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Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Niklashauser Fa(h)rt [The Niklashausen Journey] (West Germany, 1970; 86 minutes)
When once asked by his frequent collaborator Karlheinz Böhm (1928–2014) on which side of the political spectrum his sympathies lied, film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) bid his time, and after a pause replied: ‘I shoot in all directions’. In a career spanning less than twenty years, Fassbinder directed more than forty feature films, several television series (including the fifteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz [1980]), and wrote about twenty plays. Throughout his career, he was accused of radicalism by the conservative right, of betraying his principles through the way he depicted left-wing terrorism in Die Dritte Generation [The Third Generation] (1979) by Marxists, of obscenity, homophobia, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. In an essay written in 1978, he mentioned his ‘determination to keep on making a film from time to time that is directly concerned with current political problems’. Despite his own remark to Böhm and some annoyances on the left, it is indubitable that there is where his political sympathies lied for the most part.
Niklashausen Journey is loosely based on the real Drummer of Niklashausen (Franconia, Germany), Hans Böhm (d.1476), who purportedly had a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1476 telling him to urge people to burn their possessions and stop paying rents to the clergy and the nobility. He also preached common property of forests and water. Eventually, he started a peasant revolt involving tens of thousands of people who travelled to hear his speeches. He was burned at the stake in July 1476. The film uses a Brechtian aesthetic of defamiliarization, interspersing religious speeches with Marxist economic analyses and even socialist anthems. There is even a further layer of defamiliarization when the actors themselves (including Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla [b.1943], who participated in almost twenty of his films/series), at the beginning, discuss how to enact ‘the revolution’. However, in typical Fassbinder fashion, even the apparent Marxist ideals start to degenerate into violence (one of the early followers of Niklashausen stabs her sick husband to death – she earlier described him as ‘sick and old and stupid’ – because of her sexual attraction to Hans). One of the most striking images of the film is the burning of the Drummer – captured earlier by Military Police armed with machine guns. It is enacted in a scrapyard, with Hans tied to a cross and with the powerful bishop (whom we had seen before in the film in sexually suggestive scenes with groups of people; played by Kurt Raab [1941–1988], another frequent collaborator) arriving in a shiny Mercedes 600 limousine. Fassbinder died in his room in Munich of an overdose, aged 37, with the script for his next project, Rosa L, lying next to him: it was to be a film based on the life of Polish-German-Jewish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919).