JonathanRosenbaum.com

Outfoxing the Film Industry

From the Chicago Reader (July 30, 2004). — J.R.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism

Directed by Robert Greenwald.

DVDs are bringing about rapid and substantial changes in the way we consume movies, and in film culture itself. A case in point is Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, which premiered July 13 on DVD and video rather than in theaters. You could have seen it at one of more than 3,000 “house party” viewings organized by MoveOn.org two Sundays ago, or you can just buy it online for $9.95 plus shipping as I did. There must be lots of others like me, because Outfoxed has been Amazon’s top-selling video title for over a week now, and the last time I looked it had 133 customer reviews.

Watching the muckraking examination of the Fox News Channel at home had its advantages: as soon as it was over, I was able to switch directly to Fox to see if it really was as awful as Greenwald’s documentary maintained. (It was.) There are also advantages to keeping a DVD like this on the shelf: you can refer back to certain points in the film for clarification. And facts aren’t all you might want to go back to: if it’s an art film, for instance, you can jump to a favorite passage — a camera movement, a facial expression, a composition, or the delivery of a line of dialogue — the same way you can open a book to revisit some favorite lines of poetry. I’ve even found that there are some passages of film poetry that reveal themselves only when you have this power of effortless access.

Whatever the reasons, the annual profits from DVDs outstripped those of the box office a few years ago. In both businesses most of the money comes from a few blockbuster titles. But there’s something new going on when a supposedly marginal polemic like Outfoxed can catapult itself into the big time, challenging entrenched media powers in the process.

While largely effective, Greenwald’s documentary is not a complete success. Its biggest limitation is its insistence that Fox News is an offense against liberals and the Democratic Party rather than against people in general. It also intermittently taints its analysis with the same kind of primitive insults used by Fox. We are told, for example, that conservative commentator Sean Hannity is “a good-looking, all-American, clean-cut kind of guy,” that Alan Colmes, his liberal foil, “is a little squirrelly looking,” and that the contrast “sends a subtle message.” What is this subtle message? That the not-so-subtle public, including you and me, won’t give political credence to some anchors because of the way they look? Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys.

But it’s probably inevitable that those who gaze long enough into the abyss of Fox News will come away with coarsened sensibilities. The sort of nastiness practiced by Hannity and Bill O’Reilly is contagious. One of the film’s centerpieces is O’Reilly’s arrogant verbal assault on Jeremy Glick, the son of a transit worker who died in the World Trade Center attack. It’s difficult to imagine that the exchange could have gone on much longer without Glick losing his cool as well:

O’Reilly: “Shut up. Shut up.”

Glick: “Oh, please don’t tell me to shut up.”

O’Reilly: “As respect — as respect — in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians –”

Glick: “By radical extremists who were trained by this government…”

O’Reilly: “Out of respect for him…”

Glick: “…not the people of America…”

O’Reilly: “…I’m not going to–”

Glick: “…the people of the ruling class, the small minority.”

O’Reilly: “Cut his mike. I’m not going to dress you down anymore, out of respect for your father. We will be back in a moment with more of The Factor.”

Glick: “That means we’re done?”

O’Reilly: “We’re done.”

Before I watched Greenwald’s 77-minute documentary, I had to sit through a trailer for his previous opus, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (2003). Or so it seemed at the time — I’d momentarily forgotten I had only to hit “menu” on my remote to skip past this imposition, an option unavailable in theaters and less automatic on a VCR. It’s not that I mind trailers, but it’s nice to have some choice in the matter.

I wasn’t interested in this particular trailer because I’d already seen Uncovered at a MoveOn.org-sponsored house party held in my neighborhood last December. About two dozen people were present, the youngest in their 20s, the oldest perhaps in their late 70s. After the screening someone suggested that we try to get Uncovered shown at the Music Box or a multiplex; I countered that I thought that house parties of this kind were a far more appropriate, meaningful, and consequential venue for a film of this kind. (Uncovered, incidentally, is screening at a bar this weekend — a setting that arguably falls somewhere between a house party and a theatrical exhibition. See listings in Section Two for details.)

