Fassbinder pulls it off marvellously in 'Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? This particular punchline connects as hard as a blow to the back of the head. Unexplained, out of the blue, nagging evil often lurks inside the most clean-cut and unassuming of people. Fassbinder's remarkable, slow burn meditation about unspoken alienation is equal measures prosaic and horrifying. It creeps up on you in the most excruciatingly uneventful of ways, testing your patience but ultimately forcing you to reassess everything you've watched by the time you arrive at its grippingly clinical, paralyzing finale.
Fassbinder allows you to suspect, little by little, that something isn't right in the mind of Herr R. His camera constantly teases the elephant in the room….
Review by Sally Jane Black. A fairly bleak and scathing look at the banality of middle class life and the darkness it harbors. Are you ready for your close up Kurt Raab? It might not be Mr. DeMille who is calling for you but Herr Fassbinder is looking your way. Well, kind of. And the fingers that he uses to hold his cigarette are pointing in your general direction.
Or maybe they are just flicking an ash. But hold your head up high, Kurt. I had an entire capsule for this thought out in my head, but then I read that Fassbinder really didn't have much to do with this at all -- the script was mostly improvised, and he only visited the set once or twice.
Even then, this still fits nicely into his filmography, almost feeling more like the 16mm document of a Merchant of Four Seasons workshop than the tightly scripted films that preceded it. Not easy to sit through, not simple to keep yourself going through the excruciatingly mundane world of Herr R.
It creeps up on you - through it's boredom, through it's unique sound design - and Herr R. One could be radically opposed to them but still, fall victim to their siren song nonetheless. The titular Herr R, portrayed by Fassbinder favorite Kurt Raab , is a technical draftsman at a small architectural firm in Munich. The marriage between Herr R and Frau R still contains moments of sweetness and caring, but many of these revolve around nostalgia for the early, exciting days of their relationship, including reminiscing about the days when they used to go out dancing.
All in all, they live a pretty average middle-class life. But it gradually becomes clear that the repetition of it all is weighing on Herr R, and that soon, this quiet and diligent man with his slicked-back hair and three-piece suits may explode. Rather than cut to a new shot, the camera will slowly move throughout a scene, often lingering on the faces of the listeners rather than the speakers in a given situation.
In one of the more cringe-inducing scenes in the film, Herr R invites his colleagues over for a dinner party and gives quite possibly the most painfully awkward toast of all time; instead of focusing on Herr R during his speech, the camera focuses on the increasingly uncomfortable onlookers as they whisper to each other about the best way to make a quick exit from the party. Herr R, in particular, is often on the sidelines of these group scenarios, listening impassively to the empty exchanges around him.
And it's this character, if nothing else, that marks it as the indicator of it being from RW; it's about the alienation of an outsider, someone in such a mundane world, so "normal" that there is barely any expression of individuality, of anything outside of a "norm" being seen as anything except quiet or not so quiet scorn.
This is set up from the start with the characters telling the jokes, and Herr R's going flat with everyone else. It's basically a super-low budget experiment in reality-as-drama, about the emptiness of a class system that allows people to live comfortably and with some semblance of peace, but also a form of life that can be shattered so easily and with such terror.
The ending, indeed, can only be really comparable to the likes of Haneke's Cache for its random, existential impact. The more one lets Herr R in, the more this world is horrible and cruel and desperate. Not the brightest of times to have, but worthwhile all the same. Michael Fengler and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's study of the mild mannered, slightly clumsy, well-meaning Herr R Kurt Raab and his slowly growing intolerance of the perceived mundanities of his life runs not unlike a film by the UK's Mike Leigh.
Every uncomfortable moment is there for all to see, and yet most of the characters are oblivious to it. Whichever scene you may be watching, you can be fairly assured that Herr Raab, gentle and genial as he is, will be on the periphery. Rarely spoken to, often spoken of. Loved by his wife, but in a way that an owner loves a big dopey dog — and Raab is only occasionally moved to break away from the stereotype he has had thrust upon him.
