Fear Eats the Soul Rainer Fassbinder (FDR; 1974)
Fear Eats the Soul Rainer Fassbinder (FDR; 1974) Brigitte Mira; El Hedi ben Salem
Viewed 29 July 2024 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket £7
it’s a fairy tale
Fassbinder’s ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ (FES) is a film that works in spite of the anomalous relationship that lies at the core of Fassbinder’s script. The film works because of Fassbinder’s decision to frame his story as a sort of fairy tale, an ironic inverted telling of a familiar narrative in which the forces of evil conspire to prevent a relationship between two people who love each other, a relationship that is defined as unacceptable on account of its mixed race nature: an Arab man and a European/German woman.
Script wise Fassbinder reworks the logic of traditional folk tales in terms of the anomalous attributes of the two main characters. The anomaly arises from the difference in age and physicality between Ali and Emmi: Ali young tall handsom Moroccan – Emmi a short dumpy woman in late middle age. To make this relationship plausible on screen Fassbinder employs a de-intensified theatrical structure to present the action, so that whilst off stage levels of physicality are suggested between the couple, the physical attraction shown between them is restrained and evokes the idea of mutual need rather than passion, affection rather than love. A Disneyesque touch perhaps but subverted by radical intent.
Fassbinder’s scenario draws on Brecht’s theatrical ideas which centre about what should constitute effective drama. For Brecht it was the representation of ideas that was critical. In theatre it was essential to avoid the simplistic emotional manipulations that characterise Bourgeois entertainment. The purpose of the characters is to represent expressive ideas in relation to their situations. This doesn’t banish emotions, far from it, but understanding and reflecting the characters’ position (in particular social positions and their contradictions) in wider relational terms should be the paramount purpose of the writer and director.
Built on the structure of the fairy tale, Fassbinder’s script employs a mechanics of social relations. His script works because the societal relations he draws on to drive and shape the narrative are real, even if anti-architypal. (in Sleeping Beauty it is the male who is the active agent; in FES it is Emmi who is instigator) The relationship between Ali and Emmi enable us to see the social reactions it provokes. Fassbinder’s filming is stage oriented in that the unfolding scenes are contrived and composed so as to allow the viewer to see what is happening, but always implanted in the wider social perspective. Through the lens of the camera, the viewer is allocated the role of the privileged observer. There are no point of view shots, the personal reactions of Ali and Emmi are not (until late in the film) the issue. At key moments in the scenario the camera tracks in close or wide or moves to reveal a situation, but always so that we may better see/ understand the forces at work on Ali and Emmi.
As they move in together and commit as a couple by marrying, we see how the net of the surrounding condemnatory interactive social forces draws in to isolate and reject them. Both the neighbours and her grown up children punish Emmi for forming a relationship outside her racial group. The family scene when Emmi gathers her children togaether to tell them she has married Ali, takes the form of the classic moment of revelation (such as when a family all gather in the lawyer’s office to hear the reading of a will). Emmi’s revelation is the most emotionally charged sequence in FES, as one of her sons kicks in her TV unable to supress his rage at what he sees as his mother’s racial betrayal. This incident is immediately defused by Emmi’s refusal to react, her impassivity, her acceptance of her son’s action.
The first part of FES documents the winding up of the mechanics of racial discrimination to leave Emmi completely isolated from the social matrix; the second part of the film scripts the somewhat humerous unwinding of these same dramatic mechanics, as the self interest of the various parties, both neighbours and family proceeds to temper their rejection of Emmi and Ali, engendering in them at least a superficial acceptance of the relationship. This ‘unwinding’ of socially prejudicial racism happens purely at the individual level: as Fassbinder makes clear in a late scene comprising a conversation between Emmi and her follow cleaners, the social forces generating xenophobia and race hate with their underlying negative stereotypical justifications don’t go away. They lie dormant waiting an appropriate pretext or moment to reassert themselves. Ali as an Arab may be tolerated, may be awarded a sort of status as an honorary German, but all the underlying prejudices remain in play, ready to re-assert themselves given a justificatory excuse.
‘Fear Eats the Soul’ is Fassbinder’s representation of racism at work in Western culture. Laying bare the mechanics of racism through ingrained stereotypes expressing themselves through direct aggressive discrimination. Fassbinder makes his point to a nation where these same forces manifested themselves in the final solution of Nazism.
But there is also strange logic of the fairytale that makes up the substrate of the film, underlying the scenario and shaping the viewer’s response to the material. The logic is of course centred on Emmi and Ali, but it is Ali who really stands out by reason of his physicality, his body. There is an intrinsic nobility about El Hedi’s person: his dignity his presence his magnanimity his beauty. He has the characteristics of a ‘fairy tale prince’, an ideal type rather than a regular guy. Towards the end of the film when angered or perhaps slighted by Emmi’s casual possessive behaviour towards him he leaves her and briefly resumes a relationship with the young woman who runs the bar where some Moroccans gather to socialise. But when Emmi shows up in the bar, heart broken by his leaving her, his innate nobility asserts itself and he tells her he will return to her, remaining true to his marriage vow. It is an ending that is pure fairy tale, a sort of ‘…and they lived happily every after….’ Not the usual ending associated with Fassbinder.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk