Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82), a leading figure in the New German Cinema, plays an important role in this story for two reasons. First, the films of his middle period show how traces of the Hollywood melodrama were incorporated into the European auteur male psychological drama. Second, a number of Fassbinder’s key films attest to his importance in the emergence of queer-themed cinema, even though his contribution in this regard has tended to be overlooked. Fassbinder, like his Italian counterpart, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was strongly motivated by political concerns, affirming, “I don’t make any films which aren’t political.” Accordingly, his films deliver a scathing indictment of class pretensions, divisions, and prejudices, and it is upon this dimension that most scholarship has concentrated. Fassbinder’s films are nevertheless also deeply personal, reflecting his belief that people need “to find their own opportunities for change.” For that to happen, he said, a filmmaker needs “to translate everything into something that relate[s] to himself and his own reality.” This chapter will explore the personal dimension of Fassbinder’s by analyzing three films from his middle period.

Fassbinder’s personality is marked by paradoxes: on one hand, he sought love and respect ceaselessly; on the other, he destroyed the possibility of achieving a lasting relationship by subjecting his lovers to outrageous cruelty. He was also highly self-destructive—a masochist who could be as cruel to himself as he was to others, damaging his body with an excessive cocktail of drugs and alcohol in a way that would ultimately result in his premature death at the age of 37. At the same time as he sank into ever-deeper self-loathing, he became a cult figure for leftist radicals and members of the counterculture who rejoiced in his contestatory politics and his provocative flouting of social norms. During his short career, he made forty-four films in a mere 14 years, not to mention his writing of numerous stage plays, his essays, or his videos. In both his personal and professional life, he was driven by a need to protect himself against fears that had been generated by a traumatizing upbringing. Melodrama was the genre he chose as the vehicle for his most penetrating fictional investigations of the forces that drove him.

In Italy, during the decade that followed Vittorio De Sica’s introduction of a new type of male-centered film, neorealism morphed into a form of neo-neorealism that shifted the focus from social concerns to the inner life of individuals. Picking up from De Sica’s demonstration of how the neorealist mode of filmmaking could be utilized to reveal men’s “secret dramas,” Pier Paolo Pasolini and other filmmakers from the next generation, like Vittorio De Seta, proceeded to show how this mode could be exploited for purposes of self-experience and self-projection, reflecting a deepening awareness of personal subjectivity.

Pasolini’s first feature film, Accattone (1961), provides a stunning example of how readily an ostensible concern with sociopolitical issues could be coopted to serve as a vehicle for the presentation of a “subterranean film” that was personal rather than political, without in any way diminishing the impact of the explicit political concern. The means by which he achieved this lay in a skillful manipulation of strategies that Pasolini saw as constituting the “cinema of poetry”—strategies that can be identified in virtually all the subsequent male melodramas that critics have judged to have affective power and aesthetic merit.

Critics have usually looked at Accattone through a political lens, focusing on how the film exposes the plight of the underprivileged Roman subproletariat from a left-wing perspective. Viewed in this way, the eponymous Accattone (literally low life or beggar) is seen as a victim of bourgeois callousness and indifference, his status as a martyr being underlined by the use of the emotive iconography of Christianity. Pasolini himself encouraged this interpretation by emphasizing in his comments on the film the heroic status of the characters. Referring to Accattone, he said:

François Truffaut, one of the directors who launched the French New Wave, occupies a special place in the history of the evolution of the male melodrama. By eclectically combining aspects of American cinema, Italian neorealism, and Bergmanesque psychological drama to express his own personal concerns, he developed a mode of filmmaking that, both in terms of its thematic preoccupations and stylistic techniques, has exerted a powerful influence on many filmmakers ever since. This new kind of film was first manifest in his coming-of-age drama The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959), followed by a series of films tracing the ongoing experience of Truffaut’s fictional avatar, Antoine Doinel (acted by Jean-Pierre Léaud): as a young adult in Antoine and Colette (Antoine et Colette, 1962); as a fiançé in Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968); as a married man in Bed and Board (Domicile conjugal, 1970); and finally as a divorcé in Love on the Run (L’Amour en fuite, 1979).