When he is not around, he is spoken of as a commodity, as a cash-cow whose promotion at work is an obsession for his wife, and used as a basis for social one-up-man-ship masquerading as gossip amongst neighbourly coffee mornings.
Cigarettes accompany everything. We have people politely enjoying themselves or bickering as a formality. When Raab finally gets drunk enough to make a speech at the workplace, he clears the room in what is surely the film's most excruciating scene. Although an early episode in a record store, where Raab's enquiries concerning a particular track is made especially awkward by the protracted adolescent rudeness of the two giggling assistants, runs a close second.
SPOILER: Of course, watching amiable but boring people being perfectly amiable but boring, could result subsequent boredom from the audience. The superficial, banal chit-chat just begins to shift from 'fly-on-the-wall studies of human behaviour' to 'overwhelmingly infuriating' - when quite without warning, Herr Raab clubs his neighbour, his wife and his son to death.
He does this without a show of any emotion, much like majority of his day-to-day life. When his subsequent fate is revealed to an office full of his co-workers who barely acknowledge his existence anyway, the film sharply ends.
Once seen, never forgotten, this is a fine observation on the endless embracing of the normal. Pressures to succeed, to conform, to literally keep up with the Joneses, delivered so casually on a day-to-day basis with no possible way out shows very well the smallness of existence. Of course, Raab's compliance doesn't help his situation, but there's no denying this is a production that stays with you long after the credits have rolled.
A minimalist examination piece from the young R. Fassbinder ThreeSadTigers 26 June Though the title asks an important question, the film itself offers no such resolutions, with Fassbinder simply supplying us with a series of potential ideas and scenarios that might lead an audience to draw their own conclusions as to why the film ends the way that it does.
Although this was quite obviously an early work for Fassbinder, produced at a relatively young age and on a limited budget, the themes and ideas behind it are in keeping with the far greater and more assured films that he would eventually produce during the following years of his life. These ideas of dissatisfaction, fulfilment, alienation and dislocation would all be explored in varied films, such as The Merchant of Four Seasons , Fox and his Friends , Mother Kusters' Trip to Heaven and In a Year of 13 Moons respectively, with the director expressing these feelings often through jarring stylisation and alienation techniques to help convey the emotional intensity of the characters in a way that made it easier to comprehend from the perspective of the audience.
As some commentators have previously noted, the film-making technique employed throughout Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? This presentation of the film, when combined with the episodic narrative - in which nothing 'seems' to happen - make the eventual resolution all the more shocking and provocative. What Fassbinder is suggesting through the scenario presented here is never fully clarified, with the film beginning and ending with the title covering the screen and all potential notions that might have resulted in the breakdown of communication and the urge for destruction often being dismissed by the director s almost as soon as it has been established.
Nonetheless, we can draw our own conclusion with the evidence that is implied here; whilst the benefit of repeated viewings and close attention paid to the character of "R. There are a number of factors that seem to lead to the final act of the film; with the character belittled by his attractive wife, who stays at home while her husband works and continually chips away at his self-esteem by mentioning his failure to receive a promotion, his lack of social skills and his subsequent weight gain.
He also has a son that is under-performing at school, as well as becoming alienated from his classmates as a result of an unfortunate speech impediment. This seems to suggest a tenderness and compassion to the character; qualities that are also obvious in the scene in which "R" and his wife recline on the couch in bathrobes drinking wine, listening to music and reminiscing fondly on how they first met.
Nothing is black and white in Fassbinder's films, with the shades of grey presented in the character making the eventual shift in tone even more enigmatic and perplexing; with the cold and rigid examination of Fassbinder and Fengler also making any clearly defined interpretation more difficult as a result of the persistent lack of moralising or melodrama. Some viewers have noted the similarities here to the later work of Lars von Trier, in particular a film like The Idiots with its roots in the Dogme 95 manifesto, as well as films like Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark Like von Trier, Fassbinder is cold and clinical in his approach to the film, casting a cynical eye on the mechanisms of contemporary society and hinting at the very nature of bourgeois, 20th century living as a possible reason for this seemingly unprovoked cycle of violence.
