![]() Difficult to assimilate.’ The book’s opening fragment begins by proclaiming ‘the absolute impossibility of summing up Fassbinder.’ Penman suggests that there is something about Fassbinder as an individual – ‘ monster of sexual indulgence and shock horror left-wing quotes and bad drug rumours’ – but also about his cinematic aesthetic – ‘gross, untidy, extortionate’ – that make him ‘ifficult to canonize, difficult to mourn. Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (2023) is a book about Fassbinder that is constantly asking itself what a book about Fassbinder could or should be and do: ‘Is there coherence among the works? Can we arrange them into a unity?’ The answer Penman gives to these questions is an emphatic “no.” Penman abandons the synoptic in favour of the fragmentary (449 numbered fragments, followed by an appendix containing 29 unnumbered epigraph-like quotations), a disjointed style that responds to the expansiveness of its subject: an artist whose excessive appetite for cigarettes, sausages, sex, alcohol and drugs were matched only by his excessive productivity. I thought not only of spaces and things but of atmospheres: the claustrophobic dingy sepia of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), the libidinous synthetic orange of Querelle (1982), the on-edge lilacs and uncanny birdsong of Despair (1980). I thought of the stifling domestic interiors in Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day (1972), Why Does Herr K Run Amok? (1970) or Fear of Fear (1975) with their laminate sideboards, cut glass ashtrays and bulging sofas. Thresholds, picture frames, vases, shag pile carpets, houseplants, lamps. I thought about objects and textures there were not only thousands of mirrors but hundreds of door frames and windows. I thought of composing a compendium of interiors: the vast stage-like hotel reception overlooking the ocean in which much of the action of Beware of A Holy Whore (1971) plays out, the glam Baroque flocked wallpapered apartment in Fox and his Friends (1975), the watery metallic turquoise of the bar in the sci-fi miniseries World on a Wire (1973). My memory retained stills, set pieces or tableaux rather than plots, characters or themes. When I thought back on Fassbinder’s films, most of which I’d watched over a decade ago, a series of scenes flashed through my mind. Fassbinder famously filmed fast and died young, leaving behind a huge oeuvre of over forty films and three TV series, as well as directing plays and acting in films directed by other people. ![]() Before I began reading Ian Penman’s Fassbinder A Thousand Mirrors, I wondered how I might have gone about writing about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s many films myself. ![]()
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