Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (1974) 37
S. Swart, Alejandro Gonzalez Irritu: Helmer
gets raw with Amores Perros, Variety, 15 January
2001, https://variety.com/2001/lm/news/ale-
jandro-gonzalez-inarritu-1117792068/
Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the
Soul (1974)
[Country: West Germany. Production Company:
Tango-Film. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Producer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Screen-
writer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinemato-
grapher: Jrgen Jrges. Designers: Kurt Raab,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Editor: Thea Eymsz.
Cast: Brigitte Mira (Emmi Kurowski), El Hedi Ben
Salem (Ali), Barbara Valentin (Barbara, the bar
owner), Irm Hermann (Krista), Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (Eugen).]
Synopsis: After a chance meeting in a bar in
Munich, Emmi, a cleaning woman (Mira) and Ali
(El Hedi Ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan
guest worker, fall in love and marry. Family,
neighbours and work colleagues respond with hor-
ror and disgust, ostracising the couple. In despair,
they take a vacation to escape social disapproval.
On their return, they nd attitudes have changed
somewhat: their former persecutors now hypocriti-
cally look to take advantage of either Emmi or Ali.
Gradually the couples relationship starts to fall
apart. At a moment of apparent reconciliation, in
the same bar where they met, Ali collapses with an
acute ulcer, a condition typical of immigrant
workers, unlikely to be curable.
Fear Eats the Soul is among Rainer Werner
Fassbinders most canonical lms. Along with
The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), it is the one
that appears in lists of 100 best lms and is most
often assigned on undergraduate lm studies syllabi.
The lm falls into the domestic melodrama
Dolores Tierney, Alejandro Gonzalez Irritu:
Director without Borders, New Cinemas: Journal
of Contemporary Film Vol. 7 (2), 2009, pp. 10117.
Martyn Thayne
phase of Fassbinders production, the period in the
early-to-mid 1970s when, under the inuence of
Douglas Sirk, he introduced an affective directness
into his work, a directness until then rare in the
Godardian genre re-workings and austere comedies
of his already substantial oeuvre. But while Sirk may
have given Fassbinder a taste for simpler stories, his
staging of sentiment was never simple, nor did it
mark a softening of his outlook. In Fassbinders
worldview, at once cynically clear-eyed and utopian,
power pervades all social relations from the ground
up. Individuals are locked into and exploited by
large-scale systems of power and money, and inter-
personal relations offer only the mirage of escape.
Even on the level of especially on the level of
personal, emotional and sexual relations, there can
be no equality, motives are never innocent, and the
question of who whom can never be escaped.
Fassbinders lms of this period Fear Eats the
Soul, but also The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Mother
Ksters Journey to Heaven, Fox and his Friends, The
Merchant of Four Seasons and others relentlessly lead
their principal characters through downward spirals
of emotional suffering. In doing so, they also
excoriate the smugness, conformism, hypocrisy and
unacknowledged violence of post-war West German
society, shown to be founded on vulgar materialism,
psychic repression and historical guilt. However,
although there is much melodramatic suffering,
there are few entirely innocent victims: afiction can
be noble, but it is rarely pure. The central gures
who often die with or from their unhappiness are
frequently complicit with their situation, sometimes
38 Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
abjectly so, and often inict a portion of suffering on
others in turn. In compiling this compendium of
distress and exploitation, Fassbinder returned time
and again, with particular vehemence, to the insti-
tutions of the family and couple. The former is depic-
ted as an inescapable site of violent socialisation, the
latter as a nexus of bitterness, co-dependency, frus-
tration and mutual manipulation.
For all that, there is a deep strain of utopianism
and even romanticism at work in Fassbinder.
Desire and love are constant threads through all his
works, albeit ultimately in thwarted, aborted,
abused, betrayed or otherwise impossible forms. A
bleak but nuanced picture, and one that was, for
the director, ultimately political. As he put it in a
late interview: In the exploitative system under
which we live, love too is exploited and exploita-
tive. [Thus] I can recommend the desire to love,
but not love itself. But perhaps if that desire were
made to grow ever larger and ever clearer then
maybe something would change (Fischer 2004:
600). While sympathetic to many currents of the
1960s and 70s counter-culture, Fassbinder refused
to put forward overarching solutions to the pro-
blems he diagnosed, suggesting his role lay rather
in forcing audiences to pose difcult questions
about their own lives, to sensitise audiences
through the knotted problems his lms present
(Fischer 2004: 324). This combination of social
critique and apparent fatalism led some critics to
diagnose a pernicious passivity in his work. For
Richard Dyer, Fassbinders lms were suffused with
left melancholy, wallowing in suffering, acknowl-
edging social determinants while disavowing prac-
tical action (Dyer 1980: 5465). Others since,
however, have detected more subtle modes of
resistance, seeing in the dismantled masculinities
and afrmation of abjection a promise of new
modes of social, emotional and erotic being.1
Whatever the place of passivity in his lms,
Fassbinder himself was a prodigiously active and
productive gure. It was not unusual for him to
produce up to several features a year, writing and
directing, as well as frequently acting, and with a
hand in editing, production and design. Fear Eats the
Soul was produced in 15 shooting days. The speed
of production is partly explicable by the great
clarity of Fassbinders artistic vision and partly by
the efciency of his close-knit group of regular col-
laborators. The group included a substantial num-
ber of family, acolytes, friends and former and
current lovers: the directors work and tumultuous
life were intimately related on the level of produc-
tion and of casting, and sometimes in narrative
allusions. El Hedi Ben Salem, who plays Ali, was
Fassbinders then partner. The directors compli-
cated personal life and the multiple interconnec-
tions of biography and lms were a favourite topic
for West German tabloids during his life and after
his early death.
Like Sirks All That Heaven Allows (1956), of which
it is a partial re-make, Fear Eats the Soul shows a
scandalous love story across social divides, centring
on a couple faced with the disapproval and out-
right sabotage of family and neighbours. However,
in transposing the action from New England to
Munich, Fassbinder also changes the constellation
of social conicts and taboos. Where Sirks wealthy
widow falls in love with her gardener, Fassbinder
locates both his main characters at the bottom of
the social scale, lessening their class difference while
emphasising their common marginalisation. Above
all, Fassbinder amplies the scandalousness of the
match its impossibility and impropriety in the
eyes of society, and perhaps in the eyes of the
audience by adding a difference in race and
nationality, and a radical disjuncture in age and
sexual attractiveness.
On paper, this compounding of issues pre-
judice, racism, exploitation, the loneliness of the
marginalised is reminiscent of what in German is
referred to as the Problemlm, contemporary dramas
worthily addressing social problems. But the exact-
ing formalism of its visual style, along with Fas-
sbinders writing and staging, takes the lm far
from banal realism. Already in the extraordinary
opening scene, the meticulously constructed mise
en scne careful analysis of space; garish colour in
costumes and design; stylised, almost ritualised
blocking of the actors reveals a key aspect of the
lm: the way it uses relations of vision and looking
to demonstrate and allegorise how personal rela-
tions are constituted in a web of coercive social
relations. Throughout, relations and emotions are
staged through a complex exchange of gazes and
glances, including the cameras look we are never

