THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971

German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a leading figure in the New German Cinema of the 1970s. He started as a theatre actor and, in the late 1960s, established a troupe known as the "Anti-Theatre". Rejected by the West Berlin Film School, Fassbinder simply started making films. From 1969 to his premature death in 1982, he wrote and directed more than forty productions: four films in 1969, six in 1970, a five-part TV series, four features in 1972, and roughly three films a year for the remainder of his career. One can't say the man was driven!

Born in 1945, Fassbinder grew up in a country struggling to come to terms with the impact of WW2 and the post-war economic "miracle" of the Adenauer Era. In less than twenty years, Germany went from a ruined economy to a model of first-world democratic affluence. Fassbinder's work was strongly informed by the moral and psychological consequences of this period and by questions raised about personal and national identity and guilt, what he called the "amnesia that permeates Germany". In the '50s and '60s, American music and films were compelling distractions to fill some of the cultural, emotional and spiritual voids.

However, the cultural "Trojan horses" of American imperialism weren't entirely evident at the time, so the "Coca-colonisation" of Germany was pervasive. This was a central theme in New German Cinema, notably in the work of Wim Wenders, Jean-Marie Straub, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and Werner Herzog, among others.

In 1970, he wrote an essay about German émigré Douglas Sirk, a Hollywood director renowned in the '50s for his so-called "women's pictures", in which he wrote about the isolationist xenophobia and middle-class hypocrisy beneath the beautifully manicured surfaces of Sirk's ostensibly innocuous but quietly incisive melodramas. Despite their scathing subtexts, Sirk's films were revered by mainstream audiences and critics. He could 'attack from within' because his films were primarily inclusive — they captivated the viewer with engaging stories and characters while critical subtexts percolated in the background.

While strongly influenced by Sirk, Fassbinder sought a far more participatory engagement from his audience. "The American method of filmmaking," he said, "leaves the audience with emotions and little else. I want them to reflect…" Inspired by Sirk's calculated use of inauthenticity through heightened production values such as colour and set design and his equally emphatic depiction of American idealism and spiritual nostalgia, Fassbinder emulated the highly developed syntax of Hollywood to subvert its ideology: "to reveal truth through melodramatic cliché", as he put it.

He wanted viewers to approach his films actively rather than passively, so he regularly employed Brechtian distanciation to create a deliberate schism between film and viewer. Characters and objects are often framed by doorways and windows or reflected in mirrors and glass surfaces to stress objectivity and artificiality. Performances might either be stripped of emotion or saturated with it, deliberately stilted with awkward silences, dead time, and exaggerated line deliveries. Cutting between scenes was often delayed, prolonging a shot to draw attention to the 'empty screen' and reveal the anticipation and "safety" of the eventual cut. He would exaggerate feel-good tropes to expose the propensity of corporate closed-form cinema to pacify audiences with reassuring but often specious values and beliefs. He wanted the viewer to reflect on what they were watching as well as the act of watching itself, to question their relationship to the film.

The early works, an astonishing eleven films between 1969 and 1971, were all "Anti-Theatre" collaborations, but after the chaotic production of WHITY, the troupe began to implode. So Fassbinder slowed the pace to concentrate on one film, THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS. It proved to be a significant artistic and critical breakthrough.

The film tells the story of Hans Epp, a simple fruit vendor despised by his family and rejected by the object of his love, a woman with nothing but contempt for his lowly profession. Instead, he marries Irm, a woman of a lower social standing. His business grows, but a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority and futility gradually leads him into a self-destructive downward spiral.

Fassbinder believed that humankind is a "necessary destructive presence in the world" and that absolute freedom was impossible without facing this fact. In one way or another, most of his films were examinations of existential trauma: guilt, humiliation, envy, fear, jealousy, rejection, shame, intolerance, and above all, the need for love, which is withheld from many of his characters and often weaponised.

Epp is a metaphor for the condition of post-war Germany, the embodiment of existential pain. Many who knew Fassbinder said that there was more than a hint of autobiography in Hans Epp, that he mirrored Fassbinder's insecurities about being unlovable and unable to love. Like many of his films, MERCHANT is unmistakably singular and uncompromising.

Two scenes in MERCHANT illustrate Fassbinder's unique approach to open-form distanciation. In the first, Hans and Irm joyfully laugh about their business success, and in the second, Hans laughs with an old army buddy. In each case, the laughter is exaggerated out of proportion to an unsettling degree, making it difficult to identify with the characters or the scene in a conventional closed-form sense. Flashbacks and time shifts were rarely signalled, so viewers may only realise a transition has occurred once the scene is over. Temporal suspension and dislocation were intended to motivate the viewer to work with the filmmaker rather than be led by him. Fassbinder would undermine the primacy of story, characters and dialogue to draw attention to (among other things) the political, social and spiritual vacuity in a world where 'value' and 'worth' are invariably defined by commercial criteria.

Characters, settings and themes were far from stereotypical in Fassbinder's work, and provocation was pivotal. He distrusted constructs that subscribed fixed meanings to existence and loathed hypocrisy and moral superiority. He sought to examine the dynamics and co-dependence between authority and rebellion, victim and victimiser, power and complicity, and described his work as "the cinema of vicious cycles".

The exits are blocked for many of Fassbinder's characters, outsiders who live on the margins of bourgeois society, unable to comprehend the forces that constrain them. Their stories reflect the frustration and violence of suffering the pernicious toxicity of middle-class hypocrisy. Few escape the cycles of longing, betrayal, and humiliation, despising themselves and others for being the failures they have been manipulated to believe they are. Epp's self-loathing is most poignant in the scene where he drinks himself to death, an act of abject failure that is paradoxically a moment of profound self-affirmation, where, at last, he acquires something resembling dignity.

Irm looks on helplessly, tears streaming down her face, exaggerated to suggest a double mockery: feigning grief and mimicking religious piety, an example of Fassbinder's sardonic iconoclasm. Epp's benumbed drinking buddies look on in hopeless, silent incomprehension, alluding to a dispossessed nation with either nothing to say or no voice to say it with, frozen by spiritual, emotional and moral apathy. Incapable of giving or receiving love, Hans has just enough force of will for one final act of defiance — to reject the world that, even in death, mercilessly mocks and rejects him.

THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS reveals what Fassbinder called his preference for "truth-telling over story-telling". Like Hans Epp, Fassbinder knew that without love, we perish. His deliberate use of formal discontinuities never outweighed the compassion and searching integrity of his work. His films may be pessimistic, but they are always empathetic, sincere, and insightful. His characters were never ridiculed, even at their most despicable. Their inner conflicts invariably demand tragic melodrama to be satisfactorily resolved. In this respect, Fassbinder's films mirror a nation in denial, in which undemanding anti-intellectual escapism conceals a traumatised culture.

Today, where a fascination with the skid marks of celebrity dominates the popular media, popcorn rules. By leading viewers by the nose, telling them what to think and feel, most closed-form movies function as a form of social engineering, frequently pedalling spurious, highly influential mindsets that go largely unchallenged. Fassbinder contrasted the "normalising properties" of popular movies with his cinema of vicious circles, where his formal discontinuities exposed the mechanisms of political and social disenfranchisement and championed non-conformity, sexual and racial otherness, and the right to be exactly who you are.

His life and early death were in complete concert with the tone and trajectory of his subject matter, as articulate a howl as anything he put on film. It has been said that art can only be justified by life, but Fassbinder may have preferred the opposite view, that life can only be justified by cinema.