A Room of Their Own: Thoughts on the film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
by David Fellerath

Interview with the director, Katja Hill

Kit Weinert's overview of Fassbinder's life in theater 1967-1976.

A Room of Their Own

Thoughts on the film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
by David Fellerath

"I would like to build a house with my films," Rainer Werner Fassbinder once noted. "Some are the cellar, others the walls, still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house."

Fassbinder made 43 films and wrote a handful of plays before he died in 1982 at the age of 38. If his house had 43 rooms, then The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was the stifling, airless and perfumed boudoir.

PVK began its life as a play, which Fassbinder produced in 1971 with his theater company and which he dedicated to Margit Carstensen, who would play Petra in both stage and film versions. Over a period of ten days in January, 1972, Fassbinder, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and a cast of six commenced filming of PVK in an artists' colony in Bremen, West Germany. To put this shoot in context, over the preceding three calendar years, Fassbinder and his company had made 12 films, and at this point the films were only just starting to acquire a commercially pleasing technical polish.

Although Fassbinder's films were beginning to be noticed on the international film scene by this time, PVK was still very much the work of a scrappy little theater company. As is the case with underfunded stage productions, some of the parts were filled by actors who were the wrong ages for their parts. Margit Carstensen 1 , at 31, was at least a decade younger than the middle-aged Petra. Gisela Fackeldey, who plays Valerie, Petra's mother, was a youthful 48, while Hanna Schygulla 2 , at 28 years of age, was a few years too old (and, truthfully, a few pounds too heavy) for the role of Karin, the faithless young model. Such is the power of their performances, however, and the audacity of Fassbinder's conception, that it doesn't matter.

In its form--a chamber drama featuring a cast of women-- PVK harkens back to Clare Booth Luce's The Women , 1950s Douglas Sirk melodramas such as Imitation of Life and All that Heaven Allows and, in a more modernist vein, the excoriating psychodramas that were coming from Sweden's Ingmar Bergman. Indeed, much commentary on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant tends to focus on its camp aspects (Women! Clothes! Catfights!), but Fassbinder's film has more than a little in common with those of Bergman, another taskmaster who inspired fear, reverence and submission in his actors.

In particular, PVK bears notable kinship with such Bergman efforts as The Silence , Persona and Cries and Whispers , films which featured different combinations of Bergman's most celebrated female performers: Harriet and Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann. In these films, as in PVK , women enact power struggles: the good (and repressed and lesbian) sister and the earthy, carnal one in The Silence , the vampiric mute actress and her naïve, increasingly resentful caretaker in Persona , and the emotionally, spiritually and sensually polarized three sisters of Cries and Whispers .

The central triangle of PVK is that of Petra, Karin and Marlene. Although the story is, notoriously, that of a power-mad and love-crazed fashion designer's passion for a young model, the story really has little to do with lesbianism in its literal sense. The choice of an all-female cast is an aesthetic one: It suits Fassbinder's interest in Sirkean melodrama, and the naked emotions on display are well-suited to female performers and the conventions of "women's pictures."

Instead, Fassbinder is concerned with the interplay between passion and power. As the metaphorical pants-wearing businesswoman and artist, Petra is in command of her haute couture shop, an enterprise that seems to depend on the uncomplaining toil of the mute Marlene. Petra has had romantic disappointments at the hands of men, but in Karin, she sees someone she can seduce and dominate by the sheer force of her power and personality. But, as she discovers, the heart trades in a different currency: Although Karin is ignorant and impecunious, it is she who has the power to break Petra's heart. As mighty as Petra is, she can't force Karin--or anyone else--to reciprocate her affections. In the end, Fassbinder's tale of a great woman's susceptibility to amour fou and catastrophic loneliness is part of a storied tradition that runs from Euripides' Medea to Marlowe's Edward II to Welles' Citizen Kane .

PVK was a great idea for a movie, but in truth, Fassbinder's film is a bit heavy on its feet, a result of the long takes he insisted on shooting, with the inevitably languorous line readings. So, watching it can be a bit of a chore--particularly in the first half hour or so, before the arrival of Karin. Fassbinder made a number of better films: Among them are Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975), Fox and His Friends (1975), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and perhaps others.

