Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82) was a West German filmmaker who, in his short life, wrote and directed 38 feature films, several shorts and TV shows, including what many consider his masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and even produced films for other filmmakers. A one-man film studio, he created a new movie every 100 days. But his unhealthy lifestyle ended his life early when he died of a cocaine overdose at age 37.
Music critic Ian Penman had been meaning to write a book on the filmmaker for years but put it off because procrastination. Then, in the spirit of Fassbinder’s insane productivity, he gave himself a deadline of 3-4 months - the timeframe Fassbinder would turn around a completed film - to finally write it. And the end result is this: Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.
I’d like to say this was a good book but it really wasn’t. Maybe if it wasn’t so rushed, it’d be better. I’d say the same about Fassbinder’s films - of which I’ve only seen three: The Marriage of Maria Braun, Querelle, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant - that they might’ve been better if he hadn’t blitzed through them at such a feverish pace.
As a result, Querelle and Bitter Tears are both horrendously boring to sit through. Fassbinder supposedly wrote the script for Bitter Tears during one long haul flight while Querelle was his last film, made at his peak drug use - maybe if he’d taken more time with the script, maybe if he’d taken better care of his health, both films wouldn’t be such hard, dull work?
Penman’s writing style is my biggest bugbear. Like his Erik Satie book (which was published after this but I read it before the Fassbinder book), he’s written it in this numbered paragraph way that makes for a fucking awful stop/start rhythm to the book. It means he can go off on any number of tangents - many of which are banal and pointless; “Aren’t all masks death masks?” reads one idiotic numbered paragraph oh shut up! - but mainly gives it a staccato quality that resists ever building up to a smooth flow.
It just makes me angry because Penman can write well - in short bursts. His best book is It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, which is comprised of short, focused essays on notable musical figures. And he writes it without this silly numbered paragraph style too, so he doesn’t need this ugly crutch. Ironically, almost taunting me, the book closes out with three appendices, the final one of which is a short article on Fassbinder’s love of football that Penman wrote for the London Review of Books in 2014 which is great - it’s actually what I wanted the whole book to be composed of! - but that’s the only time I saw what I’d hoped the entire book would’ve been. And then it was over.
He simply can’t write long-form books - this and the Satie book are evidence of this. Perhaps that’s because he’s spent decades writing short pieces and he never developed the skills for writing a full-length book. The numbered paragraphs and stream of consciousness-style put me in mind of a messy first draft, except instead of rewriting it all into something resembling a real book, he submitted - and got accepted for publication, foolish, foolish publishers - the messy first draft.
I think I know why Penman chose this approach. He includes a quote from Nabokov’s The Eye at the end: “For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases.” You could interpret that in different ways. He’s saying that in death, Fassbinder’s influence has spread to numerous filmmakers, who in turn will die and influence others, ad infinitum.
Or he’s saying that there isn’t really a person there, just other people, creative influences, etc. that were a version of him but not him in totality. It possibly explains why this is such an uninformative supposed-biography - Penman doesn’t think there is a Fassbinder, in the summing up, to write about. Even though I, and others who might pick up this book, want to learn a bit about Fassbinder at the very least, and instead we learn very little about him, which is very unsatisfying.
Worse, there’s random sloppy details thrown in that aren’t true - Fritz Lang didn’t direct Caligari (p.124) and Penman includes quotes from people who say factually inaccurate things, like Daniel Schmid on p.94 who says Fassbinder and Marilyn Monroe died at the same age. No - she died at 36 and he died at 37.
The overall impression of all of this is one of annoyance and wasted effort, on the part of the writer and the reader. Maybe Penman was trying something different stylistically but he didn’t pull it off successfully - Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is a boring waste of time. You won’t learn anything much about the filmmaker and it won’t be much fun slogging through either - you’re better off spending a few minutes on Wikipedia looking up Fassbinder instead (which I gather is how Penman researches most of his work).
I’m not a huge fan of Fassbinder’s - Maria Braun wasn’t bad but the only other two movies of his I’ve seen were godawful - and, in a Penman-esque observation, I’ve only enjoyed one of Penman’s books - Curving Track - and disliked the other two. The same track record then for both creators! The reflecting phantoms’ population increases still more…
No comments:
Post a Comment