Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have been 71 years old last month, had he lived. The day he died, 34 years ago this week, I heard the news on the radio in Cape May, New Jersey, and I burst into tears. I was a teenage movie nut, he was my god, and there was no one I could talk to about it. He had crammed six lifetimes of film-making into less than 15 years, 40 challenging, formally aggressive, fiercely contrary, culturally parricidal, and exquisitely beautiful movies about love as slavery, pain as a natural condition and history as an oppressive weight upon young Germans like himself. He was worth the mourning.
Even then, though, I knew I was mourning something else: the 30-odd glorious years of postwar European film-making that was coming to an end, whether it was Italian neorealism and the comet-tail of its adherents and opponents; the bold cinema of the short-lived Soviet thaw, including in satellite states such as Poland and Czechoslovakia; the French New Wave, the first self-conscious cinema; or my own favourite, RWF’s New German Cinema. The signs of their demise were all about me, in interesting but conservative new crowd-pleasers such as Diva (ugh) and Das Boot.
These were cinema movements that answered back: against the past, against father figures and the vapid, kitschy films they made; against monolithic Hollywood, seen as exploitative and invasive (as someone says in Wim Wenders’s Kings Of The Road: “The Yanks have colonised our subconscious”); against [Russian studio] Mosfilm and its numbskull apparatchiks; against tweeness, quaintness; against “entertainment” and consolation; against formal timidity.
It didn’t all die that day in 1982, though Wenders made his last great movie, The State Of Things, that year, an angry blast against a philistine Hollywood throttled by mafiosi; and Truffaut died two years later, his gifts in steep decline. The subsidy system that underpinned the New German Cinema was dismantled by Helmut Kohl. In the end, the cinema that best prefigured the future was the Australian New Wave, all of whose major artists made the leap to Hollywood within three movies. National cinemas became feeder clubs for the Hollywood big leagues.
I miss these movements, awash with oppositionist ideology and cultural nationalism, steeped in history, fierce in their hatreds, and with fire in their bellies. The many geniuses in European film-making today are more like a widely scattered archipelago of vastly separated talents working alone. What Fassbinder might have made of it, we’ll never know. Sometimes I think he died at exactly the right moment.
