Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

Although it was made in 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss looks like a product of 1955, the time that it depicts. Like Sunset Boulevard, it chronicles the last days of an aging former film starlet and the young man who is drawn into her strange world. Filmed in the style of a black and white Hollywood melodrama, Veronika Voss tells a compelling story on its own, but what really impresses is the way that Fassbinder uses these trappings to dress up a distressing critique of Germany’s place in the world.

When humble newspaper man Robert Krohn first befriends Veronika, he does not recognize her, but she either doesn’t notice or just chooses not to. She seduces him like a predator desperate for one last meal, and Krohn is easy prey. But as he becomes curious about her life, and the more he realizes that Veronika has fallen far from the peak of her stardom.

Veronika spends most of her time in an odd little psychiatric clinic. The lobby looks normal enough at first, but the further the film delves into the clinic the weirder it seems. Room are connected to each other by indoor windows and twisty hallways, and everything is decorated in white. Fassbinder creates the impression of a whitewashed maze that circles in on itself, and echoing up from deep in the centre of the maze comes the sound of a radio that’s always tuned to American hillbilly music. It’s never clear where exactly the music is coming from, but it’s always loudest in Veronika’s small room at the clinic, especially during her most desperate moments.

In a film that so ably apes 1950s melodramas, the bizarre American music stands out as the only really avant-garde element, and it is striking. There is also an African American GI who rather inexplicably seems to work at the clinic, or at least is always hanging around there. Fassbinder seems to be trying to draw a connection between the United States and the psychiatric clinic, and I think ultimately he’s making a statement about Germany’s dependence on American foreign aide after World War II.

The clinic primarily works as an underground morphine dispensary. Patients become addicts in order to numb their pain, and become dependent not just on morphine, but on the clinic itself. The clinic assumes control over their lives and assets, until the patient has nothing left to give.

Both of the patients that Fassbinder introduces us to have been nearly destroyed by World War II – Veronika’s fortunes and film career have been in decline ever since the end of the war, and the other patient is a wealthy and elderly Holocaust survivor. The clinic gives them comfort, but at the price of their freedom and identity.

By equating the morphine clinic to American intervention in German affairs, Fassbinder offers a critique of his country’s reliance on outside assistance, and it must have struck a chord with the German psyche, because Veronika Voss won best film at the Berlin International Film Festival upon its release.

Because I had to miss the first three films in the Fassbinder series, I can’t compare this film to the others that were shown, which is a shame! This was the first Fassbinder film I have seen, but I hope it will not be the last.

1970s Conspiracy Films: Winter Kills

When director William Richert first walked onto the set of his film Winter Kills, he wasn’t sure how a 35mm camera worked because he had never seen one up close. He was almost a complete novice, untested except for a few short documentaries, but he somehow managed to assemble a rather extraordinary cast a crew. The supporting roles went to actors like Elizabeth Taylor, Toshiro Mifune and Anthony Perkins, with Jeff Daniels and John Huston as the leads. For cinematography Richert had the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, who had just won an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and for production design he had the equally great Robert F. Boyle, a personal favorite of Alfred Hitchcock.

Working from his own script, a comic adaptation of the novel by James Condon, Richert intended to make Winter Kills into a sort of conspiracy theory Alice in Wonderland, the Kennedy Assassination seen through the rabbit hole. Daniels plays the sheltered half-brother of a president who was gunned down nineteen years ago and when clues about the murder begin to come to light, he is drawn into a bizarre world of conspiracies and paranoia where clues lead back on each other like a Gordian knot.

Winter Kills is deliberately confusing and often just plain weird, but it the tone is somewhere between satirical slapstick and bleak absurdity. It often feels like a half-decent shot at making Coen Brothers movie, although it predates the Coens’ first film by half a decade. Come to think, it might make a decent double bill with The Big Lebowski, another offbeat piece of Americana with Jeff Daniels haplessly trying to decipher a mystery. Daniels turns in a solid performance in Winter Kills, but it’s John Huston as the cheerfully corrupt Joe Kennedy-type patriarch who really steals the show. His character is an unrepentant crook of the worst kind, but Huston plays him with such exuberance that he almost becomes lovable, though always detestable.

The film is very funny and imaginative, but it stumbles in places and frequently feels flat and uneven. Perhaps this is Richert’s inexperience as a director showing, although the production problems faced by the film are also a likely culprit.

Financed by a couple of gangsters who had gotten tired of producing soft-core porn movies and were ready for the big time (which explains some of the movie’s gratuitous nudity), Winter Kills was probably on shaky ground from the beginning. There are reports of people being paid in cash by dubious means, and then eventually they stopped being paid at all. The union closed down production on the film at least twice, one producer was executed gangland style and another ended up behind bars. Amazingly, there was a two–year gap in filming, during which Richert gathered up the available Winter Kills cast and crew and made another film in Germany called The American Success Company that somehow made enough money for Richert to finish Winter Kills.