These films put into practice a manifesto that Truffaut had proclaimed boldly in 1957, while as yet still only an ardent cinephile and film critic:

In contrast to “the stereotyped representation of reality that had come to dominate French cinema” in what Truffaut referred to disparagingly as “le cinéma de papa” (Daddy’s cinema), he aimed for a kind of film that was extremely realistic, projecting a personal vision of things that were close to the filmmaker’s own experience. In this regard, he was candid in admitting the formative influence of Roberto Rossellini and Ingmar Bergman.

At first sight, it might seem strange to include a Hollywood melodrama in a book on international art cinema, but there are good reasons for doing so. Even though the majority of male psychological dramas that emerged after World War II are not primarily associated with Hollywood, many of them show traces of the influence of American popular genre films. Moreover, many of the films produced during the era of the studios frequently contained depictions of masculine emotional experience, especially in family melodramas and westerns. Notable examples include coming-of-age films such as Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which reveals the psychological torments and dysfunctional behaviors of a troubled teenager, and Westerns such as Shane (George Stevens, 1953), with its portrayal of a man who is trapped within the identity of the kind of person (a gunslinger) he wishes he had never become. Alfred Hitchcock was able to convert the noir thriller into a vehicle for evoking the state of mind of male protagonists gripped by apprehension and obsession in films like Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), and Douglas Sirk showed a series of tormented men in his romantic melodramas, such as Tarnished Angels (1957), and his family melodramas, such as Written on the Wind (1956). Moreover, the male-centered films among the Hollywood melodramas could readily be converted into vehicles for personal self-projection and identification, as in the cases of Alfred Hitchcock and Vincente Minnelli, both of whom paved the way for European auteur directors like Jacques Demy and Rainer Werner Fassbinder who exploited elements of Hollywood melodramas for the exploration of personal issues.

Vincente Minnelli was the Hollywood director who came closest to approximating the new focus on masculine interior life found in post–World War II European auteur cinema. This is particularly true of Tea and Sympathy (1956), an adaptation of the play of the same name by Robert Anderson produced on Broadway in 1953. Minnelli’s film is significant because it shows not only how the conventions of Hollywood melodrama could be made to serve as an instrument for personal self-representation on the part of the filmmaker, but also how adaptation itself could be converted to the uses of personal cinema.

The type of male melodrama created by the Italian neorealist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, and the indigenous model developed by Satyajit Ray present masculinities viewed primarily from a perspective that conjoins social considerations with the personal. At the same time as these directors were exploiting melodrama to show the deleterious effects of social attitudes on the lives of men who were marginalized or dislocated for one reason or another, another filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, was striking off in a very different direction. Rather than inviting spectators to observe the events in his films from an external perspective, Bergman chose instead to dramatize the very processes of a particular kind of masculine subjectivity—specifically, his own—anticipating the “inward turn” that would soon be evident in the films of neo-neorealists such as Vittorio De Seta (discussed earlier in Chapter 4). In the course of doing so, Bergman developed a form of cinema that would exert an enormous influence on the way in which the internal emotional experience of men would be depicted by subsequent filmmakers.

As one critic has observed, “most of Bergman’s films, including Persona (1966), are melodramas.” But they are melodramas with a difference, in that they combine the stylistic strategies of European art cinema with the characteristic preoccupations and situations of melodrama—problematic relationships, impediments to the attainment of happiness, and other triggers of strong emotion—to create what can best be described as a “melodramatic psychodrama”: the experiential revelation of an interior state of mind. Furthermore, Bergman’s films are distinguished by the fact that the vast majority of them are not adaptations of literary sources written by others, as is the case with Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Ray’s Apu Trilogy, but rather fictions of his own invention with roots embedded in his autobiography. Consequently, Bergman’s films are deeply and directly personal to an unprecedented degree, making him, along with François Truffaut, one of the most important founders of a new type of film that one might call “personal cinema”—films in which the fictive representation constitutes a displaced expression of the filmmaker’s own engagement with his or her psychic realities, in particular those deriving from his or her actual autobiographical experience, even though the lines of connection between the diegetic world of the film and this personal engagement may be obscured by the strategies whereby the filmmaker converts this experience into a symbolic figuration.