Given that MoveOn.org — which sponsored Uncovered and Outfoxed and created a ready-made audience for them — is entirely an Internet phenomenon, it seems clear that the notion of “alternative media channels” is fast becoming obsolete. In March the organization sent out an e-mail asking its 2.9 million members to help pay for an anti-Bush television ad featuring Richard Clarke. The ad, which cost $300,000, was aired on Fox and CNN just six days later.

One of the major social potentials of DVDs, it seems to me, is to revive the kind of student-run film societies that proliferated on college campuses in the 60s, albeit with a major difference. Film societies back then depended on 16-millimeter prints, cumbersome projectors that required a modicum of technical savvy, and the availability of auditorium space. A film club that shows DVDs, on the other hand, can exist in someone’s house or apartment, in a storefront or a bar — just about anywhere on the planet.

Much as videos conform to different and incompatible regional formats (NTSC in the U.S. and Japan, PAL in most of Europe, SECAM in France), DVDs are stamped with one of six different regional codes. In the case of video, these barriers are an accidental legacy of varying technical standards adopted by individual nations when television was new. The subdivision of the DVD market happened by design: regional codes were created by the movie industry to protect its copyrights and profits. They’re meant, for example, to prevent DVDs of a given blockbuster released in region one (the U.S.) from reaching region six (China) before the film has completed its theatrical run in the latter market. But the codes are becoming irrelevant, given the increasing availability of multiregional DVD players, which can be had for as little as $60. (Reportedly there are also ways to “hack” some single-region players into multiregional ones, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for advice on how to do that.)

It’s worth investing in a multiregional player if you want to take full advantage of the global movie market. I’m not just talking about foreign films with English subtitles: some of the best American movies are more readily available in other countries than here. Long-distance shopping is easily managed and often less expensive than you might think. (Airmail postage isn’t cheap, even for something as lightweight as a DVD, but when you buy abroad you don’t have to worry about sales tax.)

We’re rapidly approaching a time when anyone living anywhere in the world can theoretically enjoy access to the canon of world cinema once reserved for film students in world capitals like New York or Paris. But availability isn’t everything: people need to know something exists before they can choose to see it. This is why I started writing a column called “Global Discoveries on DVD” for the Canadian quarterly Cinema Scope a year and a half ago. The things I’ve seen since I began monitoring the world market seem to me full of promise. I’ll limit myself to citing a few examples from the past month or so.

In February one of my favorite Russian movies, Boris Barnet’s Okraina (1933), played at Facets Cinematheque. Enduring neglect of this masterpiece moved me to bellyache in these pages that “most mainstream critics and studios tend to be lazy about enlarging the canon, and so they probably don’t have a clue as to what all the important films are, since most of the films ever made aren’t on video or DVD. Of course some of the best films are available at the video store, but the mainstream goes on limiting its definition of classics to films everyone already knows.” This month Kino Video released Okraina (under its English title, Outskirts) along with an earlier Barnet feature, The Girl With the Hatbox, on DVD.

In a chain store I recently picked up The Greatest Jazz Films Ever, a multiregional two-disc set released last year in Spain, which includes the best footage of Charlie Parker in existence. Shot by Life photographer Gjon Mili for an uncompleted follow-up to his Oscar-winning 1944 short Jammin’ the Blues, the sequence captures a relaxed, charismatic Parker miming to a prerecorded track with Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, and Buddy Rich. I first saw this footage six years ago on a rare Japanese video release called Improvisation. When I included the sequence on a list of my 1,000 favorite films I composed for my latest collection of essays, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, published in April by Johns Hopkins University Press, I wasn’t expecting to see it again anytime soon, much less find it cheap at a local mass retailer. Ironically, the liner notes identify other selections as new to DVD, but not this, the rarest of them all. To all appearances the compilers didn’t even realize what they had — a situation, alas, that’s all too typical.

