by ·Comments Off on I Only Want You to Love Me (1976, Rainer Fassbinder)

Not many places the story can go after opening with our guy in jail. It rewinds to him building a house for his hateful mom, then further, as a boy also failing to please mom. After the house, he moves new wife Erika to Munich and gets a construction job, where he works himself half to death (this is my second movie of the week where someone finances some furniture). Sure he’s a shopaholic capitalist, but he simply bought into the dream that if you work hard at a job you’re very good at, you can afford a comfortable life for your family. She gets pregnant, moves in with her parents, and he takes it hard, working more overtime and buying more stuff until he cracks under the strain and murders a friendly landlord.

Before the furniture arrived:

Mouseover to turn your murder-witness neighbor into your disappointed mother:
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by ·Comments Off on Chinese Roulette (1976, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mom (Petra von Kant) and Dad (Alex Allerson of all the ’76 Fassbinders) are leaving town on separate business trips, leaving their daughter with the mute nurse (Godard’s Married Woman). But all three adults are having secret affairs, and head to the same country house, where they try to play it off and have a good time together since they’re all equally busted. Dad is with hottie Anna Karina, mom is with dad’s employee Bruno, the nanny is with blonde Volker Spengler (fly guy of Satan’s Brew).

This is too many major actors in one place, and the daughter can’t hold her own, also is weirdly dubbed, but she gets to dance on her crutches to Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” Of course the adults end up playing mind games, and the vibes turn very sour during the titular Q&A guessing game, then Mom shoots the Mute Nurse, kind of a bum ending.

honi soit qui mal y pense:

by ·Comments Off on The State I Am In (2000, Christian Petzold)

Would’ve made a good One Battle After Another double-feature. A wanted couple is staying on the move, low on resources and comrades. Their teenage daughter is starting to become a liability, acting impulsively and attracting attention. In increasing order of importance, the daughter just wants: cigarettes, stability, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, trip-hop. A boy she meets tells her about his parents vacant modernist house, so the family moves in and plans one more bank job. Surely if they can pull this one off they’ll be home free.

Dad ended up in the teen trilogy Vampire Sisters. Mom would return as the mom in Miroirs No. 3, and the girl would go on to be stunt-cast in Carlos.

by ·Comments Off on Satan’s Brew (1976, Rainer Fassbinder)

Good manic pervert movie, like a euro-arthouse John Waters, with rapid banter and exclusively eccentric characters. I’ve seen Kurt Raab in four other Fassbinder movies, always in minor roles. Here he’s the lead, a broke poet, having become violent and desperate with writer’s block. His put-upon wife and shut-in brother (a fly-plucker whom Kurt once calls a guter junge, hmmm) are supportive, but he finds a devoted fan of his work in Petra von Kant. Illness, murder and fake murder all follow, as Raab starts plagiarizing a famous poet and acting as if possessed by that poet, until pulled back to earth by his mess of a family.

A writer contemplates his work:

Kurt’s parents are… pleased? to see him:

A writer attempts to channel a better writer:

by ·Comments Off on Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, Werner Herzog)

We follow Fini, a deaf/blind advocate who visits her people in different family and institutional situations. It’s almost a public-service issues doc, showing sad disabled people and explaining how systems have failed them. But ever since watching Little Dieter I’ve known that Herzog likes to take his doc subjects to unusual places, and who else would take a party of blind women to a cactus garden?

Vogel: “confirms Herzog as the mysterious new humanist of the 1970s, light-years removed from the sentimentality of the Italian neorealists and the simplistic propaganda of untalented documentary film radicals.”

Hand communication:

by ·Comments Off on The Big Mess (1971, Alexander Kluge)

Space explorers set out to find a home beyond the reach of monopolist capitalism – sounds serious, but the actors in the rebel mission’s crew are absolutely goofing around. Early on, their ship catches fire and they’re not sure whether to try to save it or to sell it for scrap.

Some good montage, and the lo-fi outer space effects are fun, but the actors reading from scripts with indifferent blocking is too much. I guess this is self-consciously bad, but it is bad. Raymond Gun-Virus speaks for us all: “Extra .5 star for the 100+ individually designed intertitles and a live-in-space performance by Amon Düül II.”

My first by film-philospher Kluge, falling somewhere in the middle of his features both chronologically and in popularity. I don’t know what his whole deal is yet, besides that his career spans from Lang’s latest works to our all-digital present, and Cornell calls him “the German Godard.” This movie’s janky space-travel aspect reminds me of Ga-Ga, which I loved – am I not supposed to be watching more of Szulkin’s weird sci-fi films instead of digging up new German nonsense?

Hark Bohm, Fassbinder regular and a doctor in Underground:

by ·Comments Off on Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mother K receives a bit of bad news: her husband went to work and murderer-suicided his boss. She gathers the family (son Ernst and his wife Irm Hermann, dancer daughter Corinna), and their situation attracts reporter Jorg and a communist couple. Everyone involved exploits the tragedy in their own way, also a sharp movie about political fractures within families.

L-R: Mother K, son, Irm, bearer of bad news

Communists:

Mom is the lead from Fear Eats the Soul in another big role. Ernst (star of Fear of Fear the same year) and wife Irm Hermann get the hell out of there and return pregnant. Mom’s daughter Ingrid Caven (a Year with 13 Moons star and a Suspiria Remake teacher) shacks up with the reporter (the large-faced star of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day) and finds a job in town playing off her family’s infamy. After the daughter leaves, mom calls up communists Peeping Tom and Petra von Kant, who were the last people to be nice to her, but she wants real action while they say things like “it’s a slow process / we can’t work miracles / we won’t forget you.” Falling in with increasingly radical groups, Mother K meets anarchist Horst (Matthias Fuchs of Decoder) whose plan is to bring guns to the newspaper and demand a retraction of the reporter’s sensationalist article. We get a couple of possible ways out of this: a bloody shootout via intertitle, then a happy fantasy where Mother K survives, is abandoned by everyone again, and meets a nice lonely man.

dancer, reporter:

by ·Comments Off on Germany Year 90 Nine Zero / Phony Wars (Godard)

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991)

Bursts and scraps, especially impressive in headphones.
“Now that the cold war is over, being American is pointless.”

Lemmy Constantine travels through Germany, speaks three languages. Good stuff.

–
Phony Wars (2023)

More scrapbooky than ever, and made of smaller scraps – his scrappiest one yet, but charmingly homemade in its montages and handwriting, without the typed titles.

Still, even when directors seem to have fully ignored or subverted the assignment, I continue not to like shorts commissioned by fashion companies. May ’68, tho. :raised-fist: