Fear Eats the Soul

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 1974, his first major international award. It is the most distinctive of his early films and one of the founding texts of 20th-century European cinema's reckoning with race and class. Fassbinder loosely adapted Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), a film he had publicly named among his formative influences, and moved Sirk's American melodrama of a widow and her gardener to immigrant Munich.

Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), a sixty-year-old German cleaning lady widowed by World War II, takes shelter from the rain in a Munich bar full of Moroccan workers, drawn in partly by curiosity about the Arabic music she has heard. She ends up dancing with, and then marrying, Ali (El Hedi ben Salem, Fassbinder's partner at the time), a Moroccan mechanic in his thirties. The film then watches how her neighbours, her grown children, her colleagues at the cleaning company and the wider civic life of Munich respond to the marriage.

Fassbinder works in Sirkian melodrama grounded in social realism, with long static frames, theatrical staging and blocked compositions, and the screenplay grants both Emmi and Ali their dignity at every turn, which is a large part of why the film mattered so much to the European tradition of political cinema. His collaboration with the cinematographer Jürgen Jürges, and Mira's performance at its centre, make it one of the most distinctive achievements of New German Cinema.