excerpt

Keith 2022-03-24 09:03:48

Among Fassbender's many films, "Angst essen Seele auf" (Angst essen Seele auf) only took 2 weeks to shoot, and the original intention was to shoot "Martha" and "Lonely Heart" ” (Effi Briest) as a trial of filmmaking techniques, but never imagined that this film would become another masterpiece by Fassbender.
Fassbender uses a series of layouts to show the embarrassment the outside world has given to this long-awaited couple, and from the side shows the German people's discrimination against foreign workers after the war. He took no time to express the indifference of the onlookers towards the lovers with a close-up of facial expressions, which produced a picture that was stronger in intensity than abuse.
He also continued the usual style of alienation, deliberately leaving silent stagnation between the shots, so as to create the asymmetry in the time measurement of the film and reality, causing the viewers to feel depressed and uncomfortable, and exaggerating the effects of alienation. psychological effect.
The image of the mirror also appears repeatedly in the film. Not only in this film, but even in most of Fassbender’s films, he often uses a camera to capture the characters in the mirror, thereby causing a dislocation between space and reality. Increase the mood of alienation. It can even be said that through the prop of the mirror, the characters in Fassbender's films are separated from themselves, let alone between people.
However, in Fassbender's films, the relationship between people is always fragile, and this idea creates alienation, but also makes the characters in the play forever wandering in betrayal and deception. The pure and honest Ali, even though his smile was as warm as the sun, still turned his back on Amy and slept with other women. Fassbender intentionally stretched the nude shots of men and women during an affair, and brought them into the door frame to form a complete composition, just like Amy and Ali when they were eating steak in a previous visit to Italy, forming a sharp contrast. , expressing silent mockery.
Fassbender's attitude towards male masculinity is extraordinarily calm. In his films, he doesn't see much passion for physical combat, but he is by no means a kind person. He is willing to give the males in the play a chance to be naked, and the camera sweeps in the male symbol without modification. It may be because of his bisexual identity that Fassbender does not show the male body as much as Pasolini, who is gay, pursues the naturalistic male beauty, and will never give a close-up of the phallus directly. Show admiration for males. In similar scenes with Fassbender, his attitude is always ambiguous.
Fassbender is almost toying with his actors. He often knows that actors want to get a certain role, but eventually let them down on purpose. The same is true for the characters in the movie. On the one hand, Fassbender plays the role of the creator, creating all kinds of dramatic tragedies for the characters in the film. On the other hand, he sometimes makes a cameo appearance in the film, participating in the life of the world as a passer-by, and appreciating the masterpieces he made. In the end, death knows everything.
In the film "Fear Devouring the Soul", Fassbender made corresponding adjustments to the characters and plot settings in the original film. This is not to distinguish it from the Serk film, but Fassbender's personal expression.
[Edit this paragraph] "Fear Eats the Soul" determined by the needs of the state -
Those who are familiar with Fassbinder (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) may know that the master director in the history of world cinema is relatively obscure and prefers to use metaphors. The tone is dark and heavy, with an air of despair. Although the title of the film, "Angst essen die Seele auf" (Angst essen die Seele auf) sounds like Fassbender's usual gray tone, in fact, this film is Fassbender's rare warm work. The narrative is clear and easy to understand, the form is popular and complete, and the first part is even warm and touching, full of human care.
However, the director's work "Fear Devouring the Soul" is known for its cruelty. The so-called beauty is also almost suffocating sadness. The ugly faces on the screen, the coldness and fear in the eyes, and the infinite depression in the heart cannot be released.
In the film, the social status of the old cleaner Aimi and the foreign worker Ali reduces the social attributes of the characters from the superfluous elements due to their status, thus avoiding the possibility of excessive inner scruples and struggles. This makes the characters more stateful and tenacious, which invisibly strengthens the emotional instinct of the development of the relationship between the two. Therefore, the process of Ami and Ali from meeting each other and falling in love does not require more writing and is simple and natural. Obviously, this is not the case for people with social status and complex hearts.
In the film, Fassbender intentionally puts the focus on the details of the bonding process of the two people and the emotion after getting rid of the surrounding pressure. All kinds of unrecognized emotions faced: relatives, neighbors, store owners, Aimi's colleagues, etc. The tangible and intangible pressures are clearly and vividly presented in the film. Fassbender presents in more detail the state of all these pressures when they finally collapse and dissipate, revealing the hypocrisy and frailty of their essence. Fassbender uses the power of details to present the whole process naturally and completely, so that the truth of life itself expresses what he wants to tell. In this process, Fassbender's strong control over the plot is reflected. For example, in the film, Ami and Ali's trip is a turning point for emotional pressure to break down, and it also becomes the starting point for problems between the two people. The two achieve a natural alternation, which appears in Fassbender's handling. Clean and natural. The narrative drag and clutter are avoided.
Fassbender uses various means to naturally simplify the process of emotional development of characters, and intensifies the pressure encountered by the social attributes of individuals in the process of combining two people. This is designed so that when all the external pressure faced by this unacceptable emotion in the film gradually fades away, the problems between the two people in this emotion devour this hard-won emotion, and their At this moment, the feeling of powerlessness in the face of all this has become more prominent. This emotion, because of the instinct of love when they first united, because of their hardships and courage when they were under pressure, and the lethality highlighted by the essential problem of emotion, now reaches the depths of the dark essence.
Fassbender's clear grasp of emotion and the essential state of life, as well as his ability to control the state of characters and plots and the language of the film to serve its expression, enable Fassbender to cut into his films from a more essential point of view. Life, at the level closest to the essence of things, realizes one's expressive needs. But life is not simplified here in Fassbender, he just gets closer, gets close to it with his own means and methods, even squeezes it to make it reveal its essence. In the film "Fear Eats the Soul", life is not distorted by the underlying state of being cut into. Everything is real, and the stratification of society still exists even at the lowest level. People's work, emotions, skin, and even nationality can become factors of division. When people follow Ami's gaze and look at the new foreign female worker who sits alone on the stairs where Ami sat not long ago, life is particularly cold and real because of this gaze.
For the pressure from all parties, Ami, the cleaner and the foreign worker Ali, couldn't find a more appropriate reason. She could only think that everything was out of "jealousy". Relatives, neighbors, shopkeepers, Aimi's colleagues and even restaurant waiters, people may not have such uniform hostility simply because they envy the affection between a cleaner and a foreign worker younger than her. No matter how happy they are. In the film, it is precisely because of the ambiguous state of the rejecters that the ambiguous nature of life is revealed. Life rejects everything that violates its habitual rule from all levels and corners. There will be no specific reasons. Yes, that's just because it's different.
In the film, the reason for the downplaying of the surrounding pressure may not be explained only by the "availability of Aimi to others". The reasons are complicated: time, emotional support, wedging persistence, etc., including the neutralizing effect of the availability of characters, but this is obviously not the most important, but if you are close, you will It is found that, although not the most important, it will be the most obvious. Because "useful" in life is the most essential demand of society for individuals. And when society expresses its acceptance of the individual, it must also begin from its "useful" state. In the process of showing the diminution of pressure, Fassbender captures the manifestation of this social characteristic of man as a means of presenting the diminution of pressure in the film. In the process of showing the change in the attitude of the son, you can feel that this change is just a compromise made by time and need, and rejection still exists. Life is just like that.
In the film "Fear Eats the Soul", the emotional cracks between Ami and Ali begin to appear. Ali comes to the house of the hostess of the bar in a daze. When Ali slowly takes off his clothes in the dark, the woman walks over and the two go to bed in the dark. The distance between the camera and the character, the crowding of the room by the outline of the door, the light, and the movement of the characters accurately reveal Ali's heart at the moment: he feels the annoyance and confusion of the emotional rift with Aimi. At the same time, the dazed nature of emotional engulfment is clearly and accurately displayed at the same time.
In the film, because of the accuracy of cutting into life and the accurate nature of Fassbender's grasp of its essential state, the film shows its accurate and true beauty everywhere. In the film "Fear Devouring the Soul", Ami and Ali are not separated in the end. Although this is Fassbender's intentional arrangement, fear exists because of this, because the daze will still exist, and the swallowing will continue. But that's what life is really like, and Fassbender is just letting it show itself for what it is. For two people who are truly in love, any pressure from the outside world is not the fatal part of their emotions. Fear comes from between two people who are in love, because it comes from "love" itself.
But in fact, objectively speaking, all these evaluations and analysis after the film are all in vain. It is difficult for Fassbender to be classified by rational definitions, and it is impossible to define any of Fassbender's films in a fixed way. Perhaps this is also the genius of Fassbender.