Many masterpieces of short film have been almost inaccessible for decades, even in their countries of origin. Into this category fall Jean-Pierre Melville’s 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown, Maurice Pialat’s Love Exists, Alain Resnais’ The Song of Styrene (shot in color and ‘Scope and easily the most beautiful “industrial” ever made), Jean-Luc Godard’s Charlotte and Her Jules, and Jacques Rivette’s Fool’s Mate. But a DVD made from beautiful new prints of these five films and three others has just been issued in Korea under a misleading title, Their First Films. I obtained a copy of this gem from a U.S. distributor specializing in schlock horror.

Other rarities I’ve recently found include Chekhov’s Motifs (aka Chekhovian Motifs), one of the craziest features by the Russian eccentric Kira Muratova (it’s on a Russian label with optional English subtitles and available in the U.S.); a fascinating collection of animated World War II propaganda from Disney, some of it unavailable since that time; a splendid French letterboxed copy of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West; Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger and two Kenji Mizoguchi films (released on the British labels BFI and Artificial Eye, respectively); and Louis Feuillade’s stunning 1916 French serial Judex on an American label. (Unfortunately my favorite Feuillade serial, Tih Minh, has yet to find its way to DVD, although his Les vampires and Fantomas have both come out.)

All of this stuff is available to anyone with access to the Internet, which is as much a part of this adventure as DVD technology itself. Film buffs around the world, many of them still in their 20s, are swapping information and educating one another about this unprecedented bounty via blogs and chat groups. All this is amplifying and intensifying grassroots, word-of-mouth communication in a way that threatens to forever alter the power bases that influence cultural matters. Because you no longer have to live in Paris, New York, or Chicago in order to find out who Feuillade was or why he’s so great — and because a “movie” like Outfoxed no longer has to open at a theater or even exist on celluloid in order to have a sizable social impact.

One of the extras on the Outfoxed DVD is a 30-minute “making of” feature, detailing the homey way the documentary was compiled by a team of volunteers in a very short period of time. There are several interviews with individuals assigned to monitor certain shows and cull examples of particular abuses. The ones we meet are all women, many of them suburban retirees. It’s another example of the way that cinema is evolving into a cottage industry, as it becomes easier than ever to make, preserve (at least in digital form), and disseminate. Of course, it’s also becoming more difficult than ever to decide what to watch, as the choices are quickly becoming infinite.

A Night At The Nickelodeon

Northwestern professor Scott Curtis will present a program of films from the first decade of the 20th century, including The Dancing Pig (1907), The Acrobatic Fly (1908), D.W. Griffith’s early masterpiece A Corner in Wheat (1909), and Teddy Roosevelt in Africa (1909). (JR)

Maria Full of Grace

This watchable and well-made feature debut by American independent writer-director Joshua Marston is also very much a showcase for Catalina Sadino Moreno, who plays the eponymous lead with grit and energy. Maria is a fearless and attractive 17-year-old Colombian who leaves her job on a rose plantation to work as a drug mule. For $5,000 she swallows more than 60 rubber pellets of heroin, to be reclaimed from her stool after flying to New Jersey; should a pellet break internally, death will quickly ensue. The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable. R, 101 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Pipers Alley.

Unsafe at Any Size [THE CORPORATION]

From the Chicago Reader (July 23, 2004). — J.R.

The Corporation

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott

Written by Joel Bakan, Harold Crooks, and Achbar

Narrated by Mikela J. Mikael.

A month ago I attended back-to-back press screenings of two major documentaries, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Corporation, which finally opened here last week. Though it would have broken with industry protocol to have said so at the time, before both movies had opened, it was clear that The Corporation — a 2003 Canadian film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan — was a better film, and second looks at both movies has only confirmed this impression. Michael Moore’s movie probably startles people who rely mostly on TV for their news, but The Corporation will shock even those who keep close track of newspapers and magazines. In fact, it goes beyond shocking in obliging us to ask ourselves how far we’re all prepared to go in our defense of capitalism.

