The case study for my paper will be the late work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which dates from a time when the author’s concern to provoke and explore new languages was reconfigured in a more mainstream and international manner, shaping a new way of imagining popular film (Despair,  Despair. Eine Reise ins Licht, 1978; The Marriage of Maria Braun, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979) and television production (Berlin Alexanderplatz, WDR, 1980). In his work with a stable team of technicians (with regard to the soundtrack, musician Peer Raben, editor Juliane Lorenz, and sound engineer Milan Bor), it may reasonably be claimed that he transformed the passionate explosion of the “long 1960s” into a mature mode of production ready to enter the 1980s and beyond and to reach into our times. In this paper I will explore the experiential dimensions of the soundscapes and the music, arguing that the advent and practice of sound-mixing in the 1970s, the way in which this was used to intensify the whole audiovisual experience in film and television fiction, played an important role in reconfiguring our reflexive consciousness of social relations and political issues as individualized and emotionalized.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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Cinéma & Cie
Massimo Locatelli
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Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer
Werner Fassbinder
Massimo Locatelli, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore




    Abstract

     The case study for my paper will be the late work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
     which dates from a time when the author’s concern to provoke and explore new
     languages was reconfigured in a more mainstream and international manner,
     shaping a new way of imagining popular film (Despair, Despair. Eine Reise ins
     Licht, 1978; The Marriage of Maria Braun, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979) and
     television production (Berlin Alexanderplatz, WDR, 1980). In his work with a
     stable team of technicians (with regard to the soundtrack, musician Peer Raben,
     editor Juliane Lorenz, and sound engineer Milan Bor), it may reasonably be
     claimed that he transformed the passionate explosion of the “long 1960s” into
     a mature mode of production ready to enter the 1980s and beyond and to reach
     into our times. In this paper I will explore the experiential dimensions of the
     soundscapes and the music, arguing that the advent and practice of sound-
     mixing in the 1970s, the way in which this was used to intensify the whole
     audiovisual experience in film and television fiction, played an important role in
     reconfiguring our reflexive consciousness of social relations and political issues
     as individualized and emotionalized.

   In the 1960s and 1970s, the broad movement towards individual participation
and physical involvement in political issues led media discourses to embrace
experimental languages.1 A number of filmmakers in Europe and in the USA
began exploring the limits of classical film style, developing what David Bordwell
labeled as intensified continuity.2 Thenceforth, intensified cinematic conventions
making use of a wide range of perceptual triggers to activate strong, emotionally
driven responses were increasingly to become an ever more central trope in quality
film and television production. Not by chance, in the late 1990s — following a


1
  Christopher B. Strain, The Long Sixties. America, 1955–1973 (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 2016).
2
  Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002); David Bordwell,
The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006).

                                                       Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 31, Fall 2018
                                        Massimo Locatelli


wider trend, or “sensuous turn”, in the humanities3 — film scholars, too, began
investigating emotions in film experience, gradually incorporating into their
work tools from the psychology of emotions and the affective neurosciences.4
My contribution will delve into this discussion, highlighting a still partially
neglected area of interest in this context, the auditive dimension of our emotional
involvement in film and the media.5
   The case study for my paper will be the late work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
which dates from a time when the author’s concern to provoke and explore new
languages was reconfigured in a more mainstream and international manner,
shaping a new way of imagining popular film (Despair, Despair. Eine Reise ins
Licht, 1978; The Marriage of Maria Braun, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979) and
television production (Berlin Alexanderplatz, WDR, 1980). In his work with a
stable team of technicians (with regard to the soundtrack, musician Peer Raben,
editor Juliane Lorenz, and sound engineer Milan Bor), it may reasonably be
claimed that he transformed the passionate explosion of the ‘long 1960s’ into a
mature mode of production ready to enter the 1980s and beyond and to reach
into our times. In this paper I will explore the experiential dimensions of the
soundscapes and the music,6 arguing that the advent and practice of sound-
mixing in the 1970s, the way in which this was used to intensify the whole
audiovisual experience in film and television fiction, played an important role in
reconfiguring our reflexive consciousness of social relations and political issues
as individualized and emotionalized.7


     The Sensuous is Political

  German film productions had a notable impact on modern film narratives,
contemporary matters of style and the very notion of authoring,8 and it was
a center of creative involvement in the “personal is political” debate in the

