Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

DIRECTOR(S): Rainer Werner Fassbinder SCREENPLAY: Rainer Werner Fassbinder CAST: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Irm Hermann, Elma Karlowa, Anita Bucher, Gusti Kreissl, Doris Mattes, Margit Symo, Katharina Herberg, Peter Gauhe, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lilo Pempeit DISTRIBUTOR: New Yorker Films

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was the first Fassbinder film I saw and, is to date, perhaps one of the most influential films I've ever seen. I first saw it 5 years ago in my cousin's cramped room; I was 12, naive, and, although I do admit I expected differently, the film shook me very much. 5 years later I saw it fitting to re-watch it first to commence my study of the German new wave of the 70's and, this time in my cramped room, I was equally shaken.

What spoke to me then about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most famous film, I think, speaks to me now as well. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is many things, an intimate story of two people caught in the gaze--literally--of a heinous societal tension, a film of grand intimacy in the tradition of Douglas Sirk, but one thing it is not is subtle. It's in the way the film is shot, or even in the way Fassbinder's characters speak: the film opens with a stunning shot of a lonely old woman (Brigitte Mira) entering a sleazy bar late at night, cutting to a reaction shot of the people inside staring. A "foreign" tune plays in the background, as the camera tracks all the way from the door to Ali. The moment is stunning for its bluntness and lucidity: everything from the camera to the dialogue--the lady asks for a cola--is marked by a sense of specificity.

I hesitate to call this type of openness didactic, but for a film that is dealing with the social malaise of the time, maybe didacticism isn't such a misnomer. Fassbinder's film is an open, clear-eyed stab at bourgeois racism, but what's fascinating about the film is its openness in its presentation. Ali doesn't speak great German--he speaks in third person with limited verbs--and this grammatical deficiency manifests itself as a metaphor for his lack of being in the German society. "German people no like Arabs," he says. Ali recognizes the racism that haunts Wester Germany--so does Emmi--and the social malaise that surrounds them is always present, gazes that never cease in their racism. Their gazes are always documented, Fassbinder shows us, and, like them, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is timeless in its documentation of a society caught by hatred and malaise.