Far enough to jeopardize our health and the survival of the planet? Maybe not, but at the moment it’s corporations that appear to have the power to decide. And the stories this film uses to demonstrate that are chilling. I’m reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s description of the spark that led to Lolita: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”

This riveting cinematic essay includes no less than 40 talking heads, ranging from writers such as Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Howard Zinn to CEOs such as Ray Anderson (of Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer), Sam Gibara (Goodyear Tire), Robert Keyes (Canadian Council for International Business), Chris Komisarjevsky (Burson-Marsteller Worldwide), and Sir Mark Moody-Stuart (Royal Dutch/Shell). The wide variety of voices — roughly a quarter of which belong to women — and the cogent narration, written by Harold Crooks and Achbar, make for a highly entertaining and instructive look at a subject that’s rarely discussed in detail.

Michael Moore’s presence in both films suggests that they should be regarded as complementary. The Corporation is more intellectual and nuanced, Fahrenheit 9/11 more emotional and direct. The Corporation is more interested in concepts, Fahrenheit 9/11 in personalities. Both are unambiguously leftist and activist. The Corporation is much harder to describe, which may be why it isn’t receiving the media attention lavished on Fahrenheit 9/11. Yet what it has to say about the future of the planet and the way we live is even more compelling.

I can’t think of another documentary that’s taught me as much as this one. I hadn’t known, for example, that the song “Happy Birthday” is owned by Time Warner (which expects to be paid every time it’s sung in a movie), that for a spell Bechtel controlled the use of water in Bolivia’s third-largest city (the contract even prohibited collecting rainwater), that one can legally patent “anything that’s alive except for a human being” (including genes and microbes), that Fanta Orange was created because Coca-Cola wanted to do business in Nazi Germany (where IBM punch cards were used to collate information on concentration-camp prisoners), or that, according to a recent U.S. Treasury report, in one week alone 57 American corporations were fined for trading with official enemies of the U.S., including terrorists.

This 145-minute movie may not send us out of the theater with the kind of simple directive Fahrenheit 9/11 did in implicitly urging us to vote a president out of office, but it doesn’t encourage us to accept our situation either. It also shows us how activism has already made a difference — how massive street demonstrations in Bolivia eventually gave Bolivians free access to water again and how residents in Arcata, California, managed to block more chain restaurants from moving in.

The Corporation refuses to limit its argument to sound-bite problems with sound-bite solutions. It starts out with a hilarious critique of the use of one sound-bite term, “bad apple,” when discussing corporate malfeasance. (The same criticism could be made of its use in discussions of torture at Abu Ghraib.) We see a dozen routine, glib examples of its use before the narrator asks, “What’s wrong with this picture? Can’t we pick a better metaphor?” After summoning up a host of alternatives — including “jigsaw,” “sports team,” “family unit,” “telephone system,” “eagle,” “big fish,” and “Frankenstein monster” — the film plunges into a fascinating account of how corporations as we know them today were developed by lawyers from the mid-19th through the early 20th centuries. It ties corporate growth to the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War — and to the 14th Amendment, which was intended to protect the rights of former slaves but later was used to define corporations as if they were persons. We’re told that of the 307 14th Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, 19 were brought by African-Americans, 288 by corporations.

If, legally speaking, corporations are like people — enjoying many of the same freedoms, though saddled with few of the same responsibilities — what kind of people are they? Analyzing corporations the way psychiatrists analyze patients and offering a “personality diagnostic checklist” of diverse “psychic disorders,” The Corporation maintains that the behavior of corporations is often psychotic — a premise that’s less fanciful than it sounds if we bear in mind that sanity is more a social and legal concept than a medical one. Arguing this position seems like a lawyer’s tactic, so it’s no surprise that Bakan, the main scriptwriter, is a lawyer.