3
  Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul and Simon Gottschalk, The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture: A
Sociology of the Senses (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
4
  Cfr. Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture. A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
5
  Core readings in recent literature: Annabel J. Cohen, ‘Film Music from the Perspective of Cognitive
Science’, in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. by David Neumeyer (Oxford, New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 96–130; Lars Kuchinke, Hermann Kappellhoff and
Stefan Koelsch, ‘Emotion and Music in Narrative Films: A Neuroscientific Perspective’, in The
Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. by Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel J. Cohen, Scott D. Lipscomb and
Roger A. Kendall (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 118–38.
6
  E.g. Alf Gabrielsson, John Whaleyand John Sloboda, ‘Peak Experiences in Music’, in The Oxford
Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. by Suan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut (Oxford, New
York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 745–58.
7
  Julie Brownlie, Ordinary Relationships: A Sociological Study of Emotions, Reflexivity and Culture
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
8
   Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1989).

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        Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer Werner Fassbinder


1970s. The more “global” in today’s film studies has tended to emphasize the
cultural dynamics of the international and transnational relations of German
film, pointing to its exemplariness in a changing European mediascape,9 and
a number of recent studies have reconsidered the classical works of the New
German Cinema movement in this frame. Emotionalizing tactics have also been
underlined by authors reinterpreting the whole modernist project and the role
German film authors like Alexander Kluge assumed in it,10 and in this context
the centrality of operatic conventions and/or film music has been the subject of
a substantial reassessment.11
   In fact, within what used to be considered a fundamental new wave in European
cinema —and taking for granted an interest in authors still working such as Werner
Herzog and Wim Wenders — a central place in the debate around emotion and
the cinema has also been given to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work is
currently the subject of an almost nostalgic process of recovery and reverence.
In March 2018, one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s early productions, a five-part
TV miniseries called Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (Acht Stunden sind kein Tag,
1972-73), was given its U.S. premiere, introducing a new generation of American
audiences to the prolific German director and actor, prompting an academic
site like the Daily Jstor to ask ‘Why do Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films still
resonate?’12 The concept of “resonance” will be central to our discussion, and
several scholars have also been struck recently by the same question, stressing
the different emotional aspects of his work: Stephanie Bird underscored the
comic moments of the melodramatic, quasi masochistic narrative trajectories
of Fassbinder’s films;13 Hermann Kappellhoff stressed the political value of the
‘group choreography’ of his early work;14 Patrik Sjöberg delved into the more
personal, autobiographical moments of his production, e.g. Germany in Autumn


9
  Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana, Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2008); Sabine Hake, ‘German Cinema as European Cinema: Learning
from Film History’, Film History, 25.1–2 (2013), 110–17.
10
   Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, ed. by Forrest Tara (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2012).
11
   Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003); Caryl Flinn, ‘Undoing Act 5: History, Bodies and Operatic Remains in
The Power of Emotion’, in Alexander Kluge, pp. 211–40; Larson Powell, The Differentiation of
Modernism: Postwar German Media Arts (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2013).
12
   Matthew Wills, ‘Why Do Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Films Still Resonate?’ <https://daily.jstor.
org/why-do-rainer-werner-fassbinders-films-still-resonate> [accessed 30 June 2018]. Cfr. also Tony
Pipolo, ‘Straight from the Heart: Re-viewing the Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, Cinéaste,
29.4 (2004), 18–25.
13
   Stephanie Bird, ‘The Funny Side of Fassbinder: From Melodramatic Vicious Circles to Comic
Double Vision, The Modern Language Review, 105.4 (2010), 1087–104.
14
   ‘In Fassbinder’s early films, the staging of gestures causes the represented social behavior to
appear like elements of a ceremonial liturgy, which leads all social forms of expression back to
the desire and suffering of the individual’. Hermann Kappellhoff, ‘The Distribution of Emotions:
Fassbinder and the Politics of Aesthetics’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 86.3
(2011), 201–20 (p. 219).

