Film Review
The middle instalment of a loose trilogy of films that begins with
Love Is Colder Than Death
(1969) and ends with
The American Soldier (1970),
Gods of the Plague is to Rainer
Werner Fassbinder what
À bout de souffle (1960)
and
Pierrot le fou (1963) are to
French director Jean-Luc Godard - an exercise in cinematic
deconstruction (specifically that of the American thriller B-movie)
which reflects the cultural sterility afflicting contemporary
society.
Gods of the
Plague is both a sequel to and development of
Love Is Colder Than Death, more
technically ambitious and far richer in narrative content, arguably the
best and most insightful of Fassbinder's early films. In common
with many directors of the French New Wave (by whom he was greatly
influenced), Fassbinder had a morbid affinity with American film noir
of the 40s and 50s and reflected this fascination throughout his first
decade of filmmaking, most evidently in his famous gangster trilogy.
The themes that Fassbinder introduces in
Love Is Colder Than Death, in
particular a rejection of consumerism and an attempt to view
contemporary German society through the flawed archetypes of American
film noir, are more powerfully rendered in
Gods of the Plague. It is no
accident that the heist which forms the climax of the film takes place
not, as you might expect, in a bank or jewellery shop, but in a modern
supermarket. If we accept Fassbinder's thesis that consumerism
has totally warped society's notion of where true value lies, it is
logical that his characters should end up risking their lives for
packets of fish fingers and other vacuum wrapped tat, rather than the
more usual stash of jewels and banknotes.
Typically for Fassbinder, the protagonists in
Gods of the Plague are mostly young
people who seem to be drifting through life in a zombie-like
stupor. (Taking his leave from French director Robert Bresson,
Fassbinder drove his actors to suppress all external emotions in their
performances.) The main character, Franz Walsch
(Fassbinder's alter ego), hardly ever speaks and fails to show any sign
of emotion, and yet he somehow manages to engage with those around him
(men and women appear equally susceptible to his charms) and he is seen
by the police as public enemy number one. Fassbinder's portrayal
of young people in his early films is almost relentlessly depressing -
they are morally vacuous, emotionally unresponsive and totally lacking
in vitality. Yet this merely echoes the sentiment felt by a large
section of German youth who, like Fassbinder, saw that their country
had become culturally barren and a slave to economic progress.
Soulless consumerism represented the be-all and end-all of German
culture.
Whereas as
Love Is Colder Than Death
and
The American Soldier both
have a strong vein of dark humour and feel more like outright parodies
than respectful homages to film noir,
Gods
of the Plague is far more serious in tone and a far more
incisive piece of social commentary. It takes the familiar
motifs of the American gangster films of the 1940s and blows these up
to almost ludicrous proportions - not to expose the absurdity of the
genre it is imitating but to remind us of the absurdity of life in
general. Like many a classic film noir B-movie, the plot
barely holds together and relies on the most ridiculous of contrivances
- but isn't real life exactly like that? Godard's
À bout de souffle is
referenced repeatedly, but the humour and irony of Godard's film is
elbowed out of the frame by Fassbinder, and all that remains are a few
much darker slivers of humour, notably the blood-soaked denouement in
the supermarket (a sly homage to the uncensored American gangster films
of the early 1930s).
Spared the extreme budgetary constraints that hampered Fassbinder's
first few films,
Gods of the Plague
is a polished and assured piece of cinema that reveals, for the first
time, the extent of its director's filmmaking genius. Even
though, plotwise, the film is little more than a shameless compendium
of cinematic references, which range from Josef von Sternberg's
The
Blue Angel (1930) to Godard's
Bande
à part (1962) via Howard Hawks's
The Big Sleep (1946), it is a
strikingly original piece of film art. The camerawork and
lighting evoke something of the stylistic brilliance of Orson Welles's
better films, channelling all of the beauty and elegance of the film
noir aesthetic into a cogent socio-cultural statement. There are few
films made in Germany in the late 60s, early 70s that express so
succinctly, and with such pathos, the frustration and disillusionment
felt by a generation of young people who desperately craved a cultural
identity and who saw themselves as sacrifices to the new Moloch of free
market capitalism.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Rainer Werner Fassbinder film:
The Niklashausen Journey (1970)