The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · a film in German, with a little Arabic · 1974 · about 93 minutes · the German theatrical version · freely after Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows
Mode
Hollywood melodrama turned political; a case of love across age and race, played with Brechtian frontality
Mythos
The lovers against the tribe; the stranger at the gate; the beauty and the beast reversed, with the community as the beast
Phase
From a night of rain in a bar to a hospital bed: a marriage, a town’s punishment, its relenting, an estrangement and a reconciliation
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 93 minutes, in German with a little Arabic; Jürgen Jürges’s held compositions, no composed score, the music from a jukebox and records
Register
The flat, held, slightly comic stare, rising to pathos at the joints of the plot
Scale
Two people, two flats, a stair, a bar, a shop and a workplace in one city, and the economy around them
Governing Proposition
A widowed cleaning woman in her sixties comes in out of the rain to a bar where Arab guest workers drink, dances with a Moroccan mechanic two decades younger, and marries him, and the town punishes the marriage until it finds a use for it. The wager of the film is that prejudice is a social economy rather than a feeling, that tolerance is another form of use, that the excluded, once readmitted, exclude in turn, and that a studio melodrama played in staring tableaux can make its audience look at the couple the way the town does.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a title card: “Das Glück ist nicht immer lustig”: “happiness is not always fun”. Then rain, and Emmi Kurowski, a widow in her sixties who cleans for a living, comes in out of it to a bar where Arab guest workers drink and the jukebox plays Arabic records. She sits alone. The regulars look at her, and the film looks at them looking. Ali, a Moroccan mechanic two decades younger, asks her to dance.
The dance is the first tableau. The two move in the dim bar while the regulars stand at the counter, arranged and frozen, watching. Nothing is said about what they see; the arrangement says it. Afterwards he walks her home through the rain, and there is a first night. It is the whole film in its opening minutes: two people at the centre of a frame, and a ring of others whose looking decides what the two are.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote and directed it, and his company Tango-Film produced it, in West Germany. Jürgen Jürges photographed it in colour; Thea Eymèsz edited it. Brigitte Mira plays Emmi and El Hedi ben Salem plays Ali, with Barbara Valentin as Barbara, who keeps the bar, Irm Hermann as Emmi’s daughter Krista, Fassbinder himself as Krista’s husband Eugen, Peter Gauhe as her son Bruno and Walter Sedlmayr as Angermayer the grocer. There is no composed score. The story was first told as an anecdote by a chambermaid in Fassbinder’s The American Soldier (1970), and the film is a free transposition of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. It runs about 93 minutes, in German with a little Arabic, and was first shown in West Germany early in 1974 and at Cannes that May, where it won the FIPRESCI prize and the prize of the Ecumenical Jury.
Movement II
They marry at the registry office, and the wedding lunch, a meal for two in a restaurant, becomes a scene of absurd tenderness. Then Emmi gathers her children to tell them: Krista and her husband Eugen, and Bruno. Bruno kicks in the television screen. In Sirk’s film the widow’s children give her a television in place of love; here the son destroys one in anger, and the borrowing is stated by being broken.
The town punishes the marriage, and the film shows the punishment as a way of looking. The neighbours stare from the stairs. Angermayer the grocer refuses to understand Ali’s German. Emmi’s colleagues freeze her out at their break. The camera frames the couple through doorways, banisters, the bars of the stair rail and the frames of windows, small inside rectangles, while others look at them, and the long static takes hold until the audience is staring too. Its gaze is enlisted in the town’s.
Emmi and Ali sit alone among the yellow tables and chairs of an empty beer garden. The waiters watch from a distance. Emmi weeps and says she wishes they were alone in the world, and the camera holds them as already alone, two figures in a field of empty chairs. It is one of the film’s few summits, and it is made from its flatness: colour placed rather than recorded, a composition held, and no movement toward the faces.
Movement III
They go away on holiday, and when they come back the town has changed its face. The neighbours are friendly on the same stairs where they stared. The grocer who refused Ali needs Emmi’s custom, and relents. Bruno, who kicked in the television, comes to ask whether she will mind his child. Each is friendly because each needs something of Emmi, and the film lets the reason show every time.
Emmi’s colleagues take her back. In the readmission she does a thing the film will not excuse: she shows them Ali’s muscles and displays him to her friends like a purchase. The contempt has been withdrawn, and what has replaced it is use. The disclosure can now be stated: prejudice is a social economy, not a feeling, and tolerance is another of its forms.
The repetitions are the method. The same staircase, the same bar and the same table are seen under each new arrangement of looks, and each scene is one term of a pattern the film needs twice: the refusal and the relenting, the staring and the smiling, the door shown and the door opened. The stylisation is frontal, held and slightly artificial, and it does not vary from the sour comedy of the grocer to the grief of the hospital.
Movement IV
A new cleaner joins Emmi’s colleagues: Yolanda, from Yugoslavia. The women freeze her out at their break as they froze Emmi out, and Emmi joins them. The excluded, readmitted, practise exclusion in turn. It is the part of the disclosure that is not schematic, and the film gives it without comment, in one more tableau of women who will not look at another.
