Andrei Tarkovsky vs Rainer Werner Fassbinder

While I like Stalker and Andrei Rublev, I voted Fassbinder. I may have made a mistake, thinking about it.

Tarkovsky - Andrei Rublev is one of my favourite films ever.

That's a really tough one... Hmm, I think I'll go with Tarkovsky, but I could have voted for Fassbinder on a different day.

they are my top 2 favorites probably but i vote fassbinder for all-around

Tarkovsky all the way.

can't vote. love tarkovsky. (nostalghia would be my favorite if not andrei roublev.) but i haven't seen enough fassbinder.

fassbinder

oh god this is just *not possible*

There's the whole quantity-vs-quality thing, and I just worry that some kind of underhanded humanism will make Tarkovsky's generosity of spirit win out over Fassbinder's cold queer critique. As stances towards life, more people can shelter inside Tarkovsky than inside Fassbinder, but does that really make Tarkovsky "better"?

Rainer, Winder, Fassbinder?! I hardly knew her!

I love Fassbinder, but I just think Tarkovsky was a better director. I probably find his attitude more appealing too, but I hardly consider it a "shelter". :)

Yeah, I mean, both are pretty bleak and grim, it must be said, but if you compare, say, the nihilism of the end of why "Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?" with the political rage and melancholia of the end of "Ivan's Childhood" you will see what I am getting at.

Tarkovsky, but I've only seen two or three Fassbinder films and couldn't get into them so much.

Tarkovsky has a higher GPA but RWF's volume and fearlessness are terrifying.

kinda hate both of these guys but the dream sequence/coda to Berlin Alexanderpants was mildly interesting so I guess Fassbinder wins. Can't stand Tarkovsky.

oh shakeypaws

my favourite fassbinder movie I've seen is Fear of Fear btw.

I've only seen Stalker and Solaris (and actually I don't think I made it all the way to the end of Stalker)... maybe I need to see Andrei Rublev

esp if you are having trouble falling asleep

this is a real dilemma, I keep thinking "Come on, Andrei Rublev is one of the greatest films ever made" and then I'm like "Chinese Roulette / In a Year of 13 Moons / Love is Colder Than Death / Fox and His Friends / Satan's Brew . . ." and I just *can't* choose here.

Fassbinder!!

Love every Tarkovsky film I've seen but not sure if I should vote on this as I don't think I know anything about Fassbinder.

just counted: i have seen a mere (heh) nine RWF films (vs. i think 3 AT)

Tarkovsky, because ANTICHRIST is dedicated to him

I love Fassbinder, but Tarkovsky walks this for me

this is completely impossible, you really do need them both, and I'm not going to vote

of course. this was Star Wars bait, so Shakey wins.

Tarkovsky!

of course. this was Star Wars bait, so Shakey wins.

? I don't get it

should I be insulted?

j/k, pal

I was amused that you cited the Berlin epilogue, which many RWF watchers hate.

I'm trying to think about the differences here and I"m in the mood to coin crazy binary oppositions today, so here goes:

Tarkovsky's orientation is "vertical" (think of the view-from-the-balloon shot in "Andrei Rublev" or the closing craning upward at the end of "Solaris") and this is part of a kind of architecture of spiritual "levels" in his movies that makes them emotionally powerful

by contrast, Fassbinder is "horizontal", there's no redemption or progress and there's no underworld either, just people locked on a shared material plane, fighting over resources (i.e. the financial disasters of, say, "I Only Want You to Love Me" or the funding problems in "Beware of a Holy Whore")

Maybe the point I'm making is just that for Tarkovsky the sublime is still possible (the levitation in "Mirror"!) while for Fassbinder sublimity has been voided.

maybe its an exception as Morbz notes, but the BA epilogue doesn't really fit that binary

I haven't seen any other Fassbinder besides BA fwiw, and found it pretty humorless and rough going until the epilogue, where things took a turn for the more lyrical and abstract

oh god this is just *not possible*

Pretty much. I'm still amazed I read the Love is Colder than Death Fassbinder bio when I did (I was...16, I think?).

that must have been traumatizing, I read it last year. It's not very sympathetic, that one, it's just the dirt and the seediest, most depraved anecdotes, I'm sure a great deal of them are true (and for dirt it is great reading), but... there's a reason why his friends all loved him, and I don't think that simple addiction to fame and being immortalized in his films stands as the reason why they stuck together

I live in Tarkovskystan.

xpost ok well clearly not all his friends loved him, that would have been admittedly difficult

Chinese Roulette is still my favorite Fassbinder, it's one with a good sized budget so the sound & visual aesthetic is very filmic, relatively fast paced, so anyone who's struggled through one of the other particularly crushing or Un-fun ones and is just puzzled over why there are Fassbinder fanatics, I always recommend that one as the next stop

that must have been traumatizing, I read it last year.

