3 Movies; 13 Moons

A friend with broad experience in these matters gave me some advice in terms of attracting a broader readership to my little operation here. One of the things he suggested was to at least periodically write about movies that people (regular people, not “Film” people) are watching and thinking about right now. With this advice in mind, I traveled to my local video rental outfit and rented three movies: Michael Clayton, La Vie en Rose and Collateral, with the intention of devoting my next post to at least one of these movies.

I first watched Michael Clayton, reasoning that as a Best Picture nominee, it must at least be passably good and therefore of sufficient interest to generate maybe a half-dozen paragraphs of quasi-informed commentary. I suppose the experience of viewing Atonement should have demonstrated the flaw in this reasoning. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Michael Clayton, but rather that very little of it would be complimentary and it could reasonably summed up in a handful of sentences. There is something about this new(ish) strain of Hollywood milquetoast liberalism that just seems to rub me wrong. I mean, do we really need to see a film like Michael Clayton in order to know that corporations bury evidence of the dangers of their products and pay high-powered law firms millions to convince the world of their ignorance? The cleverly non-linear narrative structure was also particularly irksome. I don’t necessarily have a problem with a movie that begins at the end (see: Citizen Kane et al), unless it is done with the express intention of misleading viewers and artificially creating suspense, as was the case with Michael Clayton.

Collateral was similarly disappointing, though for entirely different reasons. I have been recently shown the light as regards to the brilliance of Michael Mann, so I have been slowly working to familiarize myself with the examples of his oeuvre with which I had previously been unfamiliar. Like many of Mann’s movies, Collateral works very well in some ways and falls flat in others. Technically speaking, it is nearly as impressive a movie as Miami Vice. Mann’s shot constructions and compositions are undoubtedly amongst the most exacting and impressive of any contemporary Hollywood director. I challenge anyone to name me another filmmaker who could give Los Angeles the impression of being a unitary metropolis as opposed to the amorphous sprawling mess that it is, as Mann has done with Collateral. Stylistic achievements aside, however, the film is ultimately done in by its thin, contrived plot and its shameless sentimentality.

Albert Einstein defined insanity roughly as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Though clinically dubious, Einstein’s wisdom in this case convinced me to hold off on watching La Vie en Rose, at least for the moment, and instead turn to an unqualified masterpiece for cinematic succor—in this case, Fassbinder’s In a Year With 13 Moons (1978).

In his short but extraordinarily prolific career, Rainer Werner Fassbinder subverted the conventions of Hollywood genres—most particularly the family melodrama—in his effort to explore the ways in which people laid the architecture of their own suffering through their denial of love and the abortive nature of their relationships. Fassbinder was an unconventional filmmaker and In a Year With 13 Moons is an unconventional film. What makes the movie extraordinary is that it is through this unconventionality that the film succeeds precisely where many more conventional movies fail.

The narrative of In a Year With 13 Moons concerns the final days of the transsexual Erwin/Elvira Weisshaupt. The opening sequence shows Erwin/Elvira, dressed in men’s attire, soliciting the sexual attentions of a man in an open park setting and being set upon and beaten when her castrated nature is discovered. The low early morning lighting and the presentation of the film’s opening credits lend to what by most rights would be considered a scene of high drama a perfunctory nature that will become emblematic of the film in general.

In his monograph on the life and works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Braad Thomsen writes, on the subject of In a Year With 13 Moons, “The narrative is ruptured in practically every scene, and is not taken seriously at the very point when the film tradition in which Fassbinder had previously worked would have pushed things to a melodramatic climax. I know only one other film made on the same principle: Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) also deflects away from its tragedies, instead of wallowing in them” (256). Thomsen seems to get it half right here, at least in his identification of Godard as Fassbinder’s principle forebear in adopting the Brechtian technique of interrupting the viewer’s response to the action for the cinema. There is more of Godard in In a Year With 13 Moons than Thomsen suggests here, however. Moreover, I would argue that it is precisely because he treats the events portrayed in this film with great seriousness that he intentionally pulls the viewer out of any emotional connection therewith.