In one of the films key scenes, "R. Here, he complains of headaches, and the doctor opines that he's most probably over-worked and over-stressed. Instead of prescribing any kind of help, the doctor tells him to give up smoking, which will bring his blood pressure down and "help with the headaches". The flippant, unsympathetic tone of the doctor and his assessment of "R. Instead of addressing this issue, the doctor instead tells him to give up smoking; one of the few small pleasures that he seems to gleam from social interaction.
There are other hints layered throughout the film, which opens with "R's" work colleagues telling bad taste jokes that come to delicately set up a number the actions that the character will subsequently take. Fassbinder would later return to the themes of Why Does Herr R. For me, the later film is infinitely better; one of the director's most pointed, affecting and intelligent works, and one of the very best examples of New German Cinema produced during that particular period.
However, the way that the themes of that film are paralleled here gives yet another shade of interpretation to Herr. R's enigmatic approach to cinematic examination. Though it is perhaps a little rough around the edges, Why Does Herr R.
Why Does Herr R. He is most well known for forming the New German Cinema movement together with Wim Wenders, whose film Im Lauf Der Zeit has often been seen as the representative of the movement. In the 70's cinema was going through a breakthrough time, in America studios were making independent, more personal films and in Europe post modernism was spreading to cinema.
One can see this clearly in films by other European masters as well, in Fellini's work for instance. Run Amok is a rare film by Fassbinder, it is under seen and in result of that often overlooked. The former because of the similar Amok-metaphor and the latter because of the same kind of way to show the frustration, despair, depression and violence in bourgeois life.
He makes money for his wife, who doesn't work and his young son who is in school. The film describes the bourgeois life in the most realistic light possibly, and shows where the emptiness of it can lead in the worst case.
Many intelligent filmmakers have realized the interest in this case. But those films certainly aren't just copying Fassbinder, not at all. They all manage to show us different things and realize something new. Why is a very operative word in the title. Because the whole film builds around the life of Herr R. They live a quiet, peaceful life.
They have many sophisticated, intelligent friends and they enjoy intellectual music and art. But soon the viewer finds out that their whole life is built on the illusion of bourgeois peace. So why does Herr R. Is it because of the pressure of urban living? Work, family or nonexistence? Probably all of these reasons and more. The incredible pain of not knowing who you are, knowing that you've lived a lie for years, maybe even for decades. That kind of sudden realization will crush the individual.
Even that the narrative and atmosphere of it can be analyzed and categorized it is very unique. The film is very strange and shocking, something we don't usually see and that is what makes it even more fascinating. The film is based on improvisation, mostly because they had a low budget. The word Amok comes from the Malay language meaning "suicide".
By the expression 'to run Amok' people refer to sudden, insane violent rampage. Run Amok is a brilliant description where the empty, distressing bourgeois everyday can lead to. Kurt Raab leads a convenient bourgeois life: he has a steady job with chances of promotion, a good-looking wife Lilith Ungerer , a kid and many family friends.
Still, a growing sense of disillusionment and alienation is gnawing Mr. Is there anything he can do to cope with his mind-numbing life? The film consists largely of lengthy conversations about the most mundane of things; work, vacations, the son's school, buying a romantic record in a music store The whole picture is also presented exclusively with long takes and hand-held cameras.
The improvised nature of the conversations further adds to the strictly realist documentary-like feel of the movie, as does the intentionally dull cinematography. With such undramatic direction, the only detail to suggest the advancement of Mr. Lilith Ungerer as his wife also displays faint hints of similar emotions, but keeps them tightly hidden under her shell of excruciating normalcy.
When a film is titled like this one, some kind of dramatic ending or plot twist can be expected sooner or later.
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