A politização da arte no cinema de Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Abstract

This monograph analyzes the possibility of applying the concept of politicization of art, coined by german philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) in his text of 1935, entitled The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in the cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), film director and his fellow countryman, through two of his works: Ali: fear eats the soul, 1974, and Fox and his friends, 1975. Both Benjamin and Fassbinder had strong opinions about the Seventh Art and about the possibility in which it could encompass. With an optimistic outlook, Benjamin envisioned a powerful tool for the enlightenment of the subjective and material conditions of subjects through cinema, being a huge step for the future revolution of the working class. His vision was marked by the cinema of the time, the last expression of the german cinema that the philosopher observed in his life, being precisely that of the Nazi Era. Fast forward some decades after the death of the philosopher in 1940, the cinema went through other phases, culminating in a relatively freer and bolder filmmaking, the new german cinema, a mark of post-war cinema, whose greatest representative was Fassbinder. With Germany divided, films from both sides (capitalist and socialist) manifested characteristics specifics to their ideologies. The movies that were chosen to compose the research that resulted in this monograph reveal a discreet political content of somebody who dedicated himself body and soul to his art, and who understood that she could be made impossible by censorship and internal implications of his own country. Despite the disparity between the decades, we understand that Fassbinder’s cinema presents characteristics of a continuity of german cinema that was not seen by Benjamin, but which follows precepts favorable to his 1935 work. Therefore, our goal is to investigate if Walter Benjamin’s philosophical intuitions regarding cinema, especially those referring to the concept of politicization of art, were verified as true when applied to selected films by film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.