At home Ali asks for couscous, and Emmi refuses: German food is what is eaten in her house. The marriage now carries the town inside it. Ali goes to Barbara, who keeps the bar, and to her flat, and the estrangement runs through refusals of couscous and returns to the bar. This middle stretch makes its point more than once, and the Barbara episodes lean to a looser, more conventional register than the rest.
Through all of it Ali is kept largely closed. El Hedi ben Salem, a non-professional and Fassbinder’s lover, plays him with a narrow range, and the film turns the stiffness into the guardedness of a stranger and frames him so that it reads. Mira carries the rest: Emmi comic, proud, frightened and small-minded in turn, without a false beat. The film shows the love as real and the society around it as the thing that wears it down, and it lets the couple carry that society inside them.
Movement V
Emmi goes to the bar. They are reconciled, and they dance again, so that the dance that opened the story closes it. In the middle of it Ali collapses. The last dance, the fall and what follows are held a long time, and the film rises again, at a joint of the plot, as it rises only at its joints.
In the hospital the doctor gives his account: an ulcer, the illness of guest workers, which will return. He says aloud what the image of the bed already carries, and the speech is exposition. But it turns a private collapse into a condition of labour, and the camera stays on Emmi at the bedside for a long time, while the prognosis stands over the reconciliation.
The title is Ali’s phrase, in the broken German the Germans hear in him: “Angst essen Seele auf”: “fear eat soul up”. The grammar that marks him as a stranger is the grammar of the film’s truth: fear of the town, of the look, of being of no use, eats the soul, and the ulcer is where it eats. Whether the reconciliation is real or another arrangement, and whether the ulcer that will return is a prognosis for the marriage, the film leaves open. What it has made is a melodrama in which the audience is put where the neighbours stand, and has to watch itself staring.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the film resists it almost everywhere. About ninety-three minutes carry a courtship, a marriage, a town’s punishment and its relenting, an estrangement and a reconciliation, and nearly every scene is one term of a pattern the film needs twice. The dance in the bar opens the story and closes it; the staring on the stairs returns as friendliness on the same stairs; the grocer who refuses Ali comes back needing Emmi’s custom; Bruno’s kick into the television is paid by his request for a babysitter. What gives: the stretch at Barbara’s flat and the repeated refusals of couscous make one point more than once, and the doctor says aloud what the hospital image already carries.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: prejudice is a social economy, not a feeling. The community withdraws its contempt only when it has a use for the despised; its tolerance is another form of use; and the excluded, readmitted, practise exclusion in turn. Emmi, taken back by her colleagues, joins them in freezing out Yolanda, the new Yugoslav cleaner; she shows Ali’s muscles to her friends like a purchase; she refuses him couscous because German food is what is eaten in her house. The doctor’s account of guest workers’ ulcers turns a private collapse into a condition of labour. Held at the bar: the mechanism is drawn as a diagram, and the film knows its point early and states it in clean lines.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is not the film’s usual register. Its register is the flat, held, slightly comic stare, and when it rises it rises from that flatness. Emmi and Ali sit alone among the yellow tables and chairs of an empty beer garden, the waiters watching from a distance, and she weeps that she wishes they were alone in the world while the camera holds them as already alone. The first dance is watched by regulars frozen at the bar; the last dance, the collapse and Emmi at the bedside are held a long time. These are real summits of pathos, but they are few, short and gathered at the joints of the plot, and between them the film is level by design.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The film evokes a pattern more than it builds one. The pattern is old and plain: lovers set against the tribe, the stranger at the gate, a marriage that breaks a law of kinship and is punished by the community, and beneath the melodrama the beauty and the beast reversed, with the community as the beast. What is built is a ritual of exclusion: the staring tableau, figures set in doorways and on stairs as a chorus of judges, recurs until it is the film’s shape, and that holds the axis above evocation alone. But the archetype is not made to bear the load as a myth built into a plot would be. The story stays a case, deliberately ordinary, and its depth is social rather than mythic.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: the Hollywood melodrama of Sirk, whose All That Heaven Allows (1955) gives the plot of a widow, a younger man outside her class, scandalised children and a television in place of love; and the austere, distanced political cinema of the young German directors. The turn is to yoke them: Sirk’s plot moved down to a Munich tenement and a cleaning woman, sharpened by race and the guest-worker economy, and played frontally, pathos and distance in one frame. The stake was real in the casting. It was smaller elsewhere: Fassbinder had already made the turn to Sirk in The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), and this film was cheap, fast and on his proven path.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that exclusion is a way of looking. The camera frames Emmi and Ali through doorways, banisters, the bars of a stair rail and the frames of windows, holding them small inside rectangles while others look at them; neighbours and colleagues are set out in tableaux, staring, before anything is said. The long static takes make the viewer stare too, and the audience’s gaze is enlisted in the town’s. Told in close, mobile, sympathetic coverage, this would be a love story with villains; in this form it is a study of the look that makes the outsider. Held below the top: outside the framings and tableaux much of the grammar is plain and functional.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Fifty-two years of return are evidence. The film has been re-examined steadily: as the central case of Fassbinder’s adaptation of Sirk, and of the argument over melodrama as a political form; in writing on race, migration and the guest-worker economy of the Federal Republic; in queer readings through Fassbinder and El Hedi ben Salem; and in the questions its ending leaves open, whether the reconciliation is real or another arrangement, and whether the ulcer that will return is a prognosis for the marriage. Formally it yields on return in the rhymes of stair, bar and table. Held at the figure: the social argument, once grasped, does not much deepen, and much of the yield belongs to the director’s life and the Sirk comparison.