Hello all! Here is another entry that I will include in my website. I t was in Ireland where I truly got to discover and research the complex world of European Cinema. Unfortunately, this essay does not contain one of my favorite directors, Jean Cocteau, but I will leave him for a future one.
Italian Neorealism and its Children
: How “Fear Eats the Soul” of Tragic Women in
European Cinema
Fear is occasionally an emotion that is carefully explored in the annals of great cinema; however, there are specific examples of how it is manifested through the main female characters of European film and its effects upon them as well as the world around them. Through the works of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one can observe how fear is the ultimate catalyst of destruction for female characters. Federico Fellini, the famed Italian director, explored this idea in one of his the most successful movies, “La Strada. Gelsomina, the lead character, is the epitome of a woman who was drowning in the cesspool of what was expected of her and it will be shown here how trepidation kept her there to a tragic end.
Another Italian film released in 1962, “Mamma Roma”, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, offers a fascinating glimpse of a middle-aged prostitute who is fearful of having her son not only find out what she really is but what he may become. Jean-Luc Godard has his own version of human disquietude with his film “Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux”(1962) which literally means “My Life to Live: A Film in Twelve Scenes”. As a major exponent of French New Wave Cinema, a movement of the late 1950’s and 60’s that dealt with the evils of social inadequacy and class struggle influenced by Italian NeoRealism , Godard believed that “there is no real distinction between criticism and directing---both are ways of making movies” (MacCabe, p.42).
Fassbinder’s BRD (Bundesrepublic Deutschland) trilogy consists of “The Marriage of Maria Braun”, “Veronika Voss” and “Lola”: three films that constitute the director’s love of expressing female suppression; however, one of them will be explored here as well as “Ali: Fear Eats up Soul” which will show the fear motif in a different light than the other films. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of Germany’s most notable directors and completed 44 films in his brief, but illustrious life; he was also known for approaching controversial subjects in his works like racism, sexism, and corrupt bourgeois values. First, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” will be discussed in relation to Fassbinder’s idea that women are the best representations of how the Bundesrepublic Deutschland, or Federal Republic of Germany, had turned into a malignant, repulsive country that fed upon the fears of the oppressed.
Emmi, the film’s lead character, is awoman who is a passive onlooker of the life that is passing her by; she is not necessarily tragic, but she eventually does think and ends tragically. Also, Fassbinder’s film “Veronika Voss” will be explored later as a work of considerable depth when it comes to understanding how manipulation and fear are close relatives of the human condition. It appears that these filmmakers’ method of making movies is using the camera as a visual expose of human consciousness when it is overwhelmed with adversity. There are no predictable happy endings, no soliloquies on the aesthetic nature of life according to the visceral feelings of the characters. Fassbinder may have admired Douglas Sirk’s films, but they were far from resembling Hollywood melodrama because in the world of European cinema, at least as far as from the late 1950’s to early 1980’s, stark realism prevailed.
Fellini’s “La Strada” broke new ground when it premiered in 1954; the story of a strongman who trains a naïve girl in the ways of show business may seem simplistic on the surface, but in reality there are many layers. “Writing La Strada took more of Fellini’s time and effort than any film until then; more, in fact, than he would spend on almost any film until then; in fact, than he would spend on almost any film of his career” (Baxter, 1993). Gelsomina, the film’s tragic heroine, played by Fellini’s real-life wife, Giuletta Masini, had little dialogue, which was unusual for those times; women in lead roles normally had more than just a few things to say. Perhaps this was Fellini’s metaphor of the female’s limited role in society because Gelsomina communicated mainly through movement: “She has a very unusual walk. All the agility is in the feet. On the other hand, an enormous weight presses on the shoulders, which gives the impression that she drags her life behind her” (Baxter, 1993).