Oddly enough it wasn't -- quite a few eye-opening things to read, obv., but it did succeed in getting me interested in his films, though it was some time before I actually saw any.

favorite Fassbinder book by far is Christian Braad Thomsen's, I hardly agree with all his takes on each film but it's got the best balance of biographical details and how those details influenced the films, and the individual reviews often include dialog transcriptions of the exact parts you want to have, like the part of '13 Moons' where the nun tells him about his own childhood

http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780571178421?&PID=28081
2004 latest edition - http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/Fassbinder_english.html

Fassbinder -- no hesitation.

the one useful decoder-ring moment from Katz' "Love is Colder" book that stayed with me, though (I think I posted this elsewhere on ILX once) -- of course all the affairs the actors were having with each other all turn up in the films, but the reason why the autobiographical stuff is so hard to detect in the finished films is because when a romance flamed out in a huge violent event, Fassbinder would script it and then give the resulting juicy star-making part to his new flame, and cast the actual lover that inspired it in some bit role like some servant cleaning up the blood on the floor for a few seconds, so it is just the most sadistic funhouse depiction of the real life dynamics going on within the group

but that kind of involvement is best saved for the hardcore stage after you've seen more than half of the films

there is absolutely no way i can choose here.

"Maybe the point I'm making is just that for Tarkovsky the sublime is still possible (the levitation in "Mirror"!) while for Fassbinder sublimity has been voided"

Agreed. Basically Tarkovsky was still a Christian, and despite all the despair he firmly believed in transcendence: he was very much in the tradition of the great Russian authors.
Fassbinder, instead, slaps us in the face with the brute force of the naked life: he did the Doblin book, but in his movies there's all the glacial fury of Canetti's headless world.

Also, I cannot think of two directors whose biographies are so inextricably connected with their art.

RWF

Fassbinder very easily! There's something, I hate to say it, easy to make fun of with Tarkovsky. His films feel way too locked inside his own head when they're not giving off a rather admonitory tone (which leaves him open to charges of "pretentious" or "middlebrow" when I'm feeling cranky). So I find the flip-flop of this to be true:

As stances towards life, more people can shelter inside Tarkovsky than inside Fassbinder

With Tarkovsky, one has to rise up (going along with the 'vertical' nature of his cinema) to his creations which are stamped every frame of the way as his creations. It's his way or the highway (or a plummet down below) and there's no meeting the man halfway. The entire process can get heavy.

Fassbinder, by contrast, is obsessed with the outside, with context. He opens out his stories to reveal the larger forms of oppression that may be operating on his doomed characters. So there's more room to move around the story/characters even (or perhaps especially) in the cramped quarters of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. Of course, this (probably horizontal) movement stems from the fact that Fassbinder's primary mode of storytelling is melodrama which means the viewer usually knows more than the characters (who seldom enjoy POV shots). And it's unquestionably Fassbinder who frames his characters in this manner, i.e. he makes his presence know as much as Tarkovsky. But his mise-en-scene feels more lived in with room for more types of people (if only because everyone is so equally fucked).

Then again, that could be the problem with his cinema. Where Tarkovsky aims to create a new vision/world that gives hope, Fassbinder's fatalism can lead to a smug comfort in the belief that things can never get better.

Then you can bypass both extremes with The Color of Pomegranates, a better film than anything either director ever came up with.

P.S. Did y'all know that Fassbinder made a TV adaptation of The Women in 1977 called Women in New York?!?! It looks like Cukor's The Women as directed by Sirk (unsurprisingly enough but still ravishing!).

P.P.S. Fassbinder fans NEED to check out Andy Milligan if they haven't already, esp. his screeching masterpiece Seeds.

I am abashed by DD's and KJB's top-shelf analyses (even tho I don't love The Color of Pomegranates that much).

Tarkovsky, because ANTICHRIST is dedicated to him

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 Bookmark

Top reasoning! :-)

I don't quite get the comparison: T is very visual, tackles more abstract questions, seems way more aloof and is enthralled and genuinely in love with art as a concept, didn't leave much room for character. Which is very Fassbinder comes in: its theatre and political and very in-yr-face. All nerve and verve...

Paradjanov and T would be a better comparison.

kjb otm!

well Fassbinder certainly has theatricality but uses uniquely cinematic effects too (the postwar trilogy comes to mind).

And doesn't the candle/swimming pool scene in Nostalghia, one of the most horizontal shots in cinema history, fly right in the face of this whole Tarkovsky=Vertical (therefore somehow inferior) judgment?

Oh yes F has a style but both use effects for very different ends.

Fassbinder could have taken Tarkovsky in a fight, any day, But seriously, I've never seen a Fassbinder movie I wasn't instantly hooked into. With Tarkovsky, I'm not saying the films are bad, and there's a definite sense of failure on my part there, but it just hasn't happened yet.

