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Reviews
Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975)
A masterpiece and Fassbinder's best
From the opening strains of lilting carnival music, set against a colorful fairground swarming with people, there's no doubt about Fassbinder's goal in this film: To show the insanity and the depravity of the world in all its hectic disgrace. This extended metaphor smoothly gives way to the story, as Klaus, Fox's manager and boyfriend, is arrested, we meet Fox's drunken sister, Fox meets Max, Fox wins the lottery and Fox makes his notorious friends. All these events happen in rapid succession, but when the plot slows down a little Fox has a new lover: Eugen, a slick, highbrow conman. Fox doesn't realize it at the time, but when he utters the words "There's no one that can't be had" Eugen agrees completely, albeit in silence. Eugen proceeds to take Fox on a ride, milking him for money to save his father's failing company, a posh apartment and the furniture for it, fancy clothes, a vacation to Morocco and a car. Fox loses everything and kills himself, but that's to be expected in a Fassbinder film.
The irony in the U.S. title, Fox and His Friends is two-fold. His old friends, the ones who hang out in the bar he frequents, the ones who are down to earth and genuine, are the same ones he no longer has any use for. His new friends, the ones who are well cultured, the ones who make fun of him behind his back and criticize him to his face, the ones who fleece him for every penny he has, are the ones he can't get himself away from. The lives of Fox's friends from both sides get tangled together as they all watch Fox sink lower and lower and do nothing to help him. Fox and His Friends is a good enough title for this film, but the original title Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fist Fight of Freedom in English) is much more telling. Fox wants to be happy, and happiness is freedom, but he is far too vulnerable and trusting to attain either in the world he's living in. A world where no one is trustworthy and, worse than that, everyone is amoral and selfish. The characters in this movie are all involved a metaphorical fist fight where only the strong survive, where only those who are willing to connive, cheat, trick and steal are going to come out on top.
Just like in life, no one in this film is entirely sympathetic, once you get to know them. Fox is the most likable character, but even he has questionable morals. This aspect of the film is highlighted in Fox and Eugen's first conversation where Fox declares that there are three types of people in the world: Those who are clean, those who wash and those who stink no matter how much they wash themselves. He goes on to say that the latter is okay because some people like a little stink. This declaration of humanity sums up what Fassbinder is trying to say in this film and many more. The statement is matched by the visual fragmentation of the characters, who, rarely shown in the whole, are instead fragmented by stray objects, windowpanes or mirrors. The scenes of the fair, the boutiques, the bars and Morocco are all lies as Fassbinder lays these colorful settings under truth after truth about the drab and mundane world in which we live. In the end, Max and Karl, representing the best of each of Fox's groups of friends, find Fox dead from doctor prescribed sleeping pills in a subway station and decide to leave him there because they don't want to get involved.
At first it seems that Fassbinder has nothing good to say about human nature. That people are bad and Fox, the world weary victim, is an exception to the rule. But if Fox is an exception, couldn't there be other exceptions too? Surely Fox isn't one of a kind. After all, he's not a very exceptional person. Ultimately the message here is bittersweet, that one can be happy, but they have to fight for it with their life. Fox takes it one step further and sacrifices his life for happiness. Or rather, because of his lack of it in life.
Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems (2004)
A true auteur success
The term auteur is thrown around quite a bit, although it can be accurately applied to very films; *Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems* is one of them. Having directed, photographed, edited and written the film, Clive Holden has ensured authoritative control over it and the result is a highly personal, and at the same time universal, study of the multifaceted, insidious monster violence, how far its tentacles reach and how it effects the individual.
"Why doesn't this feel more unusual?" Holden poses this question midway through his film, in the segment '18,000 Dead in Gordon Head'. The question is asked in response to witnessing the murder of a young girl, and his indifference that follows. He goes on to explain that by that time he had seen that crime 18,000 times in the media already, and seeing it in person was no different to seeing it one more time on television. He was disturbed more by his lack of a reaction than by the crime itself. The world thrives on violence and there have been those who have tried to explore it and its effect on society; there have been many more who have capitalized on the seemingly insatiable and infinite desire for violence; there have been those who have done both simultaneously. But there has never, to my knowledge, someone who has so eloquently, accurately and sensitively explored the effect on this violence on the human psyche as Holden does in his film. By laying down in the same spot where the dead girl lay, Holden literally puts himself into the place of the victim. By exploring violence without showing any he forces his viewer to feel what he, the spectator, feels. By transcending the confines of the film medium into poetry, Holden eliminates the visceral charge that the viewer gets while watching the films of Sam Peckinpah or Oliver Stone, just to name two directors who have purported to explore, while instead exploiting, the societal fascination with, and apparent dependence on violence.
While the segment '18,000 Dead in Gordon Head' is only one of fourteen segments of Holden's film, and is the most explicit exploration of violence and its effects, it is not the only one. The segment 'The Jew and the Irishman', in which Holden recounts a joke he once heard, "Did you hear the one about the Jew and the Irishman?" By skipping the joke itself and going straight to the punchline that Jews are greedy and not to be trusted, and the Irish are drunk, stupid and violence, Holden removes any potential humor and forces the viewer to come to grips with the absurdity of telling such jokes. That racism and cultural intolerance are not funny; that by telling such jokes people are spreading these misconceptions and making it harder for invisible boundaries to be crossed; that even if these crimes were committed unintentionally it makes no difference: the damage has been done.
'Hitler! (revisited)', the segment detailing Holden's brother Niall's struggle with mental illness, shines a light on the world's eagerness to shut mentally unstable away and not deal with them. He discusses his own feelings of guilt and the ultimate irony that, after suffering a stroke and being put into a mental hospital and, even there, Niall did not fit in. Holden says, of visiting his brother, "going there was scary, but it was worth it." This statement can be also applied to what follows. The tragedy of Niall's situation gives way to a discussion, Niall's in fact, and his first one in some time, about Adolf Hitler. Holden states that, decades after Hitler's crimes and death, we are only now beginning to ask: "How was Hitler?" and, more importantly, "Why was Hitler?" The answer is not an easy one, and perhaps the world will never know the answer, but Holden bravely makes an assertion that most people would likely either shy away from or reject, that Hitler represents what we fear most in ourselves. Hitler was a man who slaughtered millions of people on ethnic grounds, but the fact cannot be avoided: he was a man. If one human being was capable of this, why is it hard to assume that every human being is capable of this? The terrifying fact of the matter is that it is not hard to assume that, once the thought occurs.
After the thirteenth segment, Holden has explored societal, racial, institutional and individual violence and has said all he wishes to say using words, thereafter choosing to let images speak for him. We first see trains, then the machinery inside trains, then trains again, and we hear nothing but train sounds and accompanying music for the last twenty minutes of the film. Why, during the segment that the film takes its name from, is there no dialogue? Do trains and their machinery speak for themselves? Does the viewer already know what the director is saying when he shows a train and what makes it work? The train is power, the ability to escape and the former symbol of progressive technology. Though trains have little use for most people any more they are still present and will likely be around for a long time to come. Holden, like most people in the world today, wishes to escape the violence that defines and drives society, but he knows it is impossible: like the train - pretty or ugly, modern or archaic, useful or destructive - violence is here to stay.