Fassbinder's shadow A rare film by a little-known director, a real rarity - for a sinophile there is always happiness, even when he does not meet expectations. Daniel Schmid is little known even among cinephiles, largely because his films, especially Shadow of Angels, are in the shadow of Fassbinder, whose presence in them is total. In “Shadow of Angels” RVF is the author of dialogues, co-author of the script, performer of one of the main roles, “lessor” of most actors, nevertheless, the mise-en-scene scenes in the picture are completely not Fassbinder, the presence of some other style, which we have not yet seen, looks now somewhat outdated.
The source of style inspiration for Schmid seems to be the same as for the RVF of the period of its heyday: the atmosphere of German cabaret and bourgeois baroque, but for Schmid it looks kind of kitschy and playful. Where the RVF is serious and tragic, Schmid is sarcastic and ambiguous. Taking as a basis a slippery, almost anti-Semitic plot, the director turns it into a parable about the ambivalence of social roles, about the inevitability of fascist dualistic psychology, about the general hopelessness of being. The nameless rich Jew destroys the relationship of the prostitute and her pimp, which leads to tragedy - this is the plot itself and is exhausted, but Schmid seems to enter into a formal dispute with the RVF, trying to encroach on his style and blow it up from the inside, while taking all the logical prerequisites of the RVF worldview.
“Shadow of Angels” is a dispute with Fassbinder at the level of form with complete agreement with his artistic thinking, Schmid seems to convince the RVF that to express his ideas, a different style is needed, more ironic and kitschy, more frivolity is needed, more playfulness, because if Fassbinder is a tragic Art Nouveau artist, then Schmid is a postmodern mockingbird whose misanthropic irony is total, therefore art is perhaps more pessimistic. In this picture, there is no traditional RVF division into executioners and victims, there is no problem of social stigmatization, here all Jews and anti-Semites stand for each other.
It would seem that at first it is clear why the film was banned for distribution in many countries, the anti-Semitism of the message about a rich Jew, tyrannizing others, seems obvious, however, he (this message) is somehow too caricatured and pamphlet. The power of this world - the traditional archetype of the executioner in the RVF here ironizes over his national identity, emphasizing universal hatred of himself, the atmosphere of cryptofascism in which he lives, his victims - are somehow too disgusting (Fassbinder in his paintings did not allow himself such dirty dialogues) the victims do not have a halo of martyrdom (as usual in the RVF), they are their oppressors.
For this reason, we get a film without a hero, where everyone stands each other, and even the dying prostitute performed by Ingrid Caven is somehow too weak and devoid of the desire to live. Fassbinder did everything to complicate the dialogue in the picture, the conversations of the characters oscillate between high metaphorical poetry and slum abuse, there is a touch of avant-garde theatricality of the Antitheater, but, as we have already emphasized here, two aesthetics are fighting: modernist and postmodernist, tragic and mocking, everything here is shaky and ambivalent, there are no executioners or victims, life is completely disgusting and deserves only an acid-eating irony.
There are no Fassbinder mirrors, excessive play with color and lighting, work with space, everything is somehow claustrophobic, shallow and went, and this is a conscious move on the part of Schmid. Fassbinder would never say that life has gone, tragic - yes, unjust - yes, meaningless - yes, but it did not go, Schmid's it is primitive and banal, there is no transcendental dimension, there is no breakthrough upwards, only suffocating, concreted horizontality, ontological secondaryness. How old is that, you say? The fact that the time of postmodern mocking has passed, if not after the tragedy of September 11, then after the cultural crisis of the mid-2000s caused largely by postmodernism, which continues to this day, because a new worldview paradigm has not yet been created.
Schmid is outdated, but his tapes were among the first to capture the transition to post-tragism and the ironic totality of the social landscape. The picture was shot in 1976! Can you imagine?! That's it. Now, such a pluralistic aesthetic, of course, no one will be surprised, everyone is tired of it, this page in the history of art has been turned, but to look at its beginning is now all the more interesting.