Wenders’s visual and narrative perspectives present some important variations on the cinematic developments of the sixties. He tends to build his films in brief, almost episodic accretions. His suppression of transitional material is as extreme as Godard’s, though not as radical as Straub and Huillet’s, but unlike either he does not care to distance or alienate his audience from the narrative events—only his characters. Their life in transition has no transitions. In some respects be employs Truffaut’s technique of "privileged moments," observations of instances when small actions unaccountably occur that enlighten all the participants and give pleasure or surprise, if not revelation. However, unlike what occurs in Truffaut’s work, the enlightenment that occasionally befalls Wenders’s characters is only transitory. They never learn anything and only rarely change. The spectator learns of them; we see them alone in the frame, often surrounded by the things that mark their occupations or preoccupations, traveling in a car or train. Ripley, the Dennis Hopper character in The American Friend, wears a cowboy hat ("What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?" he asks), and drives a white Thunderbird through the Hamburg streets. He lives in a dilapidated mansion that looks like the White House, in a dark room dominated by a pool table covered in plastic, on which is a box of cornflakes. A Coke machine and jukebox stand in the corner (the jukebox—the gaudy American house of pop-figures in the environment of many Wenders films, and often in Fassbinder’s) and a neon "Canada Dry" sign hangs from the ceiling. Jonathan (played by Bruno Ganz, who has become the most recognizable face in the new German cinema), a picture restorer and frame-maker used by the "mob" to kill various people, who is befriended by Ripley and betrays him, is found either in his shop, where Wenders composes him with his picture frames, punning on the fact that he is indeed "framed," or with his wife and child in his old flat in an isolated tenement on the Hamburg waterfront. The flat is filled with static images of movement: a model funicular railroad in his son’s room, on which Jonathan always bumps his head; a zoetrope, that proto-motion picture machine in which one can see figures endlessly repeat the same small physical action; a lampshade with a steam locomotive painted on it that appears to blow smoke from its chimney. (This picture is similar to a painting Ripley gives Jonathan to restore. The painting is by an artist in New York-played by the late filmmaker, Nicholas Ray-who is supposed to be dead and who forges his own work. The American Friend, which is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith (who also wrote the novel upon which Hitchcock based Strangers on a Train), has a plot as complicated as any in American film noir, from which it draws its inspiration.)

When not in one of these two places, Jonathan is on the move between Hamburg and Paris, in trains, on the metro, on escalators, pursued or in pursuit. The movement gets him nowhere but deeper into trouble, betrayed, and finally betraying. Because it is so much a reflection of the film noir thriller (Wenders even deals with the noir theme of the man wrenched from domestic circumstances by corrupt characters), there is more physical action in The American Friend than in most of the European cinema we are examining here. But it is action meditated upon more than engaged in. In every sequence, even the most violent, Wenders will pause to observe, or add an extra shot so slightly peripheral to the central action of the sequence that it serves as a kind of punctuation and redirects our attention away from the sequence’s center. This is a formal strategy common to most of his work, in which the gaze at the character and his situation (it is usually the male who is given greatest attention) becomes more important than what the character is doing precisely at the time. The neorealist tradition again pokes through. Wenders is fascinated by the way people can be seen manipulating and being manipulated by their environment. But unlike the neo-realist environment, the one Wenders creates does not so much define as set them off, characterize them negatively sometimes, even abstractly by presenting a few key elements. The determinant spaces in Wenders’s films cross the line of neo-realism to its opposite, an expressionist tendency that forms those spaces to reflect states of being. Thus Ripley’s room in The American Friend is designed as an idea of the alienated American abroad, who brings with him garish bits of his culture. Elsewhere, there is a sequence in which Jonathan is in an airport. He rides a moving walkway and sees a man fall down in front of him. The shots are cut in such a way as to create the momentary impression that he is seeing himself stumble and fall. We see him walking through the terminal, the camera tracking before him. He suddenly looks around and Wenders cuts from that movement to a dolly in toward him sleeping in the waiting room in front of an enormous complex of escalators. Making the cut on his looking about creates the expectation that the next shot will be of something he sees. Instead we see him, by means of the portentous dolly, in front of an overwhelming impersonal structure of people in movement. The result is disorienting, threatening the very qualities of the character’s state of mind.

Wenders is one of the few German filmmakers who feel comfortable with their expressionist inheritance. Fassbinder alludes to it; Herzog, even though he remade F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, keeps reacting in one way or another against it. Wenders, perhaps because he has managed both to absorb and be critical of American cinema, feels less intimidated by his own heritage. Although his films are about anxiety and irresolution, their form is secure and resolved. The dialogue he carries on with American film is much more at ease than is, for example, the dialogue that Godard carried on with it early in his career. The New Wave wanted to make American film by not making American film; they wanted to discover its essence and recenter it within a subjective context, a process that results in the conflict the films manifest between genre and personality. When the American filmmaker Samuel Fuller appears in Godard’s Pierrot le fou, it is at a party where, playing himself, he answers Ferdinand’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo) question "What is cinema?" Fuller responds (each word translated into French by another guest): "The film is like a battleground . . . Love . . . Hate . . . Action . . . Violence . . . Death . . . In one word . . . Emotion."⁶⁸ These are the qualities Godard examines in his films, analyzes (Pierrot is in fact a glossary of them), but never creates directly without mediation and meditation.

When Samuel Fuller appears in The American Friend (which pays homage to Pierrot le fou in many ways), it is as a character who is part of the story, a mafia porno king. He is implanted in the action; but because he is Sam Fuller, he also glosses it, his very presence, like that of Nicholas Ray, addressing Wenders’s relationship to American film. Thus Wenders’s examination of the American tradition is absorbed into the fiction itself. More than Godard, he makes his narratives self-sufficient, though still allusive and meditative, though to a lesser extent than Godard’s. His work reflects the second generation after the New Wave, which is more ready to accept what Godard and his generation had to confront. This acceptance seems to make it easier for Wenders to deal with his own tradition. After all, American film had no trouble absorbing German expressionism, and it is reasonable to suppose that Wenders came to his own tradition via its American forties manifestation in film noir.(Kings of the Road is dedicated to Fritz Lang, who was a major part of the expressionist movement in Germany and made some major noir films in America. A character in the film clips a photo of Lang from a film magazine; the picture reminds him of his father. The photo itself is a production still from Godard’s Contempt, where Lang plays a very fatherly film director. This intricate complex of allusions is typical of the layers of references in much of Wenders’s work.) The landscapes and rooms he finds or creates for his characters extend their psychological state; they do not overwhelm them, as did the artificial sets of the Germans in the twenties. The characters exist comfortably in them, for there is no hysteria in Wenders’s work, as there was in the expressionists’ and even in American film noir. His is a comfortable and lyrical despair. And what is finally most remarkable about him is his ability to give a new visual and narrative power to the convention of the despairing, alienated hero, to examine it in the light of his country’s own cultural tensions. No other filmmaker has dealt with the American presence in the European subconscious so directly.

