Rainer Werner Fassbinder
L'amore è più freddo della morte

Filmed in the first half of 1969 and released in German cinemas at the beginning of 1970, this was the first feature film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Behind him, he had an intense theatrical activity, culminated in his participation in the activities of the avant-garde group of the Action-theater and the subsequent founding, by him, of the Antiteater; for cinema, he had made some "shorts," like "The Vagabond" and "The Little Chaos."

Volcanically scripted, produced, directed, and edited by the future author of masterpieces like - to name a few - "Fear Eats the Soul," "In a Year of 13 Moons," "The Marriage of Maria Braun," "Chinese Roulette," "Fox and His Friends," and "The Third Generation," on the side of relationships between characters the film, a cold black and white, revolves around the usual Fassbinderian triangular structure (in this case Franz, the protagonist, played by Fassbinder himself, ends up sharing his girlfriend, Joanna, portrayed by a splendid Hanna Schygulla, with a friend, Bruno) in a crime life context (common to the artist's previous works): prostitution, thefts. We could define it as an outright affront to the Hollywood cinema model, already on its way out in Europe, notably due to the Nouvelle Vague. Fassbinder is indeed the director of extremes and here he proves it more than ever. It's as if he presents himself as a film director with a loud slap (evoked by that same slap that his character, almost gratuitously, gives to his waiting companion in the salon in the first scene...): no concessions to any kind of image aesthetic; no realism in dialogues, gestures; only provocative infractions, in the framework of an obsessive work of subtraction that also involves, on multiple occasions, the shooting and sound itself of the gunfire, even to detach from the risk of being enslaved to the established noir model.

This Fassbinder still lacks the complete and lacerating philosophy expressed by most of the later films, but we already encounter its first glimpses here, and the technique of execution speaks clearly. If we had to transcribe the lines of this work, we could spend a handful of minutes and a few pages; the locations can be counted on the fingers of one hand: a white room, a train from whose window the monotonous suburb of the city unfolds like on a fast-track reel, a gray street, a labyrinthine supermarket, a small section of an office in a police station, the outside of a shop that will be the theater of the final shootout. The world of objects and the world of humans are intermixed, they are not different, they are one supporting the bland staging of the other, in a tragic adventure, devoid of any sense and ideal.

Like the other characters, Franz develops and completes his existential parabola in the rapid succession of a series of key actions, among daring ellipses, in the enormously expanded times of a cinema that wants to be a radical enemy of rhythm, pleasantness, sociality: the first appearance of Bruno, the scene of the walk of the three, framed with a reverse dolly shot, or that of the supermarket, so provocatively long, seem to want to confront the viewer with a question on the presumed laws of cinema, on the nature of art and, more generally, on the concept of limit. As in all of Fassbinder's subsequent cinema, communication does not occur: to put it better, it does, but essentially through the barren word underlying the scream, the empty glances, the neurosis expressed by sudden gestures; above all, the silences.

The work was dedicated to Jean-Marie Straub (a collaborator of Fassbinder during that period and among the followers of the acting technique, here used by Fassbinder himself, of "estrangement," that is the distance of the actors themselves from emotions, theorized by Brecht), to Eric Rohmer and to Claude Chabrol, the latter two representatives of the Nouvelle Vague. In 1990, a band would be born in Germany, which we all know, with a name inspired by this film, but in English: Love Is Colder Than Death.