Hollywood Mellodrama module Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Hollywood Mellodrama module - Essay Example ry workers widow with that of the bourgeois Communist couple in the former is more redundant than revealing; and the somewhat strained antic behavior of the characters in the latter virtually demolishes any sense of form. While that form keeps pretending that the film is melodrama, the action and acting often border on The Three Stooges. Still, Margit Carstensens remarkable incarnation of the ultimate, twisted groupie--to Kurt Raabs impotent poet who "only murders those he loves"--resonates with perverse gusto within the dynamics of the Fassbinder troupe. In yet another sense, style almost supplants content altogether in Chinese Roulette (1976), as a delirious use of camera movement and eccentrically composed shots become ends in themselves. If there is a point to the upper-class shenanigans in the film, it may be that the venalities to which parents expose their children will be visited upon them in turn. At the center of the film there is a "truth" game conducted by a crippled child (Andrea Schober) who seeks to humiliate her parents, particularly her mother (Carstensen), by associating her behavior with that of a commandant of a concentration camp. The films excessive stylization barely disguises its similarity to Fassbinders interrogation of his own mother in Germany in Autumn. Mise-en-scà ¨ne aside, Mother Kà ¼sters provides an important clue to Fassbinders politics, which were hardly either left or right. In the silent German film Mother Krausens Journey to Happiness (d. Piel Jutzin, 1929), on which Fassbinders is based, the mother bemoans her miserable life in the slums, and after her son is arrested, turns on the gas and escapes into the fantasized "happiness" of the title--although the film ends with a strong socialist message as her daughter marches with the masses to the "Internationale." Living in a time that has absorbed the failures of one ideology after another, Fassbinder debunks such idealized solutions and implies that the only way social