Unfortunately, Wenders runs the risk of yielding to it. Like so many of the German directors of the twenties (though not for their political reasons), he left his country to work in America, for the new doyen of international filmmakers, Francis Ford Coppola. He directed the film Hammett (a project Nicolas Roeg was once interested in), which he completed in 1982 despite conflicts with his producers.⁶⁹

Like Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was concerned with the American presence. But for him it was not an obsessive concern, rather one of many determinants of modern German culture, and one way for him to work out some formal problems. Fassbinder found in the forms of fifties American melodrama stylistic methods that he could refashion and bring to bear on his own cultural and political insights. His movement back to and out of the fifties was as curious and enlightening a use of influence as any we have come across so far, and must be examined in the larger context of his work. The most prolific of filmmakers, he directed and usually wrote some thirty-nine full-length films between 1969 and 1982, including multi-episode series for television (which count as one film on his filmography). He began work in the theater and gathered around him a group of players, many of whom remained with him, appearing in one guise or another in film after film. Unlike the repertory companies of other European filmmakers (Bergman in particular), the individuals of this group rarely settled into fixed roles. Though they are instantly recognizable, they continually change types. In each Fassbinder film a Brechtian split is always present between the player we recognize and the character being created. "At no moment," wrote Brecht, "must [the actor] go so far as to be wholly transformed into the character played ."⁷⁰ Along with this anti-realist, anti-illusionary device goes one other element. With the exception of Hanna Schygulla (whose "star" performance in The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978, may have helped make that film Fassbinder’s most popular with Americans, who still tend to separate a character from the total narrative the character is part of), most of Fassbinder’s company, including Fassbinder himself, who often played a role in a film, are uniquely and wonderfully ugly, particularly in contrast to the kind of face we expect to see in an American film.⁷¹ They are not ugly in the manner of the grotesques that populate Fellini’s films. Fellini calls our attention to them, using them to create awe or amusement. The ugly faces in Fassbinder’s films do not attract attention, but rather divert it, out of the fiction to a consideration of the face in film. They so work against the kind of attractiveness we are used to that they make us conscious of its absence.

From the very beginning of his career, then, Fassbinder forced the viewer to look at something that was, in the context of normal viewing experience, unappealing: players who were not beautiful, in roles that did not exploit the conventions of psychological realism because the player always stood back somewhat from the role itself. In the early films, this standing back is very pronounced. In Katzelmacher and Gods of the Plague (1969), The American Soldier (1970; the latter two are variations of the American gangster film), Beware of a Holy Whore (also 1970, an enervated homage to Godard’s lyrical film about filmmaking, Contempt), the pace of acting and cutting is slowed to a monotonous crawl. The camera is essentially frontal and static, and the players do little more than recite their words. Katzelmacher, which signals a favorite Fassbinder subject, the foreigner entering a German working—class milieu—here a Greek immigrant worker who boards with a couple and creates enormous racial and sexual tensions among the neighborhood layabouts—is made up of a number of scenes, each taking up the length of one shot. The neighborhood group lounges by a wall, observed frontally, from a medium distance, in carefully posed and unchanging positions, intoning their discontents. Some of the characters have various sexual escapades in a room. Every once in a while, two characters are seen walking down an alley between two buildings, the camera tracking before them and a melody heard on the sound track (the only times in the film that camera movement and music are allowed). Katzelmacher is an important (if barely watchable) exercise in which Fassbinder brings to bear on his work its major initial influences, Godard, Straub, and Brecht. The energies of Godard’s (and Brecht’s) analyses of class and character are countered by the recessiveness of Straub and Huillet’s method of giving the viewer only the barest essentials, forcing him or her to construct the film from small amounts of information on the screen.

But Fassbinder recognized the dangers of the Straubian method. To cut off the spectator from wanting the film and the film from wanting the spectator, allowing the confrontation of both to create only a space between, filled with denial on the filmmaker’s part and resistance on the spectator’s, is counterproductive, and counter to Brecht’s desire that the work should clarify thought rather than obscure it. Fassbinder’s ultimate rejection of Straub was due to a desire on his part to speak to an audience intellectually and emotionally. "Films from the brain are all right, but if they don’t reach the audience, it’s no good. . . . [Straub] tried to be revolutionary and human in an inhuman way."⁷² This strong response to the extremities of modernism is indicative not only of Fassbinder’s, but of most of the new German filmmakers’ concern that they not become another splinter movement, another critically respected but commercially ignored group of "independent" filmmakers. Independent, that is, of an audience and without an outlet for the distribution of their work. They were aware that the sources of financing as well as the audience in the early seventies were less open to cinematic experiment than in the early sixties. They were aware too that the government money they depended upon at the beginning of their careers would probably not be forthcoming for films that seemed arrogantly to defy their audience. To use cinema to investigate the way the world looked, they would have to make cinema that invited viewers to look at its investigations.

The first move in this direction was, for Fassbinder, a false one. In 1969, in the middle of his cold and distanced anti-teater films, he co-directed with Michael Fengler Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Anti-teater was the name of Fassbinder’s early theater group and production company. Substitute "cinema" or "theater" and it also defines the intent of the early films to counter cinematic conventions.) The film contains the seeds of Fassbinder’s thematics—a dull and passive petit bourgeois, with a boring office job, boring wife, and boring self, kills his family and hangs himself in the office toilet. But the film is created in a style that proved extremely uncomfortable for Fassbinder. Filmed in grainy, sixteen-millimeter color, mostly with a hand-held camera and available light, in long takes, it summarizes most of the cinéma vérité conventions of the time used in the service of a fictional subject. In other words, the film assumes the anxious gaze of a clinical observer of the events, curious but uninvolved, needful of seeing, but uncertain as to what to do with what is seen. It contains some fine sequences, such as a drawn-out act of humiliation in a record shop as Herr R. (played by Kurt Raab, one of Fassbinder’s major ugly actors) tries to describe to the shop girls an inane tune he wants to buy for his wife. But the series of humiliations and the inarticulate despair suffered by the character remain undefined and unanalyzed. We see them but do not understand them, and the question posed by the film’s title is only partially explored and never adequately answered.

Mock realism was not to be the answer to Straubian rigor. Fassbinder had to go back to an unexpected American source in order to rediscover the usefulness of his European influences. Godard’s influence upon the anti-teater films is noticeable in the camera’s head-on, ninety-degree gaze at the characters, and in the concentration on their endless talk. What is missing is Godard’s ability to engage us in the talk and to fracture and layer the discourse of the films, so that many "voices" can be heard at once. Also missing is the analysis of the characters and their social/political situation that the multiple discourse can supply. Unlike Godard’s characters, Fassbinder’s appear separated from their environment. He needed a way to bring the characters forward without denying the information supplied by their surroundings, while at the same time preventing the audience from identifying with them.

