The Niklashausen Journey (1970)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Fengler

Film Review

The Niklashausen Journey (a.k.a. Die Niklashauser Fart) is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most overtly political film and also, arguably, his most experimental, as it combines historical references and contemporary concerns in an attempt to portray all kinds of political radicalism as a fundamentally lost cause.  Fassbinder co-directed the film with Michael Fengler, another up-and-coming force in New German cinema, and is clearly greatly influenced by Jean-Luc Godard's similarly themed Week End (1967).  (Godard was the main inspiration for much of Fassbinder's early work.)

As in Godard's Week End, present-day anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist sentiment is expressed through an anarchic collage of incongruous and provocative images, although Fassbinder appears to be far more pessimistic over the ability of violent revolution to change things for the better.  Germany's recent history - the rise of Fascism and its ultimate defeat by capitalist democracy - had shown that revolution merely replaces one oppressive oligarchy by another.  Never has it achieved what it sets out to achieve - the liberation of the masses, who are portrayed by Fassbinder as mindless sheep who are, invariably, led by self-serving hypocrites and fools.

Incredible as it may seem, The Niklashausen Journey was originally made for German television, on a budget that vastly exceeded most of Fassbinder's previous films.  The money was not wasted - here Fassbinder creates some of his most striking visual compositions, including some that appear to have been aspired by medieval religious art (the meaning of the original cheekily subverted by the inclusion of a modern idiom).  Whilst the film does perhaps lack the cohesion and clarity of the director's other experimental films, it is a strangely beguiling piece of film art, one that positively revels in its digression from the cosy conventions of cinema as we know it.

Most spectators may have difficulty piecing together the disjointed elements of the film but its authors' message is received loud and clear.  Fassbinder and Fengler appear to be arguing that religion and revolution are part of the same dangerous delusion, the means by which the masses allow themselves to be controlled and bled by a self-selected elite of misguided fools and unscrupulous crooks.  In the five hundred years since the shepherd Hans Bölm was burned at the stake for preaching his revolutionary doctrine, so little appears to have changed.  Capitalism may have taken over from religion as the main controlling influence of humanity (the law of supply and demand overriding all other religious tenets to become the one true commandment which governs all human activity), but the same social structure prevails.  Revolutions may come and revolutions may go, but the same old cycle of oppression and exploitation goes on forever.

Film Synopsis

On 3rd March 1476, a shepherd named Hans Böhm makes a public declaration in the town of Niklashausen that he has been visited by the Virgin Mary.  Before a mass assembly of peasants, Böhm preaches that he has been instructed by God to lead a revolution against the established Church, a revolution that will eradicate those leaders who presently enjoy power and privilege over the masses.  Five months after his vision, Böhm is arrested and executed by the Bishop of Würzburg.  Five hundred years later, a pair of radical German filmmakers have a vision...