Gunnar Fischer

Gunnar Fischer, who died on 11th June at the age of 101, was the first of Ingmar Bergman’s great cinematographic collaborators, and was instrumental in creating the beautiful black and white photography which distinguishes the best films from the first half of his career. He made 12 pictures with the Swedish director, beginning in atypical style with Port of Call in 1948. This was Bergman’s attempt at a film in the neo-realist style of Rossellini and de Sica, although his interest in the interior worlds of his characters and preference for shooting in the studio meant that the result showed more affinity with the poetical realism of Marcel Carne’s collaborations with Jacques Prevert and Jean Gabin, Le Jour se Leve and Quai des Brumes. Fischer assisted Bergman during the fairly lengthy period in which he searched for a distinctive style. Port of Call wasn’t a film which in any way went towards defining it, but it is an interesting side-step. The scenes shot on the docks of Gothenberg allowed Fischer to demonstrate his ability to depict a realistic milieu with a clear-eyed sense of the character and atmosphere of place.

The iconic scene - The Dance with Death from The Seventh Seal

Bergman had in fact wanted Fischer as his cameraman right from the start. He had begun shooting on the aptly named Crisis, Bergman’s debut film, in 1946, but after initial test reels had been shot, the studio had him replaced with a more well-established cinematographer. The two had met at the Svensk Filmindustri Studios, at which Bergman had just arrived. As Bergman put it in his autobiography The Magic Lantern, ‘we were contemporaries, enthusiastic, and we got on well together’. Bergman’s slow developmental progress as a film-maker continued, with Fischer adapting to his needs, with Three Strange Loves in 1949, and To Joy and This Can’t Happen Here in 1950. The latter was a relatively big budget studio affair which Bergman reluctantly took on. It was a spy thriller, very uncharacteristic material for him, and he felt no connection with it whatsoever. He describes the experience of making it with typically melodramatic language in Images: My Life in Film as being ‘complete torture from beginning to end’. It is one of only two of his many films which he claimed to view with shame. The other is the film he made in America in 1971, The Touch. Perhaps it is significant that both of these were films shot in English (at least It Can’t Happen Here was shot in separate Swedish and English versions) and thus designed to reach a wider audience. Bergman was always more comfortable on home territory. Fischer too only made the occasional foray into foreign filming. Fischer’s professionalism helped see him through the traumatic making of This Can’t Happen Here, and was also valuable in shooting the five commercials which Bergman made for Unilever. He seems to have been more cheerful about these ads for the new ‘Bris’ (or breeze) deodorant soap, for which he was able to insist on complete creative control. This included the power to choose his own crew, and Fischer was unhesitatingly appointed cameraman. Bergman described the ads as being ‘miniature films in the spirit of Georges Melies’, and they gave Fischer further scope for expanding his technical range and indulging in pastiches of earlier styles.

Pagan sensuality - Harriet Andersson in Summer With Monika

The film which really marked a breakthrough, and which can perhaps be seen as the first wholly characteristic Bergman film was Summer Interlude, made in 1951. As Bergman himself put it, it was ‘my first film in which I felt I was functioning independently, with a style of my own, making a film all my own, with a particular appearance of its own, which no one could ape’. Of course, Fischer contributed enormously to the creation of this ‘particular appearance’. He depicts a dualistic world composed of shadows and light and divided both in terms of geography and time (the time of life and the time of the season). These were dualities which would be further explored in Summer With Monika in 1953, another of the key films of Bergman’s early period. In both, Fischer captures the evanescent quality of the light as it plays on the clear waters surrounding the islets and isthmuses of the Stockholm Archipelago; the summer glint and dazzle on the waves and the rippled reflections they cast on dreamy interiors, giving them an enchanted subaquatic feel. In Summer With Monika, Monika wakes on the first morning moored in the archipelago to gaze up at the wavering water shadows on the roof of the boat, which are in turn cast down onto her face, illuminating a moment of pure happiness. Fischer was a master at painting such impressionistic cinematic pictures, and there are many to be found in the summer scenes of nature in Summer Interlude and Summer With Monika. He manages to bring a heightened intensity to his depictions of the brief Swedish Summer, lending it the power to embody the transitory nature of youth, love, happiness and life with which Bergman symbolically invests it. This is beautifully expressed in the scene in which Harriet Andersson’s Monika tiptoes nakedly across smooth rocks towards a rock pool, her outline blurred against the sun-flecked glaze of the ocean. It’s a moment of almost pagan sensuality, water, light, rock and flesh all indelibly felt, and it’s one to which Lars Ekborg’s hapless non-hero Harry will return in memory when things take a sour turn later on.

Enchanted summer nights - Summer With Monika

Fischer’s camerawork in the archipelago scenes of Summer With Monika serve to demonstrate his versatility and ability to adapt to unpredictable circumstances and the limitations imposed by available equipment. The budget was minimal and he only had a silent camera to work with. This may have been partly to his advantage, as it allowed him to be more mobile and flexible as to where he could go to shoot. Filming around the changing moods of the Swedish weather, a large degree of improvisation was required. The rather neurasthenic Bergman would normally be driven to despair by such lack of control, but Fischer was able to provide the supportive assurance of his reliable and steadfast professionalism and improvisatory nous, which allowed the moment to be calmly seized as required. As a result, Bergman was able to declare that ‘making Summer With Monika was a lot of fun’, and he didn’t even mind when they had to return to reshoot some of the archipelago footage. He voiced similarly pleasant memories of his time making Summer Interlude.

