Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Das Kleine Chaos (A Little Chaos) / 1966

going nowhere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Das Kleine Chaos (A Little Chaos) / 1966 

 

If Fassbinder’s short, also of 1966, A City Tramp is about an outsider who is abused by others, A Little Chaos is about outsiders who abuse the society itself, the two shorts almost bookending each other as polar opposites.

     The latter work is very much influenced by Godard and Truffaut and The New Wave in the transgressive behavior of its three major figures, Theo (Christoph Roser), Marite (Marite Greiselis), and Franz (Fassbinder) who make even attempting to sell subscriptions to a magazine service seem like a kind of accostment. 

      The work, in fact, shares a great deal of energy with Fassbinder’s 1969 feature, Love Is Colder than Death with a similar trio of two males and a female, evidently living together in a kind of sexual threesome, going on a robbery like it were simply an adolescent spree.

      In this case, when the trio runs out of money, they simply hit up on a middle-aged woman (Greta Rehfeld), Franz putting her through a Nazi-like interrogation about where she hides her money while also physically threatening her with a gun and even, for a few moments, hints at possible sexual abuse without actually carrying it out.

       Unlike Love Is Colder, however, there is no deep homoerotic attachment to or interplay between Theo and Franz, Marite being the center of both their rather meaningly sexual activities, consisting simply of kisses.

        The humor of this work exists in its final scene, after they have found the money and are busy splitting it up between them, each of them sharing how they plan to spend it—Marite announcing that she will “buy a dress and makeup and so on,” Theo hoping to buy a teddy bear for his boy, and Franz, given that his played by Fassbinder, predictably planning “to go to the movies.”—the most ordinary and bourgeoise choices they could possibly make.

        In fact, these choices mirror the very first scene, where like all consumer-crazed city dwellers, the three of them jump into their small Volkswagen to drive a few more yards down the street, as they could possibly walk that short distance or had any real place to go.

        Presumably, after the money is spent from this robbery, they simply have to hit up on some other poor woman or older man a little bit further down the street.

      

Los Angeles, January 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).