allowed to forget that we too are staring, along with
the hostile neighbours.
Thus, when Emmi takes shelter in the bar, she is
subject to the steady, cold gaze of all those present.
But the starers do not have to turn to look: in Fas-
sbinders staging, they are already looking even as
she enters. Likewise, the dance between Emmi and
Ali, which inaugurates their scandalously inap-
propriate romance (its just not natural says one
character), is initially a product of the mockery,
jealousy and resentment of others: a woman at the
bar, her advances spurned by Ali, puts money in
the jukebox and scornfully suggests he dance with
the old woman.
The opening scenes conjure one of Fassbinders
moments of utopian hope. On the space of the
empty dance oor, an unlikely bond between mis-
matched outsiders comes to pass. To an old jazz-
tango, the two dance simply, with mutual respect
and unexpected equality of esteem, and they speak
straightforwardly and honestly. Here, the subtlety of
the performances is key although Brigitte Mira, as
Emmi, tells Ali she hasnt danced in twenty years,
she is unfazed to be asked, and gets up to dance with
no sense of subordination or surprise.
Both here and later when Ali walks her home
with a kind of self-evident gallantry, and she invites
him in the dialogue does standard narrative
work, giving information about the characters. But,
in addition, the vocal performances (added later in
voice-over) lend simplicity and dignity to their
words, making of the encounter less a seduction
and more a continuation of their dance. The
dynamic between the two has an emphatic ordi-
nariness and a childlike unintendedness about it.
Nonetheless, by morning, there is an incorporeal
moment of transformation; something has hap-
pened, a horizon of possibility has opened. As the
lm unfolds, we observe their relation to be pri-
marily composed of a mixture of tenderness and
solidarity: what lends it eroticism and romanticism
is less a chemistry of bodies, than its sense of
inevitability in a place of improbability.
Once the relation is established, inviting the
viewers investment in the story, all begins to go
horribly wrong. But the problems are of more than
one kind. As many observers have pointed out, the
story divides neatly in two. In the rst half, the
Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (1974) 39
couples problems largely come from outside, while
in the second both a recapitulation and a devel-
opment of the rst the relation erodes from
within. The schematism and abstraction of this
structure as if the narrative is systematically test-
ing their love under different conditions is aligned
with the coolness of the cameras gaze, which has
many shots that hold characters within door or
window frames, or x them through the bars of
stairwells. In part, this device visually underlines
their isolation, but it also serves to frame them for
us, showing them almost as exhibits.
In the rst half, thus, the lm foregrounds the
comments of racist neighbours, the greed and
hypocrisy of family members, the hostility of the
local shopkeeper, the shameless stares of strangers.
This all takes its toll: for Emmi in particular, the
ostracism becomes unbearable. Although old and
lonely, she still has social ties to family, colleagues
and neighbours, and in that sense more to lose.
However, the hostility also strengthens the couple,
making marginalisation their common bond and
the foundation of their relation. This simultaneous
isolation and togetherness is highlighted in a
famous sequence, with Ali and Emmi seated alone
in a large caf garden, the camera in a rare break
from its usual carefully composed static framings
moving around them, as if to trace the circle of
their exclusion. As the waiting staff stands and
stares in cold impassiveness, they afrm their love,
but Emmi breaks down, wishing aloud that they
could leave and come back to nd everyone nice.
Emmis wish for acceptance comes true, but
without happy consequences. Returning from
vacation, the couple nds a radically changed sit-
uation. Social rejection is replaced by manipulative
acceptance, as the same gures who shunned or
condemned them now nd reason they all want
something to re-establish ties. When outside
pressure is reduced, the couple collapses internally.
Emmi nds a route back into society, but at the
price of collaborating in the exclusion of others,
including a new Yugoslavian worker, now ostra-
cised in her turn. Ali becomes more and more the
Other in the home. Echoing the racist banalities of
her co-workers, Emmi shows him off as an exotic
erotic exhibit. Ali, whose social connection is far
more limited, escapes the stiing marital home
40 Antonias Line (1995)