I didn't reach that point w/ Tarkovsky until I first saw The Mirror at the BAM theater about 4 years ago, when I was transported.

Haven't given up with Tarkovsky, but I think it's going to take the right moment, the right theatre, and a good restaurant beforehand. (Some old-fashioned blotter acid wouldn't hurt.) I watched weekly TV broadcasts of Berlin Alexanderplatz on a crappy 12" screen, after coming home from the pub, and still frequently ended up in tears.

yeah you kinda need to see those in the theatre--the first of his i saw was the mirror and it was amazing but watching it on dvd i can see why people might lose focus

lolz where the hell am I gonna see Tarkovsky in a theater... but yeah Solaris and Stalker put me to sleep.

paris :)

andrei roublev, the mirror, nostalghia >>> solaris, stalker >>> the sacrifice, IMHO

I really hate the sacrifice, and it's the only one i've seen of his.

i've seen about 10 of fassbinder's and love just about all of them. irm hermann 4eva! (i really love all of the actresses fassbinder uses)

His films feel way too locked inside his own head when they're not giving off a rather admonitory tone (which leaves him open to charges of "pretentious" or "middlebrow" when I'm feeling cranky).

i get where you're coming from, but .. maybe what you read as 'locked inside his own head,' i read as ambiguous, unresolved, which is a quality i appreciate. unless a scene like the candle/swimming pool has a clear meaning to most everyone & i'm off on my own planet in not getting it (& preferring to not get it)

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ali-fear-eats-the-soul.jpg
:)))))))))

<3<3<3 1970s german "fashion"

must watch more fassbinder asap

i do not recommend 'the sacrifice' as a place to start with tarkovsky, let's say. there are some amazing set pieces (some of which have regrettably been copied in music videos) & the making-of documentary is neat too, but it felt.. overthought and portentious, and what was the sacrifice in question? that's debatable, and i don't think it was supposed to be debatable, though i prefer that it is.

I liked The Sacrifice well enough, but I don't think it's just Erland Josephson that accounts for it seeming a bit like ersatz Bergman.

make Fear Eats the Soul your next RWF film, can't go wrong with that. (perhaps soon after seeing All That Heaven Allows)

lolz where the hell am I gonna see Tarkovsky in a theater

surely they show in SF or Berkeley now and then?

Shakey, don't try to watch Jeanne Dielman at home either.

Jeanne Dielman was actually oddly compelling

I saw "Andrei Roublev" at the PFA in Berkeley and "Stalker" at the Castro when I lived in San Francisco, so it's doable.

Didn't mean to overstate my "vertical" / "horizontal" thing- but you could avoid the counterexample by stressing that it's as much a metaphorics of verticality as a literal cinematographic device- there is a feeling of spiritual ascent/descent that Tarkovsky movies work to produce. He also spoke about "rhythmic pressure" when he described his films and that's a nice point of overlap with Fassbinder- how they each curate the pressure induced by the situations and shots, there are points of contact there in their shared willingness to make the viewer endure a static and not always pleasant feeling of duration.

JD "actually oddly compelling"? It's fucking stupendous. I just think a big screen gets you to the trance state more easily.

The issue re: home vs. theater viewing is less the size of the screen (or even the quality of the print)* than the fact that there are far less distractions in a theater preventing one from obtaining that trance-like state (which is soooooo essential to the effect of Jeanne Dielman). If for 201 minutes you could insulate yourself from internet, cell phone, significant others, noisy neighbors/construction workers, your three gangsta cats, etc., then you too could come to see Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the fourth greatest film of all-time. But let's face it - it ain't gonna happen.

* This is waaaay IMHO. I've argued for years with "film must be seen only in the theater!" bullies and I really don't want to get into that now. FOR ME, trance IS possible at home. If you think that's counterfeit trance, so be it.

Tarkovsky without a doubt.
actually, Tarkovsky would win almost everyone. ot just everyone...

Fassbinder isn't ecen up there with the masters imo.

KJB, I agree -- plus the proximity of the bathroom will lead almost everyone to pause Jeanna Dielman at least once.

the guy from fear eats the soul is totes mcgrotes hot, also fox and his friends.

"Shakey, don't try to watch Jeanne Dielman at home either."

It just played here. I was bummed I missed it.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-8O3S5NQFF8/SZ2VHwOpY2I/AAAAAAAAAQE/0WnTDufkcB0/s400/angst_vor_der_angst_basisfilm.jpg

yes! depressed neighbour is hella cute in that too!

he's all "we're alike, you and I" almost everybody is a complete cuntyballs in that movie tho

rwf for me, though it was tough.

i know it's not on the level of the later stuff, but "ivan's childhood" never seems to get much love, and there are some sequences in that which will probably stay with me forever.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

"why does herr r. run amok?" is so perfect in my humble opinion