Word: godards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...overwhelming. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is 31 years old. He only began making films in 1969. Since then he has completed over 20 feature films and worked a number of times in videotape, including the writing and directing of a five-part television series. He has been compared with Warhol, Godard, Sirk, Struaub and Visconti. Critics have heralded him as "extending the language and method of film more than any other film-maker of his generation." The screening of Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, made in 1975 but just recently released in the U.S., is, therefore, certainly an event of great...
...vulgar in terms of taste (flowered wallpaper and knick knacks abound in Mother K.'s apartment); he makes Brechtian use of awkward camera positioning to alienate, shooting not from within the action, but as an observer so that his audience will be responsible for creating its own realism; like Godard, he favors a fade-out to black between shots, allowing his viewer a space to fantasize within the action. The total result, however, is Fassbinder's own. The overall feeling he evokes is simple, clean-cut and slow-paced, but enough shots identifying the artifice or the absurd...
Fassbinder has criticized Godard's post 'Weekend', post-May '68 films for being too didactic and for alienating their audiences. Such is certainly the case, but Godard is not interested in reaching a broad, but a select, audience. He does not want to point out injustices but is interested in showing specifically how change can be effected. His politics must be uncompromising. Fassbinder, on the other hand, is only interested in citing in justices. He compromises his ideology in order to please a large audience. His mistake is in seeing film as a medium for reaching the middle-aged proletariat...
Film lives and preserves and Goretta is consciously paying tribute to it. Through allusions to Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (Pierre's wife tells him "sometimes I think you're crazy") and to Chabrol ("are you frightened? Do you think I'll strangle you?") Goretta places himself in the tradition of modern French, not Swiss, filmmakers. He is certainly more subtle and less pretentious than Alain Tanner, though as yet he has not been as widely received in this country. Perhaps sufficient interest will be stirred by this film to prompt more screenings of his first two features...
Last Tango in Paris at 5:45 and 9:30; My Life To Live (Godard...