Fassbinder in Hollywood

R.W. Fassbinder was a great deal more complex and interesting than this ersatz documentary would suggest. In it, former Fassbinder collaborators Ulli Lommel, Michael Ballhaus and Wim Wenders wax nostalgic about the man and the myth. Mostly, they comment on the myth. This film cleaves nicely with the propagandistic view of Fassbinder held by the official Fassbinder Society -- As some critics are reviewing Fassbinder, they are also revising his influences on world cinema. That said, this film is much more Lommel than Fassbinder, which is unfortunate as Lommel is the least interesting character on view here -- he proposes ad naseum what Fassbinder would have done as an artist in Hollywood, which if you think about it could make for a sly parody of Fassbinder but here it's all taken seriously. And Lommel takes himself far too seriously, as if his association with Fassbinder rubbed off on him long enough to give him a swig of talent (it didn't). Amateurishly shot on videotape, FASSBINDER IN HOLLYWOOD was shown on German TV this year. I see that Lommel makes a lot of bad vanity productions that no one sees. He produced and "stars" in this production. It should have been called ULLI LOMMEL TALKS FROM HOLLYWOOD AND SAYS NOTHING INTERESTING ABOUT FASSBINDER. The best thing about the documentary is an ever-so brief visit with Wim Wenders, who sits uncomfortably in what looks like a swing set and breaks through the film's deadening editorializing with a refreshing bit of honest emotion.

German director Ulli Lommel and Robert Fischer have fashioned a very likable documentary on Fassbinder, with a lot of humor and insight into Fassbinder's life. It plays as a labor of love, made by people who really loved Fassbinder and knew him personally.

There are a lot of Fassbinder documentations in the form of movies. The problem is only where you get to see them. There is a first group, like, e.g. "Der Bauer Von Babylon" (1982), directed by Fassbinder's last producer Dieter Schidor, which is a nice documentation of Fassbinder's last movie "Querelle", that is not even to be found on the Criterion edition of Querelle. The movie has been broadcast a few times in German TV and that's it. Then, there is a second group - and amongst them most unfortunately also many of Fassbinders's own movies - where it has not been possible to overcome copyright problems in the almost 30 years since Fassbinder died. Sometimes, such movies can be seen in German TV. If you have luck, you find them as torrents in some "pirate" web sites. But then there is a third - and the strangest group of Fassbinder documentations -, namely those movies which are solely to be found in the specials of the German (PAL) editions of the Fassbinder movies, but not in the international DVDs (NTSC). Amongst them are - again unfortunately - practically all the interviews that Fassbinders gave. The present film shows shorter or longer clips of interviews from practically all period of Fassbinders "13 years". "Fassbinder in Hollywood" (2002) has amongst the rather rare to be seen movies a special status insofar as its Point D'Origine is not Fassbinder's work during his life-time (1945-1982), but the work of "Fassbinder's Friends in Hollywood". As such Ulli Lommel, Wim Wenders and the cameraman Michael Ballhaus (besides others) are sub-signing. This would indeed be an unhappy starting point because none of the three really continue Fassbinders's work, although they all point out how much they are indebted to their late teacher and colleague. However, in reality, the documentation "Fassbinder in Hollywood" is a very sensitive and skilfully crafted combination of Fassbinder's influence to Hollywood on the one side (whereby the "Garage Theater" in Santa Monica has been included), and the work of the three Fassbinder friends on the other side who fulfilled what remained mere wish for Fassbinder: to live and to work in America. A very nice surprise is the short scene, where Lommel, Fassbinder and Superman, together with a Marilyn-Monroe-Doppelganger, wait for a bus at Sunset Boulevard. Fassi looks utterly displaced - in the New World as well as in the Old World. In the Old World he never got too tired to point out that he will move soon to the US (he had even a penthouse in New York), but Hanna Schygulla, the intimate connoisseur of Fassbinder's soul, in an interview, pointed out that, once arrived in America, Fassbinder would never have been able to adapt himself and probably would have gone back all the time to make his movies in Germany.

This is more of a documentary on actor-turned-director and former Fassbinder associate Ulli Lommel than a film on Fassbinder or his experiences with Hollywood. Lommel is center of the mise en scene most of the time, interviewing former colleagues or talking about his experiences with RWF, posing in front of the camera, wearing a Highlander-style coat and a cowboy hat. Lots of talk, little information - quite superfluous.

This is a one-hour documentary that one would assume would be about the time that Rainer Werner Fassbinder tried to make a mark in Hollywood with some of his films. I thought, indeed, that he had tried to do that somewhat near the end of his life/career, which was cut short when he died at 37, with films like Despair and Lili Marleen. But if I was to go by this documentary I'd be mistaken, though I also am not sure there's enough here to justify the title.

There are some good interviews here, from some of his former collaborators like cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (his are the most interesting on the technical aspects and how their collaboration sort of developed, or at least started with a great anecdote about making the anti-Western Whity in 71) and Hanna Schygulla (her reminisces are the most moving), but it's also co- produced and co-written by former Fassbinder gun-for-hire Ulli Lommel, and his involvement shows... a lot. It wouldn't be an issue if there weren't some stretches where the documentary seemed to become more about him and the start of his career (i.e. Blank Generation clips and Warhol), which only gets back to Fassbinder by a reach-around/wrap-around approach from director Robert Fischer. The documentary begins actually in an odd way too, as it focuses for the first ten minutes on some experimental Los Angeles theater group who put on Fassbinder plays; they might make for some good stories in a longer-form documentary on the director and his other works, but the theme is still *Fassbinder* in *Hollywood*, and it seems to be squeezed in like a dress that's a size or two too small to fit in.

Again, if you do check this out and you love Fassbinder's films, there's surely some good things to take away from - Wim Wenders, one of the other most famous in the "New German Wave" of cinema in the 70's and who was friends with Fassbinder (I liked most when Rainer offered to "punch out" Francis Coppola over his supposed mistreatment of Wenders while making Hammet) - but the title is verging on a misnomer. On the one hand it's kind of interesting to get some background facts about how Hollywood influenced Fassbinder in his early films (not to mention Douglas Sirk in the 50's of course, albeit he was the German father figure he always wanted), it doesn't go a ways to not contradict when later in the documentary his collaborators mention that Fassbinder didn't *really* want to make films in Hollywood so much as he was probably getting tired of the German cinema system that was constricting him in the late 70's. There's a lot of what ifs to this as well since one can never know what would've happened after 82.