"The more free, the more emancipated, the more beautiful": Fassbender, a self-proclaimed romantic anarchist, likes to blaze new trails and pursue sharp and intense effects. "With blood, tears, violence, hatred, death and love" The audience provoked and won the profound meaning in aesthetics and sociology, thus liberating people's minds and giving "people the freedom to dream with excitement". We are all inquisitors within ourselves. You cannot escape the disturbing and horrific phenomena of this age. You even feel that the real world is more dramatic than fiction. But more often we forgive reality and become limited. In fact, true artists want to write a book of liberty, they revere wild inspiration and absurd whimsy, rage and unrelenting ecstasy in a corrupted nervous system. Fassbender is also a lonely big boy: he is moody, impatient, vengeful, chaotic, and often vexatious: "Only the anger and ruthless ecstasy that exists in the artist's corrupt nervous system is the real creation of art. A source of inspiration. The artist must be inhuman and superhuman; he must maintain a strange and alienated relationship with all of us."
"There is no love, only love is possible": Fassbender chooses women as protagonists on the screen . But women are just a carrier in his films, and in his eyes, he will never find a more powerful means of expression than women's loveless picture of him. Love no longer exists, it has evolved into a "glorified form of exploitation", a "most appropriate, insidious, and effective means of social oppression", which stimulates the animal nature in the human subconscious and turns the process of history into a man The process of torturing each other, biting each other and finally swallowing each other with women, men and men, women and women, it is a pile of fragments reflecting the illusion of the world after the "magic mirror" is broken. Fassbender, in the form of a film, fulfilled the last wish of a Western philosopher, that is, "I hope that human beings will realize their own shortcomings: lack of love".


