Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64303 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-06-10
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: German
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 88 minutes

Amazon.com
If not among the better-known films by the gifted German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fear of Fear is nevertheless an absolutely characteristic work. A housewife, locked into a dull life with her distracted husband and two small children (plus nattering mother-in-law and sister-in-law living in the apartment upstairs) finds herself seized by uncontrollable anxiety. Although the wife has an affair with a doctor, there is little conventional melodrama; instead, Fassbinder strips away plot mechanics in favor of a complete identification with the woman's mysterious angst. The central role is tailor-made for one of RWF's favorite leading ladies, Margit Carstensen, whose regal cheekbones and elegant air belie the instability beneath the skin. Fassbinder's eye is exacting--the apartment is a dead-on purgatory of bourgeois nothingness--and his framing shows the influence of his Hollywood idol, Douglas Sirk. This is a small work in the bulging Fassbinder canon, but it's impeccably realized. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Powerful, vividly-designed psychological drama
Although rarely seen since its premiere on German television in 1975, Fear of Fear is a powerful, vividly-designed psychological drama about a housewife fighting her descent into madness. Margit Carstensen, one of Fassbinder's greatest divas (title roles in Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant; Martha), gives a spellbinding, richly-nuanced performance in the lead. In fact, every aspect of the film is inspired, and it deserves a prominent place in Fassbinder's filmography; Wellspring's DVD has very good image and sound quality.

Although Fear of Fear brings to mind the plays of Strindberg (Fassbinder had recently staged Miss Julie), and the films of such disparate directors as Douglas Sirk (his great 50s melodramas, like All That Heaven Allows) and Ingmar Bergman (his psychologically complex films like Persona), this is pure Fassbinder. It is one of his dramatically clearest yet most emotionally, even politically, ambiguous pictures. As a "case study" focused on one character, it bears comparison to The Merchant of Four Seasons; while in its dissection of the social pressures which bear on the individual, it is comparable to Effi Briest. Yet in its compassion, it looks back to the film Fassbinder had just finished, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven. What sets Fear of Fear apart from those other extraordinary works is that he goes even further in internalizing the depiction of his protagonist, to the extent that the design, not to mention all of the subjective shots, reflect Margot's singular point of view.

Part of the film's power comes from the paradox that, while Fassbinder focuses with laserlike intensity on one woman, he simultaneously suggests a wealth of resonances which can be interpreted - by those who are so inclined - as allegorical (Margot as "everywoman"), or even existential (the particularity of one individual in an unknowable universe, vividly dramatized through image and sound). Always political, Fassbinder also makes the film suggest, without any ideological sledgehammering, the complex interplay of the individual, family, and society. Philosophy and politics aside, the film has a gripping immediacy; and I could feel the truth in it, as it brought to mind a friend who has endured experiences akin to Margot's.

This "little" film achieves so much because of Fassbinder's mastery of both drama and visual/aural style. Its momentum comes not only from its sharp focus on Margot, but from Fassbinder's taut and elliptical screenplay, which omits several traditionally expected scenes (although I never found it confusing). Some people may find the characters surrounding Margot to be underdeveloped. But this is a highly subjective film, relentlessly focused on her, and that is how she perceives them. The shallow visual field is so effective because it reflects Margot's perceptions; it helps us feel what she feels about her surroundings. He also makes extensive use of mirrors (as in Effi Briest and Chinese Roulette). Margot's image is duplicated, and reduplicated; but ironically seeing her from so many different angles does not give us - or her - any more insight into her fractured nature. Even more visceral is Fassbinder's motif of fragmented people, showing them literally, and metaphorically, cut off. The narrow hallways and doors block characters from each other and, by implication, themselves. Fassbinder is especially deft at using this device to develop, through purely visual means, the enigmatic - and poignant - character of Bibi, Margot's young, often silent, daughter.

The final section of the film, beginning when Margot enters a mental hospital, feels a bit rushed. But it also introduces the fascinating theme of Margot's connection with other women, for the first time in the film, including a caring psychiatrist and, more ambiguously, another mental patient. Although some people see the final scene as Margot's return to madness, there could also be a tentatively hopeful interpretation. Not only have we seen Margot's progress at the hospital, but the sinister Mr. Bauer (Kurt Raab) who stalks her throughout the film (he functions as her doppelganger) is gone for good. Also, and I know this is a stretch, her surname Staudte is similar to the German Staude, the word for a perennial plant - which dies down in winter but, a few months later, springs back to life. Maybe, just maybe, with her recent developments, Margot can leave fear behind and begin her personal reintegration.

