Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Angst essen Seele auf)
Film (Original Langauge: German)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Introduced by Aylin Bademsoy
Although filmed over just two weeks and on a relatively low budget, Fassbinder’s melodrama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) quickly became one of the most renowned films associated with New German Cinema. Combined with the young director’s idiosyncratic cinematographic work, the plot, inspired by Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), reflects on post-war West German society from multiple angles. The film deals with conflicts that arise after the protagonist Emmi, a working-class German woman, falls in love with Ali, a Moroccan Gastarbeiter (guest worker, a term referring to immigrants who arrived through labor recruitment treaties signed between Germany and multiple countries, such as Italy, Greece, Turkey and Tunisia, between 1955 and 1968). While in Sirk’s film the cause of romantic conflict is a gap in class and age, in Fassbinder’s, it is Ali’s ethnicity and status as a guest worker that cause conflicts for both Emmi and Ali. The title, literally translated as “Fear eat soul up,” emphasizes Ali’s “broken” German and hence his social status associated with the ethnolect later known as Kanaksprak – language of the Kanak, a pejorative term referring to non-Western immigrants. In Ali, historical continuities and legacies of the German past are interwoven with the seemingly “personal” lives of the couple, undermining the second-wave feminist slogan on the inseparability of the personal and political. Although it first appears to be a simple love story, Ali can be read as a testimony to the continuity of Nazi ideology (or post-Nazism), as a film about the relationship between ethnic hierarchies and class society in West Germany, or as a reflection on the advanced estrangement of postwar reconstruction.
The opening shot is somewhat disorienting for the viewer. With Arabic music in the background, Emmi enters a bar, or what Germans might refer to as an “Immigrantenkneipe” (immigrant hangout). The viewer does not yet know for certain where the scene takes place: the first shot could be filmed in any Arabic-speaking country. The dominant red color indicates eroticism and warmth, something that will be lacking entirely in other settings in the film: on the streets of Munich, in Emmi’s apartment and workplace, basically anywhere but this bar.
- The Bar
Image 1
Image 2
While we see Emmi in a seemingly empty place in image 1, image 2 shows the bar from a different angle and shows it as a place where immigrant men hang out with presumably “German” women. Then Emmi sits down at the table furthest from the bar and closest to the door. The image, her first glimpse of this place, already unsettles her – and the viewer’s – expectations. Soon after entering the bar, Emmi will break her inhibitions and accept Ali’s invitation to dance that marks the beginning of their relationship. Their isolation, on the other hand, which will increase over the course of the film, begins already with their first dance and is stressed by the camerawork.
- Love
Image 3
The only place where the strict division between “Germans” and guest workers is suspended appears to be the realm of love and eroticism - and hence here also exoticism. Ali and Emmi are marginalized and isolated from the collective in terms of space, yet the German society’s discrimination of minority, internalized by Emmi as well, intrudes into their lives. Image 3 captures the collective gaze at Emmi and Ali’s relationship; while Emmi and the motionless German collective in the background are juxtaposed to and reflect in each other, Ali separates the connection between them. The German collective epitomizes danger to Emmi and Ali’s intimacy. Image 3 encapsulates the intimidating gaze of the highly estranged post-war West German majority society – the imagery of the collective manifests it as a threat to the immigrants represented by Ali. Skepticism towards any collective, as postulated by the Frankfurt School, resonates thus in Ali’s imagery.
The status of the “mixed” couple in Nazi race ideology, and its reverberations in post-war Germany, on the one hand, and the fact that we see here only “white women” and “men of color” on the other, reveal the bar as a space - isolated from an “outside” that is the realm of German “normality” - where taboos are being broken. Society is scandalized not only by the atypical age gap between an “elderly” woman and a younger man, but also by their different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Emmi’s family, her neighbors, as well as her colleagues at work react with similar indignation at this relationship. The turning point starts with the shift of attention to Ali’s physical strength, which simultaneously reduces his person merely to his body, as image 4 shows. In the spirit of West German capitalism, the Germans learn to make him carry furniture, exploit his body in every possible way, and “let” him consume and thus participate in the circulation of capital.
Image 4
Yet this “discovery” will not help Ali survive or even thrive, as the malignancy of the exploitation will be revealed at the end of the film. After Ali collapses and is brought to the hospital, a doctor states that the ulcers which has caused Ali’s collapse are common among guestworkers, and that he’ll likely be back in the hospital in about six months.