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"Who needs the revolution?" Leather-jacketed back to the camera, Rainer Werner Fassbinder answers his own query in a bare preamble before a brick wall: "Das volk!" Feudal past mined for guerrilla present, "theatrical effects" for the weapons of choice. A languid zoom up the stony staircase to the al fresco gathering, declarations and drums and the rustling of wind-swept foliage, a model for Straub-Huillet. The shaggy 5th-century shepherd (Michael König) claims to have divine visions, rallies the masses against the decadent elite, is incinerated for his trouble. (His opposite number is the aristocratic momma's boy who delights in the opportunity to belittle a pleb, "I must smell him for myself!") Tenebrous mansions and Red hymns, injustices ancient and modern. Bromides from the pulpit and tracking shots amid tall grass, plaints shouted for the echo of the mountains. Hanna Schygulla in Holy Virgin drag rehearses an anti-capitalist soliloquy ("Property is not part of the natural order"), Günther Kaufmann interrupts with news of the murders of Black Panther leaders, Fassbinder gives them direction in between swigs from a whiskey bottle. The guitars and tambourines of the rock 'n' roll interlude are answered by the witches' mud and blood and fire, "debout, les damnés de la terre..." Purposefully anachronistic agit-prop, a continuum of thwarted upheaval fervently confronted by Fassbinder and Michael Fengler by way of "agitation through instruction and militant example." Fusillades at the tent camp, the pyre in the wrecking yard, call to arms. Antonio das Mortes and Le Vent d'est are concurrent comrades, Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar evinces a fortuitous kinship. With Margit Carstensen, Michael Gordon, Kurt Raab, and Karl Scheydt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |