the police giving chase, attempts to escape the fiction. In the final tense scene, he
suddenly turns to face the audience, asks for their help, confirming his own
identity as a mere actor. The last shot is a freeze-frame that fades to white and
opens up a reflective layer of the film, underlining the arbitrariness of the end-
ing.
If the opening credits ofMaria Braunhave become a site of the signature,
then the final credits ofMutter Küstersserve as the scene of writing. The fig-
ure of standstill in Fassbinder’s films always leads beyond this purely reflexive
dimension, binding itself to other privileged instants. On the structural level of
the narration, for example, the freeze-frame inMaria Braunis tied to the
bombing that occurs during the wedding. This figure of suddenness and stand-
still corresponds structurally to the explosion at the end, through which the re-
cently reunited couple is annihilated. InMutter Küsters, the final standstill
that serves as a disruption of the visual movement is linked to the sudden
move toward terrorist activity, which repeats and replaces the husband’s despe-
rate act of violence that the radio had announced at the beginning of the film.
The list of visual standstills at the end of his films is long, but there are also
more discrete freeze-frames in other Fassbinder films.
As Karl-Heinz Bohrerargues from his aesthetic theory of“suddenness”
with regards to language and literature, the figure of suddenness places the
spectator in a perceptive situation within which the uniqueness of what is seen
counters standard modes of perception and dominant values. The radical tem-
poralization that characterizes the pregnant moment (or privileged instant)
lends it a simultaneously subjective and utopian dimension. It is on precisely
this level that Fassbinder links the visual standstill to other figurations of sud-
denness. The clearest layer of correspondence to figurations of standstill is that
of themise-en-scèneof bodies and machines.
Fassbinder in his early films was already emphasizing the link between the
mise-en-scèneand the setting in motion or the arresting of the body through sud-
denness. InDas kleine Chaos(The Little Chaos)(), where Fassbinder
plays a sadistic petty criminal, the criminal“orders”his invisible victim, shout-
ing“Rauf, runter!”(“Up! Down!”) showing himself in a half close-up. The idea
of the director controlling the body is further radicalized by the image of the
blows of the fist and the shootings that literally throw bodies out of the visual
field (inDas kleine Chaos,Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder
Than Death)(), andWhity ()). Like his violent slaps (Katzelmacher
(),Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore)
()), these blows and shots are often quite surprising and serve to dynamize
a stationary configuration.
These sudden dynamizations always generate narrative consequences, as in
the restaurant scene inWildwechselwhere Franz spits into his palm and then
The Figure of Visual Standstill in R.W. Fassbinder’s Films 81