Upstream: On a Fass-bender

Cinephiles across America rejoiced last month at the return of the Criterion Channel, which had disappeared with the death of FilmStruck at the end of November. Now it’s back, and back with a vengeance, loaded up with cinematic gems that have heretofore gone unseen in the movie streaming-verse.

As soon as it came online, I went straight for the greatly expanded Rainer Werner Fassbinder collection, where I found Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, a television mini-series about working-class families that aired in 1972 and 1973, but has been unavailable even on disc until now. For a Fassbinder fan like me, it was a revelation: the notoriously bleak German director could actually tell stories with nice characters and happy endings. Each of the five episodes is the length of a movie, all with the same family of characters banding together and scoring little victories over management, City Hall, and the upper class.The series is funny and heart-warming, yet it still carries the provocative critiques of society that Fassbinder’s rightly famous for. And it has that same, toothsome Fassbinder aesthetic, thanks in large part to the cinematography of Michael Balhaus, who shot nearly all of Fassbinder’s films in the 70s and would later go on to shoot some of Martin Scorsese’s most aggressively cinematic films, such as Goodfella’s and Gangs of New York.

Balhaus is perhaps best known for how he moves the camera, using dollies and cranes to enhance the drama and visual appeal. It’s a perfect complement to Fassbinder, who stages his scenes and arranges his actors to maximum emotional effect, often having them pause and hold their expression of anger or hurt or happiness or lust or whatever a few beats beyond what is normal. The effect is a deep emotional resonance with the viewer. And they’re simply gorgeous films, shot in Technicolor, which offers a range of deep, saturated colors that has never been rivaled in the history of film – bright 1970s oranges, yellows and blues popping out against steely grays and bleak browns.

I’ve written about Fassbinder’s work a number of times in this column, most prominently in the special World Cup of Cinema series last summer, where Fassbinder singlehandedly lead the krauts to victory over Argentina. I suggested then that the uninitiated to start with his 1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and then expand out from there with his other most highly acclaimed masterpieces Fox and His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and the Marriage of Maria Braun, before moving on to his more experimental works such as Gods of the Plague, Love is Colder Than Death and Querelle (which, I have to admit, I still find difficult to get through, despite their abundant cinematic beauty). I want to double down on that recommendation here: if you’ve not yet explored Fassbinder’s work, check out one or a few of his mid-1970s masterpieces. After finishing the Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day series, I jumped right into these favorites and have been even more amazed by them than I was during my first viewings. They’re absolutely perfect films—lovely to look at, brilliantly acted, emotionally engaging, and, ultimately, deeply and brilliantly critical of how humans relate to one another.

by Joe Miller