Fear Eats the Soul

BFI Film Classics

by Laura Cottingham

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (1974) an aging cleaning woman, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), marries a much younger, immigrant Moroccan mechanic, Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Set in Munich during the 1970s, Fear Eats the Soul melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility in order to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in postwar Germany. 

It is a film about the way conventional society detests anything and anybody unfamiliar--but also a film about the hopes and limits of love. Intricately directed, beautifully performed, and designed to show Munich life in all its shabby kitchiness, Fear Eats the Soul may be Fassbinder's finest film. Laura Cottingham celebrates Fassbinder's achievement, placing Fear Eats the Soul in relation to the director's extraordinarily prolific career in theater, film, and television. Her analysis pulls back the thin curtain that separated his work from his tumultuous life. In a detailed scene-by-scene analysis of Fear Eats the Soul, Cottingham shows how Fassbinder managed to combine beauty and tenderness with fierce political criticism. 

Genres: Film

86 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2005

About the author

Laura Cottingham is an American visual artist and art critic.

Reviews

[David Sterritt]

Laura Cottingham’s monograph on “Fear Eats the Soul,” arguably Fassbinder’s greatest picture, belongs in the front ranks of the BFI Film Classics series. It’s consistently well written, frequently insightful, and balanced in its views of Rainer Werner’s personal and professional merits and failings. This is first-rate analysis of a first-rate film.