Considering the circumstances, it’s a miracle that the film was made at all. But despite good reviews, Winter Kills was pulled from theaters after just two weeks in release, and it virtually disappeared after that. It was never screened on television and has had a spotty history on home video and DVD. It could be that audiences in 1979 simply didn’t respond to this peculiar little film. Or perhaps, as Condon has suggested, it was pulled from release because the distributor had ties with the Kennedy dynasty, who demanded that they bury the movie.

Who know? In the film, conspiracies only fall away to hide further conspiracies, so perhaps this is a case of life imitating art … or is it the other way around.

1970s Conspiracy Films: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Although several scenes seemed to be lifted straight from my childhood nightmares, I wasn’t scared by the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers while watching it in the theatre. After I went to sleep that night though, that’s when it got to me. Scenes from the movie invaded my dreams, and when I woke up in the middle of the night I was almost afraid to go back to sleep, lest I be replaced by an alien vegetable doppelganger.

Unlike a lot of horror movies, there aren’t a lot of shocks or “gotchas” in this incarnation of Body Snatchers. Instead, it relies on those creeping feelings of dread and paranoia that I’m sure many children have felt while lying awake in bed – “What if the people I love suddenly stop loving me?” “What if I go to sleep and won’t ever wake up?” “What if evil takes over my whole town?” “What if I have to escape but there’s no where to run?”

Unlike this season’s other great horror film, Eraserhead, which took place in an abstract, dreamlike reality, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feels grounded in a specific time and place. Through a style that mixes German expressionism with New Hollywood grittiness, director Philip Kaufman places the invasion very clearly in late ‘70s San Francisco. This, combined with the way his characters feel like real people with jobs and dreams and not just fodder for the aliens, makes the film feel much more serious than its premise would indicate.

The three leads all face struggles that are related to the theme of being surrounded by imposters. Donald Sutherland plays a health inspector whose job it is to find the phonies in the restaurant world – early in the film he finds what a chef is claiming is a caper is actually a rat turd. His co-worker, played by Brooke Adams, is living with a boyfriend in a stale and emotionless relationship, a pale imitation of the genuine love she could have with Sutherland. And Jeff Goldblum is a writer who is distressed by how easily the public is swayed by books that have no heart to them while dismissing the work that he pours his soul into. W. D. Richter’s script highlights just how easily fake things can infiltrate and corrupt our reality.

When it moves out of the realm of social commentary into the nitty-gritty alien invasion stuff, the script doesn’t hold up quite as well. Aside from recurring shots of mysterious grey material being disposed of, the way the aliens work seems a bit illogical and inconsistent. In a lot of horror films it might not be as much of an issue, but the leaps of logic required to buy some of the mechanics of pod people don’t always mesh with Invasion’s general level of verisimilitude.

Fortunately, the special effects work is so outstanding, not to mention extremely disgusting, that it’s easy to forgive how outlandish the whole thing is. The scenes of pod people being born don’t make a lot of sense, but they are so stomach-churning nightmarish that it doesn’t matter. Ultimately though it’s the ideas behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers that make it disturbing. The damning final shot includes no visual effects at all, but it will stick with audiences long after they’ve managed to repress the memories of the more graphic and gory scenes.

1970s Conspiracy Films: The Parallax View

Filmed during a time when it still seemed like America's best and brightest could, at any moment, wind up dead from an assassin's bullet, The Parallax View is a thriller that asks just where all those assassins might be coming from. A lot of people get assassinated in this movie, to an extent that nearly borders on absurd. Just about every major character, and many minor ones, end up assassinated, often for unknown reasons.

But The Parallax View isn't a movie that's concerned about whether its plot makes a whole lot of sense. What's important here is the idea that society is being systematically manipulated by shadowy forces behind the scenes, and shadowy forces have a way of making plot holes just disappear. Fortunately, this is a very well made film, so if the story seems to be missing a few components, everything else is firing on all cylinders. Warren Beatty stars as a shaggy-haired, small fry reporter who discovers a trace of the conspiracy and decides to see just how much of it he can unravel. Beatty has a great screen presence, but the real star here is genius cinematographer Gordon Willis, working in a 2:35 widescreen format that looks fantastic. Between thrilling long shots where actors are dwarfed by their surroundings and close-ups where big blocks of colour threaten to push them from the frame, Willis creates a world where everyone is on the verge of drowning or being swallowed up by the oppressive space around them. This is a film that truly benefits from being up on the big screen.