Godard had applied Brecht, in various measures, to the genres of American film. The result was a series of essays and reveries on the musical (A Woman Is a Woman), the "woman’s picture," (My Life to Live), the war film (Les Carabiniers), the science fiction film (Alphaville), the romantic thriller (Pierrot le fou), each an attempt to come to an intellectual understanding of its genre, analyze its elements, and speak to, rather than merely absorb and evade, its points of political and social contact. Fassbinder went through some of the genres, and chose one, the one that encompasses all of them (and has been our central concern in this study), melodrama. He went to a particular kind of melodrama, formalized in the series of films Douglas Sirk made for Universal Pictures in the fifties. These films—particularly Written on the Wind (which not only had its influence on Fassbinder, but is the progenitor of the American television series Dallas), All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession, and Imitation of Life—are the summa of American film melodrama. Not merely because they play so richly with family intrigues, despondent women and idealistic men, the sexually hyperactive and the passively homey; not only because they give us the expected situations of thwarted loves and crumbling business empires, conniving and denying, emotions too large and too demanding ever to exist in the plain air of experience; but because on an unobtrusive level they are aware of exactly what they are doing. Sirk was an intelligent European filmmaker in an unintelligent American business, contracted to make unintelligent films. He survived his obligations by crafting spectacular soap operas, in which he emphasized the grand operatic gestures of the genre and exaggerated the glowing pastel colors of fifties Technicolor (his cinematographer was Russell Metty, adept at sweeping crane shots and a rich, expressive lighting style; he photographed Touch of Evil for Orson Welles).

Sirk was in no position to make Brechtian cinema or indicate in any obtrusive way that he was aware of the absurdities of his material. But he was able to extend these absurdities just to the point of stylization—that is, almost to the point where, as in Chabrol’s films, they reveal themselves as being absurd. The crazed, masturbatory dance that the nymphomaniac Dorothy Malone character performs in her room while her father has a heart attack downstairs, his cries drowned out by her music, does not quite leap out of its context in Written on the Wind. We expect that in melodrama a bad girl will carry on while her father dies. Sirk fulfills our expectations (that is the greatest obligation of the melodramatist), but gives us slightly more; he exaggerates the already exaggerated, but then holds back. He will not deny us our feelings, but try on some level to enhance our understanding of them. The Malone character is an overstated figure of the explosion of destructive sexuality, of passion breaking through the corporate propriety of a male-dominated society. The more she uses her sexuality as a weapon, the more she is seen as the victim of repression, of the distortion of sexuality by power—as, finally, she stands under a portrait of her father, fondling a very phallic model of an oil well.⁷³ Sirk makes the lack of subtlety a virtue. For with it he shows us what melodrama is about, if we care to look: the various forms of repression. The deer that appears at the window at the end of All That Heaven Allows is not merely a sappy image in a film drenched with our tears, but a necessary punctuation, a symbol (with all its connotations of gentleness and innocence) of two passive and quiet people who are the objects of abuse and forced to deny their desire by the proper townsfolk and family who see their union as unseemly. One may groan as the deer sadly looks in the house where Jane Wyman sits at the bedside of her young lover, Rock Hudson. Groan or not, its appearance is necessary. Sirk cultivates all the groaning silliness of melodrama, recognizes its silliness, but stops just short of showing it up. Instead by over decorating it, embellishing it with color and movement and reflections in mirrors, he attempts to redeem the form.

But he cannot. Melodrama cannot be redeemed from the inside, primarily because it is so absorptive. It can suck any subject and almost any attitude into its center and adapt it, a fact demonstrated by the way American film has, with only a few recent exceptions, used melodrama to encompass all of its non-comedic statements. Almost all of the filmmakers I have been discussing have tried to confront and examine this phenomenon, but only Fassbinder confronted it head-on by, in effect, yielding to it. He enters the melodramatic structures of Sirk’s films and reemerges able to make them comment upon and reveal themselves. It would be misleading to imply that his attraction to Sirk was based only upon an unsullied intellectual understanding of their expressive possibilities; he was also attracted to the garishness, the pastel tackiness of the Sirkean mise-en-scène. But he could make use of that garishness, along with the exaggerations and posturings of the fifties faces and bodies that populate Sirk’s films, to manifest psychological states and social situations relevant to contemporary Germany. There is an undeniable campiness in Fassbinder’s work and with that a homosexual subtext that some believe runs through all of his films (Fassbinder was an outspoken gay). Richard Dyer has tried to analyze the double perspective that arises from this attraction to the gaudiness and posturings of fifties American cinema and the functional, analytical use Fassbinder turned it to:

Camp, when it functions beyond nostalgia or the glorification of the trivial (as it does not in the works of Andy Warhol, to whom Fassbinder is often and incorrectly compared), is a method of "making strange." Fassbinder’s melodrama sometimes reaches outrageous proportions and refuses to resolve into the conventional repose melodrama always offers (the deer looking through the window as Jane Wyman comforts Rock Hudson). By exaggerating the characters and their situations through parodying fifties melodramatic techniques, Fassbinder is able to analyze the personal and social relationships between his characters and between his characters and ourselves. The stereotypes created by non-reflexive melodrama—even the melodrama of Sirk, which exaggerates and plays itself up rather than reflecting upon itself—when placed in a different context, a different country, a different time, become something other than stereotypes. (Perhaps not every time. There are films in which Fassbinder’s outrageousness does not yield insight. in Satan’s Brew and Chinese Roulette (1976), in The Third Generation (1979) and, after a point, in Despair (1977), the bizarre turns to the silly and Fassbinder loses himself in the very lunacy of the events he creates. Curiously, three of these films, very different from one another, try to deal somewhat directly with fascism, and one, The Third Generation, with modern terrorism. The seriousness of the subjects either evades his grasp or is too complex for him to confront head on.)

Unlike Dyer, I would not substitute the model of camp for the model of Brecht. Fassbinder’s "campiness" is rather a part of the greater Brechtian strategy he uses throughout the Sirk-influenced films (which include most of his output from Merchant of the Four Seasons, 1971, through The Desire of Veronika Voss, 1982). The primary result of bringing melodramatic posturing to the fore, making the viewer observe it as if for the first time, is to create an estrangement from it. Suddenly we must examine what was taken for granted. The desire to draw our attention to the way we look at the image and its contents is something Fassbinder shares with all the filmmakers examined here, but none of the others, not even Chabrol or Russell, is willing to come so dangerously close to the foam rubber and satin soul of fifties melodrama as is Fassbinder in his attempt to transmogrify it. Nor is anyone quite so willing to play with his audience, to allow them to think they are coming to an emotional understanding of a situation, only to break that closeness by having the characters freeze into a tableau or by composing them within the frame of a doorway so that the viewer must observe them through the screen frame and then through a frame within that frame—often while those characters stand motionless and stare as we sit motionless and stare at them.

