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Arthouse Cinema - Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Katzelmacher: Fassbinder’s aesthetic choices and political views

Katzelmacher: Fassbinder’s aesthetic choices and political views
© Goethe-Institut Indonesien

Released in 1969, Katzelmacher is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s second feature film. His first film entitled Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love is Colder than Death) was released the same year, both black & white. Katzelmacher opens with a series of scenes featuring the film’s main characters. They live in anxiety but also with a certain distrust of each other.
 

Helga and Marie’s “value” as women is based solely on the actions of their partners. Unfortunately, Paul and Erich are nothing more than men with latent machismo, normalizing relationship violence and viewing their partners as sexual objects and parasites to be removed. Then there is Peter, who lives at the expense of his hard-working partner Elisabeth. Meanwhile, Rosy is a woman in whom the male characters in Katzelmacher confide when their manly pride is hurt. Gunda, Rosy’s landlady, is struggling with her own occasional personal conflicts. Franz doesn’t have a partner—he channels his fragile feelings toward Rosy and her transactional, sexual relationship. All of the German male characters are in masculinity crisis mode. The female characters, on the other hand, are competitive women who love to talk about and gloat over the misfortunes of others. The interactions of these nine characters are normal repetitive everyday occurrences until one day Jorgos, a Greek immigrant worker, arrives on the scene.

Fear of the troublemaker

After World War II, Germany and Austria experienced a so-called “economic miracle” in the late 1950s. It made them the strongest economies in Europe. Emigrant workers, among others from Greece, went to Germany to try their luck. Katzelmacher portrays stereotypes and exposes xenophobia in German society directed towards immigrant workers from other countries.

In Bavarian German the term Katzelmacher means troublemaker. The Greek immigrant worker Jorgos is a newcomer, has poor command of the German language, stutters in conversation, and his presence can destroy the stability of his surroundings. The German men feel intimidated by Jorgos. While they have economic difficulties or live at the expense of their partners, Jorgos is able to pay his room rent in Elisabeth’s apartment in full and in advance. In addition, according to rumors, Jorgos has a larger penis than the German men.

Socially critical experiment with a melodramatic approach

Katzelmacher addresses xenophobia and racism in the 1960s, when many immigrant workers went to Germany. Fassbinder’s critical, humorously ironic view of the German middle class after WWII takes a melodramatic approach in this film. This style in Fassbinder’s works was influenced by Douglas Sirk and the so-called Sirkian melodrama. Fassbinder uses the same approach in his later films. One of these is Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), which revisits the sentiment of the German community toward a Moroccan immigrant worker. Both films rely on the melodramatic narrative style to convey their critique of German fascists. Although not yet as prominently visible as in Angst essen Seele auf, Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher was the beginning of his melodramatic social-critical experiment.

Viewers quickly realize that the language in Katzelmacher was heavily influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s films. Fassbinder’s career began only a decade after Godard’s. Both are considered pioneers of the film movements in their respective countries, Fassbinder with the New German Film generation and Godard with the Nouvelle Vague, the “New Wave” of French film. The language of the Nouvelle Vague, which inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s production of Katzelmacher, was a strategy for dealing with small production budgets while rejecting the technical establishment in film production.

Nearly every scene in Katzelmacher was shot with a static camera; this means that the characters’ movements on screen are not tracked. The camera is always at eye level with the actors. The primarily long-take medium shots, medium-long shots, and close-ups give the impression that the characters are trapped in a confined space without the freedom to breathe and move freely. The camera moves only three times in Katzelmacher using the same technique: it accompanies two characters walking side by side and shows them from the front as they talk about justifications, which makes them feel better.

From the theater: the bare minimum

Katzelmacher was originally a theater script before it became a feature film. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a director of New German Cinema with a theater background. It is therefore not surprising that audiences find in Katzelmacher and Fassbinder’s subsequent films a manifestation of theatrical standards, beginning with shooting a single frame from the front in each scene, the clear dialogue, the sharp utterances, and ending with an eye to arranging compositions in front of the camera.

Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatrical concept, which influenced the form and style of Fassbinder’s subsequent films, can also be felt in Katzelmacher. By engaging the emotions of the main characters, Brecht’s theatrical concept rejects the illusion of theater that aims to offer the audience a cathartic experience. On the contrary: in Brecht’s view theater should distance itself from the audience and make theatergoers aware that what they are enjoying is a representation. This distance gives the audience sufficient space to question their perspectives, experience their own personal reactions, and even critique the representation itself.

The most obvious application of Brecht’s epic theater concept in Katzelmacher is the use of many characters and simplified settings while making no attempt to be as realistic as possible. Katzelmacher has very few shots of the surroundings, of a place, a building or an urban context. The audience knows only that the characters live in an apartment complex. The rest, each scene, takes place on the side of a building, in a room, an apartment, under a staircase, in a café. Props are used sparingly. If a bedroom background is required in the film, we see only a mattress on the screen. In a breakfast scene, we see only the dining table and the number of chairs corresponding to the number of characters. If there is a scene in which clothes are packed, the only visible object in the room is a closet.

Though Katzelmacher may possibly not be the best in his filmography, Fassbinder remains a pioneer of New German Cinema. It was an important work at the beginning of his career and later became the basis for the cinematic language of his subsequent films. Katzelmacher introduces filmgoers to Fassbinder’s authorship as a director, not only his film aesthetics (influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht, and Douglas Sirk) but also his sociopolitical views and critique of German society.
 

Author

Ayu Diah Cempaka © Ayu Diah Cempaka Ayu Diah Cempaka was part of the program team of the Yogyakarta Documentary Film Festival (FFD) from 2015 to 2019. In 2017 she launched – as a co-operation with Cinema Poetica – a film criticism workshop program at FFD. She took part in a film criticism workshop organized by the Salamindanaw Film Festival & Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2016. Ayu and her colleagues in Denpasar initiated and organized Cinecoda in 2016, a program that screens and discusses films.

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