Fass-Binder's Four Classics
"Fear Eats the Soul"
Veronica Fosse's Desire: The Final Chapter of the Female Vision
"Maria Braun's Marriage"
"Sailor Quiller: The Love Song


of Homosexuality" Spinder's Films Chronology
Love is Colder than Death / Liebe ist Kalter als der Tod 1969
Foreign Worker / Katzelmacher 1969 Heartbreak
/ Warum lauft Herr R.Amok 1969
The Statue of the Black Death / Gotter der Pest 1969
American GI / Der Amerikanische Soldat 1970
Journey / Die Niklashauuser Fahrt 1970
River of the Dead / Rio Das Mortes 1970
Coffee House / The Coffee House 1970
A Little Bit / Whitey 1970
Beware of the Holy Whore / Beware of the Holy Whore 1970
Aegist's Pioneers / Pionees in Ingolstadt 1970
Petra von Conte's Bitter Tears / Die Bittere Tranen der Petra von Kant 1972
The Merchant of Four Seasons 1972
Deer Crossing Point / Deer Crossing 1972
Eight Hours Don't Make a Day 1972
Bremen Freedom 1972
Wild Games / Wild Games 1972
Fear Eats the Soul / Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 1973
Marta / Martha 1973
World on a Wire 1973
Norma Heyman / Nora Helmer 1973
Samurai of Freedom / Fist-Right of Freedom 1974
Effie Brister / Effi Briest 1974
Fox and His Friend / Fox and His Friend 1974
Mother Karanda Goes to Heaven / Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven 1975
Fear of Fear / Fear of Fear 1975
Chinese Roulette / Chinese Roulette 1976
Despair / Despair 1977
Germany Autumn / Germany in Autumn 1978
The Marriage of Maria Braun 1978
One Year and Thirteen Months / In a Year with Moons 1978
The Third Generation / Die Dritte Generation 1979
Bailey Alexanderplatz (15 hours TV) ) / Berlin Alexander Platz (MS) 1980
Lili Marlene / Lili Marlene 1981
Lola / Lola 1982
The Desire of Veronika Voss / Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss 1982
The Mariners of Fog Harbor / Querelle 1983




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Extended Reading
  • Osbaldo 2022-03-25 09:01:23

    #198|@BAM. The mirroring of the brightest light on the tiniest emerging tears in two pairs of eyes. The gravity-defying tears that are in eternal conception, that fold back into the interiority of self.

  • Timmy 2022-03-22 09:02:59

    Red is a hint of lust, and it also symbolizes potential fear and threat. A large number of secondary shots are taken through barbed wire, doors and windows, and stairs, and the characters seem to be in a confined and narrow space. Fassbender learned from Bresson's minimalism and deconstructed the rejection of dissidents in the German national character in the post-Nazi era [in today's Germany, it seems to be too leftist], strictly speaking, the ending is not pessimistic , but reverts to a pathological normalization

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul quotes

  • Emmi Kurowski: But when we're together, we must be nice to each other. Otheriwse, life's not worth living.

  • Emmi Kurowski: Maybe...

    Ali: Yes?

    Emmi Kurowski: Why don't you come up for a while? I'll make us a coffee, and maybe the rain will stop.

    Ali: I'd like to, but...

    Emmi Kurowski: People always say "but". And nothing ever changes.