Fassbinder works many variations upon his basic model. At one extreme, he pays direct homage to Godard. Effi Briest (1974), based on a story by Theodor Fontane, is about a woman (played by Hanna Schygulla) destroyed by nineteenth-century cultural and sexual restrictions. Fassbinder films it in cold black-and-white episodes, rigorously composed and static, in the style of My Life to Live, a film that influenced him tremendously.⁷⁵ Here the melodrama is squelched before it has a chance to emerge, and we are forced to observe block after block of imagery that bespeaks the character’s willingness to be passively abused by a closed social order. On the other end, he makes an almost straightforward commercial narrative. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, the melodrama of a woman who refuses to be passive, who makes her career by any means, is played against another, hidden melodrama, the German "economic miracle." In both the overt melodrama of the rise to power of a lower-middle-class survivor of the war, and the hidden one of the rise to power of a lower-middleclass country that survived the war, Fassbinder examines the prostitution of good faith and the manipulation of everyone by everyone else that are necessary for continued survival in a capitalist milieu. Maria Braun’s universe is created by explosion, as the old Germany is blown up at war’s end. She and her new husband lie on their bellies in the rubble, signing their marriage contract. The film concludes with an explosion when her husband, Hermann, returns after serving a long prison term and a self-imposed exile, having taken the blame for killing Maria’s postwar lover, a black American soldier. Maria did the killing to prove her attachment to her husband; but Hermann, long-suffering soul of the nation, took the punishment. As he suffers in prison, Maria works and whores her way to corporate preeminence. In their strained reunion, in an enormous house in which Maria lives alone, while the radio blares the commentary of a soccer match (it is 1954 and the match is the first world cup Germany ever won), Maria absent-mindedly leaves a gas burner on.⁷⁶ When she goes to light her cigarette on it, she blows up the house and herself.

The Marriage of Maria Braun, more than any other Fassbinder film, depends on plot, on the interaction and continuity of events, to inform its structure, rather than on the way those events are cinematically observed (this may help account for its great popularity with American audiences). But even in this tumbling accretion of events and the double, almost allegorical text that Fassbinder asks us to read, he forces a necessary distance. By refusing to make a pure allegory in which each step in Maria’s career can be used as a key to understanding postwar Germany, but hinting enough so that we may not fall in with the outrageous episodes of Maria’s career without considering their political significance, we are kept jostled and removed enough to perceive the ambiguities of an individual and a country on the make, as well as of the garnering of power and all the destruction inherent in that process.

While The Marriage of Maria Braun is not filmed in the zero degree style of the conventional Hollywood film, neither does it give a complete example of Fassbinder’s stylistic and ideological methodology. If we go back to some earlier films, to The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Fear Eats the Soul (1973), we can see more clearly the structuring principles he employs. Petra is another film deeply influenced by Godard. Its subject is a dress designer who lives with her mute, black-dressed, red-lipsticked secretary and slave, Marlene (played by Irm Hermann, whose mean, pinched face causes the spectator discomfort in many of Fassbinder’s films). Petra (Margit Carstensen) has an affair with Karin, a young working-class model (played by Hanna Schygulla), that involves a back-and-forth shift of power and humiliation, ownership and abuse in which Fassbinder uses the lesbian situation to indicate how insidious the patriarchal codes of domination and subservience are no matter which gender adopts them. The hurtful struggles for control are shaped by means of a carefully designed shooting style and a mise-en-scène that defines the characters at every instant. The action takes place in one room; the shots are long and precise; the characters speak slowly and deliberately. A mural of a Baroque painting covers one wall. In it, a number of reclining nudes are dominated by a central male figure, and the characters in the film are placed beneath this figure at various points in their rise and fall. Three white mannequins stand about the room, composed as the bleached, lifeless surrogates of the principal characters. At one point, after Karin has left and a hysterical Petra is surrounded by her daughter, her mother, and her cousin, two of the dummies are seen lying on top of each other, while the third looks on. They function as the dumb reminders of the power-hungry affair between Petra and Karin and of Marlene’s mute witness to it all. With the mural and the dummies, Fassbinder is able to create a modified expressionism. Along with carefully made compositions that stress the emotional locations of the characters at any given moment, they allow him to extend the limited physical space and indicate the psychological struggles going on.

"Indicate" is the operative word. The strained, sometimes hysterical confrontations of the characters are transposed to their gestures and reflected in the design and objects of the room. We watch the reflections of their psychological state rather than the states themselves. "Melodramatic films are correct films," Fassbinder once said. "The American method of making them, however, left the audience with emotions and nothing else. I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling."⁷⁷ Petra suffers to an extraordinary degree, but our emotional access to her suffering is blocked by the static, almost incantatory style of the acting; by Fassbinder’s refusal to show us everything we want to see; or by his covering what we want with a distraction—the sound of Marlene’s typing, for example, which accompanies the sequence of Petra and Karin’s first meeting. A point is reached where the suffering is suffering about suffering, a sign of the thing itself. And we finally are not allowed to experience a resolution, even when the character seems to resolve her own problems. Three distinct climaxes are created in the film, each one skewing us away from a satisfying closure, forcing us into a position of confrontation with our own perceptions. When Karin leaves her, Petra has a nervous breakdown. But it is for us no intimate and horrifying expression of loss and despair. Instead, Fassbinder manufactures the elements of every such breakdown suffered by a woman in an American film of the forties or fifties. Petra is sprawled on the rug of the room, which is now emptied of all furniture. The mural, however, still dominates. She lies with a whiskey bottle, a doll that looks like Karin, and a telephone. She writhes and yells. Every time the phone rings she leaps for it, expecting to hear Karin’s voice, slamming it down when it proves not to be her. Through it all, the camera stays at her level, distorting the space, emphasizing her abysmal situation. Her mother, daughter, and cousin visit her; the spectral Marlene watches over everything. Through it all, Petra rants and insults. She hurls her whiskey bottle at the mural. She appalls her mother by telling her of her lesbian affair, and finally tries to throw them out, threatening suicide.

At which point Fassbinder literally puts a stop to the proceedings. With the camera at floor level, looking at Petra on the rug with her phone and her doll, her mother’s legs in the right foreground, her cousin and daughter back by the mural (whose dominant male figure centers the composition), Marlene in the rear at the left looking on, the characters freeze into a tableau. On the sound track, a male voice sings an aria from Verdi. The shot holds for some seventy seconds as the complex situation of the frozen characters, the aria, and our gaze slowly pulls us away and rearranges our perspective. The grand opera of Petra’s passions is now seen to be just that: a prolonged aria about emotion, but not emotion itself. We have been made spectators to it (as we always are) but are now permitted to comprehend not the emotions, but the playing of emotions. Fassbinder is saying a great deal about sexual politics in this film; he is saying even more about the politics of spectatorship, about how the viewer is controlled by melodramatic form, and how he or she can be given back that control and allowed to judge the propriety of image and event. It is one of the fine distancing moments in contemporary cinema.

