Katzelmacher
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second film, Katzelmacher (1969), meaning "Troublemaker," or, more directly, "Cat Screwer," was shot in nine days. Fassbinder wrote, directed, and starred in the film as Yorgos, a "Greek from Greece." A circle of friends in Munich frustrated by money problems and interpersonal squabbles gets to know Yorgos in various ways, manipulating him mostly, teasing him, finally beating him up, even as he provides steady rent money to one of them. He's a guest worker, an immigrant from Piraeus with a wife and two children back home. The only one among the Germans who treats him well is Marie (Hanna Schygulla). The others take advantage of his lack of German (beyond some basic phrases and words), speaking terrible things about him in his presence. They're intrigued by the alleged impressive size of his penis. One of the women claims to have been raped by him--not true. He's a friendly guy with a donkey-like personality. All of the malice comes from the group of friends, pasted on his character.
The Germans' lives are gone into in detailed sketches, often short scenes depicting conversations at first elliptical and hard to fathom, but as the film progresses and more time is given to each character, pictures of their personalities and lives emerge. Rosy (Elga Sorbas), visited often by the men in the film, sells access to her body for the sake of accumulating enough dough to have professional photos made of her to show to casting directors and agents. Her film star ambitions are ridiculed by her female friends, whether or not those women realize the money to fund the professional photos comes from their own boyfriends' visits to the aspiring actress.
Rudolf Waldemar Brem as Paul (one of Yorgos's chief tormentors) has regular sex with a man who pays him. Prostitution practiced for supplementary income is also a theme in Godard's 1967 experimental social comedy, 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her. It's a theme saying much about capitalism's unfairness--ordinary people driven to illegal acts so they can manage their lives in a society controlled by irresponsible big money exchanges and gross accumulation by the wealthy minority.
Hans Hirschmüller, three years after this film, played the lead in Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, giving a magnificent painful to watch performance as a man on a downward spiral. In Katzelmacher he plays the second most vicious of Yorgos's antagonists, Erich, a man who begins the film as Marie's boyfriend, losing her to the Greek from Greece. With Marie, Yorgos comes across as his most human self; vulnerable, seemingly simple only because of his lack of German.
A beautiful and lyrical many times repeated motif in this black and white film is a backward tracking shot in the vicinity of an apartment block where all the characters, apparently, live. Each time, it's with two different characters linked arm in arm, conversing about something pertinent to the plot, or maybe not. Usually the duo are women, or sometimes a man and a woman. Plaintive music unlike anything else in the film plays on the soundtrack during all of these special scenes. The camera almost imperceptibly tilts dreamily up and down during the shot--a strange effect adding to a feeling for the viewer of being mesmerized.
This is the "style" component of cinema. Some might argue that a weird tilting motion in a backwards tracking shot is pointless, but I found myself magnetically attracted to the technique, whatever its purpose. It has the effect of pulling the viewer into the image in a way much of the rest of the stylized shots don't--and that's also on purpose.
One common shot throughout the film shows various characters in a number of combinations against a building's wall, sitting on railings, all of these shots static in sharp contrast to the tracking shot motif mentioned above. Fassbinder, in his framing, uses these flat backgrounds to highlight themes connected to the action of whatever scene. Part of a window frame will be in one shot, in another a potted plant on a windowsill will be visible. These subtle compositions, and the sometimes geometric patterns of the characters' positions in the frame, make it vital to study the film, after the first viewing, for its purely visual aspects and for how what you see interpenetrates what you hear and feel while watching.
Since it was made so early in his short career of so many movies, there's a sense of marvel that a twenty-four year old director already spoke the language of cinema fluently, even in a low budget film in which nothing much happens.
Vic Neptune
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second film, Katzelmacher (1969), meaning "Troublemaker," or, more directly, "Cat Screwer," was shot in nine days. Fassbinder wrote, directed, and starred in the film as Yorgos, a "Greek from Greece." A circle of friends in Munich frustrated by money problems and interpersonal squabbles gets to know Yorgos in various ways, manipulating him mostly, teasing him, finally beating him up, even as he provides steady rent money to one of them. He's a guest worker, an immigrant from Piraeus with a wife and two children back home. The only one among the Germans who treats him well is Marie (Hanna Schygulla). The others take advantage of his lack of German (beyond some basic phrases and words), speaking terrible things about him in his presence. They're intrigued by the alleged impressive size of his penis. One of the women claims to have been raped by him--not true. He's a friendly guy with a donkey-like personality. All of the malice comes from the group of friends, pasted on his character.
The Germans' lives are gone into in detailed sketches, often short scenes depicting conversations at first elliptical and hard to fathom, but as the film progresses and more time is given to each character, pictures of their personalities and lives emerge. Rosy (Elga Sorbas), visited often by the men in the film, sells access to her body for the sake of accumulating enough dough to have professional photos made of her to show to casting directors and agents. Her film star ambitions are ridiculed by her female friends, whether or not those women realize the money to fund the professional photos comes from their own boyfriends' visits to the aspiring actress.
Rudolf Waldemar Brem as Paul (one of Yorgos's chief tormentors) has regular sex with a man who pays him. Prostitution practiced for supplementary income is also a theme in Godard's 1967 experimental social comedy, 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her. It's a theme saying much about capitalism's unfairness--ordinary people driven to illegal acts so they can manage their lives in a society controlled by irresponsible big money exchanges and gross accumulation by the wealthy minority.
Hans Hirschmüller, three years after this film, played the lead in Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, giving a magnificent painful to watch performance as a man on a downward spiral. In Katzelmacher he plays the second most vicious of Yorgos's antagonists, Erich, a man who begins the film as Marie's boyfriend, losing her to the Greek from Greece. With Marie, Yorgos comes across as his most human self; vulnerable, seemingly simple only because of his lack of German.
A beautiful and lyrical many times repeated motif in this black and white film is a backward tracking shot in the vicinity of an apartment block where all the characters, apparently, live. Each time, it's with two different characters linked arm in arm, conversing about something pertinent to the plot, or maybe not. Usually the duo are women, or sometimes a man and a woman. Plaintive music unlike anything else in the film plays on the soundtrack during all of these special scenes. The camera almost imperceptibly tilts dreamily up and down during the shot--a strange effect adding to a feeling for the viewer of being mesmerized.
This is the "style" component of cinema. Some might argue that a weird tilting motion in a backwards tracking shot is pointless, but I found myself magnetically attracted to the technique, whatever its purpose. It has the effect of pulling the viewer into the image in a way much of the rest of the stylized shots don't--and that's also on purpose.
One common shot throughout the film shows various characters in a number of combinations against a building's wall, sitting on railings, all of these shots static in sharp contrast to the tracking shot motif mentioned above. Fassbinder, in his framing, uses these flat backgrounds to highlight themes connected to the action of whatever scene. Part of a window frame will be in one shot, in another a potted plant on a windowsill will be visible. These subtle compositions, and the sometimes geometric patterns of the characters' positions in the frame, make it vital to study the film, after the first viewing, for its purely visual aspects and for how what you see interpenetrates what you hear and feel while watching.
Since it was made so early in his short career of so many movies, there's a sense of marvel that a twenty-four year old director already spoke the language of cinema fluently, even in a low budget film in which nothing much happens.
Vic Neptune
Comments
Post a Comment