                                                                                                 67
                                        Massimo Locatelli


(Deutschland im Herbst, 1978), with particular attention to the body of the author
as an emotional marker — or, I would dare to say, ‘sounding body’;15 Thomas
Elsaesser, in his 2013 monograph, in which he re-evaluates the meaning of the
Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, in offering a reconsideration of
trauma theory today significantly cites a Fassbinder work, The Third Generation
(Die Dritte Generation, 1979), as a central case study;16 Heide Schlipphacke,
too, explicitly interpreted Fassbinder’s work as a conscious expression of the
disquietude and fear of the post-war era, the ‘age of anxiety’.17 Trauma, pathos,
melodrama, melancholia: Fassbinder, who still serves as a reference point for
every queer biography of more contemporary filmmakers and/or for any more
or less provocative critical discourse of resistance,18 fosters research into the
emotional side of experience, without prejudices or preconceptions. Thomas
Elsaesser’s thesis that, by positing the very bodily and scandalous presence of the
director at its center — and regardless of exclusively gender-based readings —,
Fassbinder’s cinema blocked and opposed a capitalistic value system based on
mere economic exchange (a theory put forward following the tenth anniversary
of the director’s death) is still both compelling and legitimate.19


     The Intensified Body

   As a consequence of the above considerations, critics and researchers generally
link the perceptually challenging visual style of Rainer Werner Fassbinder to a
political vision, understanding his complex camera work as a means of escaping,
or at least revealing, social constraint and monotony. Thomas Elsaesser, in the
same 1994 volume mentioned above, described this issue canonically, as follows:

         The emphasis given to the looks lingering in the frames, the exchange of glances,
     the restless camera and the many close-ups of characters intently looking straight
     ahead out of the frame are clearly marked as excess, if only because so often, no
     narrative knowledge passes along the lines of sight thus traversing the space. Excess
     also, because of all the images with mirrors, windows, partitions, or the frequent
     compositions dominated by obstructions to vision, and because there is a virtual


15
   Patrik Sjöberg, ‘“Ich Bin’s, Fassbinder,” or The Timing of the Self’, in The Autobiographical Turn
in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film, ed. by Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner
(Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2014), pp. 277–96.
16
   Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema – Terror And Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (London
and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 189–214.
17
   Heidi Schlipphacke, ‘The Future of Melancholia: Freud, Fassbinder, and Anxiety after War’,
Pacific Coast Philology, 52. 1 (2017), 6–21. Cfr. also Wystan Hugh Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A
Baroque Eclogue (New York: Random House, 1947).
18
   Dennis Ioffe, Border Crossing. Russian Literature into Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2016), pp. 20–22.
19
   Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. History Identity Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 1996), p. 257.

68
         Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer Werner Fassbinder


     absence of any direct view of any of the characters. The frame appears always
     cluttered, divided and usually open only towards the spectator inscribing him/herself
     as a presence, though often “across” an object partially blocking the view: the hand
     printing press or the gramophone are so prominently stationed in Biberkopf’s room
     that they almost become silent witnesses.20

   In this way film language embodied the abolition of a high-low distinction in
culture, expressed by the interplay of modernist aesthetics with genre production
and exploitation. As Susan Sontag famously put it, ‘Sensations, feelings, the
abstract forms and styles of sensibility count’.21 At the same time, filmmakers
confronted the classical past, reprocessing its style markers through technological
advance: ‘Four strategies of camerawork and editing — argued David Bordwell
— seem central to the new style: rapid editing, bipolar extremes of lens lengths,
reliance on close shots, and wide-ranging camera movements’.22
   During the second half of the 1970s Fassbinder himself moved from the
edgy avant-garde cinema of his early years, where the emotional involvement
of both the character and the viewer were immobilized in the emptiness of
the frame (the cold love of Love is Colder Than Death, Liebe ist kälter als der
Tod, 1970), to his films on the history of Germany, a major project based on
the emotional power of classical Hollywood language, with particular attention
to the woman’s films of the 1950s and to Douglas Sirk.23 In doing so, his aim
of creating emotional overexposure, and thus undermining social and cultural
equilibrium, met also the “intensification” practices described by Bordwell in
relation to contemporary camerawork and editing strategies. But the notion of
“intensification” in Fassbinder’s case should be widened towards, on the one
side, a more self-reflexive use of visual codes, and, on the other side, towards a
renovated sound design.
   Traveling back in terms of historical backgrounds and costume films, in fact,
this type of intensified continuity finds a predecessor in Weimar modernism, as,
for example, in the free floating camera work of operators like Karl Freund, so
that Fassbinder was able to reinforce the expressive potential of the legacy of a
beloved auteur theory, citationism. At the beginning of Berlin Alexanderplatz,
for instance, the main character, Franz Biberkopf (Günther Lamprecht), leaves
the prison, and his turmoil is expressed by a dizzy, circular moving look into
the sky: the editing overlaps the long shot of Biberkopf entering a quadrilateral
Berlin courtyard, stumbling to the ground and looking up above himself, and a
vertical, subjective contreplongée rotating along the walls of the high buildings
surrounding him, which appear to be moving. The open reference to Murnau


20
   Ivi, p. 234.
21
   Susan Sontag, ‘One culture and a new sensibility’ (1965), in Against Interpretation: And Other
Essays (New York: Dell, 1966).
22
   Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 121.
23
   Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Filme befreien den Kopf, ed. by Michael Töteberg (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), pp. 11–24.