At the beginning of the film, Gelsomina carried a pile of firewood on her shoulders which indicates that her life is already burdened by the weight of a hard life. Zampano, Gelsomina’s “husband”, treated her like property which he could discard at a whim and had done so on occasion. It did not occur to him until the end of the film that she was actually a human being with feelings and had a mind of her own. Zampano preyed upon her fear of the unknown: “he gives her a broken-backed hat (she’s delighted) and teaches her a comic act in which, for the first time, she understands the pleasure of performing.
She remains, however, no more than a slave” (Baxter, 1993). Zampano also treated Gelsomina as a child that needed to be punished after her wrongdoing which, in essence,heightened her terror of this new disciplinarian in her life; he beat her with a self-made whip from a branch when she failed to play a drum the correct way according to his crude teaching methods. She cowered in his shadow whenever he was near. Yet, somehow, that fear turned into an undeniable sense of loyalty to her master: Gelsomina could have left with the circus, with the Fool whom she met later in the film, and even could have stayed with the nunnery but instead she remained with the cruel Zampano. This laid the groundwork for her destruction: “emerging from Zampano’s shadow, she evolved into the film’s tragic heroine, an emblem of man’s inhumanity to women” (Baxter, 1993).
Gelsomina was indeed, starting to see a world outside of Zampano when she saw the Fool for the first time on the high wire, balancing himself above the square in angel’s wings like a worthy member of the seraphim. It is this same character, Il Matteo or The Fool, who observed Gelsomina’s fear of progressing in life and mentioned that everything in existence has value, even a pebble; yet she failed to understand what he was saying because she did not want to understand that even she had a purpose; her fear of continuing to experience the unknown world, despite brief, past experiences with it, kept her in line with Zampano.
Fellini chose to clothe his characters in the costumes of classic carnival garb almost like the commedia dell’arte performers of 16th century Italy but the only difference is that the Fool, the strongman, and the actress/musician were actually clothed in their own shortcomings: Zampano wore almost no clothing when he broke the rusted chain of social conformity and marital fidelity; the Fool wore wings but could never fly past levity which led to his accidental death, and Gelsomina with her quasi- Pagliacci face never smiled openly because of her fear to leave the dominant Zampano who eventually left her to eventually die years later. It was the smile that showed everything: “Fellini told her to smile with her mouth closed…” (Baxter, 1993).
Another Italian tragic heroine appeared in Pasolini’s “Mamma Roma” (1962) tells the tale of a former prostitute, played by the ever-popular Anna Magnani, whose love for her son, Ettore, was the true source of joy in life despite her infectious laughter throughout the film: “Magnani plays the sort of character called “indomitable”; she is absolutely self-sacrificing and obsessed.”(Schwartz,1992).
Yet, there is one driving fear that tortured her soul: her son’s discovery of her secret that she was a prostitute and his father was her pimp. “Mamma Roma" is actually a sort of Passion play where the female lead is tormented at every turn by her past despite weddings, church visits, a new apartment, and a new job at a fruit and vegetable stand, so she tries to forget by concentrating on her son’s happiness. Mamma Roma rebukes his interest in a local girl as a way of rebuking herself for her past penchant for commonality.
Regardless, Ettore goes so far as to sell her tango records to buy his girlfriend a medallion. Unlike Gelsomina, Mamma Roma uses fear as a catalyst, not as an excuse for passivity. She chooses to act instead of cowering in the shadow of her tormentor, Carmine, her former pimp and lover who wants to use the secret of Ettore’s parentage to his advantage. Unfortunately, this was a dark road indeed because her fear of telling her son the truth was counterproductive. Ettore’s fate was sealed: “When Ettore learns the truth about his mother, he throws himself into crime. Traumatized by the confrontation with what he sees as hypocrisy, Ettore destroys what his mother has built: himself” (Baxter, 1993).
Mamma Roma even went back into prostitution to give her son the material things he needed but despite the counsel of the local priest, she could not be the perfect mother for him; her concern of herself and her son staying losers in society doomed them both: “Despite her efforts, both mother and son are dragged down by forces they cannot control” (Baxter, 1993). Pasolini upheld the tradition of Italian NeoRealism with this film since it seemed to suggest that the marginalized faction of society are prone to drowning in their own fears and as in later examples that will be given here, women are the preferred symbols: “Any of the subproletarian people who try to struggle up and out will be pulled, or pushed, back and under” (Baxter, 1993).
