After flirting with big-budget filmmaking in Man on Horseback (1969), Volker Schlöndorff returned to a smaller scale with Baal (1970), a German TV adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first full-length play. It’s a damn good thing that he did, too. The set of the film acted as an incubator of New German Cinema talent, starting with its star, who appears in nearly every frame of the film. A 24-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder—having recently completed his first feature, Love Is Colder Than Death— plays Baal, Brecht’s contemptible antihero: a degenerate poet with a drinking problem and a compulsive need to lash out at every societal convention he encounters. Fassbinder’s screen presence is magnetic and uneasy from the moment the film opens: Baal walks through a field smoking a cigarette in a leather jacket while “The Hymn of the Great Baal” recounts his unpleasant exploits.
Filling out the cast are actors who would become Fassbinder’s reliable repertory players, including a radiant Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, and Günther Kaufmann; in fact, Fassbinder and Kaufmann met on the Baal set, leading to a yearslong cinematic and romantic relationship. As the ill-fated Sophie, Schlöndorff cast Margarethe von Trotta, who would go on to become one of Germany’s foremost feminist filmmakers.
It’s hard to ignore the similarities between Baal’s character and the more salacious details of Fassbinder’s own biography: the fluid, voracious sexuality; the reliance on drugs and alcohol that contributed to an early death; the contentious relationships with those to whom he was closest. Context makes the film difficult to watch at times, as Baal annihilates himself in excruciatingly cataclysmic fashion and for no good reason, taking everyone in his orbit down with him. How much of Baal did Fassbinder base on himself, and how much of this is projection from fifty years later? Hard to say, but either way, as one character says in the movie’s final stretch, “Something about that pale lump makes you think of yourself.”
Baal screens this evening and tomorrow, January 19 and 20, and on January 25, at Metrograph as part of the series “Under the Skin: The Pleasure of Discomfort.”
