AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

This essay looks at how Bertolt Brecht’s new forms of drama were adopted by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It looks at how he uses the illusion of a fourth wall to involve the viewer in the emotional relations of the characters. It will explore the use of spatial configuration to represent emotional conflict and class divisions. The essay aims to portray how emotional subject matter is depicted by Fassbinder in ways that subvert audience expectations and encourage thought processes. Also, it will show how the conventional melodrama may be reworked to suit the director’s purpose of engaging deeply with the audience.

Brecht thought that new forms were needed in dramatic performance to deal with modern socio-economic reality. He came up with new techniques to provoke an audience response, subverting the conventional expectations of drama (Bradley 3). He wanted to provide alternative ways of seeing characters. He wanted to stop the audience from being passive spectators, and through engaging with characters’ emotions, to think about their own prejudices and how their actions could influence the future (4). One of the most obvious techniques Brecht used to break down the barrier between the stage and spectator was to destroy the illusory ‘fourth wall’, the idea that the audience is eavesdropping or spying on the dramatic action (4). In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder employs this technique frequently to represent his characters’ emotional and socio-economic states. It can be seen in the use of the overextended camera gaze, the framing, and the silences that accompany many of the ‘freeze-frame’ shots. The overextended camera gaze allows a scene to stand alone instead of forming a continuous narrative, and gives the audience a chance to reflect on and analyze a character’s emotions (Burns 69). The viewer feels the uncomfortable tension when Emmi has told her children about her marriage because the camera tracks slowly over each of their faces, and the room is completely silent. In the scene where Emmi has been shunned by her colleagues, the camera lingers on her face for so long as she eats her lunch that the viewer can almost read her thoughts. Brecht felt that the spectator was actually a creator, and naturally here we attempt to interpret what we are watching, even if there is no action, and we are just observing a blank expression. The primary player is actually the spectator (Wekwerth 58).

The defining of drama by form, not just content is another way that Fassbinder references Brecht’s style (Bradley 3). The characters’ ideological, social and emotional relations are defined by the physical and spatial depiction, not only by their actions (6). The physical divide between Emmi and the other people in the scene where she first goes to the bar emphasizes her isolation, loneliness, as well as her separate socio-economic status. Fassbinder’s use of framing in many scenes symbolizes the characters’ inner emotional states. Newlyweds Ali and Emmi are viewed through an archway as they sit in the restaurant, seeming out of place as there are no other customers. Fassbinder makes the audience feel as if they are secretly observing, through this unnatural viewpoint. Again, in the kitchen scene when Ali has stormed out after the argument, Emmi is framed by the doorway, trapping her in her own house. Emmi’s spatial isolation and confinement make the viewer seem to be the outside looking in, unable to reach her. Because of this distance, there is a sense that she is imprisoned and isolated.

Fassbinder makes the audience think about how they would behave in a situation, and engage with what the character is feeling, by representing emotional crises of the characters. An example in the film is the scene where Emmi goes to Ali’s place of work to try to resolve their problems, but he joins his co-workers in mocking her, and laughing when they suggest she is his grandmother from Morocco. Emmi’s discomfort and betrayal can be felt as she has to stand there and take it. Through development of the characters’ emotions, Fassbinder shows that they do not have fixed personalities from the beginning – they change and evolve, subject to the events that unfold and the pressures of society, as well as to their own internal struggles. Brecht too, aimed to portray characters in this way (Wekwerth 27). Ali changes from being devoted to Emmi, to becoming estranged from her, and then his through gambling, drinking and cheating on her, we witness an emotional conflict within him. Emmi too, seems to have a divided self; at first she is open minded to her new husband’s culture, standing by him against others’ prejudices, but then tension unfolds when she treats him like an object in front of her friends, and later shows little tolerance for his wishes by stating that she doesn’t like couscous. Fassbinder, following Brecht’s way of working, chooses to make the characters’ actions subvert our expectations. This was in order to break the audience’s habit of thinking they can predict a character’s behavior, to reactivate the thought process by upsetting the conventional unfolding of a drama (44).

Fassbinder’s minor characters are multi-dimensional, and can be ambiguous. He doesn’t always give the viewer what they are expecting, when he deals with racism and sexual politics involving the reactions of the minor protagonists. He uses a mundane subject to convey racism with the shopkeeper making a confusing long discourse about margarine that Ali is trying to buy. Later, the shopkeeper decides he has to look after his own interests, and accepts Emmi back as a customer to benefit his business. Like Brecht did, Fassbinder is presenting his characters in a conflicting manner so that the audience is forced to take an active role in deciding what the cause might be. Similarly, Emmi’s neighbours are judgmental of her relationship with a younger black man, but change their thinking once they realize having a strong man around can benefit them. Some of the minor characters’ behavior is puzzling to the viewer, because it is unexpected. Fassbinder is intentionally making the audience wonder, and reflect as to whether they would behave in the same way.

