And we’ll buy ourselves a little piece of heaven ✵ Ali: Fear Eats the Soul - REBEL REBEL ✵ 1960–1974 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

New German Cinema

DIRECTOR

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

WRITER

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

STARS

Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Irm Hermann

BEFORE

1955 Douglas Sirk’s romantic melodrama All That Heaven Allows provides inspiration for Fassbinder’s Ali.

1972 Fassbinder makes his mark as a provocative filmmaker with The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

AFTER

1979 The Marriage of Maria Braun is Fassbinder’s biggest mainstream success.

1980 Fassbinder’s TV mini-series Berlin Alexanderplatz becomes a cult classic.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) is an intense study of an unlikely but tender relationship between an aging German cleaning woman and a younger Arab immigrant worker. It is also a trenchant commentary on the state of 1970s Germany, as the couple face the derision and criticism of their family and friends. By focusing on the relationship between a white German woman and an immigrant, and placing it in the tough urban heart of Munich, Fassbinder achieved the emotional engagement of classic melodrama while exposing the underlying tensions in German culture.

New German Cinema directors such as Fassbinder sought to create something peculiarly German by bringing together the sharp modernity and realism of the French and British new waves with the storytelling power of Hollywood. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul can also be seen as a homage to one of Fassbinder’s cinematic heroes, German émigré Douglas Sirk, whose 1955 movie All That Heaven Allows portrayed the romance between a well-to-do widow and a younger gardener.

Fassbinder always worked quickly, but this movie was made exceptionally fast—in under two weeks, squeezed between two other projects. The result of this rapid shooting schedule is a lean, stripped-down work of great directness and immediacy.

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Fassbinder (left) plays Eugen, son-in-law of German cleaning woman Emmi (center). He and his wife Krista (Irm Hermann) laugh at Emmi when she says she has fallen in love with a younger Moroccan man.

Happiness is not always fun.”

Epigraph / Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Racial tensions

The German woman in the movie is the 60-year-old Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira) and the immigrant is 40-year-old Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). They meet when Emmi ducks into an Arabic bar to get out of the rain on the way home from work. Ali asks Emmi to dance, and despite his limited grasp of German, a heartfelt relationship develops between them. They move in together, realize that they love each other, and decide to marry. Their marriage is quickly exposed to the prejudice and gossip of everyone around them, and an end to outright hostility only comes from the local shopkeepers’ and bar owners’ hypocritical need to keep their custom. The constant pressure threatens to destroy their relationship, and Ali seeks solace in the arms of the female bartender who used to cook for him, Barbara (Barbara Valentin, far left). Yet in the end, their love endures.

In many of Fassbinder’s movies, his attitude to his characters can be harsh and mocking. In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, it is the cruelty of the people around Emmi and Ali that is exposed. By contrast, Emmi and Ali’s relationship is handled in a touching and sincere way.

At the end of the movie, Ali collapses and is taken to a hospital, suffering from a stomach ulcer—something common, the doctor says, among migrants, because of the continual prejudice they face. As Ali says, “Fear eats the soul.” Emmi promises to do everything she can to reduce the stress, and has a solution that is profound in its almost banal simplicity: “When we’re together, we must be nice to one another.”

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In his movies, Fassbinder presented to German society an uncompromising portrayal of its flaws. While Emmi and Ali may stay together, the racism that makes him ill will not go away.

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER Director

Fassbinder was the driving force of New German Cinema. In a career spanning just 14 years, he made more than 40 movies, many TV dramas, and 24 stage plays. He was born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1945, and had a lonely childhood in which he watched thousands of movies. By 21, he was running a theater company, manically writing and directing play after play. He made his first feature movie in 1969 and quickly achieved international acclaim, but his private life was often troubled, and he died of a drug overdose at just 37.

Key movies

1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

1979 The Marriage of Maria Braun

What else to watch: All That Heaven Allows (1955) ✵ Lola Montès (1955) ✵ The Damned (1969) ✵ The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) ✵ The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) ✵ The Tin Drum (1979) ✵ Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)