Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
(Angst essen Seele auf)

Screening on Film

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
With Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin.
West Germany, 1973, 35mm, color, 94 min.
German with English subtitles.

This is melodrama with a capital M, and a beautiful homage to the great German-American director Douglas Sirk—particularly to his film All That Heaven Allows and its attendant social commentary. The story had already been foreshadowed in Fassbinder’s The American Soldier, in which a maid tells the sad story that transpires here: of an older German woman who meets and marries a Moroccan guest worker twenty years her junior. Fassbinder brilliantly articulates class and sexual politics by showing how once the prejudices surrounding the controversial couple begin to lessen, their relationship starts to unravel. His famous interior long shots are perfectly integrated and the colors masterfully contrasted with the grim reality they adorn.