The tableau finally fades to black. We have been given distance and an opportunity to resolve the problems of the film and its characters. Now Fassbinder gives the characters an opportunity to resolve their problems. When the image fades back in to Petra, she has achieved a new calm. She lies in bed and talks to her mother (Marlene stares from the doorway). For the first time since the beginning of the film she is without wig and makeup. She now realizes that her attraction to Karin was not love at all, but the desire for possession. Karin calls, but Petra, once hysterical, is now restrained and refuses to see her. She says she is at peace and Mama leaves. In the finest tradition of Joan Crawford, our heroine has discovered an inner strength. The only thing left for her is to make amends to her slave, Marlene. As she approaches her, Fassbinder composes Petra in a shot that indicates that her new-found understanding may not be very thorough. She is seen (as often throughout the film) through a set of wooden shelves that frame her face. Opposite her face is a doll. The peace and kindness she claims to have discovered are challenged by the blocked, restricting frame, the toy doll, the objects that cause us to pull away from a direct observation of the character. Petra is still removed, from herself and from us. We may not sympathize with her new calm and understanding any more than we could with her old hysteria. Marlene, the dumb chorus to all the proceedings, has a dim comprehension of the treachery of feelings and reacts accordingly. Petra offers her freedom and joy, promising that they will work together. Marlene smiles and, still the slave, kisses Petra’s hand. But her mistress refuses the gesture and instead, as she has earlier done with Karin, urges Marlene to tell her about herself.

Marlene looks at Petra and immediately walks off. Petra puts on a record, the Platters singing "The Great Pretender" (fifties rock becomes an interesting analogue to the nineteenth-century operatic aria). In a far shot of the room, darkened, with Petra lying in bed, Marlene returns with a suitcase. She moves back and forth, packing her things, which include a gun that she casually drops in. She takes her case and the doll that looks like Karin, and leaves. Petra turns off the light and goes to sleep, and the film ends. The only certainty is that Marlene has come to some understanding of the tyranny of feelings and of the danger of proprietorship inherent in the words "Tell me about yourself," while we have learned about the possibilities of overcoming the proprietary assumptions of films that manipulate our emotions.

In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant Fassbinder created the kind of enclosed, hothouse confessional that Ingmar Bergman is so attracted to (he recognized the connection, and in one shot, when Karin tells Petra the amazing story of how her father killed her mother and himself, he frames the two in imitation of the famous two-shot of Alma and Elizabeth in Persona, one character facing front, the other turned slightly). But the hothouse quality is continually punctured by the absurdity of the characters’ gestures, their overreactions, the very clothes they wear, which are parodies of high-fashion chic. In short, Fassbinder reveals the absurdities of excess that lie just below the surface of Bergman’s melodramas and exposes them baldly for the conventions they are. The exaggerations and the highly stylized cinematic treatment of them constitute not reality, but one of many possible ways of observing it.

Petra is a formal exercise, one approach to the complexities of sexual relationships. It provides an alternative to the abstractions of Effi Briest, where the action is stopped at regular intervals, formed into discrete episodes of faltering and blocked passion. Petra employs exaggeration and indirection to point up the dangers of emotions overindulged and manipulated. What it does not do (apart from persistently reminding us of the patriarchal order) is demonstrate Fassbinder’s skill in dealing with socially determined relationships, particularly those of working people, a class he has been more successful in treating than any filmmaker since the neo-realists. In 1974 he in effect remade Petra from the perspective of male homosexuality. The film, called Fox and His Friends in English-though its original title, Faustrecht der Freiheit, which roughly means "Might makes right," is more precise-concerns a working-class gay, played by Fassbinder, who is taken up by a group of bourgeois men who proceed to exploit and humiliate him. Like Petra, the film is less concerned with homosexuality-something taken for granted by both works-than with manipulations for power that, in the case of Fox, depend on class structure more than on sexual proclivity. In both films homosexuality is a primary distancing device. We are presented with what is for many of us an alien world. The milieu is then used by Fassbinder to get at other important problems. Fox does not close itself off from the world, as does Petra, and its narrative parallels the standard Hollywood melodrama of the woman who falls in love with a man out of her class and suffers for it, until snobbery and bigotry are swept away by the force of love. The difference here is that it is a man falling in love with another man, and rather than class bigotry, Fassbinder concentrates on the exploitation of one class by another. Love does not conquer, and poor Fox dies on a subway platform from an overdose of Valium. His body is ignored by his friends and rolled by two young boys.

Fox is a direct and straightforward film. The analysis of class structure it performs is simple and moving and proves that emotions can be valid expressions of conflict if the psychological and social realities of the conflict can be perceived beneath the conventions. Less straightforward, though more moving and acute in its analysis of social structures, is Fear Eats the Soul (Ali). Like Fox, Ali is closer to the conventions of cinematic realism than is Petra. That is, it does not attempt an abstract contemplation of its form, but instead envelops that contemplation within a traditionally "well-made story"—well made, that is, except for Fassbinder’s insistent breaking of the action by tableaux, by the hard and exaggerated stares of the people who observe the main characters, and by the rigorous and distancing double framing of those characters within doorways, arches, and open spaces. The content of the story also creates a built-in alienation effect. Ali is based on Sirk’s film All That Heaven Allows, in which well-to-do widow Jane Wyman falls in love with young nurseryman Rock Hudson and receives the scorn and derision of her children and friends. Love conquers (albeit with some difficulty) at the end. Ali is about a young immigrant Moroccan worker who falls in love with an old German widow and marries her to the scorn and derision of her children and neighbors, who finally come around when they discover that Ali and Emmi can be of use to them. Here Emmi begins showing Ali off and he leaves her for a whore. They have a reconciliation in the Arab bar where they first met, during which Ali collapses from an ulcer, which, we are told by a doctor, is a common ailment of migrant workers in Germany. Like All That Heaven Allows, Ali ends with Emmi sitting at Ali’s bedside. There is, however, no deer at the window; only the doctor looking over them, who has assured Emmi that Ali’s ulcer will simply keep recurring until it kills him. The doctor in Sirk’s film assures Jane Wyman that love and care will help the injured Rock Hudson.

The pleasure of Ali is gained from the subtle layering that Fassbinder achieves, first by presenting us with a touching joke—the perfectly nonsensical notion that an old German Woman, a former Nazi Party member, would marry a foreigner, and not merely a foreigner, but a young black man—and then using the joke to express some warm emotions, eliciting pity and compaassion for the couple, and finally discovering in their plight some complex social and political problems. Ali is concerned with the isolation of foreign workers and native old people from the society in which they live, and the further isolation of one foreign worker and one old person from those who immediately surround them, an isolation caused by their attempt to overcome their loneliness by being together. It is the perfect melodramatic situation: one or two people (it cannot be more, for melodrama depends upon individual struggle) attempt to find happiness and are made more unhappy because others will not let them be. "Happiness is not always fun," is Fassbinder’s epigraph for the film. Emmi and Ali are oppressed on every level, by the society at large, by their neighbors, Emmi by her family (in a fit of exquisite outrage over her marriage, a son kicks in Emmi’s television), and finally by each other.