Meeting death on the road - Summer Interlude

The sun-filled scenes of watery, oceanic bliss are contrasted with the dark and oppressive atmosphere with which Fischer imbues the Stockholm scenes. In Summer With Monika, these seem to draw on film noir in the intensity and extent of the shadows in the alleyways, stairwells and streets. The city is made to seem dark and forbidding, the interiors ill-lit and claustrophobic. There is something of an air of the late 50s and early 60s English kitchen-sink dramas about these poor urban settings. Summer Interlude, with its theatrical backdrop, is rather more expressionistic in style, anticipating a significant aspect of the visual look of Bergman’s work. This is particularly evident in the dressing room scenes, with the exaggerated features of ballet make-up seen close-to giving a rationale for such an overemphasised look. The ballet setting inevitably brings to mind Powell and Pressburger and The Red Shoes. Fischer doesn’t give us a performer’s eye view of the performance, with expressionist projections of psychological interiority, as Powell does. He holds back, viewing the choreography as a whole from low or slightly elevated angles. The ballerinas themselves seem to be lit from within, glowing with the illumination of artistic dedication, hard work and passion. The sinister, lurking presence in the dressing room of the raptor-nosed, arch-eyebrowed man in black brings the evil sorceror of Swan Lake, von Rothbart, backstage, seemingly still in character. He is one of the death-like figures which haunt Bergman’s work (the archetype reaching its apogee in The Seventh Seal, of course, in which the death-like figure actually is death). Another manifestation is the old crone who crosses in front of the ballerina Marie (played by Maj-Britt Nilsson, an actress who never quite made into Bergman’s regular repertory company) as she makes her way along the old summer path to the chalet where she spent an idyllic, youthful season. Fischer frames this stooped, black-clad figure making her inexorable way across the island past the stark traceries of dead winter trees. Her brief glance back at Marie suggests a chilling sense of recognition, and a promise of a future meeting. This scene shows that Fischer was as adept at depicting the cold landscapes of winter as he was the sun-kissed shores of summer.

The illuminated face - Harriet Andersson in Summer With Monika

In the dressing-room, Fischer shoots numerous shots in which the characters are caught in reflections, whether in bulb-edged mirrors or arched, rain-speckled windows. Such reflections recur throughout his films with Bergman. In the final scene of Summer With Monika, for example, in which Harry gazes at himself holding the baby in the mirrored door of the café, and slips into a reverie of his life with Monika. Or in Smiles of a Summer Night, in which Gunnar Bjornstrand’s pompous lawyer’s vainglorious strut alongside the relaxed saunter of Eva Dahlbeck’s worldly actress is shot as reflected in a gutter puddle. Fischer manages these tricky set-ups perfectly. The close-up on Monika (towards the end of Summer With Monika) in the café where she has retreated to escape from Harry and the baby is one of a series of Fischer’s illuminated faces. He moves slowly in on her, shooting her looking directly into the camera. The background fades to a deep black, leaving just her face, holding our gaze for several moments, daring us to disapprove of her actions, her need. Similar illuminated faces can be found throughout Bergman’s work, particularly from this period. At the end of The Seventh Seal, for example, the face of Gunnel Lindblom’s mute character is illuminated with a look of rapturous expectation at the approach of death, whose shadow momentarily brushes across her upturned features. At the end of Wild Strawberries we see Isak Borg’s face looking up with beatific calm from his pillow, his dream self having found reconciliation and acceptance in the paradise of childhood memory.

The illuminated face - Gunnel Lindblom in The Seventh Seal

The three films which Fischer made with Bergman in the mid-50s (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries) remain the director’s best-known works, and are also the most unabashedly enjoyable and beautiful to look at. Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was a bawdy, farcical comedy whose tone Fischer set by creating light and airy interiors in which witty exchanges, comical misapprehensions and self-delusions could be played out. He had some previous experience with such comedy, the story from Waiting Women in which the husband and wife played Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Bjornstrand get stuck in a lift being a choice slice of witty byplay in the manner of the Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn movies. For the climactic midsummer night’s gathering at the country house, he conjured an enchanted twilight of suspended time in which evening never quite progresses to the darkness of night.

Prayers on the terminal beach - Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal is undoubtedly Bergman’s best-known work (it even finds its way into a Scott Walker song) and Fischer’s photography is absolutely central to its evocation of a medieval world filled with fear, darkness and intimations of imminent apocalypse. The opening shot of ominous clouds beneath which the silhouette of a hovering falcon is etched once more shows his skill at capturing meteorological atmospheres and imbuing them with resonant symbolic weight. Fischer seems to have been particularly fond of clouds, and caught their transient formations in several shots in his work with Bergman. They certainly feature in Summer Interlude, Summer With Monika and Wild Strawberries. The scenes on the shoreline which act as the film’s prologue are masterful examples of setting mood through dramatic, non-realistic lighting. The sun sinks beneath the oceanic horizon, and cliffs seem to radiate a baleful darkness. Faces stand out as luminous beacons against this pervasive gloom, whether Max von Sydow’s knight, Gunnar Bjornstrand’s squire, or the gaunt, chalky clown-face of Death, who appears suddenly and without ceremony. The white chess pieces which the knight uses in his game with Death (Death, naturally, ends up with the black pieces, commenting, with bone-dry humour, ‘very appropriate, don’t you think?’) also shine out against the backdrop of the abyssal sea, glowing with the fierce radiance of life. This really does feel like a terminal beach, the knight and his squire washed up on its shore to witness the end of all things.

