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Rainer Werner Fassbinder. |
I call them gangster films, but they�re more like gangster pastiches, or the archetypes of gangster movies. Men of few words drift through a sparse, late-60�s Munich (sparse both in terms of the setting and in terms of the population; there are very few people in Fassbinder�s Munich) and drink, start fights, collapse in seedy hotels, buy pornography, and have sex with women who inexplicably love them. Then they blow it all on a heist gone wrong (and that�s not a spoiler; the heist never goes right, it just comes with the territory).
It�s interesting that these movies are made in black-and-white, because by the late �60�s, most filmmakers had made the transition to color. At this point, if you were going to make a film in black-and-white, it wasn�t just a matter of economy or convention; you were doing so as a conscious artistic choice. For Fassbinder in these early works, I think it lends them an icy depth and beauty that they might have lacked otherwise. There�s an anecdote (which I may have related before) that goes like this, and it comes from Andrew O�Hehir of Salon.com: Martin Scorsese is hanging out with Lars von Trier (because that�s what glamorous directors do, they hang out with each other) and Scorsese says to von Trier (paraphrasing): �I really liked the opening sequence of Antichrist. It was very beautiful,� and von Trier says (paraphrasing): �Well of course it was beautiful. It was in black-and-white and slow motion.� Now, these Fassbinder films may not be in slow motion, but they�re in black-and-white, and I think that�s one of the tragedies of the sixties (cinematically speaking), that they transitioned to color�often of a poor, grimy quality�just as black-and-white was looking better than ever. Paul Simon was wrong when he said that everything looks worse in black-and-white; it looks so much better. And a film like Gods of the Plague looks like a Bela Tarr film where things happen.
Poster for Love is Colder than Death. |
Post-script: For my post on Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, click here.