As a whole, the film feels a bit disjointed, drawn out some times and rushed at others, but its individual sequences are little masterpieces. Structurally it kind of weirdly reminds me of the rock opera "concept albums" from the same era, complete with a prologue and a reprise, and great individual parts that don't quite gel together into a coherent way.

There's the short and smartly edited opening sequence on Seattle's Space Needle, the gleefully offbeat action romp in a Northwest country town, the taunt, the sublimely Hitchcock suspense of the airplane scene, and the operatic final showdown, but what stands out the most is an unsuspected piece of avant garde cinema spliced into the middle of the film.

Beatty's character, having successfully infiltrated an organisation that trains assassins, is taken into a darkened theatre and shown a film intended to brainwash him. It's a propaganda created like Soviet montage but with a distinctly Americana flavour, and it completely fills the screen, as we watch it along with Beatty's reporter. Images and words flash on the screen that are initially comforting, but become more threatening and confusing as they are repeated faster in different sequences. It's a powerful example of just how easily people, and that includes the audience watching The Parallax View, can be manipulated by the media, especially film.

The montage is constructed to make the viewer believe that the world has descended into chaos and that only the viewer can set things right again by becoming a hero, as symbolised by the repeated image of Marvel Comics' Thor. It's interesting that this is also the journey that most feature films take us on, as well. How often after watching a great adventure movie where the protagonist triumphs, do we leave the theatre feeling like we too can take on the world?

The Parallax View subverts this to some extent, although it doesn't go as far as it might have. After all, Beatty's character is a lone hero who believes that he's the only one who can rescue the world from encroaching chaos, even before he views the propaganda film. He acts above the law and solves problems through violence. He's scrappy and nearly unbeatable as a James Bond character, and the audience is meant to identify with him. He plays the same part as Thor does during the propaganda montage, and the film's downbeat ending doesn't really defray that effect.

What the montage scene does do is alert the audience to the fact that they are being manipulated, even after that scene is over. It may be the ultimate paranoia film, in that it asks "Is society being controlled by unseen forces?" and then answers "Yes, and you are being controlled just by watching this movie."

1970s Conspiracy Films: Night Moves

The first thing we see in Night Moves, the scene that plays under the opening credits, is private detective Harry Moseby, played by Gene Hackman, receiving a telephone message about a case involving a missing girl. The audience immediately knows what kind of movie they’re going to be watching, who the protagonist is, and what he’s going to try and do.

Except, it doesn’t really all work out that way. In most detective movies the gumshoe is the least intriguing character, but in Mosley’s case the audience is brought to ponder his past history, his psychology and his motives just as much as Moseby ponders those involved in the cases he investigates. Unlike Sam Spade, being a detective isn’t what he is, it’s what he does… or at least tries to do.

The thing is that Mosley isn’t a very great detective. The second big way that Night Moves subverts the detective genre is that people only start dying after he’s solved his case, and the harder he tries to solve the murders, the more of them there are.

Mosley is never shown to make truly ignorant mistakes or blunders; he’s no real intellectual, but he isn’t portrayed as a lummox either. When he can’t solve the mystery at the end of the film, in spite of great determination, and even courage, the film leaves us with a sinking feeling of confusion and despair, and more questions than answers.

Night Moves feels very much like a product of the mid-seventies, from Moseby’s moustache to his wife’s crocheted blouses, from long scenes involving reel-to-reel answering machines to the ruminations on the deaths of the Kennedys, and especially to the feeling that the “free love” ideals of the ‘60s have turned to decay. I felt like audiences in 1975 would have felt an intimate connection with this movie, and its weary cynicism still has bite today.

There are bits that have not aged well, though. This movie includes The Most Seventies Scene Ever, in which Gene Hackman is lying in bed with his wife, caressing her gratuitously bare breasts with his foot as he eats cheese fondue out of a little home fondue pot. I am not making that up. The soundtrack is made up almost exclusively of watery synths, and it is very, very bad.

In the closing moments, however, I had a glimpse of what Night Moves might have been life if the sound cues were chosen by Martin Scorsese. Someone’s cell phone went off behind me, the only time in movie history when a cell phone has improved a movie, and the ring tone was Bob Marley’s version of All Across the Watchtower. As Mosley helplessly watches a man drown, a man he trusted until this very moment, and as he sees all the meaning he had built up around this case washed violently away, I thought the song fit the film and the tenor of the times it was conveying perfectly.

“There’s too much confusion here, and I can’t get no relief.”

