Tag Archives: Hanna Schygulla

Kamikaze 89 [1982)

Here is a strange case.

I thought I was watching a movie by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The first I had ever seen.

But I was not.

And I still haven’t seen a Fassbinder movie per se.

This movie was directed by the late- Wolf Gremm.

Gremm might be most well-known for the 1980 film Fabian.

For that movie, Gremm adapted a work of Erich Kästner.

Kästner was always a bridesmaid and never a bride.

Nominated four times for the Nobel in literature, Kästner nevertheless was an important writer in that he used cinematic techniques in his literature.

Think about that for a second.

What might that mean?

Jump cuts, anyone?

‘Tis now that we pay homage to the great Jean-Paul Belmondo.

AND to my favorite drummer ever:  Charlie Watts.

Back to Kästner.

The Nazis burned his books.

These book burnings were instigated by (Psaki) Goebbels.

Kästner may not have really been a man of much integrity.

He wrote for UfA in 1942 under the pseudonym Berthold Bürger.

But you may know Kästner most for a Hollywood adaption of one of his children’s books:  The Parent Trap.

Made twice.

Which brings us to our film by Wolf Gremm.

It’s true:  Gremm and Fassbinder were close friends.

And I was tricked because Fassbinder is the all-consuming star of Gremm’s masterpiece Kamikaze 89 (alternately Kamikaze 1989).

Like a German version of Godard’s Alphaville.

Fassbinder is 100% Lemmy Caution.

But this whole thing needed a premise.

And that story was provide by Swedish author Per Wahlöö.

Before there was Stieg Larsson, there was Per Wahlöö.

Active between 1965 and 1975, and focusing on his character detective Martin Beck (a Stockholm policeman), Wahlöö collaborated with Maj Sjöwall on ten novels featuring Beck.

Like Erich Kästner, Wahlöö and Sjöwall were leftists.  

Communists.

Marxists.

Not unusual in Sweden.

You will find the same idealistic naïveté in the biographical details of Steig Larsson.

Gremm’s film did well as Fantasporto in Portugal.

And for good reason.

Because it is a fucking masterpiece!

The soundtrack is even by Tangerine Dream.

Edgar Froese.

Lester Bangs would have been proud.

Bangs died about three months after this film came out.

We see Brigitte Mira.

We see Nicole Heesters.

Someone briefly gets naked.

We might even see Fassbinder’s junk briefly.

I’ve gotta hand it to Xaver Schwarzenberger.

This film is stunning.

It pops!

Like a more punk version of Nicolas Roeg’s work on Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451.

Schwarzenberger was (and is) perhaps the equivalent of Godard’s Raoul Coutard.

So what?

The world, in general, has not heard of Wolf Gremm.

So this film must be discussed in relation to Fassbinder.

Was Fassbinder as good a director as he was an actor?

I don’t know.

Was Fassbinder as good a director as Gremm?

I don’t know.

Did Fassbinder ever make a film as good as the masterpiece Kamikaze 89?

I don’t know.

Something else should be noted.

Fassbinder himself died two months after Kamikaze 89 was released.

Which is to say, a month before Lester Bangs.

Let’s talk about New German Cinema.

I have devoted plenty of time to my favorite (the Nouvelle Vague aka French New Wave).

But I do not recall ever having broached the topic of Neuer Deutscher Film.

I will say this.

I think Werner Herzog may be the most overrated filmmaker of all-time.

Right next to Tarantino.

I hate to fucking admit it, but Tarantino (whom I hate) has WAY more talent than Herzog.

But hey:  my favorite director ever is Godard.

We first join Fassbinder about 1974 with Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul.

Eight years later, Fassbinder would be dead.

At age 37.

From a cocaine/barbiturate overdose.

I have lived seven years longer than Fassbinder.

Fassbinder crammed his career into his 30s.

Bangs died of an (accidental?) overdose of an analgesic opioid (Darvon), Valium, and cough syrup.

Bangs was 33.

Someone else important died at that age.

Bangs had a great mustache.

Fassbinder had a weird beard.

A nasty, seven-day stubble.

But Fassbinder fucking had style!

1975 saw him come out with Fox and His Friends.

Fassbinder was married for two years.

He then divorced.

I feel that.

Ingrid Caven.

A beautiful lady.

They say.

Hanna Schygulla.

Godard’s Passion.

1982.

There’s a reason I like Fassbinder.

I think.

Because Fassbinder liked Godard.

The Merchant of Four Seasons.