Dark contrasts - Death and the knight in church

The duality between the bright natural world and the shadowed city which Fischer’s camerawork had realised in Summer Interlude and Summer With Monika is intensified in The Seventh Seal, in which exteriors and interiors are presented as distinctly different environments. The sunlit exteriors of the open coastal landscape are the domain of the company of players who represent, particularly in the form of Bibi Andersson’s Mia and Nils Poppe’s Jof, the simple joys of life. These landscapes and the light in which they are bathed are obscured by the choking clouds of incense swung from the censers of the self-flagellating penitents who groan and wail their way past the players’ performance, and by the dark forest through which they must travel to rejoin the coast road, both of which Fischer atmospherically evokes with particular lighting effects. A harsh, unforgiving glare burning through the penitent’s smoke, and a weave of shadow and dimly penetrating light for the forest. The interiors are the domain of death and are marked by the extreme contrast of blacks and whites. The church in which the knight unwittingly confesses to a duplicitous Death is full of inky shadow, with isolated details (the illuminated faces of Death and the knight, and the grille which separates them) standing out against the black void. The plague house in which the thief robs the dying and the inn at which he later turns up to torment Jof, forcing him to dance like a bear, his shadow cast by the hellish firelight in grotesque pantomimic form upon the wall, are also places in which deep darkness and depravations of the human spirit prevail. Finally, in the knight’s castle, the sputtering flames in their sconces do little to hold back the night’s shadows, and serve to outline Death’s dark silhouette, which seems to emerge or form itself from them.

Formed from shadow - Death outlined

The iconic shot from The Seventh Seal is the one which depicts the train of characters led along the ridge of a hill by Death in a final danse macabre. This once more demonstrated Fischer’s ability to improvise and swiftly adapt to circumstances. According to Bergman, they had already called it a day because of an approaching storm, and most of the actors had gone ahead and returned to their accommodation. He then spotted a dark cloud which had the perfect glowering mass for what he had in mind. Fischer’s love of filming clouds found its ultimate expression, and he quickly set up the camera to catch this one whilst it was still in place. Instead of the actors, ‘a few grips and a couple of tourists danced in their place, having no idea what it was all about. The image that later became famous of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was improvised in only a few minutes’.

Flocking thoughts - Isak dreams

The third of the great Bergman films on which Fischer worked was Wild Strawberries, in which he got to work with silent film master Victor Sjostrom, who plays the protagonist, elderly professor Isak Borg. Sjostrom’s expressionist masterpieces The Wind and The Phantom Carriage certainly exerted an influence on both Bergman and Fischer. In Wild Strawberries, Fischer employs expressionistic distortion in the dream sequences which punctuate the realistic flow of the narrative. In the example which opens the film, he eschews the characteristic expressionist use of shadows and jagged angles in favour of a harsh, over-exposed mid-day glare, in which contrasts become hazy and objects lose their defining edges. A later sequence contains an effective transition from waking to dream states in which Fischer once more employs the technique whereby the background fades out behind a character’s face, this time in the superimposed form of a dissolve. Borg is resting his head on the car window, the landscape passing by outside. As he drifts into sleep, this fades away, shading into darkness, and is replaced by the image of a night tree, its stark branches etched darkly against the sky, towards which birds noisily flock. It’s an effective image of the restless state of Borg’s mind. The jagged outlines of bare trees provide the requisite expressionist angles, as they do in a later scene, in which Fischer places such a bare branch in the foreground, slashing across the screen. Such branches and bleak, denuded trees feature in others of his films with Bergman, providing an externalised representation of souls in winter.

Summer meadows of memory - Wild Strawberries

The journey across Sweden which provides the film’s form allows Fischer to frame more Nordic landscapes, with summer forests, lakes and meadows (and clouds, of course). The sun-dappled glades of childhood memory are beautifully evoked with a slightly unreal light suggesting a certain amount of editing for Edenic perfection in Borg’s mind. The recollected interiors of his childhood summer home are bright and sun-filled, composed of various shades of white (as are the costumes which the members of his family wear). In these scenes, Fischer successfully recreates the idyllic depictions of Swedish home life painted by Carl Larsson at the turn of the century. Borg’s final dream of reconciliation and human connection leaves us with another of Fischer’s illuminated faces, as mentioned above. Sjostrom’s beatific expression as he looks across the bay of his remembered childhood is a wonderfully understated piece of acting perfectly captured by Fischer’s camera. Nothing needs to be said, the image articulates the moment in a manner beyond words.