Subsequent to her ordeal in the park, Erwin/Elvira returns to her apartment where she unexpectedly meets her lover, the failed actor Christoph and a bitter argument ensues. The content and shot constructions of this scene call to mind the masterful central scene in Godard’s Contempt, which depicts the argument between Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot in their Rome apartment. While the similarities between these two scenes are remarkable, it is their differences which are truly instructive. The characters in Godard’s film are highly idealized and the troubles with which they are dealing seem comparatively trite. The analogous scene in In a Year With 13 Moons is conversely remarkable for the unstinting ugliness of the characters and barbs with which they stick each other. Erwin/Elvira is fat and manly and scarred and frighteningly vulnerable. Christoph, for his part, is vulgar and merciless in pointing out these shortcomings. One gets the sense in watching this scene in Contempt that the relationship may be doomed, but both parties will undoubtedly survive the rift (though of course one of them doesn’t)—the same cannot be said for Erwin/Elvira.

The scene which follows this argument is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing, affecting, memorable and baffling in all of cinema. Erwin/Elvira meets with her friend the prostitute Red Zora and relates to her how she once, when still a complete man, worked in an abattoir. The two then walk to a slaughterhouse and watch as the throats of a half dozen steer are slit and their blood pours forth torrentially. As they and the viewer regard this nearly unbearably grisly scene, Erwin/Elvira proceeds to recount her sad history—her years in the slaughterhouse, her marriage to the slaughterhouse owner’s daughter, her wife’s giving birth to their own daughter and her subsequent journey to Casablanca for her sex-change/castration—to Red Zora. The effect of this is singular as at one moment the non-German speaking viewer finds it difficult to read the subtitles as she is transfixed by the nauseous violence of the images. When this violence becomes overpowering, she seeks solace in the words, but the emotional violence recounted is equally merciless. The viewer ultimately finds a kind of balance by alternating between these two elements, at once getting the emotional force of the violence of each, while being spared the brutal totality of either.

The music over the introduction to this scene is the main theme from Nino Rota’s score for Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). At first glance, this seems to be a jarring mismatch of music to thematic and visual elements, but it actually underscores the primary aspect of the film’s narrative. Amarcord—which translates as ‘I remember’ in the dialect of Fellini’s native Rimini—is essentially a long reminiscence on Fellini’s youth. In a Year With 13 Moons is also a meditation on the past and in particular it is Erwin/Elvira’s search for her own forgotten past in the hopes that she will find clues to suggest the source of her ultimate brokenness.

Fassbinder’s oeuvre is one of the most personal bodies of work in the history of cinema. That In a Year With 13 Moons is one of the more personal of his films is therefore significant. Fassbinder himself wrote, directed, photographed, edited and decorated the film himself. The film is notable for many of its unique and truly masterful compositions. There is a scene in which Erwin/Elvira and Zora listen as their friend Seelenfrieda recounts a dream, primarily during one roughly two-minute shot. The low candle lighting and red/orange/golden color scheme portends the visual scheme of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The shot is static with the camera roughly at eye level. To the left there is a cross hanging on the wall behind and above a small television set, which is turned on. Seelenfrieda is in the right foreground, directly behind and empty set of shelves, which serves to chop up the frame into geometrical segments. Behind him, a well built man slowly and rhythmically performs biceps curls with a pair of dumbbells. In the far background, Erwin/Elvira stands and Zora lays on the floor against the wall. The effect is striking and calls to mind the modernist compositions of Michelangelo Antonioni.

