The Fassbinder
Collection I (Fantoma)
Picture: Sound: Extras: Film:
Whity C+ C-
C+ B
Pioneers In Ingolstadt C C+
C C+
Though he left us tragically, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
left a legacy of radical cinema that continues to endure. Though the effectiveness of his films vary,
they are all originals and we now continue his films on DVD with Fantoma’s set
of two of his seven films from 1970: Whity and Pioneers In Ingolstadt. They have been gathered together in a set
dubbed The Fassbinder Collection I.
Whity is the name of a black slave in Fassbinder’s
still-bold take on the Spaghetti Western, even shot in one of Sergio Leone’s
own locations. Whity is actually the
illegitimate son of a wealthy, deranged landowner who does not consider him of
any worth but slavery, because “half-breeds” are still considered full-breed of
color in the power structure. Combine
this with the explicit racism, homosexuality, cross-dressing and cast of other
deranged character, and Fassbinder allows this to cross over into horror very
quickly. Unlike most films in the
cycle, this is one of the boldest and best that does not try to cash in on the
huge box office success of The Dollars Trilogy. It even gets creepier when Fassbinder plays with the idea of skin
color throughout.
Pioneers In Ingolstadt is a German telefilm
based on the ironically titles play by Marieluise Fleisser about soldiers
building a bridge and the prostitutes who become involved with them. Instead of a “hooker with a heart of gold”
cliché or the usual melodrama, we get realistic hookers trying to survive and
surviving depending on how well they can deal with reality. The soldiers have their own issues, but it
becomes a stratum of character study that helped put Fassbinder on the map in a
new way and sealed his association with working through the work of Douglas
Sirk.
Like some of the Mike Leigh TV works we have covered
elsewhere on the site, it is obvious the talent was not bound to stay in the
television medium for long. Both films
are worth seeing, but Whity is one of the best of several Fassbinder
films this critic has seen so far. A
director still not full rediscovered yet due to his still-potent boldness, The
Fassbinder Collection I is as good a place as any to start seeing his work.
Whity offers an anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image
that was shot by the great Michael Ballhaus, in which the look and world of the
Spaghetti Westerns Sergio Leone helped to create (and many others tried to
imitate) is remarkably recaptured before it is subverted. The 1.33 X 1 image on Ingolstadt has
color issues and is lucky to survive as well as it does, since TV archives are
in often worse shape than those of feature films. Dietrich Lohmann, who had already shot several films for
Fassbinder, shot Ingolstadt. As
is typical for telefilms of the era, it is more cinematic that you would get
today from almost any country or network, globalization notwithstanding.
Whity has Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono that is on the small
side, though it is clean, yet it is also a little too compressed. We have heard worse Dolby 1.0 with fuller
sound, because of outright muffling, but that is the nature of this 1.0: it is
like playing Russian Roulette where the person is more likely to loose. It does not help that the audio on all such
films (i.e., Spaghetti Westerns) were usually poor to begin with. Ingolstadt fares a bit better with it
Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono mix, but it also shows its age. Extras include a very good audio commentary
by actor/producer Ulli Lommel and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus on Whity
and a filmography on Pioneers.
Both have smart essays on pullouts in each DVD case by Chuck Stephens
worth your time. Fantoma put this set
out along with some other key titles of Fassbinder, which you will also find on
this site.
- Nicholas Sheffo