Convicted of a petty crime, Ettore dies on a hospital table stretched out in crucified fashion while his mother’s worst fear is not only fully realized, but amplified by the guilt that she could have prevented it if she were a better mother: “She tears open the cupboards, grabbing the clothes she had bought him, symbols of her hope for his social integration and rise.” (Schwartz,1993). Pasolini might have thought of Mamma Roma as an amalgam of the two Marys in the Bible: one the mother of God, the other a former prostitute because both had feared for Jesus’ life and had still lost Him; after all, the image of Ettore on the table does resemble Mantegna’s painting, “The Dead Christ”.
During the same year that “Mamma Rosa” came out, another film giant released his “Vivre sa vie” (1962). Jean-Luc Godard had his own prostitute lead character, Nana, played by his wife,Anna Karina, who feared the possibility of not becoming a successful actress after a failed marriage. Unlike Gelsomina, Nana finally found the courage to leave prostitution in the midst of finally finding love, but it came too late and she was eventually killed. In true French New Wave style, the director does not sugarcoat anything: “Godard preferred the straight French approach to the American double game.
He is not discreet; he paints his characters’ psychological quirks in black and white” (Moullet, 1960). There are twelve tableaux in the film, each depicting the lead character’s descent into Tartarus like a blind female Orpheus ready to return to the land of the living with an Academy award waiting not far behind. Nana’s world is situated in a Godardian Paris where pop culture is prevalent with posters everywhere and an underworld where gangsters and prostitutes live comfortably as a sub-culture. This is where dreams are born and where they can easily die; Christian ethics are in rapid decay: “the erosion of Christianity since the end of the last century---which Godard being of protestant origin, is very conscious of---has left people to choose between the Christian concept of a shared human existence and the modern deification of the individual” (Moullet, 1960).
By watching Dreyer’s classic film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, Nana is enraptured by the idea that a woman can stand by her principles even to the point of impending death; she vacillates between the sacred thought of dreaming to be an important member of society to the profanity of selling her body, but not her soul. Her fear of being trapped in the underbelly of Parisian society leads her to fall in the trap of Pandora’s Box: “Although she was forbidden to open the box and warned of the danger it contained, she gave way to her curiosity and released all the evils into the world” (Mulvey, 1992, cited in Pietropaolo & Testaferri, 1995).
Nana’s curiosity of profiting financially from the underworld was fuelled by her anxiety for success. Her pimp, customers, and colleagues all vindicated her profession in her eyes; one day, an acting job may come but at least she will have the money to survive in the meantime. As in the E.A. Poe story, “The Oval Portrait” read by her lover in the film, Godard paints a camera portrait of Nana frame by frame like the painter in the tale, until the subject of the artwork lays prone in a gutter, robbed of her life because she was too afraid to fully pursue her dreams.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder tackled the notion of a heroine’s paralyzing fear in the racially-charged “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”; he was a true product of the Oberhausen Manifesto, which ironically started in 1962 when the aforementioned films, save “La Strada”, premiered: “Political concerns and the desire to present a critical picture of Germany, features that had been missing from German cinema up to that time, now became articles of faith for the directors who had demanded and promised the renewal of the national cinema in their Oberhausen Manifesto” (Pflaum, 1990).
This paved the way for Fassbinder’s legendary use of emotion as a driving force behind his filmmaking; the director was eager to share his views: “The American method of making [films] left the audience with emotions and nothing else. I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling” (Fassbinder, 1976, cited by Kardish & Lorenz, 1997). In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”, Emmi, played by the award-winning Brigitte Mira, is the only heroine that does not deal with death in this discussion, at least not a physical one. Her apprehension starts once she invited Ali to her apartment and they slept together; after all, Emmi and her late father were members of the Nazi party. She confesses happiness with trepidation, but Ali, in his broken German, states: “Fear eat Soul".