Expressionist angles - The Magician

The Magician (1958) emphasised the gothic strain in Bergman’s work which had been so evident in The Seventh Seal (and which would again come to the fore in Hour of the Wolf). Max von Sydow’s travelling 19th century illusionist Albert Vogler (Vogler being a mane used repeatedly by Bergman for his artist characters) and his wife Manda (Ingrid Thulin) both dress in black, Manda initially disguised as a young man. Von Sydow even died his hair and beard black for the role, completing the goth look. Fischer got to use the whole range of expressionist horror techniques in the climactic scene in the attic. Here, the aggressively sceptical Dr Vergerus (Gunnar Bjornstrand) prepares to carry out an autopsy on the body of Vogler, who appears to have been murdered. The attic is a jumble of expressionistic clutter, an unruly assemblage of off-kilter angles, oversized clocks and tilted mirrors. Fischer uses the suggestive shadows to summon spectres, with hands reaching out from the between wooden slats (as in Night of the Living Dead and Bedlam) and Vogler’s pale, deathly face manifesting in shafts of moonlight. Reflections appear and disappear in the fly-specked, rust-veiled mirrors and objects are imbued with a pregnant sense of imminent animation. It’s a miniature distillation of the essence of early horror film, channelling the spirits of Murnau, Leni, Wiene and Whale.

Larsson summers - Wild Strawberries

Fischer’s last film with Bergman was The Devil’s Eye, another bawdy and farcical comedy with a fantastical edge, which hopped between modern-day Sweden and a rather well-appointed Hell. It’s reasonably enjoyable, but fails to hit the high spots of Smiles of a Summer Night. It was a minor note on which to part. Bergman had given Fischer a public dressing down early on in the production, criticising him for what he perceived as a minor lighting fault during a view of the day’s rushes. Fischer was hurt by such discourteous treatment after all this time, and Bergman subsequently apologised, but it was a sign that their partnership was nearing its end. Bergman had worked with Sven Nykvist as his cameraman on The Virgin Spring prior to making The Devil’s Eye, Fischer having been unavailable. Jerry Vermilye, in his book on Bergman, claims that he had made a commitment to work on a film for Disney, although I can’t find any indication as to which it might have been. Bergman and Nykvist had worked together some years before on Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), but they really hit it off on The Virgin Spring, and a strong artistic bond was formed. Bergman further soured his relationship with Fischer by telling him that he had been spoiled by working with Nykvist. Such remarks as these and the criticisms mentioned above seemed designed to promote a rift and force the relationship towards a swift end. Bergman is hardly generous in his acknowledgement of Fischer’s contribution to his development as a film maker and his instrumental role in creating some of his greatest films and most memorable images. He barely gets a mention either in his autobiography The Magic Lantern or in his survey of his own oeuvre Images: My Life in Film. Nykvist, on the other hand, is singled out for fulsome praise and portrayed as an artistic soul mate. Nykvist was a brilliant cinematographer, but he built on and added to a reputation which Bergman had already established alongside Fischer. Bergman could have done with giving this a little more acknowledgement.

Midsummer night's games - Harriet Andersson and Ake Fridell in Smiles of a Summer Night

Bergman’s split with Fischer marked a turning point in his development. With Nyvist, he would turn increasingly inward, focussing on the spiritual and emotional crises of individuals (often artists) in the modern world. After The Devil’s Eye he embarked on his ‘faith’ trilogy: Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence, stripped down in terms of sets, cast, plot and, in the end, language. This is the point at which the stereotyped image of Bergman’s films as being relentlessly bleak and hopeless begins to set in. There was less of a focus on nature, which was increasingly reduced to an elementary and stark representational form (as with the jagged outline of the tree seen through the window in Winter Light). Bergman eventually found his ideal setting in what others might consider the rather bleak surrounds of the island of Faro, on which he eventually set up home. Interiors were predominant in the films of this new period, and Nykvist’s camera focussed closely on the faces of Bergman’s regular cast of actors, observing their every nuance and reaction (a stylistic preoccupation acknowledged in the title of the 1976 film Face to Face).

Beatific visage - Isak finds contentment

Nevertheless, Fischer was the cameraman who established the look of the first half of Bergman’s career, helping him when he was struggling to find an identity, and guiding him towards his worldwide success. Happily, there seems to have been no lingering ill-feeling between Bergman and Fischer. In the year following The Devil’s Eye, Fischer was filming another light-hearted Bergman script, The Pleasure Garden, under a different director. He also returned to work with Bergman himself one more time, shooting the title of the 1971 film The Touch. Fischer may be gone, but the torch has been passed on. His sons Jens and Peter, the children of his 67 year marriage to Gull Soderblom, are both now established cinematographers.

