Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Der Stadtstreicher (The City Tramp) / 1966

the undesired man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Der Stadtstreicher (The City Tramp) / 1966

 

Fassbinder’s earliest short film, The City Tramp, immediately calls up references to Chaplin’s “tramp.” But this figure, played by Cristoph Roser, is not at all Chaplinesque in his appearance or behavior, and his drunken loutishness reminds me far more of the unnamed starving tramp of Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel Hunger. Although Fassbinder himself connects his film to the French New Wave, in particular to Éric Rohmer’s Le Signe du lion (1962), which he described as having loved with it first appeared, this city tramp, like Hamsun’s figure, is a true loner who has none of the early society of Rohmer’s Pierre or even the later friendship of a figure like his Toto.

       Although there is nothing obviously homosexual about Roser’s character, one might even argue that he fits very nicely the image of the early version of the gay figures who are in the process of tortuously coming out such as in the 1940s films of Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger, individuals so isolated from the rest of society that they consider and symbolically undergo death.

 

        Fassbinder’s tramp is not only an outsider, but is a totally isolated drunk, who has absolutely no friends, the only individual who is even kind to him being a woman (played by later Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann) who he spontaneously accosts, asking if he might take a shower and kill himself in her bathroom, in a manner not dissimilar to his encounter with the figure in Hamsun’s book of Ylajali. Although she doesn’t permit him into her flat, after he sings he a strangely engaging song about how everything in Japan is so much smaller that elsewhere, she does eventually deliver him a sandwich.    

     The irony is that in Fassbinder’s short film, the Tramp is quite early on provided with the designated weapon, a gun he discovers on the street, the tool he needs to end his life. Similar to Hamsun’s unnamed journalist, however, he is at first too proud and determined to take advantage of it, and attempts to rid himself of the weapon, throwing into the trash. In a strange almost Kafka-like situation, however, the waitress who as observed him in her establishment illegally eating an apple he has pulled from his briefcase, discovers it and insists upon returning it to him, despite his attempts to reject it. And no matter how he would like to rid himself of the weapon, it keeps being returned to him with all of its potential of ending his life.

        In what might almost be perceived as a sexual comment, the Tramp tries to simply enter a public pissoir, but even there he is met with scorn (ironically by a man played by Fassbinder himself), sneered at, perhaps, even for his unattractiveness as a sexual being in a public loo. 

    And when he finally determines to kill himself, imagining, just as in the Anger film, his action as being connected to the martyrdom of Christ, the two men who have inexplicably been following him, suddenly steal the gun, taunt him, and mock him in what any gay might recognize as an incident of bullying. As he pretends to shoot them with his empty fingers, lying face down on the grass, we cannot but recognize the utter hopelessness of this societal outsider, not only a drunken misfit as this figure might first have been thought to be, but one among those, including gay men, who are dismissed by the society for not performing the roles expected of them—in this case enacting his own death.

      Roser’s figure ultimately, we perceive, is not just a derelict being, but an incompetent male who is not even welcome into the gay sexual underworld of the public bathrooms.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).