Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974)

Fassbinder's look at the social costs of a relationship across racial lines

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Country: Germany

Time: 1 hour and 33 minutes

Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription); Kanopy (free w/library card); Amazon ($3.99 to rent)

In the opening sequence of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a widowed German cleaning lady in her late 50s or early 60s enters a bar in Munich to escape a downpour. The bar’s other patrons, a group of Arab friends, stare at her in standoffish silence. They have come to Germany as Gasterbeiter, foreign-born workers who began arriving in the mid-1950s after West Germany signed a series of bilateral agreements facilitating immigration to address growing labor shortages. Emmi, the German “intruder”, sits and orders a coke. The bartender sarcastically suggests that Ali, a Moroccan in his thirties, dance with her. He does. As they dance, they speak. As they speak, Ali and Emmi begin ever so slightly to fall in love. So the film’s central romance begins.

Of course, the society in which they exist remains intolerant. The aloofness of the workers is mere prelude to the forthcoming German vitriol. Lingering hostilities, submerged beneath what Theodor Adorno called “the willful forgetting” of the country’s Nazi past, are liable to surface at a moment’s notice. The 1968 Munich Massacre, carried out by Black September, has only further focused German hostilities on Arab workers. As remains true in most Fassbinder works, love doesn’t come easy.

This opening juxtaposition between intimate movements channeled through language and touch and the hostile fixity of gazes, postures, and attitudes emerges a recurring motif throughout the film. Society has deemed Emmi and Ali’s relationship deviant given its trespass of racial and age differences. In turn, social rejection comes in unremitting waves of denigrating commentary from neighbors, colleagues, and family members over the course of the film. The ugliness is never subtle. Instead, the sheer repetition, the dull obviousness of this malice, remains the point. It is an accretion of antipathy that cannot but break individuals forced to continually erect outward postures of resistance and defiance. It constricts Emmi and Ali’s worlds, foisting responsibility for all forms of support and sociality onto a romantic relationship. When kindness comes from others, it does so only because it can be instrumentalized for personal gain, forcing Ali and Emmi to decide whether social inclusion under false pretenses remains preferable to absolute isolation. As one of Emmi’s colleagues tells her, “Everyone needs others, Emmi. Everyone.” At its core, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul interrogates whether relationships can exist under conditions of socially imposed quarantine and the ways in which external hostility calcifies tenderness.

A man of volcanic and destructive appetites, an iconoclastic impresario of the outsider film, and an absurdly prolific director (as well as screenwriter, cinematographer, and theater director), Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains one of the most interesting, challenging, and startling directors of post-war film. Born shortly after German surrender in 1945, he worked in various independent and “underground” theater companies after being rejected from film school as a young man—which, all things considered, was probably for the best. As a theater director, he began to develop a series of lifelong professional (and sexual) relationships with a revolving troupe of actors (male and female) who would go on to populate his films. By almost all accounts, he remained a destructive personality—towards others and himself—at once capable of vicious misanthropy, deep generosity, and sometimes troubling forms of loyalty. A willing and able enfant terrible and provocateur, he was both admired and lambasted by critics. (To give a little insight, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò: 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a ferocious adaptation of the Marquise de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom that is almost universally acknowledged to be one of the most difficult films to watch, remained one of Fassbinder’s favorite works.) His public homosexuality could elicit extreme venom—in a particularly grotesque review of his final film, published after he died at 37 from an overdose of barbiturates and cocaine, Time Out called Querelle (1982) “perhaps an entirely appropriate parting shot from a drug-crazed German f——.” Throughout his life, his work retained a remarkable ability to antagonize just about every political group, association, and coalition in West Germany across the political spectrum, while still finding state funding to make sensitive, moving, and probing films that depicted the challenges faced by outsiders, exiles, and strivers in a rapidly transforming economic juggernaut too eager to overlook its immediate past.