Passion Plays and Inverted Infernos

Fictions of Fascism - Berlin Alexanderplatz and Salo,or the 120 Days of Sodom


It was pure coincidence that found me watching these two films in close proximity recently, but they seem to dovetail with each other on many levels. Both are culminating works of directors who worked as iconoclasts within their respective countries, Germany and Italy. Fassbinder had always intended to film Alfred Doblin’s 1929 novel, having strongly identified with all of the central triangle of characters, Franz Biberkopf, Reinhold and Mieze. He had frequently included characters called Franz in his films, and had himself played a character called Franz Biberkopf in his 1974 film Fox and His Friends. Whilst he made five further films in the two years left to him, there is a sense that this was the film he had been building up to over his whole prolific career, the one that meant most to him. Salo, on the other hand, is one of those films which trails its own mythology of notoriety. Using de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom as a basis (the full title is Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom) Pasolini unleashes a nihilistic barrage of disgust at the structures of power which he sees operating in the world. It was a film which I approached with some caution, having loved Pasolini’s 60s work but come unstuck with the 70s ‘Trilogy of Life’, which seemed to have been made with sloppy haste, particularly Canterbury Tales, which saw disconcertingly familiar faces (Tom Baker and Robin Askwith!) dubbed in a hopelessly unconvincing fashion. Salo uses dubbing for a few of the characters (Italian cinema seemed to do a lot of this) but is generally filmed with a great deal more control and care. Indeed, there is a cool formality about its photography and structure which serves to provide an aesthetic counterpoint to the acts of depravity and cruelty which the film portrays in relentless detail. It is a film which sets out to disgust in a directly physical sense whilst providing an intellectual framework which gives some analytical basis(excuse?) for that revulsion. In some ways, it is a shame that this is the final film that Pasolini made before his brutal murder, as it has the feel of a transitional work, a ruthless clearing away of old concerns before formulating a new direction. Ingmar Bergman's film From the Life of Marionettes strikes me as being similar in this respect. It is a film of unremitting nihilism and despair which offers no hint of hope. If this had been Bergman's final film, it would have been a bleak testimony and might have been taken as a sign of a mind at the end of its tether. But instead it was a culmination of a particular strand in his work (the intensely interior psychodrama) which he took to its utmost extreme, to the point almost of self-parody in fact, in order to exorcise it and move on. His next film was the far lighter and more humane (and extremely successful)Fanny and Alexander, which many critics consider the summary work of his career. What would Pasolini have moved onto next, I wonder?

Both films in part seek to provide an insight into the psychological underpinnings of fascism. They are rooted in a particular time and place. Salo takes its name from the capital of the puppet state set up by the Nazis in Northern Italy in 1944, forcibly established after the surrender of the Italian government and intended to act as a buffer against the progress of the Allies. It therefore marks a terminal or decadent phase of fascism, in which any pretence at the rule of law begins to break down. Pasolini deliberately focuses on the town sign of Marzabotto as the prisoners who will be the subjects of the four ‘rulers’’ closed republic within a republic are driven towards their fate, and one is gunned down as he tries to escape. This was a town whose inhabitants were massacred by the Nazis. Berlin Alexanderplatz is set in the late 20s, when social and political order were beginning to break down and extremist parties were starting to attract increasing support. Franz encounters Nazis, Communists and Anarchists in the course of the film, but remains essentially indifferent to politics, adhering to a stubbornly individualistic point of view. So it is situated at the birth of fascism. Obviously Fassbinder is able to view Doblin’s material with the benefit of hindsight, and the rise of the Nazis is clearly foreshadowed, particularly in the last episode, in which we see a scene in the theatre of madness playing out in Franz’s fevered mind in which a mob of brownshirts wades into a group of communists in the unterbahn and batters them to the ground. The song ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ which Franz sings throughout the film, particularly in moments when his tenuous grasp on sanity begins to slip, also seems to be anticipating the rise of a new nationalism. It was the song the Nazi characters used in the patriotic song dual with the French (the Marselleise, of course) in Casablanca. Finally, the Horst Wessel Song emerges in the final credits to trumpet the imminent rise to power of the Nazis. This was the official party anthem from 1930 onward.

Neither Fassbinder nor Pasolini were interested in the mere reproduction of a historical moment, however. That would have isolated the issues being addressed within a safely sealed-off past, and both were concerned to confront the perpetuation in the modern day of abusive power relations which fascism serves to represent. This is made evident by the use of extra-historical references which were non-existent in the period depicted. This is most strikingly apparent in the last episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which takes place largely in Franz’s inner landscape after his breakdown into madness and catatonia. The overlapping collage of music which accompanies his hallucinatory visions includes The Velvet Underground’s Candy Says, Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity (also used in Chris Petit’s Radio-On, funded by Wim Wenders’ Road Movies production company), Janis Joplin’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee (presumably for the line ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’), Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No.2 as well as Glenn Miller’s In the Mood, and versions of Silent Night and Santa Lucia sung by Dean Martin and Elvis Presley respectively. Salo also makes reference to French philosophers such as Pierre Klossowski and Roland Barthes, neither of whom were published until some time after the war.

Shutting out the world

Both films focus on closed-off environments. The action of Berlin Alexanderplatz takes place on a limited series of sets built in Munich (one of them using the remnants of the Berlin set which Ingmar Bergman used for his dream-vision of the birth of fascism, The Serpent’s Egg). Franz takes to the streets in his attempts to play an active part in the economy by selling newspapers or shoelaces, but mostly Berlin is represented by a series of claustrophobic interiors to which he retreats, most notably his bare, sparsely furnished apartment, pulsing with pink light from an obscure external source. This light gives a hint at the expressionist nature of Fassbinder’s film. The fleshy illumination suggests that we are really viewing Franz’s inner world, the walls of the room in which he spends so much of his time being the bony boundaries of his skull. Throughout, the rigidly defined self is seen as a prison, most obviously symbolised by the caged bird which Mieze gives to Franz, and which hangs in the exact centre of his room, a miniaturized and geometrically aligned analogue of the room and of Franz’s mind. The spaces of the city set, the courtyards of the buildings shot on location and even the forest to which Franz, Mieze and then Reinhardt make a rare escape, are all confined and bounded. They are like urban laboratory mazes through which rats are run, constraining, channelling and controlling the characters and shaping their personalities and destinies. The barbed wire in the forest also is a chilling symbolic glimpse of the future, of the woodland massacres of the early stages of the holocaust. Simon Schama, in his book Landscape and Memory, talks about the close identification of ideas of German nationalism with forests. In the chapter Blood in the Forest, he writes about the dark association of the forest with death, dating from Tacitus’s accounts of the brutal aftermath of the massacre of an entire Roman army in the wilds of the Teutoburger Wald. The Nazi motto blut und boden (blood and soil) sums up the vicious quality of this founding myth, and it is in this myth soaked arboreal arena that Mieze is sacrificed, allowing for the rebirth of both her murderer Reinholdt and also of Franz, who had previously played childish games with her in the same setting, before receiving a premonitory wound on the head. In Pasolini’s Salo, once the subjects have been rounded up, the society which Salo’s libertines have gathered retreats behind the walls of an old aristocratic Pallazzo, a building redolent of old wealth, old power. Here, this interior world is zoned in the utilitarian manner of a classic utopia designed around carefully planned goals of social engineering. There are carefully segregated quarters for masters, guards, servants and slaves and rooms for storytelling and for the immediate enactment of desires which these are intended to arouse.