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1974, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is substantial: the film showed that the despised machinery of studio melodrama could carry a precise political analysis without irony at its characters’ expense. It did not reorganise what film could do so much as fuse two existing possibilities. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it gave the New German Cinema one of its first international successes, with two prizes at Cannes in 1974; it became the standard instance of political melodrama; and it is taught wherever Fassbinder and Sirk are taught. The reach is real and lasting but narrow in kind, and much of it is shared with Fassbinder’s whole body and with Sirk’s revival.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric over fifty-two years. The form is whole: the film as released survives, restored rather than altered, and nothing of the work is lost. Presence has been continuous in art cinema, in repertory screenings, in successive home editions, in teaching and on the critics’ lists, though it has not passed far beyond cinema’s own audience and is narrower than that of the decade’s popular classics. The fabric is fixed to its moment in dress, in rooms and in the guest-worker term itself, but the subject has outlived its conditions, and the film is watched now as a film about migration rather than as a period piece. A presence real but confined to the art cinema sets the figure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The command is real and lean. Jürgen Jürges’s camera holds its compositions with complete assurance; the framing through doors and rails is exact; colour is placed rather than recorded, the yellow of the beer garden and the red of the bar; the editing keeps each scene at the length its stare requires and no longer. Brigitte Mira’s Emmi is a great performance, comic, proud, frightened and small-minded in turn without a false beat, and in the tableaux the arrangement of bodies is the meaning. The costs: El Hedi ben Salem’s narrow range, which the film turns to account but cannot always hide; children and colleagues set at caricature; flat coverage of transitional scenes; and the doctor’s speech, which is exposition.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Angermayer the grocer refusing to understand Ali’s German, played as sour comedy, and Ali collapsed in hospital under the doctor’s prognosis. One law governs both: people are treated as their use to others, and the look decides who is a person. The grocer relents because he needs Emmi’s custom; the hospital names the ulcer as the guest worker’s illness. The neighbours’ stares, the children’s fury, the colleagues’ lunch break, Emmi’s display of Ali and her coldness to Yolanda are one law seen from different sides, and the frontal, held stylisation is the same from first scene to last. The range is moderate, one city and one class; the Barbara episodes lean to a looser register.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure. Emmi’s consciousness, fully; the family, in her children and the marriage; labour, in her cleaning work, the colleagues’ hierarchy, Ali’s workshop and his ulcer; the state and the economy, in the guest-worker system that is the film’s ground; race and age, in the couple itself. They are integrated: the town’s contempt, the economy of usefulness and the marriage are one discovery. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: Ali’s consciousness is kept largely closed, by design and by the playing; history is touched rather than held; the sacred and the natural order are absent; and the world is two flats, a stair, a bar, a shop and a workplace in one city.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.5. A film whole as released and still watched fifty-two years on, now as a film about migration; a disclosure that tolerance is another form of use and that the readmitted exclude in turn; a form in which exclusion is a way of looking, framed through doors and rails and set out in staring tableaux; and one law, that people are treated as their use to others, from the grocer’s sour comedy to the hospital bed.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: Emmi’s consciousness, the family, labour and the guest-worker economy are held as one discovery, but Ali’s inner life is kept closed, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and the world is a few rooms in one city. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, where the lovers against the tribe are evoked and only the staring tableau is built, and The Sublime at 7.8, where real summits of pathos are few, short and gathered at the joints of the plot.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, The Made at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls three tenths short, Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 four tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 nine tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.1, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) as released, the German theatrical version, about 93 minutes, in colour, first shown in West Germany early in 1974, from the title card to the hospital bed: written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and produced by his company Tango-Film, photographed by Jürgen Jürges and edited by Thea Eymèsz. There is no composed score; the music is source music, chiefly the bar’s jukebox and Arabic records. Restoration is repair and is not judged as a different film. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the film in German, with its little Arabic; English renderings are a reader’s aid and nothing is charged to them. Words are quoted only where they are certain: the opening title card, and the four words of Ali’s phrase that give the title. Speech is otherwise described. Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows is the film’s source and is not part of the work. Details that could not be verified, among them the song to which Emmi and Ali dance, the length of the shoot, the history of the restaurant of the wedding lunch, Emmi’s own past, the name Ali gives as his own, the later life of El Hedi ben Salem, the film’s descendants by name, its standing abroad beside its director’s other films, the order of some middle scenes, the shot and scene counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given.