Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman

Review by Gary Kaill

‘Just sit down and write something rather than holding on to endless revision, rejig, reassessment,’ cautions Ian Penman at the start of Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors. ‘Let the ruin attract its own spectres.’ Wise words indeed, and counsel that immediately causes the book to claim an engaging duality: alert to its own distinct process (Penman set himself the challenge of completing it just a few months) while operating as a deeply personal (re)consideration of the work of German filmmaker and dramatist Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Though from the off, Penman is quick to debunk any notion of traditionally claimed authority: ‘I have no desire to be some kind of amiable, reasonable, curator of the archive.’

Despite these protestations, he once again calls on the agile scrutiny he applied to the musical radicals who featured in his exceptional 2019 collection It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track. Written in 450 (often very) short paragraphs, the book functions as a robust argument to look again for those of us who have often found Fassbinder’s ‘lifeless scene[s] surveilled by a diagnostician’s cold, insectile gaze’ difficult to love as much as we’d perhaps like to.

As a callow youth, like Penman, I too readied myself for Channel 4’s 1985 broadcast in full of the thirteen episode masterwork Berlin Alexanderplatz, but unlike him, distracted by the heat, damn ‘O’ levels and the arrival of Bruce Springsteen on these shores, I drifted away quickly. I had enough in the bank, I figured, having connected deeply the previous year with Edgar Reitz’s Heimat (shown on Saturday evenings by BBC2) and the odd Rohmer or Chabrol in the same slot. A foolish moment of distraction, in hindsight, having returned to the film many years later and been knocked sideways by its peculiar grandeur, the scale of its vision. (See also: Douglas Sirk, a huge influence on Fassbinder, whose 1950s Technicolor melodramas, too seemingly on-the-nose for me as a young movie fan, and now indispensable, are considered in fascinating depth here.)

This is where Penman’s writing, as ever, finds formidable purchase: in both how you find your way into an artist and their art, and how you find your way back in. He admits that ‘being stuck inside an airless room for what might be an eternity is not the best formula for watching films about… people stuck inside cheerless rooms tearing lumps out of each other for what might well be and eternity’ and so abandons his original plan to rewatch the entire filmography during lockdown. And in revisiting not just the work but his own previous convictions, the book takes on the quality of an invitation — most powerfully for the curious, rather than the converted. Certainly, there are a multitude of unexpected side-roads that serve to broaden its appeal: a delicious section on the work of Michael Mann that correctly takes issue with much of the director’s sprawling canon (including the ‘dream of perfectly designed sound, set, lighting, mood’ that is the maddening, yet forever irresistable Heat); the movie soundtracks of the great Jack Nitzsche; Netflix and our new, effortless consumption methods.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors gave me cause to, yes, count my Fassbinders (I think six, at most) but that, I think, is the least of its intentions — Penman argues against much of the work as eloquently as he stands up for it. But I’ll go back to them (and more) with a deepened curiosity and, I imagine (certainly if a joyous revisiting of a dozen or so Rohmers at the turn of the year is anything to go by), a greater appreciation. This is a wonderful thing — an elegantly assembled scrapbook brimming with insight and history, its creator daring to once again occupy multiple roles: critic, diarist, evangelist. Generous to a fault, and still balancing passion and level-headed caution with winning ease, Penman, you suspect, could apply illuminating angles of inquiry to a crate of unexposed film.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 19th April 2023

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