LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH (1969) B/W widescreen 88m dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

w/Ulli Lommel, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake, Liz Sollner, Gisela Otto, Ursula Stratz, Monica Nuchtern, Hans Hirschmuller, Les Olvides, Peer Raben, Howard Gaines, Peter Moland, Kurt Raab, Peter Berling, Anastassios Karalas, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Yaak Karsunke, Hannes Gromball

Strange gangster story about a small-time pimp who is torn between his mistress and the gangster sent after him by the syndicate he has refused to join.

From the Criterion website (www.criterion.com), "Love is Colder Than Death: Poor Souls" by Michael Koresky:

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder launched himself into the German film scene as though from a catapult, making ten features between April 1969 and November 1970, impressive works that already evinced the sociological rigor and mastery of form that would define the highest-profile career of any director in the New German Cinema. At the same time, these early films stand apart from those that came after: enlisting the talents of collaborators simultaneously involved in Munich’s Antiteater (anti-theater) performance group, of which Fassbinder was a founder, they are all made in a detached, experimental style informed by the sensibility of that group’s work. At the end of this phase, the filmmaker abandoned this austere approach in the interest of reaching a wider audience, and he is now best known for the more accessible films that followed, splendidly grim, Hollywood-inspired melodramas that bring a visual realism couched in the verities of everyday West German life to a genre known for its glossiness and symphonic emotional crescendos. But the films he made at the beginning of his career are compelling in their own right; political and personal, confrontational and moving, they showcase the provocative artistry of a filmmaker who, before his premature death at thirty-seven, dedicated himself to bringing to light uncomfortable truths about his country’s legacy and postwar complacency.

"West German cinema was moribund in the fifties and early sixties, unable to find its footing even two decades after World War II. More than three-quarters of its domestic audience had been lost to television. Furthermore, the industry was barely on the international radar, as it tended toward Heimatfilms (homeland films) --- simplistic, provincial movies extolling the virtues of the German nation and intended strictly for German audiences. It was a moment ripe for shaking up by a new generation of artists, and on February 28, 1962, that moment was definitively seized. During the annual International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, a group of twenty-six young filmmakers, inspired by the Free Cinema movement in England and the New Wave in France, demanded a new kind of German cinema. They did this in the Oberhausen Manifesto, a sort of call to arms for new filmmakers to make engaged, daring cinema, and to demand support from the government to do so. 'The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new,' proclaimed the signatories, who included Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Peter Schamoni. Though the tone of the manifesto was urgent, it would take three years of lobbying government cultural commissions for the movement to bear fruit. The group finally saw twenty films given full or partial public financing between 1965 and 1968, as well as the founding of state film schools in Berlin and Munich in 1966. The early films that were made under the aegis of this cinematic revolution --- such as Volker Schlondorff's Young Torless and Kluge's Yesterday Girl (both 1966) --- were critiques of the conformity and apathy of German society. What these radicalized filmmakers demanded wasn’t necessarily what viewers wanted, however: with few exceptions, these films, made cheaply because of the meagerness of the government funding, proved unpopular, even alienating, to mainstream audiences, and as the sixties came to a close, the New German Cinema seemed to be ending almost as soon as it had begun.

"Into this climate swaggered Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Born in May 1945, just weeks after Germany’s surrender to the Allies, he was considerably younger than the filmmakers who had been part of the Oberhausen group and the others who had sprung up in its wake. The rebellious child of divorced parents, Fassbinder was a repeat boarding-school runaway who, as an adult, would often describe, with a mix of bitterness and blitheness, a childhood defined by neglect. His interest in film was forged early, as he retreated to the movies almost daily, watching mostly American films, often of the gangster variety. His first step toward a career in the arts was his 1964 enrollment in Munich’s Fridl-Leonhard acting school, which he loathed for what he viewed as its oppressive, dogmatic atmosphere. While there, he kept his sights set on cinema; his goal, after he graduated in May 1966, was to be accepted into the new German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, to which he submitted an 8 mm short titled This Night as part of his application. He was rejected but decided to make movies on his own, convincing his first lover, Christoph Roser, an out-of-work actor with a little money in the bank, to fund them. The results were two French New Wave–inflected shorts, The City Tramp (1966) and A Little Chaos (1967), the former inspired by Eric Rohmer, the latter by Jean-Luc Godard. Both were turned down by the Oberhausen festival.

