Quote of the Day #3
“Their eyes met in Rome. On a street in Rome — the Via Piemonte. He was coming down it, coming along toward her, when she first saw him. She didn’t know it but he was also coming into her life, into her destiny — bringing what was meant to be.
Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.
If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.”
From For the Rest of Her Life, by Cornell Woolrich, filmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as MARTHA.
This sequence is treated in an extraordinary manner by Fassbinder in his TV adaptation of one of Woolrich’s last stories (in which the heroine’s ultimate fate somewhat reflects Woolrich’s own.
As seen in the picture at top, we begin looking past Martha as she spots the man (PEEPING TOM’s Karlheinz Boehm). Following her as she crosses the square, we — well, at this point it becomes complicated.
The actors pause opposite each other and seem to circle each other, but the camera also circles them…
Having started on Martha, we now follow the mysterious stranger as he walks away…
In the DVD extras on Volume 1 of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder collection, Boehm calls this one of the greatest shots of all time, and I think I have to agree. He also talks about how hard it was to perform the shot unself-consciously — I think the actors have to step over the tracks, and they also have to remain impassive as the camera tracks right across their eyelines. Seeing this movie explains all those circling tracks in Scorsese’s COLOR OF MONEY, also shot by Michael Ballhaus.
I don’t think the actors do quite manage to avoid self-consciousness, but that doesn’t bother me at all. The shot is so strange and disorientating that one assumes it’s meant to convey something of the mystery Woolrich writes about — it’s like the world just executed a spin around the characters, and they each feel the importance of this inexplicable moment.
shadowplay 
April 14, 2010 at 11:53 pm
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “one of the greatest shots of all time,” but it is certainly one of the greatest shots in Fassbinder.
April 15, 2010 at 12:02 am
And influential — via Scorsese it enters the mainstream, and now you see rotating shots in everything. Leone may have influenced some of that (there’s that incredible shot in OUATITWest) but I bet Scorsese had more to do with it.
April 15, 2010 at 3:34 am
MOMA screening Fassbinder telefilm
worldonawire
April 15, 2010 at 3:38 am
It’s one of the greatest shots of all-time.
April 15, 2010 at 3:40 am
Needless to say there’s more to the film than this shot. In Woolrich Fassbinder finds his most ideal dramtization of sado-masochistic bliss.
April 15, 2010 at 4:07 am
NY Times review; Fassbinder telefilm at MOMA
worldonawire
April 15, 2010 at 4:19 am
Thanks for the clip .
The youtube quality video makes the effect all that more intense. It actually made me a little queasy seeing the space around the two figuresturn to gel like that.
It reminds me of one Fourth of July when I was near a very strong explosion. The air concussed and everything looked like it had turned jelly. It was either that or the fluid in my eyeballs getting shaken around.
As a camera “move”, its very atypical, in that the move itself is not so important, but what is left in its wake is.
April 15, 2010 at 4:51 am
Martha Heyer of Douglas Sirk street?
April 15, 2010 at 5:24 am
Karlheinz Boehm who also starred in Minnelli’s FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE and George Pal’s WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM (as the practical brother).
April 15, 2010 at 6:50 am
Martha Hyer is the actress who played the schoolteacher in Minnelli’s ”Some Came Running”. Fassbinder liked his films too.
MARTHA is the most direct of Fassbinder’s deconstructive examinations of melodrama. Melodramatic cliches are brought in and piled on but always distanced and alienated calling attention to the characters perverse natures. Of course Fassbinder wanted to be both Brecht and Sirk, he wanted people to think about social constructs critically yet alse feel their constrictive nature emotionally. You can see that especially in his soulful ”I Only Want You To Love Me” another made-for-TV masterpiece of cinema, which really goes deeply into the class issues of post-War Germany and especially in the beautiful ”Ali : Fear Eats the Soul”. Fassbinder was one film-maker who really took to TV and made incredible works for it.
Fassbinder of course took the circular camera from Godard in WEEKEND. And while it isn’t a masterpiece, CHINESE ROULETTE has an even more baroque circular tracking shot. Also shot by Ballhaus.