Fassbinder was impressed by the popular Hollywood melodrama because of its themes of everyday, realistic human emotions, and its impact on a mass audience. He was influenced greatly by Douglas Sirk, whose films, he wrote in an essay, were ‘…motivated by deep human sympathy’ (Watson 103). He wanted to make a film using the conventional themes of melodrama, but rework them to overturn audience expectations, and make a criticism against the Hollywood genre (104). In film melodrama, the characters are shown in everyday, realistic situations. The subject matter can bring intense emotional appeal to the audience (Burns 64). Characters’ feelings are dictated by the pressures of society, and this can be read by the symbolism of ordinary situations (Burns 58).

In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder reworks the subject matter of Sirk’s film All That Heaven Allows (1955), where a middle-class widow falls in love with her younger gardener. Sirk’s film contains several themes of melodrama common to his work: loneliness, fear, exploitation within intimate relationships, social pressure on individuals, and pressure on women who think for themselves (Watson 103). Emmi and Ali find love and a mutual bond because they both lead a lonely existence – she a widow, he a foreigner who works long hours and shares a lodging with all men. Skvirsky suggests that their inexplicable love for each other is because of this bond, and that they are united against a class struggle; Ali is a black guest worker subject to racism, and she is an older cleaning lady – neither have a very high economic or social standing (103). Fassbinder treats their relationship in a non-judgmental way, and without illusions of making them out to be the hero-victims of the story (106). Neither one of them is completely virtuous – Emmi shows insensitivity towards Ali’s culture when she tells him ‘In Germany we don’t eat couscous’, and when she shows him off to her friends like a piece of meat. Ali suffers but his behavior is questionable too as he cheats on Emmi, and stays out drinking and gambling. Fassbinder uses these melodramatic episodes to show that the characters have other selves they have to come to terms with in their relationship. He is subverting the audience expectations of a familiar genre. The male is the object of sexual desire - Ali in the shower as Emmi gazes at his beauty, Ali being physically admired by Emmi’s co-workers. Social order or perhaps more accurately, disorder is suggested through the reactions of people around them to their relationship. The neighbours gossip and are disapproving, Emmi’s children are so shocked that they can’t even speak, and react with silence, then a violent outburst as her son kicks the television. These portrayals are taking the Hollywood melodrama a step out of its comfort zone, by showing us unpleasant examples of the way society has shaped the characters’ beliefs. Characters’ emotions are expressed in melodramatic ways, but the scenes remain serious because they are not parodied; intense feelings give the scenes weight (Watson 106). Fassbinder wants to provoke reflection and analytical thought, and suggest that the fantastical Hollywood style is not reality, whilst retaining a strong emotional response (Burns 65).

The melodrama of sudden illness is used further to reflect a social disorder, as well as the idea that a sudden crisis strengthens the couple’s commitment. When Ali collapses with a stomach ulcer, it is on the dance floor after Emmi has told him “Together we are strong” (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). This suggests that their relationship is founded on their mutual class struggle, and that they need each other to survive (Skvirsky 106). The ambiguity of the ending, where the audience is left wondering if their relationship will survive, is due to the idea that Ali’s status as a foreign worker has caused his illness, and that it will no doubt recur. Emmi makes a vow to stand by him, but the underlying feeling is that, in light of their circumstances – their place in society, faced with economic and social pressures - no happy ending is guaranteed.

In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder has convincingly employed Brecht’s idea that by presenting drama in an unconventional way, the viewer will engage in an active manner. Fassbinder uses various visual techniques to show the characters’ emotions, and portrays them with conflicting behavior. The viewer becomes surprised by the subversion of expected characterisations, and the emotional internal and external conflicts of the characters require a participatory role from the viewer in order to make sense of the narrative. The use of melodrama provides an emotional reaction in an engaging way. By reworking a familiar genre, Fassbinder provokes deeper thought processes in the audience, at the same time as entertaining them.

Works Cited

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Brigitte Mira, El Hedi Ben Salem. Wellspring Media, 1974. Film.

All That Heaven Allows. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Perf. Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson. Criterion Collection, 1955. Film.

Bradley, Laura. Brecht and Political Theatre: The Mother on Stage. Oxford, 2006. Ebrary, Inc. Web. 21. Sep. 2011.

Burns, Rob. “ Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Aug: A mellow Brechtian Drama“. German Life and Letters 48:1 (January 1995): 56-74. Journal article.

Skvirsky, Salome Aguilera. ”The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven.” Cinema Journal 47.3 (Spring 2008): 90-121. Research Library. Web. 26. Sep. 2011.

Watson, Wallace Steadman. Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film as Public and Private Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Print.

Wekwerth, Manfred.  Daring to Play: a Brecht Companion. Trans. Braun, Rebecca. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.