Like Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation is a critique of the mass media, but it’s also smart enough to know that it’s part of the same corporate world it’s exposing. This leads to an especially funny and clever interlude about what it calls “real-life product placement,” in which it uses itself as a prime illustration, and to a pithy explanation from Moore of why some corporations are willing to sponsor his anticorporate shenanigans. We also get a detailed account of how Fox News systematically suppressed two reporters’ evidence of health hazards in milk containing bovine growth hormone — a hormone banned in Canada and Europe but left on the market here because it generates such big profits.

This is a heavy documentary, yet one with a remarkably light touch when articulating even its scariest points. Any movie that can use portions of a campy instructional film from half a century ago to further as well as mock some of its own positions clearly has an advanced sense of rhetoric, not to mention an imaginative grasp of filmmaking possibilities. Above all, this movie’s flair in using anything and everything to build its argument with seamless continuity makes it easy to watch.

Corporate psychoses that lead to corporate offenses are the main bill of fare here, yet the interviewee who registers as most heroic and charismatic isn’t Chomsky (even if he’s less hyperbolic than usual) or Moore (even though he delivers the film’s eloquent last words). It’s Ray Anderson, whose account of how he came to understand environmental concerns and made sustainability the watchword at his carpet company is probably the most meaningful personal story this film has to tell. More broadly, the decision not to divide the world neatly between heroes and villains, as Fahrenheit 9/11 does, encourages us to see the solutions to problems as complex rather than as a simple matter of picking the right political party.

MARTHA: Fassbinder’s Uneasy Testament

Like my essay on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant that was posted here a couple of weeks ago (see below), this article was previously published by Madman in Australia to accompany their DVD release of this later Fassbinder film. Prior to that, it was commissioned by the Fantoma DVD label in the U.S. for their own release of Martha. —J.R.

MARGIT CARSTENSEN: You really are a wretched person.

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER: That’s what I’ve been saying all along.

MARGIT CARSTENSEN: How am I supposed to pull myself together after this?

The following exchange, appearing at the end of a dialogue that took place between the writer-director and his lead actress after the completion of their film Martha in 1973 (1), helps to pinpoint what continues to make that film politically lethal. Fassbinder’s sarcasm, which becomes oddly comforting in most of its on-screen as well as offscreen manifestations, offers a particular kind of challenge to the viewer in Martha that becomes inextricably tied to how one regards its title heroine. Accepting the self-rationalizations and denials of a woman trapped in a monstrous marriage to a sadist is made to seem intolerable, a cause for squirming, and the fact that Fassbinder plays this game as poker-faced high comedy only makes the challenge more formidable.

Vacationing in Rome, a virgin librarian in her early 30s (Carstensen) abruptly loses her domineering father, who collapses from heart failure on the Spanish Steps. Shortly afterwards —- and following the snatching of her purse by Fassbinder regular El Hedi Ben Salem, who has already entered her hotel room in the opening scene, as if to confirm her status as victim — she meets a macho and abusive bridge and dam builder (Peeping Tom’s Karlheinz Böhm) whom she shows an immediate interest in, and winds up marrying him. It’s a match made in heaven between a masochist and a  sadist, with the husband’s contempt, cruelty, and absurdly escalating demands mainly received by this fragile heroine as her proper due and the prescribed duty of any good wife in any bourgeois marriage. It’s an excruciatingly open question whether she finally achieves absolute fulfillment, complete enslavement, or some grotesque combination of the two.

For Fassbinder in his dialogue with Cartensen, it’s a happy ending: “When Martha can no longer take care of herself, she has finally gotten what she wanted all along,” he maintains. Carstensen counters, “I wouldn’t go that far. I really think that this is a resignation on her part.” (2)

The radical cleavage between these positions produces the candy-colored, acid-coated valentine delivered by Martha to viewers, inflected by what may well be Carstensen’s greatest performance in a Fassbinder film. And if we choke on the bittersweet confection, it might be said that the film is functioning politically.

