Bitter Tears and Pretty Excess in Fassbinder's Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kantand Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

Summary

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER is one of the most important yet controversial figures in the history of queer German cinema. His films often depict sexualized bodies and aesthetics, debatably to the point of fetishism, without affirming an explicit LGBTQ politics. This essay proposes that Fassbinder's depiction of gender performativity is key to understanding and assessing the queerness of his oeuvre's engagement with representations of otherness and visual pleasure. Linking feminist and queer theory, I examine how the New German Cinema director emphasizes a stylized femininity acted out by female characters in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant(The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972) and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss(Veronika Voss, 1982). These female-focused films, I argue, speak to the ways in which he draws attention, throughout his body of work, to Western cinema's interest in performativities of difference, not only of gender but intersecting aesthetics of race, class, and queer sexualities. As he focuses on women as they manipulate feminized clothing, gestures, and objects to perform an everdoubling representation of female difference, Fassbinder reveals that cinema eroticizes aesthetic and bodily imitations of otherness that can never be fully contained within a gender binary or within the cinematic frame.

Cinematic Subjectivity and Queer Excess

Fassbinder's films often explore the relationship between cinematic images of sexual otherness—which engage bodily and aesthetic performativities of gender, race, class, and sexuality—and visual pleasure. This is due in part to the artistic and sociohistorical context in which his films were produced. As a key filmmaker in New German Cinema, a movement that emerged in West Germany in the 1960s, he, along with his counterparts, unsettled notions of German identity, film authorship, and cinematic identification. The movement gained much of its momentum from state initiatives aiming to revitalize German film culture following a period of American control over the country's film markets after the Second World War. As a result, a small number of independent-minded, mostly male directors utilized government sponsorship to establish themselves as art cinema auteurs in Europe and the United States.