suddenly wipes the spit onto the overly-made-up face of his girlfriend Hanni.
She leaves the visual field with her makeup smeared across her face. Such an
inexplicably brutal instant occurs not only in connection with violent gestures
but also in moments of pathos. There is, for example, a long shot inWarnung
vor einer heiligen Nutte, where Fred (Kurt Raab), who has collapsed along
with his buddies in a state of exhaustion and drunkenness, suddenly gets up to
tame the uncontrolled fury that seems to be slowly building by leading the
group in singing a religious song by Schubert, assuming the role of a conductor,
rousing his drunken buddies to join in the chorus.
As far as machines are concerned, the ambivalence of the mechanism of
standstill and movement appear even more clearly than in the scenic outbreak
of a body from a statuary pose into kinetic gesture. In Fassbinder’s work we
find that the omnipresence of audio devices has often been noted–jukeboxes,
record players, and tape recorders. Their running or pausing is sometimes char-
acteristic of shots or entire scenes, or are even responsible for structuring entire
films, asIn einem Jahr mit dreizehn Monden. Here, Irene awakens the trans-
vestite Elvira by removing a record needle stuck in a groove, thereby causing a
dramatic silence. At the film’s end, another song is heard skipping in a groove,
highlighting a freeze-frame as the last shot, in which we see the sister Gudrun
disappearing, as a witness to Elvira’s childhood trauma. This is also echoed later
when the playing of a tape with Elvira’s voice on it announces her death.
InMutter Küsters, the recording equipment and bugging operations repre-
sent the control and power of the media. After her first public speech before
Communist party members, Küsters departs, only to discover that her speech
was recorded without her knowledge. A similar situation involving audio
equipment and power is found inIch will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt,
but the association with the visual standstill is more obvious. The visual inter-
ruption inMutter Küstersparadoxically represents the definition of an al-
ways-already-recorded image, a kind of“robotic image”(Serge Daney) that
serves as a mobile idol. It is no accident that at the beginning ofLola (), in
a certain sense as a motto for the film, a photograph of Adenauer is shown,
revealing the chancellor leaning on the armrest of a sofa beside one of his favor-
ite objects, a music box including a radio, record player, television, and tape
deck. Another example is the“sound terror”that accompanies the mendacity
of images that Eddie Constantine mentions at the beginning ofDie dritte Gen-
eration ().
The ambiguity of the always-already-recorded image and sound in Fassbin-
der’s films is bound to the affixation of each speech act by power, whether it is
the language of love or politics. At the same time, the idea of control in Fassbin-
der’s work also encounters a dimension that Jean-Luc Godard in hisHistoire(s)
du Cinéma (), in paying homage to Fassbinder, calls the“control of the
82 Christa Blümlinger