12 - “Ich bin’s, Fassbinder,” or The Timing of the Self

Summary

Introduction

The challenges awaiting you when addressing the omnibus film Deutschland im Herbst (German Autumn, 1978) reveal themselves the moment you attempt to articulate even the most basic observations about the film’s genre and authorship. With no less than thirteen directors involved in its production, how do we negotiate a satisfactory model for discussing authorship that takes into consideration the film in its entirety while also respecting the auteur-specific traits of the individual segments? Deutschland im Herbst is not so much a collection of short stories assembled into one volume as it is a carefully curated exhibition of individual works that also serve a broader preordained concept or idea. Although transitions from one segment, or auteur, to the next are not explicitly signaled, the spectator is never in doubt when a shift has occurred. The film opens and closes on public funerals: the first is that of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, kidnapped then murdered by the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction or RAF), and the second is the collective funeral of Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Jan Carl Raspe, the three RAF members found dead in their cells in Stammheim maximum security prison. The movement in the film as a whole, however, should not be understood as circular, cyclical, or as offering even the hint of closure, but quite the opposite, being fragmented in its order and ambiguous in its ending. Such traits also apply to the autobiographically inflected segment made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder titled “When Cruelty Reaches a Certain Level.”

Fassbinder as Auteur

Regardless of one’s personal attitudes toward auteur theory or auteurinspired analysis, there are directors that seem almost destined to be evaluated according to auteuristic claims. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one such director. This should not mean that all, or even most, Fassbinder scholarship is obsessively preoccupied with his biography, flamboyant as it is; but even analyses of his work not motivated by auteurism seem to slip into the auteur trope, almost despite themselves.

How, then, does the auteur-inspired perspective inform the study of the autobiographical? What lingers, what is discarded, and what gets added? How does the autobiographical film differ from a film analyzed from a more or less traditional auteur perspective?