If Erwin/Elvira’s quest to uncover her past provides the thrust of the narrative, the film’s defining moment (every movie has one) comes when she and Red Zora visit the orphanage at which s/he was raised. Zora approaches one of the nuns and inquires if she is Sister Gudrun—the nun Erwin/Elvira remembers as the one who primarily raised her. Confirmed of her identity, Zora brings her to Elvira who introduces herself as Erwin Weisshaupt. Sister Gudrun indeed remembers Erwin and proceeds to tell the gothically tragic story of Erwin’s childhood. Erwin’s mother brought young Erwin to the orphanage explaining that his father was lost in the war and that she could not raise him alone. The young boy was doted upon by the nuns in the convent and at a certain point a young couple came and hoped to adopt Erwin as their own. In order to confirm her wish to give Erwin away for adoption, Sister Gudrun paid a visit to Erwin’s mother and finds that his father has returned, more children have been born and the mother seems to have forgotten completely about her son Erwin. Since Erwin’s father is still alive, his permission must also be given for the boy to be adopted and as the mother does not wish her husband to know of the child’s existence, she refuses this permission.

The way in which this scene is presented is even more important than the story related. Each of the three characters present remains in her own space, not acknowledging the presence of the other two. It is almost as though the story is too devastating to be shared collectively and that it must indeed be absorbed alone. It is in this way that Fassbinder’s film reveals a realism that is wholly absent from conventional melodrama. Movies portrayed in a typical melodramatic mode will always present the tragedy or sadness of it characters in such a way as to invite the audience to sympathize and feel affronted by the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Real world tragedy is never so neatly parsed and if it were it would fail to be tragic. Humans find themselves in tragic situations precisely because they fail to invoke sympathy, causing others to look away or otherwise view their problems as unfixable.

Another important aspect of this scene is Fassbinder’s casting of his own mother, Lieselotte Pempeit, in the role of Sister Gudrun. One can sense the subtext of Fassbinder’s feelings regarding his own fatherless upbringing bubbling up through Gudrun’s narration. Moreover, the revelation that Gudrun was reading a volume of Schopenhauer when she was interrupted by Erwin/Elvira and Zora is significant in terms of the themes of death explored in the film (more on this later).

I would also point out that it is at this point, roughly halfway through the film, that the quixotic nature of the Erwin/Elvira and Red Zora’s quest becomes apparent. This quest is indeed quixotic in the sense that despite discovering the ostensible source of Erwin/Elvira’s loss of identity, this discovery does nothing to heal the wounds. Further, there is a genuine comedy in the pairing of Erwin/Elvira and Red Zora and the futility of their ‘adventures’ in righting past wrongs.

The irony of Erwin/Elvira’s transgendered status is that Erwin was not a homosexual. Indeed, the film reveals that the decision to travel to Casablanca for the sex change/castration was a rash one made as a result of an infatuation Erwin had for his one-time business partner, the brothel owner-cum-real estate speculator Anton Saitz. In what was undoubtedly a manifestation of Erwin’s desire for a father figure, he admitted to Saitz one day that he was in love with him. Saitz explained that this wouldn’t be a problem if only Erwin were a woman, leading to his fateful trip to Casablanca. Saitz’s own story is a further illustration of Einstein’s definition of insanity. Imprisoned in a concentration camp as a child, Saitz was freed with the liberation at the end of the war. Rather than learn from his experience of the Nazis’ brutality, in adulthood, Saitz modeled his own brothel on the concentration camp model.

Erwin/Elvira opts to visit Saitz at his office on her own, presumably to continue her quest to exorcise her demons. Learning of the location of his office by listening to the ramblings of a disgruntled former employee, Erwin/Elvira climbs the stairs toward the 16th floor and narrowly avoids running into Saitz and his entourage on their way down the stairs. The inexplicable gunfight she witnesses in the parking lot below calls to mind the parking lot altercation, which occurs at the beginning of the road trip in Godard’s Weekend (1967).

The remainder of the film becomes fully imbued with the theme of suicide and death. As she waits in an abandoned office for Saitz’s return, Erwin/Elvira watches as a man prepares a noose from which to hang himself at which point she asks him for a light. She asks if he intends to kill himself, which he readily admits—even asking if she minds. Before he does, however, she offers him some red wine, French bread and cheese. She then reveals this to be something of an homage to her former life with Saitz:

“It’s an old story with the red wine and the French bread and cheese; almost a bit sentimental, when I think about it. But what would life be without sentiment? Pretty sad, I’d say. It all started with cheese.”

