Tuesday, November 25 at 6:00 PM – Gene Siskel Film Center — 164 N State Street
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
FEAR OF FEAR
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1975
In German with English subtitles
Fear eats the soul, sure — but where does it come from? Throughout the mid-1970s Fassbinder paid repeated homage to the then-maligned “women’s pictures” of his hero, German émigré Douglas Sirk. Passions that roiled just beneath the surface in Sirk’s films became open wounds in Fassbinder’s acerbic treatments — sometimes operatically so but always retaining a layer of compelling inscrutability. In this lesser-known work from his florid middle period, originally made for television, the madman of Munich continued to explore the terror of domestic alienation. Margit Carstensen, a Fassbinder regular (who memorably came unglued as RWF’s titular anti-heroines Martha and Petra Von Kant) here portrays Margot, a put-upon, Valium-popping housewife who drifts into a kind of nameless psychological torture during her second pregnancy. Life around her moves along like a horrifying dream, one whose meaning Margot is somehow not allowed to plumb; professional help proves sorely unhelpful. The source of the “angst” is not explicit, but should be familiar to us all — a buzzing, a harshness, a sense that things are not as they should be. A terror of madness and the inevitability of its overtaking us. A clue: in a 1971 essay on Sirk’s melodramas, Fassbinder offered, “Women think in Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors… Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope.” (GW)
91 min • Westdeutscher Rundfunk • 35mm from Janus Films
Preceded by: “House Cleaning Blues” (Dave Fleischer, 1937) – 6 min – 16mm
NEXT UP: KWAIDAN on Monday, December 1 at Music Box