Reinholdt and Mieze-Dance of Death

Franz Biberkopf, the central viewpoint character whose progress we follow through the harsh world of the Berlin underclass in the late 20s, is an immediately unsympathetic character. I had to put a certain amount of faith in Fassbinder in order to commit myself to spending 16 or so hours in his company. He moans and wails upon his release from prison at the start of the film and is dismissive of the orthodox Jewish scholar who takes pity on him and nurses him in his booklined apartment. He is like an overgrown child, which is essentially what he remains throughout the film. He has been imprisoned for beating his prostitute lover Ida to death and one of the first things he does upon his release is to visit her sister and rape her, an act which brings him back to life. The image of Ida being beaten to death is one which recurs over and over during the film, as if it is being constantly replayed in Franz’s head. He goes back to visit Ida’s sister the day after his assault to bring her towels, and to promise never to return. It is a pitifully inadequate gesture, shortly followed by his personal declaration of his determination to live an honest life, formally severing himself from his former existence and being reborn. The rest of the film sees him battling against himself, and his self-declared nobility manifests itself in a masochistic passivity which offers no resistance to the depredations of his exploiters. The reiteration of his murderous assault on Ida in his mind suggests that he may even be seeking the calvalry which is finally and explosively depicted in the final scene in the hallucinatory progress of his insanity (he is depicted crucified against the backdrop of a nuclear mushroom cloud, the total disruption of his personality). Franz’s expectations of living an honourable life assume that the world will conform in gratified response. It is a childishly egocentric view which places the self at the centre of all things. He is dismissive of any idea of political union to further his idea of a better world, mocking the anarchists whose meeting he has been taken along to (and nearly fallen asleep during) whilst playing on a makeshift playground swing. He sells a Nazi paper without having any real belief in its contents (although even he seems reluctant to don the swastika armband which goes with what for him is just a job) and refuses to argue with a group of old Communist companions, whose ‘dialectic’ response is to threaten to beat him up rather than convert him through argument. Franz is broken several times during his progress before his final disintegration, both figuratively in his descent into alcoholic oblivion after his ‘betrayal’ by Luders, and literally when he loses an arm having been pushed out of a getaway car by Reinholdt. These experiences cause him to develop a more fatalistic and wary relationship with the world. He grows up, in other words.

The central triangular relationship in the film is that between Franz and Mieze and Franz and Reinholdt (and finally – and fatally – between Reinholdt and Mieze). Human relationships in Berlin Alexanderplatz (and in Fassbinder’s work in general) are seen in terms of the exertion of power, of dominance and submission, both in terms of desire and economics (the two seen as inextricable). They are part of an exchange which is often exercised remotely. So Reinholdt inveigles Franz into taking on his discarded lovers when he grows tired of them, and Eva offers Mieze to Franz and is later persuaded by her to bear Franz’s child on her behalf. The sense of ownership which goes with this exchange is made clear by the fact that Mieze is a name bestowed by Franz (her real name is only heard again in newspaper articles and in court after her death), and she herself repeatedly refers to herself as belonging to him. When he finds out about her death, Franz seems relieved, as this means that ‘meine Mieze’ didn’t leave him (as Ida had presumably attempted to do, thus precipitating his murderous rage). She remained his until the end.

Eva-intervening angel

His Both Eva and Mieze are prostitutes who are set up with wealthy clients. This is how Eva is able to rise to a higher level of social standing than Franz, from which she is able to exert a degree of remote control over him (it is she who directs Mieze to discourage his dalliance with anarchism). She has managed to sell herself to a wealthier client, a heightened degree of opulence which is evident from the fact that the apartment to which she is able to invite people during his absence has a larger cage than Franz’s at its centre which contains a chattering monkey. The first encounters with Reinholdt and Mieze are both heralded by Peer Raben’s score rising to a heavenly nebulousness which musically expresses the moment of epiphany which Franz experiences. After meeting Reinholdt, the two are soon meeting in the toilet to discuss the transferral of Reinholdt’s unwanted girlfriends to Franz with evidently transferred desire. With Mieze, Franz’s face softens and he tells her ‘it’s like the sun rising’. If ever he feels genuine love, then this is it. Mieze, with her girlish manner and pink ribbon in her hair, offers Franz the possibility of a childlike paradise of love, a protected garden of eden in which Reinholdt is the lurking serpent awaiting the egress which Franz so willingly gives him. It is a paradise funded initially by the clients of Mieze’s prostitution and, subsequent to his re-acquaintance with Reinholdt, by the proceeds gained from his work with the criminal syndicate headed by gangleader Pums. It becomes his new ideal, in other words, for which he is prepared to discard his former noble asseverations. An ideal outside of himself for which he is prepared to make sacrifices.

