Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974)
Friday, 10:00 am, Regal Downtown #4
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Writer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematographer: Jürgen Jürges
Cast: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin
Running Time: 94 min
Few directors in the 20th century—truly, few artists working in any medium—achieved the level of constant creation that Rainer Werner Fassbinder maintained from 1969 until his untimely death in 1982 at the age of 37. In the span of 13 years, Fassbinder helmed 35 feature films, two television series, and two dozen stage plays; he even found time for dozens of acting roles. His 1974 feature, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, for many critics and fans stands as the defining film of his career.
Openly indebted to the work of Douglas Sirk, Ali continued Fassbinder’s move from the typical European Art House formalism of his first features toward a more sensuous, emotionally involved cinema. The film liberally reworks Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows to tell the story of the forbidden romance between a 30-something Moroccan immigrant (Fassbinder’s then lover El Hedi ben Salem) and a sexagenarian widow (Fassbinder regular Brigitte Mira). Fassbinder retains both Sirk’s boldly stylized coloration and his effectively employed melodrama, while adding significant depth. Not content to function as a merely entertaining tale of romance, Ali is at once an insightful examination of the race relations of postwar Germany and a tellingly personal account of socially unacceptable love. Fassbinder’s personal attachment pays significant dividends, resulting in a film that pulsates with emotion and displays social insight without caving to the stifling intellectualism that occasionally marred his work.
Winner of the International Critics Prize at Cannes, Ali elevated Fassbinder to the upper echelon of European filmmakers. For passion, style, insight, and honesty, few films in Fassbinder’s career can match it. Indeed, few films, period, have achieved the combination of emotion and intelligence on display here, in what just might be Fassbinder’s masterpiece.
