Considering Fassbinder – Reflections from Todd Haynes
Director Todd Haynes, whose work includes the award-winning Far From Heaven, Poison, Safe, and his latest, the identity-shifting meditation on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There recently spoke with IFQ Critic Todd Konrad and succinctly offered his thoughts on acclaimed iconoclastic director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The pair shares an equal fascination with bending well-worn genres and exploring issues of identity and power, i.e. each director’s socially conscious reinterpretation of melodrama master Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder injected a social critique of post-war German racism in his version, titled Ali: Fear Eats the Soul while Haynes’ own Far From Heaven pays homage to Sirk’s claustrophobic melodrama while retaining Fassbinder’s racial critique and adding his own examination of closeted homosexuality in 1950’s America. Haynes comments on the impact Fassbinder has held over his own life and chats with glee over the release of Fassbinder’s epic miniseries and (in many critical eyes) magnum opus, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
IFQ: When examining your work, one filmmaker who seems to continuously inform your films is the late German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder who has been receiving a flurry attention as of late, including the re-release of his miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz. What are your thoughts about Fassbinder himself and his work and Berlin Alexanderplatz, in general?
Todd Haynes: Yeah I’m so excited to hear that it’s coming out on DVD. I made the mistake of not getting it on video when a beautiful box set came out in the Eighties.
IFQ: Well, I must say that as a fellow Fassbinder fan, I couldn’t be happier that Berlin Alexanderplatz is finally coming out on DVD.
TH: Oh yeah, me too, I’m in the same boat. I was first exposed to Fassbinder’s films in college and they’ve remained really central to my life and my inspiration. I just think he is a remarkable figure in post-war cinema and obviously, particularly, post-war German film and the New German Cinema. But he is this rare entity and seemingly becomes more so as every year passes as he belongs to a tradition of politics and social criticism in filmmaking, having a strong point of view that challenges the status quo, which has faded somewhat from mainstream films. He was definitely formed by ’68, Europe, and a certain intellectual, progressive and political sensibility.
But he also did something very different than his contemporaries in the kinds of films and American genres that he turned to. His discovery of Douglas Sirk is such an incredibly, fascinating critical discovery wherein he found a political and critical potential in a genre dismissed and degraded as the “maternal melodrama” or the “American melodrama.” And he realized that talking about love and power in relationships and inside the domestic setting are often the strongest and most impactful ways of looking at societal pressures and persuasion. And to look at the sorts of power systems that play themselves out amongst men and women and relationships, and that those power dynamics re-echo historical and political structures. He saw that all of that can be found in something as mainstream and American as the American melodrama. So he’s just fascinating and his body of work is so rich and powerful.