Like all complex people, his contradictions probably aren’t resolvable. Yet throughout it all, he worked. The volume of output is astounding: 44 films (including a 931-minute Berlin Alexanderplatz miniseries) across sixteen years. He helped inaugurate and define the New German Cinema—a (very) disparate group of German filmmakers influenced by Italian Neorealism and French New Wave works who made low budget films dependent on West German subsidies, many of which played on German television. His work has influenced directors as diverse as Pedro Almodóvar, Derek Jarmin, Martin Scorcese, and Gaspar Noé.

With all respect to the good folks making lists at Sight and Sound, I’m not sure Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is Fassbinder’s greatest film—I’d probably reserve that title for either The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) or Lola (1982), both about women attempting to work their way up in materialistic (and male-dominated) post-war worlds—but it may be the best entry point into his work, largely because it features so many of his recurring propensities and thematic interests: social outcasts, exploitation, strong central women, strident critiques of a complacent and materialistic West Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder (the country’s post-war “economic miracle”)—itself a rather effective grease for the wheels of “willful forgetting”—as well as a fondness for melodrama and pastiche, a remarkable knowledge of film history liable to the direct quoting of others’ work, and an extremely acute sense of lighting and staging developed during his time in theater.

Fassbinder often re-worked other directors’ subject matter and stories in fascinating ways. Lola (1982) updated Joseph von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), while Ali: Fear Eats the Soul reworked Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), an American film (directed by a German forced to flee Nazi persecution) that explored the social costs of a relationship between an older woman and her younger lover. Like Sirk, who remained a major influence, Fassbinder drew heavily upon the melodrama’s conventions in order to formulate plots and heighten dramatic tension and irony. He eschewed natural lighting (“Sirk’s lighting is always as unnatural as possible,” he once noted), instead preferring to isolate warm spotlights within tenebrous confines—in particular, the stage spotlight appears frequently throughout his films. His cameras often rest within darker foregrounds that tunnel outwards (through windows or down hallways) into light. In Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, the staging continually contrasts populated spaces (almost always conveying collective antipathy) and sparsely peopled areas, introducing heady atmospherics into drab 1970s Munich. It’s a great, great work that intentionally eschews subtlety in order to address very unsubtle forms of racism and xenophobia, while daring to look at two marginal, deeply human, sympathetic, and imperfect characters.

In part, Fassbinder’s sheer productivity and the exuberant variety of his work remains part of his charm, even if some of his films tend towards the overwrought: the melodrama occasionally descending into the maudlin and all that. I find him least compelling when dealing with the domestic and psychological—say, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Chinese Roulette (1976). To my mind, his most moving work avoids the hermetic in favor of broader social questions, mores, boundaries, and transgressions—alongside Lola and The Marriage of Maria Braun, Fox and His Friends (1975) remains a moving example of this sort of societal portraiture. The melodrama as a form suited him in large measure because deep psychological probing did not. At its worst, the camp can become its own plot point, ceasing to accentuate character or atmosphere. In some films, such as Beware a Holy Whore (1970), the narrative sputters and the conceits feel half-baked. (Unfair to blame the drugs, particularly for such an early miss, but one wonders...) In part, I love Fassbinder’s work because he made so much mediocrity and it’s from within the failures that one clearly grasps the strengths.

Beneath the bravado and the poor personal choices and the misfires, one finds works that refuse to patronize their audience or characters, while insisting upon humanizing marginal dreamers and strivers and romantics navigating cold and pragmatic worlds. If the act of making art—not its selling or promotion, but the process of creation itself—often brings out the best in otherwise flawed individuals, then Fassbinder the filmmaker embodies a deep generosity and honesty. As he once said, “I long for a little naiveté, but there isn’t any around.” After a friend relayed a poor review of a recently released film, he replied: “I’ll fix it next time.” Words to live by.¹

Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:

Rainer Werner Fassbinder — The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder — Lola (1981)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder — Fox and His Friends (1975)

1. I once heard this story and I hesitate to verify for fear of its being apocryphal.