I hasten to add that this proposition is debatable. It was debated, at any rate, by Richard Roud and myself over three issues of Film Comment in the mid-70s (2) — with Roud maintaining that the film wasn’t “believable” without “some notion that Martha is sensually chained” to her husband, and the “super-cool” treatment of the characters making this impossible. For him, therefore, “Martha [has] neither the intensity nor the compassion of The Bitter Tea of Petra von Kant, Ali, or The Merchant of Four Seasons,” three earlier and better-known Fassbinder features. My own intemperate counter-thrust was to argue that the latter three films seemed “to operate as flattery machines…designed to make one conclude I’m compassionate/ironic, therefore I am, while Martha, which makes its social victim as hard to `understand’ as its oppressor, brings one back to the more radical theory of Descartes.” A less fancy version of this argument would be to say that Martha prompts more analysis than attitude, thereby making its difficulties purposeful and ultimately educational in a Brechtian manner, by testing the viewer’s implicit notions of what a bourgeois marriage should be.

But Martha had more practical difficulties to cope with at the time, at least in reaching an American audience. Unlike those three earlier Fassbinder films and many later ones, it failed to surface at the New York Film Festival (which Roud was the director of at the time) or land a stateside distributor, and subsequent legal problems with the Cornell Woolrich estate about its adaptation of a Woolrich story (3) kept it out of reach for a good many years afterwards. Consequently it never had a chance to be become canonized when Fassbinder was still in vogue in the states —- making its release on DVD its first real opportunity, apart from a few appearances at Fassbinder retrospectives, to reach an American public.

***

Part of my reluctance to join the Fassbinder bandwagon in the 70s was that I couldn’t accept without qualms the critical industry’s interpretation of his work as left-wing and subversive — an interpretation that was intricately bound up with the rediscovery of Douglas Sirk’s 50s Hollywood movies by Fassbinder and others. For academics who argued — and in many cases still argue — that Sirk soap operas like Imitation of Life were subversive critiques of American life rather than conformist endorsements, a certain historical sleight of hand was necessary, particularly when it came to dealing with the reception those movies were given back in the 50s. Sirk — a leftist stage director in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany and something of a closet intellectual and campy commercial director in both Germany and the U.S. — made movies with conservative, defeatist, and conformist as well as skeptical and subversive elements. The conservative elements played most indelibly to his producers and his contemporary audiences; the skeptical and subversive ingredients were more often cynically and carefully buried, waiting to be discovered by future generations.

Reconciling Sirk’s or Fassbinder’s cynicism with a leftist political agenda has always struck me as somewhat problematic. Both directors tend to deal with characters incapable of understanding their own social victimization and, more often than not, incapable of change; regarding these doomed characters with ironic compassion, Sirk and Fassbinder are to my mind more defeatist than progressive because their sophistication often consists of recognizing corruption and stupidity, not of imagining situations where they might be overcome. The worlds both directors conjure up resemble more stylish versions of the repressed world found in W.C. Fields comedies — bounded on all sides by irritations and petty frustrations. (”There are no lighthearted moments in any Fassbinder film that I can recall,” Gary Indiana wrote in the February 1996 Artforum. “If a character’s happy, it’s because he hasn’t yet heard the bad news.”) Fassbinder differs most strikingly from Sirk in focusing much more often on working-class and petit bourgeois characters, at least through the mid-70s —- Martha is a notable exception — but the sense of entrapment is no less pronounced.

Sirk’s stylistic hallmarks include theatrical uses of lighting, color, and mirrors, and his thematic hallmarks include blindness; in the most general terms, one could say his movies are about ways of seeing and not seeing. Fassbinder’s self-conscious and relatively low-budget appropriation of these hallmarks make them at once more overt and more overtly campy, so that contemporary readings of Fassbinder films are fully in tune with these attitudes in a way that contemporary readings of Sirk films were not. (For the record, the heroine of Martha is named Martha Hyer — after an actress who played in one Sirk feature, the 1956 Battle Hymn, though Hyer’s association with a genteel and somewhat bookish upscale repression is probably tied more directly to her role in the 1959 Vincente Minnelli melodrama Some Came Running.)

