Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf)

BFI Film Classics

by Laura Cottingham

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul ( Angst Essen Seele Auf , 1974) Emma (Brigitte Mira), a working-class widow and former member of the Nazi party, marries Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan migrant worker. Set in Munich during the 1970s, the film melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war 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 kitschiness, Fear Eats the Soul may be Fassbinder's finest film.

Laura Cottingham celebrates Fassbinder's achievement, placing Fear Eats the Soul in relation to his extraordinarily prolific career in theatre, film and television. Her analysis pulls back the thin curtain that separated his work from his tumultuous life. She also explores the director's debt to the lush Hollywood melodramas made by fellow German Douglas Sirk, especially All That Heaven Allows (1955). In a detailed scene-by-scene analysis, Cottingham shows how Fassbinder managed to combine beauty and tenderness with fierce political critique.

Genres: Film

100 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.