This precedes my earlier introduction.

1971.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

1972.

Fassbinder was bisexual.

He bought Günther Kauffman, who appears in Kamikaze 89, four Lamborghinis over the period of one year.

“calculatedly provocative”, they called him.

A verbal kamikaze.

I feel that.

The Tenderness of Wolves.

1973.

As actor.

I have focused on films available in the United States.

On iTunes.

I am.

Pauly Deathwish.

Twenty years coming.

10/11.

-PD

 

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Passion [1982)

All you need is the first word.  The first sentence to get you going.

You can meditate.  Think too hard.

And now that it’s started it is gloriously ruined.  Like Kind of Blue.

Miles Davis would tell his players…one take.

Perhaps there were caveats.  But Bill Evans was ready.  Coltrane…

It is the same with “Sister Ray” by The Velvet Underground.

One take.  Make it count.

Everything proceeds from the first word.  But don’t take it too seriously.

It is like many other first words.  “Once upon a time…”

From a mist rises Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.  Bruckner would use the same device many times (no doubt in honor of Ludwig van).

Yes.  We say Ludwig Van in honor of Mauricio Kagel.  And the entire spirit of everything here might be compared to Joseph Beuys.

And just like that <bam> we go over-budget.

Jerzy Radziwilowicz plays the Jean-Luc Godard character here (with the wardrobe ostensibly taken right off the back of Jacques Dutronc).  Thus Godard still creates a distance between his story and THE story.  The whole bit about Poland is made to throw us off the scent (a bit like the glorious obfuscation of Joyce in Finnegans Wake).

We find Godard to be right.  The available forms are too mundane.  The audience stops thinking when they are comfortable.  So we must disorient them a bit–prod like a brainiac Hitchcock.

You see, the most important thing is not who acted in this film.  Rather, the crucial component is the juxtaposition which allows for revelation.

We see the most perfectly-placed tableaux of human paintings.  Come to life.  The proper term is tableau vivant.  Maybe you see them at Christmas.  Perhaps a manger and the Christian genesis.

Ah, but with Godard it is Delacroix and Rubens and Rembrandt etc.  I assume Ingmar Bergman missed this Godard film because the former had already made up his mind regarding the latter.  And thus the admiration flowed in one direction alone.  We see the delicacy of Bergman–that technique of the long shot (temporally speaking).  You can almost imagine Godard telling his cast of thousands in this mini-epic to have no expression at all.

There is a connection to Stravinsky.  Neoclassicism, but really a radical belief in the purity of music.  To paraphrase Igor, “Music doesn’t have meaning.  A note is a note.”  Perhaps I have done the great composer an injustice with my memory.  Yet, a paraphrase is a paraphrase.

We humans are not computers.  No matter how many books we have.  No matter how steel-trap our memory.  No matter how fast our Internet.

And thus, that which is juxtaposed against the meticulous composition of the tableaux vivants?  Everyday life.  Careless shots.  The beauty of the sky.  The natural sway of a handheld camera.  The sun as it burns up the lens upon peeking through the bare trees.  Hanna Schygulla running through the snow with a lavender umbrella.

Real life.  Labor.  A factory.  And who is the real star?  Isabelle Huppert.  Her character in Sauve qui peut (la vie) was not a sympathetic one.  Can we say?  WE had no sympathy for her.  Very little.  Not none.

Yet here…she is the lamb of God (of which she speaks).  Huppert is the labor element.  Workers’ rights.  It is intimated that her monotonous job has caused her to stutter.  Why?  Because it is not easy to talk about the factory.

And why, she asks, are people in films never shown working?  It is not allowed.  Filming in factories.  Indeed, I believe there is a specifically French meaning here.  [And Swiss, as the film is shot in Switzerland.]  But the real shocker?  Work and sex (“pornography”) are equally prohibited on the screen.

Only Godard would find this fascinating link.  And that is why we love him.

But mostly it is another thing.

Life is so much richer in the films of Godard.  Sure, there are some exceptions, but the exceptions themselves are merely the process being revealed.  It is “the thinking life” to paraphrase Henry Miller.

Once you have been there, you don’t want to go back.  Or you can’t go back.  But we do go back.  Thinking is hard work.

And as the world bemoans what havoc Europe has wrought, let it be noted…the Beethovens, Mozarts, Dvoraks…

This is the humanism which little by little comes to occupy the mature films of Jean-Luc Godard.

Most importantly, he never stopped being a critic.

And his film reviews?  They are his films themselves.

-PD

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