Emmi and Ali are met with disgust and prejudice throughout most of the film, but the heroine’s fear reaches its apex when they cannot have a simple meal together without prying, Teutonic eyes; yet, once they come back from holiday, German society seems to finally accept their marriage. At this point, Fassbinder decides to unravel their relationship because it appears that her despair of never being accepted went beyond social issues; it inhabited their life together as well. Racism was a problem because he is Black in Postwar Germany, but her age brought down the Furies for getting a man twenty years her junior.
They wanted to tear her apart just as the original Furies did to Orpheus. The tragedy is that Ali decided to go outside his marriage for comfort, leaving Emmi to suffer under the vices of her own childhood trauma that must have accompanied her by being raised by Nazis. This is the different kind of fear that was hinted about earlier: the kind that virtually suffocated the relationship near the end of the movie; however, this, once again, fits in with the genre of the new German school of filmmaking: “ But the New German Cinema ought not to be confused with the avant-garde: it was for the most part an attempt to create something that would not fit at either pole of the rigid dichotomy between the avant-garde and the commercial, something that would, in Fassbinder’s words, let the audience “feel and think” (McCormick, 1991, cited by Frieden, McCormick, Petersen, & Vogelsang, 1993). Emmi’s fears nibbled on her soul but did not consume it; she was at Ali’s bedside at the movie’s end when he became quite ill; his doctor condemned him to a perpetual ulcer but Emmi is the only heroine here that did not die a spiritual or physical death from utter torment. Now a new fear of ultimately losing Ali forever replaces her old insecurities about their relationship.
“Veronika Voss” (1982), the last film of Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy, tells the story of a morphine-addicted singer who is afraid of letting go of her past. “UFA and Treblinka are key concepts in understanding the film” (Pflaum, 1990). UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft), was the film studio that produced German cinema until 1945, and Treblinka, of course, was the Nazi concentration camp from which two Holocaust survivors came in the film. Veronika Voss, played by Rosel Zech, was a former UFA film star who reportedly had an affair with Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of Propaganda. Her background provided the mental landscape for her fear that she would never be the same kind of celebrity she was during the war years after being lauded by the Nazi government; thus, she decided to live in a haze of opiates provided by her corrupt neurologist, Dr. Marianne Katz who, in a very calculated way, set up her own kind of concentration camp in her private practice by providing patients with a slow death from which she would profit.
It is pure irony that the film starts in the exact same way that Godard’s “Vivre sa vie” starts: the tragic heroine cathartically watching a film in a theater which mirrors her real-life situation. At times, she fearfully closes her eyes unable to bear seeing her true self on screen. Nana, from Godard’s film, and Veronika are total opposites but are going in the same direction: one aspires to be a successful actress and is spiraling down to the depths of obscurity, the other is a successful actress spiraling down to the depths of obscurity.
Both deal with their own soul-eating fears in their own way: Nana tries to placate her fear by suggesting that love can help conquer it, but Veronika allows her fear to be submerged in drugs and alcohol so that it can re-emerge. Yet, Robert Kuhn, Veronika’s lover, represents love in the same way that Nana’s boyfriend does as a possible savior from the torments of her fears of not being a happy and satisfied human being; this is why he posed a threat to Dr. Katz’s rule over the aging actress: one cannot give an inmate in her medical concentration camp any hope of being released. Fassbinder was very careful to give the doctor’s hospital a look of deadly confinement with its bar-like windows, secret rooms, and somber surroundings (It is no mistake that the film was shot in black and white): “Fassbinder erects a monument to those favored by the former system, who cannot adapt to the present---which actually speaks in their (Veronika’s) favor---as well as victims of the system, who are so damaged they are unable to go on with life” (Pflaum, 1990).