Openly bisexual, tyrannical on his sets, and habitually dressed in a leather jacket, Fassbinder cut a starlike figure in the firmament of New German Cinema, though in this respect he was hardly alone. If the French New Wave of the 60s was mainly about films, the New German Cinema of the 70s was mainly about filmmakers, and each of its best-known directors had a claim to fame that was largely a matter of public image: eccentric exhibitionism crossed with German romanticism (Werner Herzog), existentialist hip crossed with black attire and rock ‘n’ roll (Wim Wenders), Wagnerian pronouncements (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg), a dandy’s stupefied worship of shrines and divas (Werner Schroeter), and so on. When it came to Fassbinder, who improbably evoked both John Belushi and Andy Warhol, one was made to feel that the real drama in film after film wasn’t so much in the makeshift characters or the fruit-salad images but in the offscreen intrigues of a baby Caligula manipulating his players and technicians.

Although it was made for German TV, Martha benefited from having a bigger budget than was usual for Fassbinder at the time — which allowed for some Italian location shooting as well as a more baroque and elaborate camera style than one finds in most of his other features (such as a spectacular 720-degree tracking shot encircling Martha and her husband-to-be, Helmuth Salomon, when they first encounter one another in Rome, immediately after her father’s death). It’s tempting to ascribe this kind of high style — also apparent at the banquet back in Germany where Martha first gets introduced to Helmuth —- to personal factors. Fassbinder appears to have had a particular investment in this material that his collaborators have noted, including cinematographer Michael Balhaus and Karlheinz Böhm in Juliane Lorenz’s Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder (New York/London, Applause Books, 1997). The latter reports that Fassbinder consciously based the portrayal of Helmuth Salomon on his own father, and even dressed like his father in conservative neckties, shirts, and suits throughout the film’s production — an association that seems echoed by Helmuth surfacing magically as a kind of doppelganger-replacement for Martha’s own father immediately after his death.

Certainly the tension that we briefly observe at the outset between father and daughter paves the way for her equally conflicted determination much later in the story to accede hilarously to Helmuth’s desire for her to read a book on dam construction during his absence. (Typically, she initially rebels against this directive, then winds up memorizing entire passages that she can recite to him.) And even without reading the Woolrich story that inspired the plot, one can infer that the paranoia and masochism that underlie Woolrich’s special brand of suspense and horror are perfectly suited to Fassbinder’s ideological project. This obliges us to identify with Martha’s anguish even at those selected moments when we can’t be entirely sure how much her masochism is inflected by her paranoia, thereby obliging us to question how much her imprisonment is a function of her own will. Part of the luminosity and passion of Carstensen’s performance is to make us feel that ambiguity and ambivalence, all the way up to the impending sense of doom carried in the final shot.

Notes
1. “Rainer Werner Fassbinder Talking about Oppression with Margit Carstensen,” translated by Eric Rentschler, in Rentschler’s collection West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York/London: Holmes & Meier, 1988), pp. 168-171.

2. “London Journal” by Jonathan Rosenbaum, January-February 1975, p. 83; “Rotterdam Journal” by Richard Roud, May-June 1975, pp. 2 & 62; “London Journal” by Jonathan Rosenbaum, January-February 1976, p. 4.

3. “For the Rest of Her Life,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1968. To the best of my knowledge, this has been reprinted only twice —- in Ellery Queen’s Murder Menu (1969), and, much later, in Tonight, Somewhere in New York:The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel by Cornell Woolrich (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005), where the editor, Francis M. Nevins, erroneously claims that the story also appeared in his classic posthumous 1971 collection of Woolrich stories, Nightwebs (New York: Harper & Row).

One should add that although Woolrich’s story —- reportedly “the last of his stories that [he] lived to see published,” five years before Martha was made —- begins, like the story, with the couple meeting by chance on a street in Rome (although her father doesn’t figure in the plot) and ends quite similarly with the heroine in a wheelchair, most of the details in between are substantially different. (For one thing, the story is much more explicit about the husband’s sadism than it is about the wife’s masochism.)