Free Theater of Cruelty by Ian Buruma Page B

“as though his feet are always getting stuck.” John slinks and slouches, snakelike; you expect him to start hissing at any moment.
    The third extraordinary performance is by Barbara Sukowa as Mieze, the provincial girl who came to Berlin “to have some fun” and ends up being Biberkopf’s whore. Her mannerisms—the lickingof her fingers to smooth her eyebrows, the coltish hopping onto Biberkopf’s lap, the giggly flirtations, the fits of hysterical screaming—are marks of a kind of innocent sluttishness, if such a thing can be imagined. Dressed in white, she looks the picture of innocence, just waiting to be sacrificed in this wicked world. When Reinhold tricks her into taking a walk with him in the dark, ominous, Hansel and Gretel–like woods outside Berlin, he takes off his shirt to show her his tattoo of an anvil. Why an anvil, she wants to know. “Because someone has to lie down on it,” he says. “Why didn’t you have a bed tattooed there instead?” she wonders. “No,” he says, “I think an anvil is closer to the truth.” “Are you a blacksmith?” she asks. “That, too, a little.… No one should get too close to me … they will get burned right away.” And she does. She flirts with Reinhold, then she curses him. Reinhold strangles her in a rage.
    In these emotional cocktails, it is hard to get the balance just right between brutality and charm, sweetness and callous self-regard, innocence and sauciness. The brilliance of Fassbinder and his cast is in the way they manage to express all these feelings in a work that is so tightly structured, formal, aesthetic. Fassbinder composed every frame with the eye of a painter and manipulated his actors rather like a puppet master. Almost every scene is filmed in artificial light: yellow streetlamps and headlights glowing in the misty night; grays and sulfurous greens in the stuffy subway stations; oranges and shades of brown in the apartments. The only bright colors penetrating the gloom come from flashing neon signs. The sun shines rarely. To give the light a diffuse, 1920s feel, reminiscent of Josef von Sternberg’s films, Fassbinder covered the camera lens with a silk stocking. The woods are filmed through a haze. Indoor scenes are sometimes lit through a veil of reflective particles stirred by rotating fans to blur and soften the light even further.
    By pressing his characters into confined spaces, framed by windowpanesor iron bars, crowded by furniture and objects in cluttered rooms, or reflected in mirrors, Fassbinder creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia, of people feeling caged in the metropolis. His great hero, the director Douglas Sirk, who often used similar effects, might have been an influence. The paintings of Max Beckmann, of human beings stuffed into narrow attics or pushed together in cramped dance halls, could have been another source of inspiration. The last shot of Biberkopf, before he goes mad, after he finally realizes what his friend Reinhold has done to Mieze, shows him laughing hysterically through the bars of a birdcage hanging from the rafters of his room. (The original inhabitant of this cage, a canary, had already been squeezed to death by the despairing Biberkopf.)
    The narration is in Fassbinder’s own voice, tender, ironic, poetic, and entirely faithful to the book. Fassbinder did not play Biberkopf. He played Döblin. But the movie is far from a literal translation of the text. Fassbinder made the story his own. First of all, he added a character who wasn’t there in Döblin’s version: Frau Bast, Biberkopf’s ever-loyal, all-understanding, blindly loving, warmly maternal landlady. She is the consoling presence, always ready to excuse, to clean up, to arrange things. Frau Bast is also rather nosy. Like his Biberkopf, Fassbinder himself was deeply drawn to mother figures, first of all his actual mother, Liselotte (Lilo) Pempeit, who acted in several of his films, including
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, where she appears