The relationship between Reinholdt and Franz is one which Fassbinder has drawn out from underlying implications in Doblin’s novel, and was evidently important to him as a teenager becoming aware of his bisexuality. Gottfried John’s portrayal of Reinholdt is quite mesmerising, taking a character who is in essence a callous and brutal psychopath and suggesting a broken and vulnerable core beneath the hardened carapace. This is done partly through his constant stutter (apparently recalled from John’s childhood) which lends an uncertain hesitancy to his every statement, no matter how vehemently intended. His defensively hunched frame and wary sideways glances reveal a psyche coiled tightly in on itself. Franz’s dream of Reinholdt as a serpent is apposite on more than a merely symbolic level. When Franz is released from the comforting confinement of prison into a world which clearly terrifies him, he rediscovers his ‘self’ by forcing himself sexually on the woman whose sister he murdered, thus defusing his feeling of helplessness by re-establishing his sense of power. At the other end of the film, Reinhardt also discovers himself in prison, but in a scene which reveals a previously unimagined tenderness. He embraces, kisses and declares his love for his Polish cellmate, his stutter noticeably diminished, as if some blockage has finally been cleared away. Reinholdt reveals the tattoo which he has on his chest to Mieze when they are circling each other in their dance of love and death in the heart of the forest. It is the symbol of his self-perception, of his hard destructive power. Franz gets under his skin so much (enough for him to throw him out of the car) because he’s just too soft and pliable to be smashed against this anvil. He just keeps coming back for more.

The Passion of Franz Biberkopf - Personal Apocalypse

In the end, Franz goes through the stations of his own personal Passion, which unspools in his head as he lies catatonic in an asylum, spoon fed like a baby. He has to go through another rebirth, another destruction and reformation of his character. Fassbinder designates the final episode as an epilogue, suggesting that the meaningful phase of Franz’s life as an individual rather than a merely functional component of society ended with the death of Mieze. The title he gives it is ‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder. My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf’. This serves as fair warning of the personal nature of this conclusion, but its fevered hallucinatory nature was considered incompatible with the rest of the film by many critics. However, throughout the film, the grain of the 16mm film and the haze of softened and blurred lighting have been far from naturalistic and have expressed a subjectivity which is merely heightened in this climax by the turn to full blown madness. Franz essentially witnesses a parade of the characters from his life, transformed into symbolic figures, which is possibly how the audience has read them all along. Franz is exposed to the fictive nature of his life. In many ways, this resembles the conclusion of another epic German film series which was shown on television, Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat. Here, the central character, Herrmann, goes through a series of carnivalesque encounters with the cast of characters he is now seeking to leave. Again, the essentially realistic nature of the previous dramas is abandoned for this dreamlike summation. Franz endures various torments during his journey through the underworld conjured by his madness, these often presided over by Reinholdt in a human slaughterhouse or sordid bordello (memorably overrun by rats in one sequence) before finally re-emerging as a man much reduced. Whereas Reinholdt has discovered a degree of emotional articulacy, Franz’s former loquaciousness and stream of consciousness babble has been silenced. He takes a job as a night watchman, still singing his ‘Watch on the Rhine’ song. He won’t have to wait much longer until the world for which he is now prepared is born.

Salo takes place during the dying days of fascism in Italy, and the retreat to the Pallazzo thus is in part an act of desperation, a regression to complete indulgence of authority while it remains. In the face of death, all limits are abandoned, the masks of civilisation discarded. Power is revealed in all its naked essence. This enclosed world over which they still have complete control also becomes a testing ground for the four representatives of Authority: the duke, the bishop, the magistrate and the president. The current model of power has exhausted itself and so they create a laboratory in which a new one can be tested, new ways found to perpetuate their dominance.

Imperfection!

The film’s formal structure follows the model not only of de Sade’s novel, but of Dante’s Inferno, with its descending concentric circles of the bureaucratically designated damned. Pasolini had already unveiled a scabrous glimpse of his vision of Hell in the climax to Canterbury Tales, but here it is the sole focus of the film and echoes Dante’s poem in its pointed relation of its sins to the contemporary world. But Salo is an inverted Inferno in that those who would have been condemned to their own apposite torments in Dante’s universe are here in charge and dispensing the judgements themselves. The Ante-Inferno is the first act, in which the subjects of the experiment are rounded up and inspected by the four authoritarian libertines. Their insistence on the selection perfect specimens (one girl is rejected because she has a rear molar missing) is a reflection of the promulgation of the idea of an Olympian master race of physical and racial purity by leaders who bear more resemblance to relatives of the Addams family. Once in the house, and the rules having been explained, the experiment goes through three stages, or circles, each prefaced by an intertitle. There are the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood. This circularity indicates the creation of a self-perpetuating system, which doesn’t progress anywhere but spirals endlessly in its fixed orbit, thus ensuring the perpetuation of power. The prostitutes (or Madams) who preside over the room of stories, use their pornographic fantasies to stimulate desires which are then acted upon by the libertines. They are like a strange form of advertising agency, creating a need which can then be fulfilled by their clients. The strict instruction that no-one will engage in any form of intercourse with a member of the opposite sex is a form of coercion which exerts control over the body, forcing it into adopting new appetites. The prevailing mode of disgust is not necessarily Pasolini’s expression of self-hatred in relation to his own homosexuality. It is a repulsion at people being forced into acts which are contrary to their nature. The extremely anal nature of the libertines’ re-alignment of their victims’ sexuality also symbolically stands for the sterility of their putative new world. The delight with which they relate the murder of a mother who had tried to protect her child from them indicates that this is a regime which has no interest in nurturing a new generation. It wants to attain an immortality of replicated power through the imposition of its own patterns of circular desire. These are fully manifested in the next level of this modern inferno: the circle of shit.