The discussion which takes place between this man and Erwin/Elvira becomes almost absurdly philosophical. When she asks him why he wishes to end his life, he explains that it is because he does not wish to allow things to go on being real simply because he perceives them. Essentially he is choosing to end his life to make a philosophical point. But there is an important philosophical point to the man’s view of suicide and one which will bear further in Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979). This is the idea as proposed by Schopenhauer that suicide is not a negation of existence, but an attempt on the part of the suicide to enter into a different form of existence altogether.

As if such evidence were needed, Erwin/Elvira’s eventual reunion with Saitz confirms the futility of her journey through her past to find and ostensibly heal the sources of her suffering. Saitz is revealed to be an archetypal example of arrested development. He no longer performs any work in his office and instead spends his time viewing and reenacting Martin and Lewis movies with his cronies. It takes some time and an old photograph to remind Saitz of who Elvira/Erwin is/was and when he does remember, instead of commenting one way or another, he insists upon a song and dance first. Erwin/Elvira somehow joins in with this prearranged song and dance and the viewer is again struck by the film’s moments of seemingly inappropriate comedy. The dance ends and Saitz tells Erwin/Elvira that she’s grown fat, but its okay because everyone is getting fat these days and in an aside informs his retinue that this lady used to be a boy named Erwin.

The film’s downward spiral has reached a sort of critical mass at this point and the viewer senses that Erwin/Elvira’s end is near. The remainder of the film is surprisingly affecting—one might almost say sentimental, but throughout, Erwin/Elvira’s predicament and her suffering are kept one step removed from the viewer’s ability to relate. Erwin/Elvira brings Saitz to her apartment and while she goes to the kitchen, Saitz encounters Red Zora who has been sleeping on Erwin/Elvira’s bed. Zora learns of Saitz’s identity and immediately recognizes his signficance to Erwin/Elvira’s story. This does not prevent her, however, from welcoming his sexual advances. Erwin/Elvira witnesses this and, defeated, goes into the bathroom and cuts off her hair while staring into the mirror. She then outfits herself in men’s clothing and pays a visit to his former wife and daughter. She seems to make an abortive attempt at reconciliation with his wife, but both realize it is too late. Erwin/Elvira returns to her apartment and seeks out a neighbor to talk to. The neighbor, friendly as can be and completely ignoring the obvious existential crisis through which she is going, explains that he would love to talk, would love to come down and have a beer, but it is after 11:00 and he must be getting to bed.

The soundtrack of the film’s final minutes is suffused with a recording of Erwin/Elvira talking about her past suicide attempts. Convinced that something terrible is happening, the neighbors attempt to enter Erwin/Elvira’s apartment, but are thwarted at the door by Saitz’s guard, who insists he cannot let anyone in. One by one, Erwin/Elvira’s daughter, wife and even Sister Gudrun arrives. Each must be searched for weapons by Saitz’s sentry before they can enter. When they finally gain entry into the apartment, Erwin/Elvira is found lifeless on her bed as Red Zora and Saitz emerge, oblivious to her fate, from their embrace on the floor beside her. The viewer’s experience of this scene is hampered by the insistence of the continued recording of Erwin/Elvira’s suicidal monologue. This has the ultimate effect of highlighting the inevitability of Erwin/Elvira’s death, while at the same time preventing the viewer from experiencing any real emotional involvement with the truth of it.

It can be argued that among filmmakers, Fassbinder had a greater understanding and a greater grasp of the emotional violence with which we treat those closest to us in part because he was a great practitioner of this violence in his own life. He may have seen his portrayal of this cycle in his films as a sort of penance for his own actions. Whatever the case, he was, in his films, able to reflect the awful banal truth of this emotional mayhem in a way very few other directors could and there may be no better example of this than In a Year With 13 Moons.