suicide. 
 
    To tell their story Von Trotta and Schlondorff have opted for natural settings – drab workplaces, nondescript domestic interiors, unromanticized outdoor scenes. It all contributes to the you-are-there, slice of life feel reminiscent of the American independent films of the era. At the same time cameraman Jost Vacano favors harsh, flat lighting and spartan geometric forms that suggest an authoritarian vibe more akin to East Germany than West.

   Indeed, in the difficult-to-take, Orwellian epilogue, we could be forgiven for suspecting that the vulgar, self-congratulatory pean rendered by – and for – the socio-economic power elite is a scene stage managed in the evil GDR and not the virtuous, democratic-minded Federal Republic. Corporate controlled media, then and now, relies on the sanctity of 'freedom of the press,' however extreme its manifestations, to justify its dependence on a mass audience to sustain its large profits. (Although the analogy may not be perfect, the similarity to the sanctimonious cries of ‘free speech’ of more recent times can hardly be missed). 

    Still, the filmmakers are to be praised for injecting a certain ambiguity into a story operating from such a moral and emotional stacked deck. The extent of Katharina’s initial culpability is left unanswered, as is the criminal guilt of Ludwig, or for that matter, how he managed to escape from her apartment building. Likewise, their eventual fates are left open-ended.

    Ultimately Katharina Blum is a sober reminder that, even in ostensibly free societies, a citizen’s rights are not absolute or inalienable: rights that can arbitrarily be taken away by the state or infringed upon by an all-seeing media aren’t rights at all, but only temporary privileges.

   [1] In the film’s sleaziest scene, the tabloid paper’s star reporter sneaks into a hospital’s intensive care unit and tries to extract information from Katharina’s seriously ill mother. She tells him nothing but he later spuriously quotes her in print. She dies soon after. The shock of the reporter’s visit may well have tipped her over.
   [2]  There’s also La Dolce Vita, in which an ethically indifferent journalist and his cadre of photographers dig up scandal on Rome’s beautiful people. LDV shares with KB a certain postmodern cynicism amidst the backdrop of media corruption, but the context is different: the earlier work concerns itself with the culture of celebrity, the jaded rich, and Old World decadence, while Katharina Blum has much more of a political edge. Contemporary, quintessentially paranoic, even existential in its uncompromising, take-no-prisoners attitude, Katharina Blum is actually closer in tone and spirit to Ace in the Hole than Dolce Vita.  
   [3] When the DVD of KB came out two decades or so ago most of the comparisons were, understandably if rather facilely, to the 9/11 attacks and the resultant paranoia in the U.S. Heavy handed government intrusions on individual liberties were buttressed by a compliant media and its uncritical acceptance of the war-on-terror meme, the ultimate result being that all news outlets, the vast majority anyway, were little more than cheerleaders of official policy. Two decades later a similar paranoia set in with the Covid 19 virus and the resultant, some might say inevitable, politicization of the situation, especially in the highly polarized U.S., where recriminations and counter-recriminations flew fast and furious, and to some extent still do.