Thus, Veronika’s apprehension of being a loser was created by a former Germany society’s opium-like addictive qualities when it related to celebrities. Now that the old Nazi regime has been replaced, the addiction has not abated; Fassbinder clearly made his opinions known: “His hatred toward the new power brokers, who supply society with the drugs that it (whether actually or presumably) needs; the journalist (the detective figure in the film), who represents the principle of democracy, doesn’t stand a chance against the conspiracy” (Pfaum, 1990). Veronika Voss died from not only her own self-degradation born out of fear, not only from an overdose of drugs, but from Dr. Katz’s selfish manipulations which run rampant throughout the film (e.g. her concentration camp-like coldness towards treating the elderly couple who were both Holocaust survivors, thereby condemning them to death, the blatant murder of Kuhn’s girlfriend due to the neurologist’s own fears, the ostracization of Kuhn, etc.); in other words, Dr. Katz was able to secure Veronica’s wealth when she died because her drug pusher mentality capitalized on her fear of making a decision without the doctor’s “advice.
Italian Neorealism and its far-reaching influence on women in European cinema has many more examples such as in another Fassbinder film “Angst vor der Angst” (1975) translated as “Fear of Fear” which included another drug-addicted woman, Margot, who was too fearful to cope with life; although it was a TV production, the film retained all of Fassbinder’s trademark realism from the tragic heroine motif to the complicated family life as was depicted in “Fear: Ali Eats the Soul”. Like Veronika, Margot assumed that she was losing her mind and turned to drugs out of angst that she could not solve her problems without them. Fassbinder had never been afraid to address death and depression in the same breath just like his colleagues, Fellini, Godard, and Pasolini.
Fear is a major emotion which drove the engine to a great deal of European films from Neorealism to the New German Cinema because it was prevalent during the times in which each film was made: “La Strada” was filmed during the post-Mussolini years when Italy was still suffering from the after effects of World War II (thus, the nationwide consternation of rising above adversity symbolized by Gelsomina); “Mamma Rosa” was created as a result of a Cahiers du Cinema- awakened Italy that had an agenda to express realistic elements despite fear of opposition; “Vivre sa vie” was a response to the opposition of reform in cinema :“The New Wave was born in 1959, and by the end of 1960, it was already an object of contempt” (Truffaut, 1960, cited by Hillier, 1986); Fassbinder’s works “Fear: Ali Eats the Soul” and “Veronika Voss” were further extensions of both French and Italian schools of filmmaking regardless of state funding that was steeped in the expectation of traditional German cinema.
The words of Fassbinder himself can explain why fear is such a powerful subject in the films that were discussed: “Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be exploiting them. It never ends. It’s a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other” (Fassbinder, 1976, cited by Kardish & Lorenz, 1997). Each director, whether from Italy, France, or Germany, was not immune to using emotions like fear as a device for storytelling.
Bibliography
Baxter, John, Fellini, pp.105-‘7, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993
Elsaesser, T., Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In Kardish, Laurence & Lorenz, Juliane, eds. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1997, pp.15-19.
Moullet, L., 1960. Jean-Luc Godard. In Hillier, Jim, ed. Cahiers du Cinema 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluation of Hollywood Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp.41, 108-‘9.
Mulvey, Laura, 1992. The Myth of Pandora. In Pietropaolo, Laura & Testaferri, eds. Feminisms in the Cinema, USA: Indiana University Press, 1995, p.8.
Pflaum, Hans Gunther, Germany on Film: Theme and Content in the Cinema of the Federal Republic of Germany, Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University, pp.62-‘3.
Schwartz, Barth David, Pasolini, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, pp. 395-‘99.
Film Bibliography
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974.[DVD] Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany: Criterion Collection.
Mamma Roma,1962. [DVD] Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy: Criterion Collection.
La Strada, 1954. [DVD] Directed by Federico Fellini. Italy: Criterion Collection.
Veronika Voss, 1982. [DVD] Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany: Criterion Collection.
Vivre sa vie, 1962. [DVD] Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. France: Criterion Collection.
Angst vor der Angst, 1975 [DVD] Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany: Criterion Collection.