When neighbors and family begin to accept them, because Ali is strong and can help the neighbors move things, because the family needs Emmi to baby sit, because the local racist grocer needs their trade, Emmi and Ali begin to oppress each other. She shows off his muscles to the neighbors. She refuses to make him couscous. He leaves her and seeks solace with a whore. He and his workmates laugh at her when she comes to take him home. The mutuality and generality of meanness redoubles, extends. Ali stares at himself in a mirror and repeatedly slaps his own face; Emmi and her now friendly co-workers sit on the steps in the building they clean and ostracize another worker, a woman from Yugoslavia—another immigrant, isolated the way Emmi and Ali were a short time ago. The worker is observed, sitting alone on the steps, in exactly the same shot that isolated Emmi earlier. Oppression and cruelty return like a rhyme.

Fassbinder refuses to allow his characters to learn anything. There is no liberal sentimentality in his work and absolutely no hope that everything will be all right in the end. He reveals the material facts of exploitation on all levels and counterpoints them with the false emotional security offered us by melodrama, the security that comes from believing that repression and emotional suffering will be repaid by a higher and more lasting peace. Fassbinder knows that peace on any level is impossible in a culture divided by class and overdetermined by an ideology of competition that depends upon the exploitation of one individual or group by another. The only hope he can offer is the ability to make us see this. And the only way he can make us see is to cut into the pathos at every possible point, give us the emotions we feel are our due and at the same time reorient our gaze so that we may analyze why we are feeling them and what is going on in the narrative to make us feel them. At one point Ali and Emmi sit in an empty outdoor cafe. Emmi weeps copiously and convincingly over the treatment that she and her husband have been getting. It is a high point of pathos in the film, the focus of our identification with these two apparently innocent sufferers. Two things shatter this identification. Through it all, the owners and waiters of the cafe stand in the background like statues, staring at the couple. When Emmi reaches the height of her passion, weeping, clutching Ali’s hands, the actors both suddenly stop acting, freeze, the camera pulling back, past the tables and chairs, isolating the figures in tableau. We are once again forced to leave the fiction and judge the cause of and reaction to emotions.

Fassbinder died in 1982. In his work he took over from Godard the role of interrogator of everyday life and the cinematic images that attempt to explain it. A new cycle may be starting. In Sauve qui peut (La Vie), Godard reentered the world of everyday struggle, sexual gamesmanship and the oppressiveness of social roles. As the New Wave films influenced a new generation of filmmakers, so those filmmakers are now having their effect on their teachers. The communal web that marked the vitality of sixties cinema may be reasserting itself, and the creative and commercial success of the Germans may have helped to call Godard out of his isolation.

The communal web is not all-inclusive. One major figure of the German renaissance, Werner Herzog, attempts to create for himself the romantic image of the lone artist, whose work is born out of individual struggle and deals with human mysteries in a landscape of awesome natural forms. Herzog is an extraordinary self-promoter, eager to do or to fabricate great personal deeds (walking 300 miles to visit the film critic Lotte Eisner on her sickbed; threatening a cantankerous actor, Klaus Kinski, with a gun on the banks of the Amazon; traveling with a film crew to a Caribbean island threatened with volcanic annihilation). And his films are dedicated to an evocation of the mysterious, the ineffable, a world apparently outside the immediate materialist concerns of Fassbinder or Wenders, Alexander Kluge or Volker Schlöndorff.

Herzog is so dedicated to an almost metaphysical contemplation of the spirit that from film to film he runs the risk of being condemned as a mystic—or worse, a mystifier—a filmmaker with few ideas, but a distinct talent for creating a mise-en-scène evocative of the unknown and unknowable. Yet clearly Herzog does not completely ignore the realities of the world. He is capable of creating films like Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) or Heart of Glass (1976) or Woyzeck (1978), in which the taste for mysteries is put at the service of an investigation of the madness of power (and the powers of madness), the distortions and turmoils of early capitalism, the infinite abuses heaped upon the lowly and the powerless.

Perhaps Herzog is the only contemporary filmmaker who can reach for metaphysics while still infusing his meditations with a recognition of history and human activity within it. If so it is as much a result of the way he builds his films as it is of the subjects encompassed and created by them. Had Aguirre been made by a conventional filmmaker, it would have turned out to be an exotic costume picture about man versus nature in the tropical jungle. Herzog does this, but also manages to create out of the confrontation a reverie on the unspeakable attractions of fascism. This is accomplished in part by the particular way he observes his characters in their environment: a distant, seemingly uninvolved gaze that refuses to explore or to explain, and that accepts equally everything that is put in the frame. This method sets out a range of relationships and perspectives. Aguirre is a lunatic, a maniacal, physically distorted individual crazed by the belief that he can discover El Dorado. He and the conquistadors he forces to accompany him travel up the Amazon, defying its terrors and blind to the impossibility of their quest. Only we, as secure onlookers, discern their smallness and Aguirre’s insanity. The images of destruction, the decimation of the men by Aguirre’s wrath, disease, starvation, arrows shot from shore by unseen natives; images of nature’s presence and indifference to the madness of the intruder—such as the monkeys that take over the raft and are adopted by Aguirre as his new followers are viewed with a matter-of-factness that becomes hallucinatory. There is no sense of climax, no consciousness on the part of Aguirre or his men of their self-destruction (and certainly no consciousness of the destruction they and their fellows visit upon the country), only a persistence that is admirable and appalling, a monomania as impossible and unyielding as the jungle through which they move. (This may sound familiar. Coppola based Apocalypse Now very closely on the structure of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and even borrowed many of its images.)⁷⁸

Herzog has a most curious relationship to the neo-realist tradition, that part of it at least that calls for objective observation of figures and landscape. Like the neo-realists, he very carefully manipulates what he wishes the camera to see; but he is more willing than the neorealists to absent himself from the act of observation, or, more accurately, create an illusion of an omniscient eye, looking but not judging. In 1970 he released a narrative feature called Even Dwarfs Started Small, an odd, Buñuelian allegory with an all-midget cast, involving revolt and cruelty and a notion that the small are as terrible as the large, the oppressed as vicious as the oppressors. Dwarfs manages most successfully to demonstrate Herzog’s ability to treat the bizarre as if it were normal without removing or diminishing any of the bizarre characteristics of his subjects. It also contains the anomalous images that are essential to Herzog’s mise-en-scéne, images that have no immediate connection to the narrative, but by entering it fill it with an enigmatic, even awesome quality: a crucified monkey; a kneeling camel; an old truck that goes endlessly around in circles. What is incomplete in this film is the landscape-physical and, through metaphorical transformation, psychological-that extends the narrative, adding connotation, attenuating rational analysis. Dwarfs is a claustrophobic work. Herzog still must find the way to observe a fully articulated world to complement the characters—or swallow them up.

The way is found in Fata Morgana (also released in 1970), a "documentary" of the North African desert (Herzog continually alternates his narrative film production with documentaries, and the methods used in both are similar and feed into one another), though in fact more a dadaist expression of the region than a record.⁷⁹ In this film, narrative is kept separate from the images. An idea of narrative structure is laid over the images by means of a voice-over commentary reading a South American Indian creation myth. The film itself is divided into three parts: "Creation ... .. Paradise," and "The Golden Age," but the relationship of the images to the commentary and the headings is ironic at best, in general non-existent. After an introductory series of shots that shows, eight times in succession, a jet plane landing, the first section of the film proceeds, made up largely of left and right tracking shots of a desert landscape. As the "creation" narration continues, remnants of human habitation are seen: oil refineries with burning smokestacks, a wrecked airplane, junkyards. When human figures appear here and in the later sections, they are connected to the landscape only by their poverty and isolation—more accurately, by the poverty and isolation Herzog creates for them in his refusal to make any links between the figures and where and how they live. He is perfectly content to photograph a native of the region in full figure, staring at the camera, his features distorted by a wide-angle lens. The figure becomes one object among the others, contemplated and unexplained. When he photographs the Europeans who live in the region, the sense of disconnection is even more startling. A German holds up a lizard and gives a lecture on the desert heat; another dives for tortoises in a pool. At the beginning of the "Golden Age" section the camera stares at a man and woman sitting at a piano and drums, singing terrible Spanish pop songs, on what appears to be the stage of some wretched ballroom. (The man wears a pair of goggles similar to those worn by some of the dwarfs in Even Dwarfs Started Small.) Meanwhile the commentary has broken down into perfect dada. nonsense: "In the Golden Age man and wife live in harmony. Now, for example, they appear before the lens of the camera. Death in their eyes. A smile on their faces [the couple we see are not smiling]. A finger in the pie. . . ."

The film keeps moving from the strange to the silly and back again. At its strongest Herzog merely lets his camera move by the derelict structures of Western building companies, with a Leonard Cohen song on the sound track, or stare impassively at the dried-out animal carcasses that stain the ground. Fata Morgana is about impassive observation and refusal: the camera’s refusal to become involved in, or even inquisitive about, what it sees. "There is landscape even without deeper meaning," says the commentary at one point, and it is a statement without much irony. The images Herzog makes from this landscape have no past and no future. Even though many of them contain the remnants of a colonial past, the distance Herzog keeps from them (there is a preponderance of telephoto shots in the film) disassociates us from any historical analysis. One need only refer to Jean-Louis Bertucelli’s film Ramparts of Clay, released in the same year as Fata Morgana, to see how the same landscape can be entered not as a place of mystery, a surreal world to be gazed at from a distance, but as the habitation of people struggling to live, coming to consciousness of their economic and social circumstances. Bertucelli’s North African desert has deeper meaning, and while he does not entirely ignore its otherness—like Herzog he tracks persistently, here around the walls of the desert village—his tracking shots also embrace the landscape, attempt to comprehend it, as opposed to Herzog’s telephoto, lateral tracks that only emphasize its strangeness. Bertucelli does not yield to its mysteries, but rather wishes to understand them. The people he observes are not aliens; they attempt to survive the landscape, not become one of its objects.

This comparison reemphasizes the dilemma of dealing with Herzog. Whenever a sense of otherness can be asserted, he will assert it. Whenever possible, he will attempt the impossible and merge a neorealist observation of people in a landscape with an expressionist’s desire to make that landscape a state of mind; if he can, he will turn people themselves into a state of mind. Like most of the filmmakers discussed here, Herzog is less interested in the individual psychology of his characters and the motivations for their situations and actions than he is in the way those situations and actions can be observed. More than the others, he refuses most analysis and chooses instead to make his characters enigmatic, self-contained objects, passive sufferers of the world’s stupidity, sometimes defying the world by withdrawal into a kind of heroic innocence, in any case falling in defeat with their grace intact. Whether a proto-fascist like Aguirre, an idiot savant like Kaspar Hauser (in Every Man for Himself and God Against All), or a mythic figure like Nosferatu, the Herzog character moves through a landscape that (in the films following Fata Morgana) is a German romantic’s dream of nature—oblivious to it while we are hypnotized by it—and finally disappears.⁸⁰ "My characters have no shadows . . . " Herzog says. "They are characters without a past, or whose past does not matter. They come out of the darkness and people who come out of the darkness cast no shadow. The light is something that always hurts them, so the character is there, at the moment, and then is gone to his obscurity. Their actions are somehow oblivious, it seems, to themselves."⁸¹

Though not to us. We attempt to understand, though blocked at every instant by the landscape and by the characters (whose strangeness on screen is often compounded by their extra-narrative existence—Bruno S., who plays Kaspar Hauser, is a part-time schizophrenic "in real life"; Klaus Kinski is a bizarre personality both in and outside the films; the actors in Heart of Glass are hypnotized throughout). Blockage, awe, dis-ease—these reactions link Herzog’s work to the expressionist tradition. He is able to turn a landscape or a figure into an expression of oddity, separation; his gaze isolates and makes strange, more strange in fact than that of the original expressionists. They separated their work from the natural world and painted the world they wanted inside the studio, creating an extreme chiaroscuro that helped provoke a perceptual anxiety (an effect Herzog achieves in Heart of Glass, the film that closely approaches the visual and acting styles of the expressionists). Herzog achieves somewhat similar results by the prolonged gaze upon distant, natural landscapes, shots held so long that the natural becomes artificial and troubling. It is a technique that he in fact learned from one of the last of the expressionists, F. W. Murnau. In Murnau’s Nosferatu the artificial settings are punctuated by shots of actual landscapes, and while these are never held as long as Herzog holds his shots, they showed him a way of delivering up the natural world so that it is perceived as obdurate, unpliable, unknowable. Perhaps Herzog’s remaking of Nosferatu is somewhat less interesting than we would expect it to be because he demonstrated what he had learned from Murnau’s film before remaking it. His Nosferatu is a direct homage to a kind of filmmaking he had already been practicing and, with the exception of Klaus Kinski’s reading of the central role—his melancholy rat’s face giving the vampire a despair missing in Murnau and all other film versions of the Dracula myth—he does not add to or deepen the myth to any great extent. The film does not completely evoke the original nor find its own style, suffering from too conscious an attempt to pay homage rather than intelligently extend an influence.

