ÌÇÐÄVlog

In the brief space of 17 years, crammed into an almost charismatically self destructive life, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) made 42 films, of which at least a handful are major artistic achievements. To that oeuvre, its implications for an understanding of German history and culture, Thomas Elsaesser devotes this important and sophisticated book.

He draws attention to the complex irresolutions of Fassbinder's cinematographic style: on the one hand, Fassbinder was manifestly part of the self-reflexive climate of the European art cinema; yet he also had a deep and abiding attachment to popular forms of cinema - above all to the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk. His films combined these two strands into a strangely unsettling palimpsest in which both modes function in a slightly distanced, contingent, "quotational" mode. The cool cerebrality of the art cinema is constantly undercut by unapologetically self-indulgent scenes of endlessly milked high emotion; yet the high emotion strikes the viewer as though its grand linguistic and bodily gestures were spoken and enacted rather than meant.

Elsaesser relates the unstable statement of Fassbinder's cinema to its theme; the films obsessively explore the theme of love, but this is love defined in cinematic mode as a ceaseless interplay of seeing and being seen, of voyeurism and exhibitionism. He stresses Fassbinder's fondness for shots that virtuosically frame the characters in doors, windows, mirrors, apertures. The lives chronicled are framed - visually, and also in the colloquial sense of "framed", in that they are loaded with guilt and transgression not of their own making.

Fassbinder's films have a good deal to say about recent German history. Time and time again the self-consciously handled intrapersonal melodrama is made to reflect, and reflect upon, broader patterns of public life in Germany.

From The Marriage of Maria Braun via Lili Marleen to Veronika Voss, the experiences of the central woman figure run in unstable synchrony with the course of public events. The filmic statement is never one of totalising symbolic equivalence; rather, the gaps and mismatches of the allegorical mode become part of the film's reflectivity. Above all, Fassbinder's films invite us to see their own generic mode as implicated in historical diagnosis. Indeed, Fassbinder draws on a lengthy tradition in German literature which seeks to comprehend society less through its materiality, less through facts and events, than through processes of societal symbolisation and self-understanding.

I have two criticisms of what is undoubtedly a major study. One is that the book (apart from its covers) has no stills. Both the general and the specialist reader would be grateful to be reminded of what a Fassbinder film actually looks like. The other is that on occasion Elsaesser moves into a linguistic mode of high opacity, not to say total impenetrability. I am sure I am not the only reader who will feel that a little of this goes a very long way.

Martin Swales is professor of German, University College London.