                                                                                              69
                                       Massimo Locatelli


and to Karl Grune’s The Street (Die Strasse, 1923) here is not an innocent game
but a conscious attack on aesthetic stability.
   The “intensifying” development of the technological and stylistic codes in
film and television has played a far from secondary role in a wider cultural and
social change towards experiential and emotional readings of our individual and
collective life, which careful observers of the artistic and literary scene, such as
Sontag, identified in the mid-1960s as a ‘new sensibility’.24 More recently, the
rediscovery of emotion and the senses has emerged powerfully, causing a real
‘sensuous turn’ in academic debate, which goes as far as to influence the way
in which historical and critical research is carried out.25 Many key concepts in
the humanities, especially in the cultural history of the 20th century, have also
been reconsidered in the light of their “sensous”, emotional impact. In a recent
contribution on Alfred Döblin’s modernism, Mario Slugan needed to go back
to Fassbinder in order to demonstrate the strengths of a definition of montage
built solely on perceptual, stylistic, and narratological criteria. He posited one
subset of a broadly conceived hyperstimulation — the perceptual experience of
disruption — as the essential intermedial trait of montage, and then proceeded to
tease out its specificities in different media. In the case of film, he articulated both
visual and sound montage in terms of their spatiotemporal dislocation and their
divergence from editing norms,26 thus testifying to the inextricable connection
between a perceiving gaze and its “resonating” auditory experience. What many
Fassbinder studies have failed to observe, in fact, is the aural dimension of his
stylistic innovation, which goes beyond the mere experience of dislocation.


     The Sounding Body

   The “dislocative” affordance posed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s filmscapes is
without doubt a central question: its origin has been identified in the considerable
dilemma around the narrator’s voice (who is speaking in his narratives?)27 as well
as in the open intermedial exchanges he plays with, especially in the case of
Berlin Alexanderplatz.28 What is undoubtedly true is that Fassbinder consciously
has recourse not only to multiple semiotic agencies and points of view (the
identification of his persona with Döblin’s Franz Biberkopf allowed any and


24
   Sontag, ‘One culture and a new sensibility’.
25
   Vannini, Waskul and Gottschalk, The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture, p. 25.
26
   Mario Slugan, Montage as Perceptual Experience: Berlin Alexanderplatz from Döblin to Fassbinder
(Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2017).
27
   E.g. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
28
   Though apparently not attentive to the authentic urban landscape: cfr. Andreas Fickers, Jasper
Aalbers, Annelies Jacobs and Karin Bijsterveld, ‘Sounds Familiar. Intermediality and Remediation
in the Written, Sonic and Audiovisual Narratives of Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Soundscapes of
the Urban Past. Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, ed. by Karin Bijsterveld (Bielefeld:
Transcript Verlag, 2013), pp. 77–115.

70
        Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer Werner Fassbinder


