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Originally Posted by demonrail666

I like Merchant of Four Seasons a lot but I'm struggling to find anything very funny in it, although it's a while since I watched it.

And yeah, definitely check Sirk out, although I'm slightly at a loss as to why Fassbinder is so often described as being a very Sirkian filmmaker. All his interviews have him talking about what a huge influence he was but I just don't see it translated into the films themselves. A bit like when Tarantino goes on about his debt to Mario Bava. Cool but where is it in the actual films?

the funny (to me) & sirk actually relate.

according to the critic (some professor of german) (sorry i have already sent back the disc and i can't rewatch it) fassbinder in the 60s made very cold very intellectual films in which there wasn't a lot of love for the characters.

around 1970 he discovers sirk and adopts similar techniques to portray an excess of emotion (previously absent in him): very artificial lighting, very calculated mise en scene, exaggerated acting, etc.

 

the difference (i think) is that while sirk apparently made these things in earnest (i don't know, having not seen) fassbinder seems to use them for ironic & critical effect. the take for me seems to be that having feelings makes you vulnerable to exploitation, and a display of feelings is never innocent but rather part of a larger machinery of social repression.

i watched this interview after teh movie so i didn't go back to corroborate but can say some things i remember noticing: these zoom-ins into closeup. the massive tears in the wife's face that look like she was splattered with egg white (see photo), the whole story with that little record he plays over. his "true love" dressed like some butterfly. the lashing in the war flashback-- looks more like a bedroom scene. the drinking and throwing of chairs and everything-- it's all over the top, but it doesn't sweep you. then at the very final scene, that very deadpan "okay" comes in total contrast from eeeeeeeeverything that has happened before. and of course we laughed at this. it's the realpolitik beneath the great display of feeling.

and the reason why i think all this is funny is that, while the pain of the characters is supposed to be authentic, the display of emotion is highly artificial and self-conscious, and seems to point at something else, to look at social structures and ideologies beneath feelings, as way as ways in wich people manipulate and mindfuck each other. it's the opposite of a "romantic" film in which the focus is on the feelings and everything else is an excuse. here the feelings are deprived of their finality through exaggeration-- we see past them, into other machinery in operation.

in some other type of drama, a class difference between lovers is an obstacle to be overcome by love; here love can't overcome it and instead we end up looking at class prejudices very coldly. i'm not saying sirk may not do this either, as i've said i have not seen him, but OTHER films don't do that-- the princess marries the pauper, love triumphs, etc.

so i don't know how or to what end sirk used his exaggerated feeling, but in the case of fassbinder it appears to me to be very very brechtian. distancing rather than demanding instant identification. so a lot of the feeling comes across as massive contrivance-- to use or manipulate someone for example. and the sister-as-greek-chorus helps us see that.

in the case of the film-- it shows completely how love is given or withdrawn according to performance of class standards. performance = love. that is completely cold and completely horrible, and that's the supersad part.

and yes, while i feel for the characters, i've always found brechtian irony very funny. no?? on top of the supersad, you can also laugh. a bit like his friend in the war-- "let's go save him" "no, wait, let's see what happens." i guess his friend is a stand in for the audience, too. "you're a pig". ha ha ha ha. yes. oh and absurdities like the encounter with the friend in the bar/restaurant-- they look at each other, he drops the plates he's about to serve, they embrace, walk hand in hand, we're left looking at the broken plates on the floor. hilarious.

plus, this totally ex-post-facto, and completely arbitrary, which only adds to a brechtian read-- the main character looks to me a lot like george costanza, ha ha ha. similar face, body type, even some attitudes.