"Fassbinder became increasingly involved in theater over the next couple of years, though filmmaking was always in the back of his mind. Impressed by a Brechtian staging of Antigone, he soon joined --- or, as some involved have said, imposed himself on --- the Action Theater in Munich, fashioned after the New York experimental group the Living Theater, and began staging plays he had written. The Action Theater wasn’t long for this world, however (the converted cinema in which the group had set up shop was destroyed in April 1968 by a band of radicals who had regularly attended productions, mainly to heckle and vocally propound their own more violent philosophies from the audience --- these included Andreas Baader, later of Baader-Meinof infamy); afterward, Fassbinder and others from the Action Theater formed the Antiteater collective, which put on plays --- including leftist updates of works by Goethe, Sophocles, and John Gay --- at venues around Munich. This troupe, which included Kurt Raab, Peer Raben, Irm Hermann, and Hanna Schygulla, would supply the core members of the crew that would help Fassbinder realize his filmmaking dreams. As with theater, Fassbinder was interested in pushing cinema into darker and more confrontational and political realms.

"His first feature, Love Is Colder Than Death, was shot in Munich in twenty-four days in April 1969; it was funded by money Fassbinder had made by taking acting gigs, as well as some contributed by Hanna von Rezzori, an heiress to the Bosch hardware fortune and patron of the arts. In the leading role, Fassbinder cast not one of his loyal Antiteater players but Ulli Lommel, whom he’d acted alongside in Schlondorff's TV adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Baal. In Love Is Colder Than Death, Fassbinder employs a chilly, detached aesthetic --- inspired by the experimental work of Godard and Jean-Marie Straub --- to subvert American gangster movie cliches. Lommel plays Bruno, a worker for a crime syndicate who is instructed to convince a small-time hood, Franz (Fassbinder), to join the outfit. The simmering tension of the film comes from its underlying eroticism, as the evident attraction between Bruno and Franz --- and between Franz’s girl, Joanna (Schygulla), and both men --- creates complications. All romantic possibilities are ultimately beside the point, however, as the nihilistic Love Is Colder Than Death presents such pursuits as futile, culminating in a betrayal and a botched robbery.

"The film also thwarts conventional audience identification with its protagonists. They are like mannequins, posed in static tableaux, often in stark, white rooms. Fassbinder’s camera rarely moves as it surveys their follies in self-consciously long takes. But his attitude toward them never seems patronizing; rather, he distills behavior into gestures, and language into basic, childlike words. In a 1969 interview, he called these characters 'poor souls ... who didn’t know what to do with themselves, who were simply set down, as they are, and who weren’t given a chance.' Though Fassbinder was influenced by Hollywood and French New Wave depictions of the criminal underworld, there’s no glamour to the lives of gangsters in his world --- he sees them not as cool rebels but as symbols of capitalist exploitation, victims of bourgeois society, and therefore as trapped in the muck of the everyday as everyone else. Fassbinder said early in his career that his films fell into two categories: 'cinema films' (self-referential genre pieces) and 'bourgeois films' (social critiques). Though Love Is Colder Than Death was an example of the former, it was also contending with the class and money issues important to the latter.

"Other first-time filmmakers might have been discouraged by the response Love Is Colder Than Death received at its Berlin Film Festival premiere in June 1969. Not Fassbinder. Though jeered at onstage by an audience put off by his film’s distant, clammy aesthetic, he clasped his hands and shook them over his head in a gesture of victory. And he plunged into his next film --- an adaptation of his 1968 play Katzelmacher --- with an avidity that would set the pace for the rest of his career. Though that Berlin audience didn’t know it, an important star of the fledgling New German Cinema had been born."