every sort of narrative shift throughout the filmmaker’s career) and to different,
usually contradictory sources of discourse (film, radio, television, literature, and
even Döblin’s mathematical formulas are embedded in his narrative texture), but
also to wider and often-cited sound-related allegories, such as the one that opens
Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the even more famous one that ends The Marriage of
Maria Braun. In the first case, Franz Biberkopf walks quietly with a jailer in the
silent prison courtyard and is directed to the exit gate, where a warder greets
him and opens the metal door. Until this point we have only heard the faint
voice of an opera singer from a distant radio (the aria, with its old-fashioned
lo-fi sound texture, begins as extra-diegetic with the title boards and becomes a
possible intra-diegetic music when the street outside the prison is shown, for a
brief moment, with its urban soundscape, cars roaring, and so on). But now, as
Franz looks out of the gate and takes a step forward to reach the threshold, the
camera cuts to a frontal close up of the man stopping terrified and staring into
the unknown, while the unpleasant clangor of the city rises rapidly and forces
him to cover his ears with his hands. Here Fassbinder freezes the frame and the
scene, adding the metaphorical value of the stillness, and finally superimposes on
this close up the title of the first section: ‘I. Die Strafe beginnt — The punishment
begins’. We can refuse to look at the real world, but its sound will inevitably
reach and overwhelm us.
   The final sequence of The Marriage of Maria Braun has a similar, even more
tragic tone. The main character, a World War II widow, played by Hanna
Schigulla, discovers during the reading of her second husband’s will that all her
lifelong efforts to be independent have been wiped out by a simple contract
between the two men in her life: Hermann (Klaus Löwitsch), who was supposed
to have died in 1945, and Karl (Ivan Desny), just departed. The long scene is
accompanied by the running commentary of the football world cup final of 1954,
the so-called “Miracle of Bern”, a match that ‘has been built up as a mythical place
of remembrance in the history of German sport’.29 We hear the radio throughout
the sequence in a fragmentary way, the volume varying according to the different
rooms in which the action takes place (higher volume when Hermann sits in the
living room listening to the game, lower volume in the other rooms of the ground
floor, even lower or not at all when Maria needs to rest and calm down upstairs);
then, after the abrupt explosion that ends the lives of both Maria and Hermann
— whether intentionally or not is unclear, for Maria leaves the gas oven open and
lights a cigarette —, nothing else remains but the voice of the radio commentary
and the burning villa.
   The intermedial, narrative and discursive dimensions of Fassbinder’s multi-
layered soundscape construction have been widely recognized and researched,


29
  The central role played by The Marriage of Maria Braun in the construction and political
exploitation of this match has been underscored by Diethelm Blecking, ‘Das “Wunder von Bern”
1954 – Zur politischen Instrumentalisierung eines Mythos’, Historical Social Research / Historische
Sozialforschung, 40.4 (2015), 197–208 (p. 197).

                                                                                                71
                                        Massimo Locatelli


but these examples should lead us to a further consideration about its role in the
shaping of a modern soundscape. The early 1970s witnessed the introduction
of multi-track recording, a technological device that allowed young American
filmmakers, the “movie brats”, to adapt the soundscape of their films to the new
style and language they were creating at a visual level.30 While experimenting
with more sensitive color print, brighter lenses and zoom lenses, multi-track
recording fostered the creation of a multi-layered perceptual space, where the
different sound tracks (dialogue, music, noises) exceeded the rules of continuity
and overlapped each other, overriding or “dislocating” the usual sense of spatial
unity. The textbook case in this sense is James Webb’s sound design for Robert
Altman’s Nashville (1975); a reading of Leigh Brackett’s screenplay for Altman’s
The Long Goodbye (1973) testifies how the director’s technique had evolved in
such a direction, as ‘there are entire pages of parenthetical cues, clearly stating
how overlapping is to occur’.31 The improvement in Dolby systems and in sound
reproduction devices in movie theaters caused the role of sound engineering to
expand and assume a paramount importance in film production. Although the
technological change was introduced in film production by previous developments
in the music industry, the decade testified the birth of a new audibility in the
world of audiovision, made of multiple sound layers enhancing immersive space
perception. Considering also the arrival of graphical intervention and trans-
media design, Laurent Jullier referred to post-1977 film productions, when all
these practices were finally spreading, as the immersive film-concert.32 According
to Frances Dyson’s approach to contemporary new media as accumulation of
auditive technologies of the past, we could say that the 1970s transformed film
sounds into ‘almost palpable envelopments’ ready to be embraced by later,
immersive and virtual, technological experiences.33


30
   Jeff Smith, ‘Film Sound in the Hollywood Renaissance, 1968–1980’, in Sound: Dialogue, Music,
and Effects (Behind the Silver Screen Series), ed. by Kathryn Kalinak (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2015), pp. 83–106. A central figure in this was sound recordist Chris Newman,
who, on The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola,
1972) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) ‘created multi-tracks by running two tape
recorders simultaneously [...] driving back and forth to the Nagra factory so they could keep making
adjustments to our new four-track recorders’, Chris Newman in CAS, online forum, JwSound,
<http://jwsoundgroup.net/index.php?/topic/17292-chris-newman-in-cas/&> [accessed 28 June
2018]. For an overview of the impact of music recording and mixing technologies on film, cfr. Julie
Hubbert, ‘The Compilation Soundtrack from the 1960s to the Present’, in The Oxford Handbook
of Film Music Studies, pp. 291–318 (p. 299). Michel Chion, introducing his notion of superchamp
(superfield), traces back this history to musicals like Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970) and
Tommy (Ken Russell, 1975): Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), pp. 155-156.
31
    Online exhibit by the University of Michigan Library <https://www.lib.umich.edu/online-
exhibits/exhibits/show/altman/altmanesque-sound---music/the-altman-sound> [accessed 28 June
2018]. Cfr. also Smith, ‘Film Sound in the Hollywood Renaissance, 1968-1980’, pp. 91–3.
32
   Laurent Jullier, L’écran postmoderne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), p. 140.
33
   Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 2009), p. 3.

