Word: proletariats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fassbinder is mainly a humanitarian. He is interested in the banality, not the poverty, of the proletariat. His politics consist almost solely in enunciating that banality and its causes for a politically naive audience. In that respect, Mother Kusterstells a typical Fassbinder story. A man has gone berserk in a factory, killing his boss's son and then killing himself. The press exploits his family and distorts the picture of the man. His wife (Mother Kusters, played by Brigitte Mira), deserted by her children, seeks comfort where she can find it. First, with the Thalmanns, a couple of armchair communists...
...twist, for Fassbinder, is to throw havoc into the lives of those who don't cry out, who don't revolt on their own. Fassbinder feels an immense sympathy with the proletariat's specific angst, with the tension of the everyday, and he is angry with a capitalist economic system that perpetuates such banality. Mother Kusters is forced, through a melodramatic super-realism, to the understanding that "having something isn't having all." She questions whether she has been really living or whether "they" (the capitalist manufacturers) have just indoctrinated her into thinking that she was living...
Fassbinder has stated "I don't make any films which aren't political." (Film Comment, Nov-Dec. '75) Mother Kusters, though stamped through and through with Marxist politics, fails because it makes no final political statement. While Fassbinder evokes a hope in the humanity of the proletariat, he does not illuminate any possibility of revolutionary change from within their ranks. Mother K. is the woman who can never be a revolutionary because she is too easily swayed, too easily disillusioned. She is anxious for rapid and broad-sweeping change but, when that fails, will satisfy herself with petit-bourgeois dreams...
...Fassbinder's love of camp as well. Mother K.'s daughter is seen almost exclusively through mirrors, applying lipstick, mascara, brushing her hair back in the mirror or a car floating eerily through blue space. Traditionally in cinema such mirror shots lay bare the unconscious bourgeois fantasies of the proletariat. Fassbinder understands this and makes exceptional use of the image to emphasize his belief that "All classes betray their own character and favor the next higher. That's why we can wait a very long time for a real revolution in this world...
...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 masses. Fassbinder expects these people to create their own radical realism. Ultimately he is too optimistic about the breadth of his viewing public and too pessimistic about revolutionary methods...