The obsessive subject of this second circle, the production and consumption of shit, narrows Pasolini’s focus onto the appetites of the ever-expanding consumer society. He made it clear that he saw this as a metaphor for fast food, and while it maybe rather blunt in that specific context, it also stands for the endless spiral of production and consumption of useless rubbish into whose unnatural coils a hypnotised populace are guided by a mixture of fear and seduction. The new world which the libertines seek to create can thus be seen as a foretaste of our consumer society, of consumption for its own sake. Current panics over widespread obesity and ‘binge’ drinking would tend to suggest that the source of Pasolini’s fears have not diminished over time. The culmination of this forced introduction to new appetites comes with the faecal wedding feast, which binds the subjects into the predatory compact which its consumption represents. There is a clear Freudian element to all this, suggesting a reversion to a pre-childhood ‘anal’ phase. It suggests a reversion to a state in which the id is dominant, and the fulfilment of the needs of the ‘pleasure principle’ take precedence over all other considerations. This is the level of consciousness at which consumer society and its mediated propaganda (or advertising) is pitched (‘because you’re worth it’) and it is the state that the provocative tales of the ‘madams’ has succeeded in invoking. To achieve this, it is necessary to remove the spiritual element, which provides a distracting level of wider meaning to the world. Thus, religion is banned from the world of the Pallazzo (one of the girls is gloatingly uncovered on a hidden altar, having cut her own throat). Any sense of community must also be dismantled, contact only being permissible within the controlled arena of the libertines’ fantasies. This atomisation makes the subjects more susceptible to subconscious suggestion, to the displacement of the need for human contact with manufactured comforts. Thus, when two of the girls are discovered lying together, they are immediately noted down in the ‘black book’, effectively sealing their fate.
Empathy and compassion are forbidden emotions.

The rest room to which the libertines retire after their exertions is decorated in an exquisitely modernist style. Bauhaus chairs and Fernand Leger murals. The modernist aims of disrupting tradition and suggesting new modes of artistic (and sometimes by extension political) expression have been easily absorbed into this new model. There is no longer any need for exhibitions of ‘degenerate art’. Everything can be turned into a product and sold, drained of any meaning, rendered tasteless. This looks forward to the ‘shocking’ art of the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, as peddled by super-advertising agent Charles Saatchi (who also persuaded people of the virtues of Silk Cut cigarettes and the Conservative Party) and to the rise of ‘extreme’ cinema (currently manifest in Lars von Trier’s Anti-Christ) which is largely decontextualised from any wider meaning. In this sense, Pasolini is almost deliberately setting out to produce something which cannot be so readily absorbed, both due to its relentlessly exaggerated taboo physicality, and to the anchoring of the disgust which that (presumably) arouses in a resolutely anti-establishment stance.

The signs that the libertines have succeeded in their programme come when the subjects begin to denounce each other in order to either evade punishment for their own transgressions of the law or simply to find favour with those in authority. There are small acts of rebellion, but they make little real impact. The guard who sleeps with the black servant raises a defiant fist (a gesture of socialist affiliation or a presage of the black power salute?) before he is gunned down. The pianist who has accompanied the madams’ fantasies finally stops playing, calmly ascends the stairs and walks to a window from which she throws herself to her death on the pavement below. This is the ultimate refusal of the artist to participate in the promotion of political coercion, to collaborate on propagandistic projects (earlier we have heard some of the music of Carl Orff, who has been accused of being precisely such an artist). These are passive and indirect acts of rebellion, however, enacted on a personal level which does little to affect the system which has been imposed. Ultimately, those who have been noted in the magistrate’s black book for their transgressions of the ‘laws’ are tortured to death in the final circle, the circle of blood. Each of the four figures of authority take their turn to watch this ritualised slaughter from the distanced comfort of an extravagantly crowned throne, the seat of their new power. The grotesque events in the courtyard arena are viewed by them and by us through the lenses of a pair of binoculars, which, it is demonstrated, can be reversed to render the tormented figures tiny and insignificant.The control over the media can easily be used to obscure or distort the terrible violence unleashed by the exertion of absolute power. The triumph of this power is celebrated by a campy chorus line dance of the dressing-gowned libertines, high kicking over the violated corpses. Inside, two young guards dance to the refined strains of a civilised waltz playing on the radio. One refers disinterestedly to his girlfriend in response to the other’s question. But that was in a world which now seems wholly disconnected, a dimming memory. The circle has been conjoined. The rituals have been enacted. Blood and soil have mixed. Another New Order is ready to be born.