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       Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer Werner Fassbinder


   Although there are no similar witnesses to the mode of production of
Fassbinder’s sound or to the recording technologies he used, we should note
how he also integrated these improvements into his bigger productions of the
late 1970s. While trusting in the intensified continuity of perpetually moving
and zooming cameras, fast editing and intensive close-ups, he was able to
organize a complementary soundscape made up of multiple levels of narration
and, accordingly, of sound sources, with the overlapping of different tracks,
continuous variations in the high-low volume range, contradictory matching
of visual, verbal, written and musical information. Think, for instance, of
the powerful sequence of Franz Biberkopf’s first visit to his wife’s twin sister.
Both her rape and the subsequent flashback to him killing his wife begin with
a dialogue and the noises of everyday home life (a door opening and closing,
footsteps on an old wooden floor) in the foreground. But in both scenes the
volume of the dialogue and of the diegetic noises is deliberately turned down,
reducing them to an auditive background, and Döblin’s estranging original text
enters with its false, anguished, scientific objectivity (in the second case in the
form of a judicial news report, and quoting Newton’s laws of physical force),
describing the crime scenes as a resonating place (‘At a first blow she said “ouch”
and no longer called him “you dirty bum”, but “oh, man”, instead’),34 while the
diegetic sound is partially deadened in the frozen background. During the rape
scene, some violin music enters after a little while, at a very low volume, almost
as a third level of environmental sound, melancholic and suave, while in the
murder scene the music comes right at the end, after the noises have risen again
violently (Franz exits banging the door hard), with a full orchestral score full of
pathos that opposes, as an emotional commentary, the coolness of the last title
board presenting the mathematical formula of acceleration, ‘the degree of the
disturbance effected by the force’.35
   Rather than playing with modernist, Brechtian distanciation effects, the title
sequence of The Marriage of Maria Braun exploits these improvements in sound
technology even more widely in their full, immersive efficacy. Maria marries
Wehrmacht officer Hermann during a violent bombing raid, the day before he
leaves, apparently never to come back. When the bombs have almost reached the
small ceremony, everybody flees, including the celebrating city official. Hermann
and Maria chase him down the street and force him to sign the marriage contract.
Then the title boards start, introducing a melancholy Maria searching for her
missing husband at the train station. The whole initial sequence is characterized
not only by impressive close-ups, rapid editing, fast camera movements and
zooms, but also by the frantic juxtaposition of explosions, the hissing of bombs,
shouting, and snarling threats, which are gradually replaced first by the incipient
film music and then by the obsessive noise of the trains. This auditory immersion


34
    Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (London, New York:
Continuum, 2004), p. 74.
35
   Ivi, p. 75.

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in a war context anticipates the role played throughout the whole film by the
environmental sounds of the factory: thematic connotation, narrative framing,
emotional reinforcement, a marker of perceptual intensification.36


     The Senses in Context

   Film in Germany had a longstanding tradition of experimenting in sound and
music. Following Brecht’s and Weill’s legacy, authors like Kluge and Straub and
Huillet challenged the rhetorical conventions of German speaking, and tried
even to translate musicological questions and urges, from Bach’s counterpoint to
Schönberg’s serialism, into an abstract, visual concept.37 A red line of contrapuntal
use of the soundtrack against the image could be traced back from comedian
Karl Valentin’s shorts and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s version of Brecht’s Threepenny
Opera (Die 3 Groschen-Oper, 1931), to the first distancing and thrilling use of
electronic music in the soundtrack of Rosemary (Das Mädchen Rosemarie, Rolf
Thiele, 1958). As we could show, Rainer Werner Fassbinder got started in this
tradition, and made wide use of spatiotemporal dislocation techniques; but he
enhanced it in his late work by embedding the novel sound design of this decade
and thus constructing a more complex, immersive experience of emotional
plenitude. Here he excelled: making modernism visible and audible for the
masses. Bringing hopelessness to the mainstream. The political instance of the
sound/image counterpoint became a personal cry of despair, the lack of meaning
of the serialized sound-image caused the destruction of the sounding body of his
heroines, and finally of the living body of the author himself.
   This kind of enhanced, multi-layered spatiality was a novelty in German
film, and its appearance on German television was even more unprecedented.
Thomas Elsaesser acknowledged Fassbinder’s importance in reconciling the
romantic ideal of authorship with the commercial needs of the film industry, and
his brilliant tactic was being part of it while at the same time remaining on its
margins. The same is true of his relationship with the German public television
broadcaster.38 Jane Shattuc has studied this relationship in depth, underlining
the difficulty experienced by the wider TV audience with the complexity and
literariness of Berlin Alexanderplatz, although some of the viewers’ commentaries
she quoted need to be more properly understood. When the series appeared



