The RW Fassbinder Collection - 1973-1982 (Commemorative Edition) (Box Set) DVD | Movie Mail UK

Star Review

Whether you're fresh from experiencing the previous box set, The RW Fassbinder Collection (1969-1972), or you prefer to delve into this later collection directly, you're in for a full dose of Fassbinder's melodrama period with some excursions to very different pastures indeed – as exemplified in the wild and shrill satire Satan's Brew, after which footbaths will never be the same again.

Fear Eats the Soul is as nearly a Sirk homage as possible in Fassbinder. It parallels All That Heaven Allows so closely that it even references a touchstone sequence from Sirk's film (the gift of a tv set delivering "life's parade at your fingertips"), but naturally in twisted and tormented form. The use of artificiality also becomes more straightforward in this film.When the star, El Hedi Ben Salem, is voiced by another actor, there is of course a rationale (his enunciation), but the result is also that the voice -body split reveals a torn character . In a near-expressionist move, the artificiality directly mirrors his alienation. (It also turns the voice into a comment and, as in Katzelmacher, it invites stylised dialogue)

The gauntlet falls right at the beginning of Chinese Roulette. When the sound of squealing tires is not a 'naturalistic' sound culled from some noise library but instead a foley artist's lips squealing , we know the illusionist conventions of narrative cinema themselves are at stake. We have reached the heights of artificiality where art and artifice coalesce happily. And why shouldn't they: it is a child who rigs the games in this film, when children are otherwise near-absent from the Fassbinder universe.

The title concluding this selection, The Marriage of Maria Braun, was a phenomenal success both at home and abroad. That it did not win the Golden Bear at the Berlinale came as a severe blow to Fassbinder who regarded it as his greatest achievement at the time.

Dare we hope for a box of his most rewarding television work next? Perhaps Nora Helmer, and The Stationmaster's Wife, and Eight Hours Are Not a Day, the semi-soap about unionising and structural crisis in the Ruhr; oh and definitely thescience-fiction two-parter World on a Wire (from D.F.Galouye's novel Simulacron-3) which delineates an unreal 1973 by being just a tiny bit more '1973' than 1973 actually was.

Christoph Michel on 8th October 2007

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