April 15, 2010 at 10:37 am
Yes, Christopher, she does indeed give her address as Detlef Sierck Strasse.
I like the way Margit Carstensen grins to express horror, distress, awkwardness. It’s established early on (in the first half hour which has little to do with the source story) so that we have no trouble interpreting that rictus later.
From Godard to Fassbinder to Scorsese to modern US cinema…
The use of music at the end of Martha fascinates me — in some way it softens that brutal conclusion.
April 15, 2010 at 1:41 pm
God, what an amazing film this is! Possibly even Fassbinder’s best?
April 15, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I certainly wouldn’t know, I’m practically an RWF virgin (what an alarming phrase!). I guess I’ve seen about a tenth of his output, if that.
April 15, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Carstensen was great in FEAR OF FEAR.
April 15, 2010 at 2:14 pm
My current Fassbinder favourite is ”The Third Generation” which is one of his most ambitious, formally and politically. It has Eddie Constantine, in another movie a PI in a totalitarian state run by a computer, in a superb performance as a villain who runs a computer empire. It is one of two movies he served as his own DP(among the DP’s he worked with, he is easily second only to Ballhaus). I love the BRD trilogy, ALI, Mother Kusters, Effi Briest.
Oh and “The Merchant of Four Seasons”, the first film of his that I had seen and it was instant admiration. In his long prolific career, the longest gap between two movies was between “Beware of a Holy Whore” and “Merchant of Four Seasons” during which he revisited Sirk’s movies and rethought his aesthetic.
Over and above all is “Berlin Alexanderplatz” which is a spiritual experience like few others in film history.
April 15, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Karlheinz Boem’s most important film was, of course, Peeping Tom.
Martha is one of Fassbinder’s best. Other Top-Drawer RWF’s include In a Year of 13 Moons, Fox and His Friends, Querelle, Bewar of a Holy Whore, The Marriage of Maira Braun and of course Berlin Alexanderplatz
April 15, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Boehm talks wistfully of RWF’s plan to make a film with both him and Romy Schneider — still labouring under the reputation of their Sissi films, they hoped this would kill their kitsch associations once and for all.
Of course, Schneider and to an extent Boehm did become international stars, while only the Germans really knew of the Sissi series. So they were worrying about nothing. But still, it’s a shame that movie never happened.
What with the real geographical Berlin Alexanderplatz, and a street named after Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin feels very much like RWF’s personal property.
I think my next RWF experience might be World on a Wire…
April 15, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Funny because he was a Munich kid. A Bavarian. The state where Hitler first found support. A fact of utmost importance to most Fassbinderites.
Alexanderplatz lapsed to East Germany during the Cold War, Fassbinder shot his film on sets leftover from Bergman’s ”The Serpent’s Egg” which according to him, suited him fine because he felt that the novel he adapted(which I haven’t read) wasn’t really about Alexanderplatz at a particular point but about what he termed the “refuges” in which the characters lived, the bars, the houses and the apartment exteriors. For most of the film he sets the film in vividly and beautifully detailed sets…until the Epilogue which of course changes everything.
Fassbinder in his lifetime sought to chronicle his nation, with all it’s flaws and laundry laid out for the world to see, and he did that admirably. If you want to understand the history of Germany after the war, Fassbinder is the place to go.
April 15, 2010 at 5:08 pm
In retrospect, my comment is a little bizarre.
I think what what I was trying to say, was that the movement of the camera in the scene is entropic; circling back on itself.
April 15, 2010 at 5:32 pm
No, I love everything you said!
It reminds me that Hitchcock’s exponential zoom (or “trombine shot”) in Vertigo was inspired by the sensation of being very drunk and almost passing out at the Chelsea Arts Ball. These shots work because in some way they resonate with subjective experiences like your firework explosion.
April 15, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Thanks, appreciate it!
April 16, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Speaking of Romy Schneider and SISSI, I once had an Austrian boyfriend who insisted on showing me the whole of his SISSI box-set.
Seldom has the phrase ‘Darling, come back to bed!’ come in more handy.
April 16, 2010 at 1:58 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ9UxTh5XHM
April 16, 2010 at 2:09 pm
There he is! Still looking good.