36
   Cfr. Amedeo D’Adamo, Empathetic Space on Screen: Constructing Powerful Place and Setting
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 119.
37
   ‘As in twelve-tone musical technique, then, the importance of the camera in Moses and Aron
(Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, 1974) thus equalizes its elements, flattens them out in visual
space, and emphasizes their abstract interrelatedness’, Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The
German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University
of California Press, 1995), p. 149.
38
   Elsaesser, New German Cinema, p. 110.

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       Engaged Soundscapes: The Emotionalized Sound of Rainer Werner Fassbinder


them to be ‘badly lit’ and incomprehensible,39 they were rejecting precisely those
stylistic properties that Fassbinder was transferring from art cinema to popular
television, properties which would inevitably become the norm in the following
decades: low key photography as the color gradience of intensified continuity,
sound-mixing as its sounding board — that is to say, the audiovisual design of
the future, “emotionalized” and multi-layered mediascapes.
   The aim of this contribution is, indeed, not to establish an individual primacy
or reconsider critical evaluations. Irrespective of its importance in the history
of film aesthetics, Fassbinder’s work shows us, as a relevant case study, how a
wider trend towards a “sensuous turn” in cultural production could be rooted in
film production practices, in the social sharing of audio-visual technologies, and
particularly in the birth of modern sound engineering.
   The age of the intensification of audiovisual languages has indeed corresponded
to a new conception of our listening experience. Since the 1950s, French
musicology considered the production of sounds as the way to a technologically
mediated relationship with the reality of things, as in the research of Schaeffer
on concrete musical objects. Subsequently, the translation of Merleau-Ponty’s
The Visible and the Invisible in 1968 also opened up to the English-speaking
world a phenomenology that imagined sound as a physical event, an almost
organic process of positioning the subjective body in the world: the matrix of
any embodied relation in Don Ihde’s philosophical trajectory.40 Vibration and
movement, the time-line which gives life to film images, in Michel Chion’s view.41
At the same time, perception psychology could re-discover situatedness and
object-relation, paving the way in Gibson’s work for a subsequent ecological
psychology of hearing.42 Everyday sounds are complex and rich in redundant
and complementary information, and from the 1970s on film sound engineers
would have reproduced their whole resonating capability.
   As a fact, together with stereophonic sound reproduction, multi-track
recording and the introduction of a multi-layered spatiality in film destroyed a
notable tradition of skepticism about audition’s spatiality and objectivity, which
had its highest point in 1959 with Strawson’s famous discussion of sounds as
pure experiences.43 Modern film sound involves, on the contrary, experiencing or
perceptually representing such spatial characteristics as direction and distance,


39
    Jane Shattuc, Television, Tabloids, and Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 163–91.
40
   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1968); Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1976).
41
   Cfr. Chion.
42
   James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966);
Id., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979); William W.
Gaver, ‘What in the World Do We Hear? An Ecological Approach to Auditory Source Perception’,
Ecological Psychology, 5 (1993), 1–29.
43
   Peter F. Strawson, Individuals (London and New York: Routledge, 1959).

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                                Massimo Locatelli


and is phenomenologically linked to relational intelligence: through its spacial
affordances, the soundscapes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s late work showed
to a wider audience how audition and the senses are concretely grounded in
life experience and perception. And, finally, even more clearly than in other,
contemporary examples, by placing the body at the very heart of his visual
and auditory representation strategies, the German author influentially helped
to move popular film and television into the age of emotional reflexivity. The
present time.




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