This book is the culmination of a long itinerary. It began several decades ago with my study of Thomas More’s Utopia—an attempt on my part to locate the origins of the social idealism that has inflected the evolution of my country. During the course of this investigation, I realized that More’s ambiguous, paradoxical work could not be separated from its author (who appears as a fictionalized character in the account of his imagined ideal society), and neither could the real-life More be separated from the circumstances that were prompting him to write the book in 1515. Intrigued by this connection between an author and his work, I extended the scope of my investigations to cover the whole of the sixteenth century in England, looking first at the way fiction was used to address political issues in the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs, and then the social and psychological purposes of the extensive imitation of Renaissance Italian literary sources that took place in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

In the course of these investigations, I discovered that various strategies of imaginative displacement were regularly being deployed in this literature, which led me to conduct further enquiries into what was motivating such a process, and what its functions were. The answers began to suggest themselves to me as a result of daily interchanges I had while a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, during 1987–88, with scholars like the anthropologist Rodney Needham and the psychoanalyst, translator and musicologist Alan Tyson, who pointed me in the direction of Sigmund Freud’s speculations on dreams and dreaming. Upon reading Freud’s crucial work, I quickly recognized that the process Freud ascribed to dreams involved mechanisms of displaced fictive invention that were similar to those I had been encountering in my studies of Tudor literature.

After a spell as a senior administrator in my home university, which deepened my insights into what Thomas More called “politic worldly drifts,” I decided to see whether the same mechanisms were operating in contemporary forms of fictive representation, and whether fiction was being used for the same purposes, particularly with reference to the literature and cinema of my own country, New Zealand.

While isolated examples of male melodrama can be found in films made prior to World War II, it was the discovery of a new form of cinematic language with the advent of Italian neorealism, combined with the traumatic social conditions in Europe in the aftermath of the War, that provided the impetus for the emergence of the male melodrama as a significant new genre. In France, Jean Renoir foreshadowed this new kind of male-focused movie with his film Toni (1935), which explores the emotional tribulations of a dispossessed Italian immigrant who, seeking employment in Southern France, falls in love with a woman whom he loses to another man and then is killed after taking the blame when she shoots her abusive husband. In his choice of theme, his use of non-professional actors, and his decision to shoot on-location rather than in a studio, Renoir provided a model that would directly encourage others, like Luchino Visconti, who had been Renoir’s assistant on the film, to make similar movies, such as Obsession (Ossessione, Luchino Visconti, 1943).

The new cinematic language made possible by lighter equipment and liberation from the need for studio-enabled directors, as Roberto Rossellini, one of the leaders of the neorealist movement, put it, “to speak in the most direct possible way.” That new manner of speaking, in turn, lent itself admirably to the portrayal of masculine emotional experience once the focus of attention shifted from a largely social and political perspective to one that viewed the political through the lens of the personal.

One can identify three stages by which this shift occurred. In the earliest phase, as in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945) and Paisan (Païsà, 1946), the primary motive was sociological and political. In Paisan, for example, which is set during the Italian campaign when the Allies invaded Italy from the south in an attempt to dislodge the occupying Nazi German forces, the film’s six episodes are all constructed around situations that depend for their cathartic effect on irony residing in the contrast between the perspectives and motives of the characters who are primarily involved in the events of each episode and the contradictory assumptions and intentions of those with whom the allied forces, and those who are on their side, come into conflict.