MERCHANT OF THE FOUR SEASONS

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER, 1971

R.W. Fassbinder's early works, an astonishing eleven films between 1969 and 1971, were all "Anti-Theatre" collaborations, but after the chaotic production of Whity, the troupe began to implode. So Fassbinder slowed the pace to concentrate on one film, The Merchant of Four Seasons. It proved to be a significant artistic and critical breakthrough. 

The film tells the story of Hans Epp, a simple fruit vendor despised by his family and rejected by the object of his love, a woman with nothing but contempt for his lowly profession. Instead, he marries Irm, a woman of a lower social standing. His business grows, but a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority and futility gradually leads him into a self-destructive downward spiral. 

Epp is a metaphor for the condition of post-war Germany, the embodiment of existential pain. Many who knew Fassbinder said that Hans Epp had more than a hint of autobiography, that he mirrored Fassbinder's insecurities about being unlovable and unable to love. Like many of his films, Merchant is unmistakably singular and uncompromising.

Fassbinder believed that humankind is a "necessary destructive presence in the world" and that absolute freedom was impossible without facing this fact. One way or another, most of his films were examinations of existential trauma and, above all, the need for love, which is withheld from many of his characters and often weaponised. 

He wanted viewers to approach his films actively rather than passively, so he regularly employed Brechtian distanciation to create a deliberate schism between film and viewer. Performances might either be stripped of emotion or saturated with it, deliberately stilted with awkward silences, dead time, and exaggerated line deliveries. He wanted the viewer to reflect on what they were watching and the act of watching.

Two scenes illustrate Fassbinder's unique approach to open-form distanciation. In the first, Hans and Irm joyfully laugh about their business success, and in the second, Hans laughs with an old army buddy. In each case, the laughter is exaggerated out of proportion to an unsettling degree, making it difficult to identify with the characters or the scene in a conventional closed-form sense. 

The exits are blocked for many of Fassbinder's characters, outsiders who live on the margins of bourgeois society, unable to comprehend the forces that constrain them. Their stories reflect the frustration and violence of suffering the pernicious toxicity of middle-class hypocrisy. Epp's self-loathing is most poignant in the scene where he drinks himself to death, an act of abject failure that is paradoxically a moment of profound self-affirmation, where, at last, he acquires something resembling dignity. 

Epp's drinking buddies look on in hopeless, silent incomprehension, alluding to a dispossessed nation with either nothing to say or no voice to say it with, frozen by spiritual, emotional and moral apathy. Incapable of giving or receiving love, Hans has just enough force of will for one final act of defiance — to reject the world that, even in death, mercilessly mocks and rejects him.

The Merchant of Four Seasons reveals what Fassbinder called his preference for "truth-telling over story-telling". Like Hans Epp, Fassbinder knew that without love, we perish. His deliberate use of formal discontinuities never outweighed the compassion and searching integrity of his work. His films may be pessimistic but always empathetic, sincere, and insightful. His characters were never ridiculed, even at their most despicable. Their inner conflicts invariably demand tragic melodrama to be satisfactorily resolved. In this respect, Fassbinder's films mirror a nation in denial, in which undemanding anti-intellectual escapism conceals a traumatised culture. 

Today, where a fascination with the skid marks of celebrity dominates the popular media, popcorn rules. By leading viewers by the nose, telling them what to think and feel, most closed-form movies function as a form of social engineering, frequently pedalling spurious, highly influential mindsets that go largely unchallenged. Fassbinder contrasted the "normalising properties" of popular movies with his cinema of vicious circles, where his formal discontinuities exposed the mechanisms of political and social disenfranchisement and championed non-conformity, sexual and racial otherness, and the right to be exactly who you are.

His life and early death were in complete concert with the tone and trajectory of his subject matter, as articulate a howl as anything he put on film. It has been said that art can only be justified by life, but Fassbinder may have preferred the opposite view, that life can only be justified by cinema.