Fear of fear

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Movie
Original title Fear of fear
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1975
length 88 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder
script RW Fassbinder based on a template by Asta Scheib
production Peter Märthesheimer ( WDR )
music Peer ravens
camera Jürgen Juerges , Ulrich Prinz
cut Liesgret Schmitt-Klink , Beate Fischer-Weiskirch
occupation

Fear of Fear is a film drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder from 1975 with Margit Carstensen in the leading role.

Total shooting time: 25 days, costs: approx. 375,000 DM.

Fear of Fear is the fifth RW Fassbinder film in four years for WDR in cooperation with the editor in charge, Peter Märthesheimer .

action

Margot, in her mid-thirties, lives with her husband Kurt and their little daughter Bibi in their mother-in-law's house. Kurt's sister and her husband live above them. When Margot becomes pregnant, she begins to suffer from anxiety attacks that are incomprehensible to herself and those around her. The husband Kurt is caring, but only thinks about his exam and cannot help her. The mother-in-law and sister-in-law Lore are ashamed of Margot's behavior. The pharmacist mainly has a relationship with her in mind when he prescribes Valium for her without a prescription.

Margot becomes addicted to valium, drinks cognac like an addict and suddenly makes a suicide attempt. The doctors are at a loss: one diagnoses schizophrenia , psychiatry diagnoses deep depression and prescribes work as therapy.

Only two people who are on the fringes of society seek contact with the increasingly isolated Margot: the beloved daughter Bibi and a mysterious neighbor. This is rejected by Margot and found hanged shortly afterwards. Margot reacts lethargic .

backgrounds

“FEAR OF FEAR isn't really about mental illness, it's a film about the 'normal' human condition. Mental illness is an essential part of a society like the one we live in. I only show the life of a completely normal person, not an extreme situation. (...) The film shows how someone who tries to lead a life that is alien to himself, alienated from the true self, is inevitably shattered. The life this woman has to lead is not her life. Your unconscious begins to realize that she is leading a life that really has nothing to do with her. This type of 'illness' sets in with anyone who begins to realize that the life they are leading may not be the life they would like to lead, and that most people are simply part of their lives that are not theirs Role is. This is how you get 'sick'. (...) "

- RW Fassbinder in 'The Death of the Family' - Conversation with John Hughes and Ruth McCormick

Asta Scheib wrote the template for the film in the form of the short story "Langsame Tage" and sent it to RW Fassbinder , whose films she greatly appreciated. Asta Scheib was then 35 years old, a housewife and mother of two children. Until then, she had occasionally written articles for a local newspaper and a women's magazine. The story was her first film template. Fassbinder adopted them almost unchanged for his script.

Reviews

“With 'Fear of Fear' Fassbinder, it seems, opens up a perspective on the social and psychological case history that is no longer so radical in its drastic form, but he delivers differently than with ' Why is Mr. R. running amok? 'here is a comprehensible anamnesis . He even makes it clear visually what is going on in Margot when he repeatedly illustrates her subjects with blurred images. The eloquent camerawork with which Fassbinder is known does the rest to stage Margot's gradual disappearance from normality: she often stands behind half-open doors, her face half outside, half in the room, the camera observes her through mirrors, which cover the whole apartment Margots is hung up, or provides extreme close-ups of her face as it drifts from one wordless hysteria to the next in all its wakefulness . 'Fear of Fear' is therefore much more verbose than Fassbinder's previous psychological and social collapse studies and ends the stage of the director that is determined by films like ' Fear Eats Soul ', ' Martha ' and ' Mother Küster's' Journey to Heaven ' was - films that only seemed to be interested in the consequences and not in the symptoms of doom. "

- Stefan Höltgen

“The regulated, the 'normal', the well-worn, the obvious, the visible, the haptic stay with them like fear stays with them. Like the dark side of the moon, the others will never see them. But Margot lives on with this dark side of the moon. The normality of the bourgeoisie has caught up with them, 'integrated' them - as it is called so pretty and ugly in New High German. The fear of the abyss remains. The tablets 'reconcile' their fear with normalcy. A flimsy solution. "

- Ulrich Behrens

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Rainer Werner Fassbinder: poet, actor, filmmaker; Exhibition 28.5. - July 19, 1992. Argon, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-87024-212-4 , p. 50.
  2. ↑ Robert Fischer (Ed.): Fassbinder on Fassbinder. Publishing house of the authors , Frankfurt am Main 2004.
  3. ↑ Filmzentrale.com, first published in "Schnitt"
  4. ↑ Follow-me-now.de