Remembering Fassbinder

What is most significant about Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) is that, as one of the first openly gay filmmakers ever, he could draw from his outsider’s stance an enormous empathy for a vast array of individuals, straight and gay, young and old.

He was obsessed with the near-impossibility of love, with the power struggles within relationships and with the destructive elements within society.

“The best thing I can think of,” he once said, “would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That’s my dream, to make such a German film--beautiful and extravagant and fantastic.” He made 51 films for TV and theatrical release in 13 brief years before his death at age 37 of too much work and too many drugs. And he succeeded in attaining his goal far more often than not.

In collaboration with the Goethe Institute and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, the UCLA Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of Fassbinder’s films starting Friday and running through March 16 at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater. It is composed of 31 features, two shorts, an interview film with Fassbinder, the monumental miniseries “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) and a documentary on its making, as well as eight features unfamiliar to American audiences.

Arguably, Fassbinder’s finest film is his 1973 “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (March 1, after the 7:30 p.m. screening of “Katzelmacher”). It is a romance, as unexpected to us as it is to a plump 60-ish cleaning woman (Brigitte Mira) who meets a 40-ish Moroccan named Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem) in a drab Munich neighborhood bar frequented by Arab immigrants. They dare to marry, and the film becomes as bitter and straightforward an indictment of racism and xenophobia as has ever been committed to film. But what makes the film a masterpiece is that Fassbinder does not stop here but goes beyond social protest to reach for some quite unexpected and ironic truths about human nature and relationships.

Also key in the Fassbinder canon are two companion films about lesbian and gay life, 1972’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) and 1974’s “Fox and His Friends” (Feb. 27, at 7:30 p.m.), both of which are so thoroughly realized as to be universal in their truths about human nature and relationships.

The first is a harrowing drama of agonized love, laced with sardonic humor, in which Margit Carstensen stars in the title role as a top fashion designer who falls in love with a younger woman (Hanna Schygulla, a key Fassbinder collaborator) fleeing from an unhappy marriage. The second is a classic tale about a naive proletarian destroyed by a bourgeois snob. Arguably the screen’s best serious portrayal of gays up to that time, the film stars Fassbinder himself as a sideshow performer who wins 500,000 marks in a lottery only to be exploited by a good-looking young man (Peter Chatel). The gay world Fassbinder so acutely delineates becomes a microcosm for society at large, in which stifling, dehumanizing materialistic bourgeois values are greatly intensified.

“Effi Briest” (March 2, 7 p.m.) is an exquisite period piece, a rarity for Fassbinder, and affords Schygulla one of her best roles as a teenage bride living on an isolated country estate with a much older husband frequently away on business. Ulli Lommel plays a dashing major who comes into Effi’s life briefly--but with consequences that prove dire years later. That Fassbinder immerses himself so thoroughly in Effi’s distant world only underlines the timelessness of his own concern for the individual in conflict with society.

Fassbinder’s crowning achievement is his 15 1/2-hour 1980 adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s 1929 “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” a sprawling saga of the urban lower depths. It is a monumental, luminous contemplation of the human condition and a stylistic tour de force that has been aptly called an homage to director Josef von Sternberg.

It’s an everyman saga, set against a Germany skidding toward National Socialism, and also, in Fassbinder’s words, “the story of two men whose little lives on this Earth are destroyed because they never get the opportunity to muster up the courage even to recognize, much less be able to admit to themselves, that they desire each other in an unusual way.” The men are a sometime laborer and pimp (Gunter Lamprecht) and a petty gangster (Gottfried John).

(Note: “Berlin Alexanderplatz” will screen in two parts Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Goethe Institute, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 110. A documentary on the making of the film will screen Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the institute.)

The climax to Fassbinder’s career was his great postwar trilogy satirizing the kitschy tastes and values of the “economic miracle” of the ‘50s. In 1978’s “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (March 9, after the 7 p.m. screening of “The Stationmaster’s Wife”), Fassbinder took the conventions of the ‘40s women’s picture to their delirious heights as a way of commenting on the absurd nature of war, the German character, the plight of women, life itself and especially love. Schygulla stars as a woman struggling to survive in World War II and its grim aftermath.

After “Maria Braun” came “Veronika Voss” and “Lola” (March 15 at 7:30 p.m.)--the first about a glamorous Nazi-era star cruelly cast aside, the second a reworking of “The Blue Angel” set in the ‘50s and starring Barbara Sukowa an Armin Mueller-Stahl.

In a way, it was fitting that Fassbinder’s career ended with his final commentary on homosexuality, his 1982 film of Jean Genet’s “Querelle” (March 16, about 9 p.m.), a steamy erotic port city fantasy that had at its heart the struggle of men to square away homosexual feelings with an intensely macho concept of masculinity. The entire film is a kind of ritual of sacrifice. It seems a valiant expression of overwhelming despair on the part of Fassbinder, whose death has been said to have been hastened by the suicide of his lover, to whom this final film is dedicated.

For complete schedule: (310) 206-FILM. Goethe Institute, (213) 525-3388.

Note: “Fire on the Mountain,” the outstanding documentary on the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division in World War II, completes its run today at the Grande 4-Plex and reopens at the Monica 4-Plex for Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. screenings. Grande 4-Plex: (213) 617-0268. Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741