Imagining Interiors: Black Sunday

When shown in American cinemas, the 1960 Italian horror film Las Maschera del Demonio, ran with a disclaimer that the film would shock audience like no other and should not be seen by children under twelve. This was after three minutes of gore had been edited out of the film, and some of the satanic references had been removed, including the translated title “The Mask of Satan.” The film was released as Black Sunday.

In the following half a century, Black Sunday has lost some of its power to shock, so I tried to imagine watching it through the eyes of my eleven-year old self, perhaps having caught it on TV late at night. There are images here, of witches being tortured, people burning alive, corpses rising from the earth and maggots crawling around in the eye socket of a formerly beautiful women, that would have made for feverish talk on the playground the next day at school. All the talk of Satan would have certainly deeply unsettled me as a child and kept me awake for reasons I would have been unable to explain.

Watching this movie about a week after Eraserhead I couldn’t help but compare the two films. Both of them derive their power from strange, disturbing images that relate to each other more like in a dream than in a story bound by logic. Black Sunday has most of the trappings of a traditional narrative film, but none of it really holds together in the clear light of day. It throws around potent images and symbols too quickly for the audience to really be able to make sense of it all, but the feeling you’re left with, provided you can turn off your 21^st century brain, is dread rather than confusion. Like in Eraserhead, there are enough things here that connect subconsciously and emotionally that “making sense” doesn’t seem to matter.

Black Sunday boasts some great, grisly special effects and inspired production design, though perhaps its biggest visual treat is the face of Barbara Steele, which is at once alluring and somehow unnerving, beautiful but slightly askew. She is instantly recognizable, which makes a few plot points more plausible and also made for some awesome movie posters.

Steele gives quite a good performance as well, a bit schlocky perhaps, but well beyond what most of the other actors deliver. Of course, the fact that everyone’s voice has been obviously overdubbed, mostly with anachronistic American accents, doesn’t do the film a lot of favors. Ultimately, there are too many places where the seams of this movie shows, from a few dodgy makeup and costuming jobs, to obviously rubber effects, to a score that distracts more than it connects.

The cumulative effect is too many reminders that you’re watching a film, and one that was probably made with not enough time or enough money, which is one of the reasons that Black Sunday isn’t as immersive as Eraserhead.

Few films hit as hard as Eraserhead, though, and Black Sunday still has plenty of creepy scenes of horror that can’t easily be forgotten … especially for those under twelve.

Imagining Interiors: Kontroll

Instead of the scheduled Australian film The Well, which was unavailable tonight, we were treated to Kontroll, a Hungarian film made by American-born Nimrod Antal in 2003. After gaining acclaim with this film Antal has gone on to have a career in Hollywood, most recently directing Predators for Robert Rodriguez. I am glad I didn’t know that going into this movie, though, and was able to watch it with an open mind.

The film takes place entirely in the Budapest subway system and initially follows a group of misfit ticket collectors as they try to perform their jobs with some semblance of dignity in the seediest part of the subway line where train patrons are more likely to physically threaten them, offer them the services of a prostitute or play deaf rather than simply show their rail pass. Filming in the actual subway, Antal makes this world feel real and alive, and does an excellent job setting up his main actors as a band of likeable losers who try to do their best in spite of a hostile environment and their own limitations. If the passengers themselves weren’t bad enough, there’s also an unseen murderer lurking somewhere in the bowels of the subway system who has developed a habit of pushing complete strangers in front of moving trains.

After the first twenty minutes I was impressed with this movie, which I thought had created the perfect set-up: our small group of weary and unwitting workers would cross paths with this murderer, and the results would be disastrous, but in the end we would learn just what these misfits were made of.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the movie that Antal decided to make. Instead, as the movie goes on most of the crew of losers drop to the background as he focuses on their most adept member, a mysterious loner named Bulcsú who dropped out of a “normal” society and now sleeps in the subway like a homeless person because … well, we never really find out. Eventually the movie turns into long stretches of watching Bulcsú sort of wander around the subway with no clear goal or motivation.

It’s still stylishly done, but the promise of the first half hour is badly squandered as the movie becomes more psychological and symbolic without really giving us a reason to care about Bulcsú or his psychology.

In the end the murderer subplot does resurface for a showdown with Bulcsú which is well staged and shows off the skills Antal would eventually get hired for in Hollywood, but ultimately has no real dramatic weight.

To be charitable to the last half of the film, I would assume that Antal, who was working from his own script, intended for his movie to have some of the dreamlike qualities that Eraserhead does, where the literal meaning takes backseat to whatever symbolic meaning the audience takes from the film. But Eraserhead works because it is a tightly controlled film, and Kontroll feels a bit like Atal threw in everything he could get to stick. The result is an interesting film that ultimately feels like a wasted opportunity to make something truly terrific. But I suppose it got the director a job!