Still, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant holds a special fascination, and a special place in Fassbinder's canon. It may not be the most comfortable room in Fassbinder's house, but it is one of the most boldly designed, bravely conceived and as such, one of the most unforgettable.

footnotes:

1 Although Margit Carstensen has been overshadowed by the more glamorous Hanna Schygulla, she is a hard-working, gifted actress who played roles large and small in 16 films with Fassbinder. In addition to PVK , her most notable films with him include Martha (1974), Fear of Fear (1975), Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven , The Third Generation (1979) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). She is a busy actress to this day, and she recently appeared in Crispin Hellion Glover's It is Fine. Everything is Fine! which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

2 Hanna Schygulla was Fassbinder's first and most important artistic friendship. The two met in a Munich drama school in the mid-1960s. Fassbinder was there out of necessity--there was no place to study film, and he needed to begin a dramatic apprenticeship somewhere. Schygulla, on the other hand, was bored with her conventional course of study at university, and was looking to shake up her life (and irritate her parents). The two formed a fast friendship born of a mutual distaste for their poseur classmates and the benighted pedagogical methods at the school. According to Fassbinder's own essay, "Hanna Schygulla--Not a Star, Just a Vulnerable Human Being Like the Rest of Us," drama school was utter hell: "These Wednesday [improvisation classes] were demonstrations of the greatest desperation on the one hand and the most brutal sadism on the other. Rarely have I seen human beings behave so ruthlessly, so scornfully and contemptuously toward other human beings." Fassbinder goes on to write, immodestly, that "we were also considered the two most interesting and gifted people at the school--difficult people, to be sure, but endowed with the most promising, though perhaps abnormal, indeed rather alarming, talent." After a year together at school, the duo drifted apart for a couple of years--and Fassbinder confesses that he even forgot her name. However, he tracked her down in time for his first feature, Love is Colder than Death (1969), and their partnership was renewed. They made 20 films together, a collaboration that survived a period of estrangement in the mid-1970s before they reached their international apogee with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979).

April 2007 interview with Katja Hill

director and adapter of Little Green Pig's "The Bitter Tears Of Petra von Kant"

PIG: Give us a thumbnail sketch of the plot of The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant.

KH: We meet Petra, a fashion designer, who is very passionate about her art and yet doesn't have a lick of work ethic to do anything about it. She gets other people to do her bidding for her, most notably her very quiet friend, Marlene; and soon enough we encounter a new love interest in Petra's life, Karin Thimm, a young up-and-coming beauty who wants to be an actress and a model and ends up using Petra to get herself forward in her career. Basically it's a story about the world's biggest liar being one-upped by an even bigger liar.

PIG: So what do you know about Rainer Werner Fassbinder?

KH: Well, he was a very determined guy who wasn't going to let other people tell him that he wasn't going to make great art. He was rejected from film school, got into theatre school, he ended up using his tremendous knowledge of theatre to make wonderful films. He made, I think, 42 films in his young life. That's more movies than Shakespeare wrote plays, which is pretty amazing, and Fassbinder died younger. On average it ended up breaking down to about one movie every 100 days that he produced in his career...

PIG: But he had much more access to cocaine.

KH: Riiiiight...

PIG: Than Shakespeare did.

KH: People always emphasize that, you know: he was this tremendous, rowdy party-er; he had to have his cocaine and his salaries in cash so he could support his 30 grams a day habits, something ridiculous like that. But you can't deny the fact that the man made great art. It's as though he knew he had very little time to do it.

PIG: What attracted you to this story?

KH: I wanted to do a play that featured all women and wasn't Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues or Quilters.

PIG: What themes interest you?

KH: I like that Fassbinder seems to be very interested in people who are living on the fringe of society. Outsiders who want to be insiders. He has a great tenderness for them that isn't sentimental and it's very interesting in theatre to see losers who try to win.

PIG: Is there a moral or overriding parable with this story?

KH: No.

PIG: "All People Are Bad"?

Pause as we try that one again.

PIG: Okay, but Karin has the most hope of going forward while Petra is mired in her own baggage, if I may mix that metaphor.

KH: It makes me think again and again of what Fassbinder was criticized for all the time: having some ambition. But there's absolutely no way that he could have created the art in his life that he did without ambition and that's true of all artists. The play touches on the necessary, helpful ruthlessness of artists which society would say is absolutely wrong. In the play when Karin gets what she needs from Petra which is a simple leg-up in the business and she starts to succeed and Petra turns into this mewling, puking slob saying, "Love me, love me, love me, stay with me!" Karin realizes that it's bad baggage, some people are just bad news, and she moves on and she's hated for it and vilified for it. But who's the survivor? Karin. Karin gets out. She has a certain vulpine knack for jumping on to the next thing when she can and when she should and there's nothing wrong with that. Fassbinder was on to something and he might have been saying something about himself too. All the insults from the press about his personal habits and his relations with his communal group of artists that he lived with, made theatre and later movies with...

PIG: You've personally found that to be the case with art?

KH: Yeah. I think it is ruthless, thankless work, no different if you're trying to make art here in North Carolina versus a city with greater arts resources. In fact you have to be even more ruthless down here because you don't have a huge society cheering you on, saying, "Art is great!" You have to do that for yourself and you have to pull the other artists that you believe in close to you and hang on tight. But I do it without the cocaine and without the rampant fist-fucking.

Don't put that on the web site!

PIG: That's goin' on there.

KH: Oh, God.

