Fassbinder and Spectatorship

It is nearly impossible to imagine a discussion of film as an ideological medium which does not focus at some point on Hollywood cinema. Hollywood's domination of world-wide film production, ranging from approximately the post-World War I years through the 1940s, firmly established the film industry within the laws of monopoly capitalism. Hollywood cinema has thus been a central factor in understanding the nature of art in capitalist society as a kind of merchandise to be consumed. It is as well through Hollywood cinema that we understand the cinema, in ideological terms, as an apparatus, i.e., as a of machinery which delivers and produces on the scale of commodity production. Hollywood cinema, too, has defined what most of us expect from films and how we watch them. Such expectations and attitudes include terms like pleasure, fantasy, identification, enjoyment and, of course, the most common of all, entertainment. That these too are a part of the ideology of cinema is beyond question. What is questionable is whether they are ideological in the way that the conditions of Hollywood production and distribution imply. The model of a cinematic apparatus perhaps suggests that pleasure in watching a film is the simple result of manipulation, suggesting in turn the equation of cinema with a passive vehicle for bourgeois ideology at its hegemonic best. But if we focus on that vast network of the cinematic apparatus, comprised of a series of relations between, for instance, industry and art, production and finished film, viewer and screen, then it is possible to speak of the ideology of cinema as a multi-dimensional process. The cinematic apparatus is both an extensive business machine, an appendage of corporate power and the complex technical procedures which determine how spectators watch and enjoy films. Rainer Fassbinder's 1974 film Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) raises many crucial issues concerning the relationship between film and ideology, issues which focus precisely on the conditions of film viewing: the relationship between viewer and screen, the Hollywood legacy and the entertainment factor, and the possibilities of radical social analysis within a conventional narrative framework. Ali tells the story of an unlikely romance between a German cleaning woman in her fifties and a Moroccan immigrant worker twenty years her junior. Such beginnings are reminiscent in a general way of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. The two meet in a Munich bar, the Asphalt Pub,