A Gem
This is one of Fassbinder's most finely crafted films. The illness of the protagonist (Margit Carstenson) leads to just as many questions about the people around her as it does to herself. Thus, this is a statement about society at large and not just a personal portrait. Fassbinder, I have read, was greatly fascinated with Freudian psychology - and some of this passion we can see in the structure of his films.
This is a middle-period Fassbinder film - but one which, while embracing a similar theme to 'Martha', I think is very forward looking.
I admire this film - and agree with Vincent Canby (New York Times) when he calls Fassbinder a major artist.

ARTISTRY
This underrated little film by Fassbinder is a mesmerizing look at a housewife's descent into anxiety, depression, alcohol and prescription drug addiction, adultery, and madness. I found it better than Polanski's "Repulsion," which treats a similar theme in a much more sensational manner. By comparison, "Fear of Fear" is quiet and understated, but mightily evocative of the hell that bored, unfulfilled housewives sometimes go through when they find no other outlets other than housework. Margot's experience in this film closely parallels what Sylvia Plath (whose journals I just read) went through before her suicide, being caged-in both by social conventions and psychiatric problems. I know the film sounds like a downer, but the images on the screen are so compelling that I couldn't help but be struck by Fassbinder's sense of composition and style, which -- be forewarned -- is somewhat static compared to the frenzied, fast-paced editing we have become used to nowadays (for instance in "Run Lola Run," which, by the way, I loved). I had heard Fassbinder described as a genius, yet the films I had seen -- "Love is Colder than Death," "Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, "Berlin Alexanderplatz," and a few others -- had left me in doubt. But now that I have seen "Fear of Fear," "The Merchant of Four Seasons," and "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" I am no longer in doubt: Fassbinder was gifted. There's much about Fassbinder I don't like: women are always getting beaten or slapped in his movies, he likes to film blood and even animals dying (not in "Fear of Fear," thankfully, although there's a scene where the leading lady cuts her arm and it looks very real), and his dialogue is often banal. Yet he is a visual artist of the first order. Although he came out of the theater (he was a stage actor in Munich), his strong suit isn't his writing or his acting but his masterful eye, his impressive sense of compostition. Visually, he seems to leave nothing to chance. Every piece of furniture, evey lamp and ashtray, every line and angle, is exactly where Fassbinder wants it to be on the screen. In terms of his greatness, he is more accurately classed with painters and photographers. With Fassbinder, you have to use your eyes, which is why I recommend watching his films without subtitles -- even if you don't understand German. If you only expect to watch a Fassbinder film once, don't waste your time reading when you should be feasting on what he frames for you up on that screen. I have found that Fassbinder appeals more to visual artists than to those who demand a great story, but "Fear of Fear" is an instance where both the script and his visual sense appealed to me (although even here the latter much more than the former). Not that he's out there shooting majestic nature scenes or beautiful landscapes. He usually works with mundane -- even squalid -- environments: bathrooms, supermarkets, drug stores, ungroomed bodies, faces that only a mother could love. But he could also film a bouquet of flowers like nobody's business, and some of his close-ups (for instance, of Margit Carstensen) rival Ingmar Bergman's. Is Fassbinder as great as Bergman? It's kind of unfair to ask that question considering that Fassbinder died in his thirties (he was 36, I think). In terms of Bergman's body of work, that would only take us up to "A Lesson in Love." God only knows what marvels Fassbinder would have created in his fourties and fifties. We might not have his "Persona" (much less his "Fanny and Alexander"), but we do have reels and reels of interesting juvenilia and about half a dozen or so mature works that are worth close study. Fassbinder's visual sense sometimes gets a bit gaudy, but not here: "Fear of Fear" expresses his mature style nearly at its sharpest. As if he knew he would die young, Fassbinder was a workaholic who undertook several projects a year. Sometimes one gets the feeling that less would have been more. There's some drab Fassbinder out there that might turn you off, but "Fear of Fear" is a good place to start.