THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT

THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: IMAGE

“External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?” - Gilles Deleuze

“The more real things get, the more like myths they become.” - R.W. Fassbinder

The origins of the earliest cinematic records are debatable but in the final analysis it doesn’t matter who first made photographs move. The living eye, unable to preserve the sights it beheld, was gifted the ability to see again. Through the invention of a mystically alchemical process known as cinema, the objects of the world were transformed into the subjects of a movie, able to be returned to infinitely, forever preserving a pocket of time. Reality itself would never be the same, all because the world is so full of images demanding to be remembered. Few films make louder demands than THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT.

In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk (like ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and IMITATION OF LIFE) and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional register. One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater. This unforgettable, unforgiving dissection of the imbalanced relationship between a haughty fashion designer (Margit Carstensen) and a beautiful but icy ingenue (Hanna Schygulla)—based, in a sly gender reversal, on the writer-director’s own desperate obsession with a young actor—is a true Fassbinder affair, featuring full-throttle performances by an all-female cast.

Inspired by the melancholic images of Douglas Sirk, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (later a major Scorsese collaborator) works entirely within a single room. Using voyeuristic angles and gently gliding pans, he manages to frame the film’s drama in ways that do more than justice to the beauty of the actors and setting. With any other cinematographer, BITTER TEARS could have been a failure. But there may exist no more beautiful images in all of cinema.

“BITTER TEARS has perhaps the most rigorous frames-within-framing of the director’s career, particularly as fashioned by the rafters and the shelves that cordon the women off into separate squares, reducing them to isolated sculptures that appear to be ready to join all the other artifacts that have been assembled for Petra’s elaborate loft, while mirrors provide us brief, jolting X-rays-within-X-rays of their souls.” – Chuck Bowen