through heavy drinking and sex with other women. Note

He too can be shockingly cruel: in a bitter scene, he
1. For a good summary of these readings, see
laughs along as his co-workers mock the unhappy
Gornkel 2012.
Emmi as his grandmother from Morocco.
If the division into two parts represents a kind of
thesis and antithesis, the conclusion offers little Further reading
redeeming synthesis. The penultimate scene, the
Richard Dyer, Reading Fassbinders Sexual
narrative climax, repeats elements from Emmis and
Politics, in Tony Rayns (ed.), Fassbinder, Lon-
Alis history, and at rst seems to offer the possibility
don, British Film Institute, 1980, pp. 5465.
of resolution. Emmi arrives at the bar to rescue Ali,
Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinders Germany: History,
who is recklessly gambling and drinking. Dressed in
Identity, Subject, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Uni-
their wedding clothes, the couple dance again to the
versity Press, 1996.
music of their rst meeting. Here, in the space
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Tteberg, Leo
where the relation began, they attempt as in the
A. Lensing, The Anarchy of the Imagination: Inter-
liberal model of relationships to talk through their
views, Essays, Notes, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
problems. All seems set for a third start, a higher
University Press, 1992.
and happier synthesis of understanding and honesty.
Robert Fischer (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
Ali admits to sleeping around, Emmi forgives him; it
Fassbinder ber Fassbinder, Frankfurt am Main,
doesnt matter, she says, she knows she is old,
Verlag der Autoren, 2004.
mutual kindness is more important.
Elena Gornkel, Impossible, Impolitic: Ali: Fear
At this point, Fassbinder violently aborts the
reconciliation. Ali collapses with an ulcer, a condi- Eats the Soul and Fassbinders Asynchronous
tion that, we learn, is endemic and recurrent Bodies, in Brigitte Peucker (ed.), A Companion to
among immigrant workers. All easy hope is dis- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hoboken, Wiley Black-
pelled: the lm stages the futility of interpersonal well, 2012, pp. 50215.
goodwill in the face of social conditions, conditions Judith Mayne, Fassbinder and Spectatorship, New
which burrow deep into the bodies of the poor. German Critique, Vol. 12, 1977, pp. 6174.
Laura Mulvey, Notes on Sirk and Melodrama, in
The lm ends downbeat and ambivalent, with
Emmi weeping by Alis hospital bed, vowing to Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington, Indiana
take care of him. Some see this as a kind of happy University Press, 1989, pp. 3944.
ending; if so, then only in the spirit of the lms
sober motto, a quotation from Godards Vivre sa vie: Bran Hanrahan
Happiness is not always fun.

Antonias Line (1995)

[Country: Netherlands, Belgium, UK. Production
Company: Bergen. Director and screenwriter:
Marleen Gorris. Cinematographer: Willy Stassen.
Editors: Wim Louwrier, Michiel Reichwein. Music:
Ilona Sekacz. Cast: Willeke van Ammelrooy (Antonia),
I Els Dottermans (Danielle), Veerle van Overloop
(Therese), Marina de Graaf (Deedee), Jan Decleir
(Farmer Bas), Mil Seghers (Crooked Finger).]
Synopsis: A Dutch matron oversees a close-knit,
matriarchal community where feminism and liber-
alism thrive.
Antonias Line won the Oscar for the best foreign
language lm of 1995, the rst lm by a female
director ever to accomplish this feat. The woman
in question was the Dutch lmmaker Marleen
The Routledge Encyclopedia
of Films

Edited by
Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and
John White
First published 2015
by Routledge
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II. Barrow, Sarah, editor of compilation. III. Haenni, Sabine, editor of compilation.
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