PIG: You're obviously into being very lady-like at all times: What about wanting to do a play with strong roles for women, as an actress yourself? What's the lay of the land these days?

KH: This is going to sound tremendously sexist of me but in my life I've been pretty frustrated by the fact that in the theatre if you want to make it as a woman you have to be at least five times stronger than about any male actor you're going to encounter. There have always been far fewer parts for women in classical and even modern theatre. I thought it would be so much easier to create a show that would benefit from the amount of female talent that we have available locally.

PIG: Is it any different working with an all-female cast?

KH: Of course we all sit around and talk about our periods.

PIG: Sure.

KH: I think there's been less aggression in the group about approaching the work but there's still a tremendous work ethic about getting it done and meeting goals by a certain time. There's a great communal spirit to it. It's not bitchy. At least not yet. It seems to be very supportive.

PIG: You did the adaptation and the translation?

KH: No, I didn't do the translation. I don't speak German. I speak "Pig-German" and that's indeed what Petra does too in the play.

PIG: How did you adapt it?

KH: Of course I watched the movie a million times then I read a plain-jane translation that I got my hands on and thought about what it was that was more appealing about the movie with its subtitles. Generally it was their brevity, the whole act of subtitling a movie is about "how do I get the right amount of words on the screen to represent the idea or gist of what's being said in these frames?" I think that's a really good tip as a playwright. "How can I say it in as few words as possible?"

PIG: And yet, this is very much in your voice?

KH: You think?

PIG: Yes.

KH: It's kind of "wack-a-doodle-doo". If Fassbinder met the Marx Brothers: that's kind of what I hoped to get through this production.

PIG: You're relatively new to directing. How have you found talking to actors? Is it difficult? Do you have to adjust yourself to different types of actor? Or can you speak one language to everybody?

KH: It's very difficult and I'm leaning very heavily on the crutches of what makes sense to me but I don't think that's necessarily a weakness. Even Elia Kazan said that he couldn't direct something if he couldn't understand it, so when I encounter something that's awkward or tricky I just try to think about what I'd try to do to make it simpler or more straightforward.

PIG: Do you speak in terms of action or emotion?

KH: I speak in terms of action and many times I tell the actors to do very specific things, with their fingers, or with their bodies. When you go into a theatre there tends to be a reverential tone, especially if you assume right away that this is going to be a very sad story about heartbreak and loss. It's hard to shake actors out of that attitude and tell them, "No, no, it's a great, big, funny story. Really. You'll give yourself much further to go if approach it from a humorous angle first." It makes me appreciate what actors do, to be on the other side of it and see how much they're putting out there and risking every night in rehearsal, not to mention performance.

PIG: This production has six costume designers, one for each character. How's that working out and where did that inspiration come from?

KH: I felt that this show would be almost impossible for one person to costume unless they had two years to do it. Nobody around here has two years to do that kind of thing. I also felt that because the costumes figure in so greatly into the force of the play I didn't want to run the risk of any one designer settling on a character as more important or their favorite. Everyone in this play should be somebody's favorite. We've had great success with that. The conversations I've had with designers about the characters have been almost giddy and I can't wait to see how it all comes together.

PIG: Hadn't you once said something about wanting the competition between the characters to mirror the competition between the designers, each striving for something more outrageous than the other?

KH: Yeah, dressing in this play is a competitive sport. Even in a lot of classical theatre from the Restoration period on forward there was never any "period behavior", just period clothing that informed your movement, your character, who you were. It's so true of these characters: they are what they wear. I thought it would be interesting to have six designers and a healthy sense of competition between them. To be working silently on their creations only to show up together on costume parade night and say, "This is what I have. What do YOU have? Bring it on!"

PIG: This quote from Racine about Eurypides' Phaedra reminded me of Petra:
"It possesses all the qualities required by Aristotle in a tragic hero, that is: the ability to arouse pity and terror. For Phaedra is neither entirely guilty nor entirely innocent."

KH: Very much so.

PIG: Why do we care about her?

KH: Well...

long pause

This music is killing me.

Kenny G-esque muzak has been playing in the cocktail lounge; maniacal laughter

It's KILLING me! The Kenny G! OK. "Why do we care about Petra von Kant?" She does it to herself and we all do. You know? She falls in love with the wrong person who ends up using her but the person who uses her ends up using her in a way that she (Petra) has already used other people herself. That way it's a karmic kind of justice to be brought down by another poseur.

PIG: Do we see ourselves in her or do we just laugh from the sidelines?

KH: Anybody who has fallen in love with the wrong person only to see it clear as day after the breakup what they should have noticed as red flags earlier on can relate to what Petra's going through. Everybody else in the play can see it coming except for Petra. She's blindsided by it. This vampire.

PIG: That's the slapstick.

KH: Yeah. Kenny G's still killin' me.

PIG: Kenny G. is killing us all.