Perhaps the problem with Herzog is that he seems to insist on denying his own intelligence by adopting the guise of the romantic, attacking rationalism, evading analysis, dealing with history and psychology almost exclusively in the forms of allegory, and most concerned with anomalous states of mind and perception. His subject is always the outsider, the individual or group alien to the rationally constructed bourgeois world, whose strangeness makes the world strange by his or their presence. Even in Stroszek (1977), his one fiction film that does deal with the modern world, Herzog is more interested in observing the absolute alienation of his three unlikely German immigrants (one simpleton—Bruno S. again—one little old man who studies animal magnetism, and one prostitute) from the flat American midwestern landscape and its flat inhabitants than he is in understanding it. As I have said, Herzog’s eye is obsessively drawn to otherness, and his preference in observing the strange and bizarre is to let it remain inviolate and make the rest of the world other by its very presence. Nature and society remain untouched by the appearance of the shadowless other. At the end of Aguirre, the imprisoning camera eye swoops wide circles around the raft upon which stands the lunatic conquistador, surrounded by the dying and dead and overrun by monkeys. Despite the movement, despite the allegory of the fascist personality contained in the narrative, the final image entraps the character and the spectator’s comprehension of him in stasis. History is canceled by wonder—even admiration for the heroic madman.

In Heart of Glass, Herzog attempts to create an allegory of the rise and fall of industry. The inhabitants of a nineteenth-century glassmaking town become crazed because they have lost the secret of their manufacturing process. A seer voices apocalyptic visions of the death throes of capitalism. But just as the megalomania of Aguirre becomes more attractive to Herzog than the prophecy of fascism inherent in the megalomania, so the mysterious breakdown of the town in Heart of Glass (and the manifestation of that breakdown in the zombie-like actions of the hypnotized players) becomes more attractive than a comprehension of economics and its cultural effects. Herzog gets caught up in a fascination with obsession, with the attraction to megalomania, and he short-circuits his allegory and his prophecy.

François Truffaut in his film The Wild Child (1969) attempts to understand the ramifications of bringing language and reason to a child who has known neither most of his life. The film is about education and learning, the need to give up nature, and the melancholy nostalgia for the life of nature that is given up. The mise-en-scène echoes the rusticity of D. W. Griffith, as Truffaut parallels his character’s acquisition of language with the simple visual language of early film. In Every Man for Himself and God Against All, whose subject is an individual who has been locked in a dungeon, perhaps since birth, Herzog attempts to assume the point of view of the half-formed man, suddenly released upon the world not knowing language or reason, and to understand what the rational world of the nineteenth century can learn from him. The answer, he finds, is nothing. Kaspar Hauser becomes an obstacle the bourgeois world must overcome, and the world for Kaspar becomes an extension of his dreams. The form of the film slides the internal and external worlds into one another, and Kaspar gets stuck in a prison house in which kindness and brutality become two poles of incomprehension. In his version of the wolf-boy myth, Truffaut has his wild child almost educated by the bourgeois world; Herzog is content that the world will never be educated by the child-like mind.

Finally, there is a certain self-satisfaction that determines Herzog’s films. Beyond the discomfort, the awe, even the semi-hypnosis they tend to create through the long-held shots of sublime landscapes, they are works very content with themselves—a phenomenon that further connects them with the expressionists (and perhaps with romanticism in general), whose films never inquired about their own nature; whose images were silent about their genesis and meaning. Of all major contemporary European filmmakers, Herzog is most willing to allow his images to stand uninterrogated; to allow them, and the carefully selected music he insinuates under them, to generate amazement, promote reverie, and frustrate analysis. His films, like his characters, are without shadows, and, like the landscape of Fata Morgana, without deeper meaning. His images are astounding, but his discourse is attenuated. The films are more incantations than narratives.

Herzog has taken the movement from neo-realism to modernism to a curious dead end. He de-politicizes the neo-realist image so that observation becomes its own end. His landscapes and his inward looking characters suffer our gaze but take no cognizance of it, make no response. The modernist thrust, in either its Brechtian or its non-Brechtian mode, is to make the image accountable to our perception of it and permit a mutual interrogation to occur. Even the most simple gesture, such as the frame-by-frame slow motion that Godard uses in Sauve qui peut (La Vie), reveals a desire on the filmmaker’s part to excite desire in the viewer to consider the complexities of the illusion that film is (that life is). Herzog has rerouted this desire back to an acceptance of mysteries and the mystery of film.

But, after saying all this, I must point out that Herzog does share the modernist’s ability to disturb the spectator, to force him or her into dealing with some elements of the imagery, even if the result is frustration when the images do not yield to coherent analysis (as opposed, for example, to Straub and Huillet’s images, which will yield after much work). Those images are so well made and seductive that it is impossible to dismiss them, no matter how banal their content proves to be. There are few filmmakers who can turn the simplest image—like the blowing wheat field that opens Every Man for Himself and God Against All or the shot of Bruno S. gazing at a newborn infant in Stroszek—into an evocation of awe and strangeness, or who can make the most complex images—like the one that ends Aguirre or those that close Heart of Glass—suggest the eternal ambiguities and contradictions of a Faustian desire. But it is precisely the embracing of such eternal ambiguities that I find troubling. Herzog’s is a cinema of impasse. The provocation of ambiguity, the ironies of the yearning hero frustrated by the rational controls of the social order or the irrational controls of nature are attractive to any of us still suffering the remnants of romanticism. But these provocations and ironies and the desires of doomed heroes, when allowed to go unanalyzed, invite us to remove ourselves from a world in which ambiguities must be sorted out and understood, and in which ironies provide only temporary refuge. Amos Vogel once wrote about Herzog’s films, "To reveal a metaphysical element in life or art without becoming a reactionary is one of the challenges of the day."⁸² Herzog just barely meets the challenge. Neither a metaphysician nor a reactionary, he creates a romantic, allegorical universe which excites the eye and threatens to muffle the mind.

Most of the filmmakers I am discussing have tried with varying success to attack the old romanticism of form and content and to dislodge the notion that form is the glass that permits us to gaze into a world of passions and mysteries, yearnings and transcendings. Herzog is by no means attempting to re-create the old zero-degree style, but he is trying to promote cinema as something of a magic glass that can reveal the extraordinary beyond our ordinary vision. Filmmakers like Fassbinder and Godard, Chabrol and Buñuel, Antonioni, and many others we have yet to discuss, attempt to show that in the ordinary lies the possibility for cinema to reveal the complexities of reality, a reality constituted by the intersection of cinema with our own experience, each addressing the other without mystifications. From the various formal concerns of these individuals has come an understanding that film is not limited to mere description or to the simple transmitting of moral platitudes. Nor must it be dedicated to the opulence of spectacle, to entertainment by excess. Rather, film can set itself the role of examiner and revealer of things hidden. Not mysterious things, though perhaps those things that societies and their politics have a stake in making mysterious. As filmmakers have begun to reveal that theirs is a work of artifice, of making images, they have also been able to reveal what makes up images—both those of film and those of our day-to-day lives. In the process of interrogation film has reflected back to us the questions that it had—until the mid-forties—largely ignored. In revealing the methods of its looking it is able to reveal things not looked at before by film. This work of demystification has helped us regain control over what we see, and see where we can exercise some control.

                    Chapter Three