Scene Analysis Ali: Fear eats the Soul

Fear Eats the Soul, directed by Fassbinder, is a movie challenging the norms. The issues discussed do not only include spectatorship and voyeurism but they are used to strike the characters’ loneliness into the hearts of the audience. In the first scene, located in the Pub, the oppressing views come from the people in the pub; Ali’s friends.

The tension in the place is unreal, with everything seeming so forced and critical of Emmi and Ali. The use of sound during these first scenes should be considered important, since it introduces the audience to the movie in a quite shocking way, the middle eastern tunes would not have been expected by Germany at the time, and the movie that followed them surely not either. The rest of the film follows a rather typical new German wave profile, with very little diegetic sound, adding to the film’s realism and dirtiness, so to say. It goes along with the fact that real people were used as actors and the fact that the German wave focused on the real lives of lower class people like Emmi and Ali.

In the picture on the immediete left one can see how shadows and the dark colors of the bar are used by Fassbinder to circle the voyeurs in, as they look and judge while Ali dances with Emmi. The use of colour in the costumes proves the time right, as Germans at the time celbrated vibrant colors, making Fassbinder’s characters look like shallow dolls absorbed by the

tinniest flicker of something as outragous as Ali and Emmi. The new german wave was trying to rebell against this americanziation of germany, with the people looking flashy and so on. The darkened dorners also show Fassbinder’s ability to use framing effectively, as discussed later in this analysis. During the film housemades follow the same pattern as Ali follows Emmi upstairs in her apparment block. This comes to show just how much Fassbiner wanted to critizise such voyeuristic judgment.

This scene is an example of how Fassbinder uses the framing to cut off Emmi and Ali. The closer objects in the frame are out of focus and act as barriers between them and the voyeurs, placing Emmi and Ali in their own world, and us the ones looking in and judging as described previously.

In this scene Fassbinder using lighting to separate his characters from the other voyeurs in the pub. Fassbinder is known to use lighting like here, whether natural or not, to dramatize his films. Here the red light gives a sort of romantic flare to the pair, foreshadowing their relationship.

Throughout the entire movie color, sound, editing and framing of the characters come to show how different and beautiful they are. All of it is used, in this scene especially to make Emmi and Ali stand out as something beautiful and not something that should be spectated with hate. I chose this scene, because I believe it is a good representation of the film and Fassbinder’s work, it is foreshadowing his techniques and also a great introduction the style of the new German wave. This scene is as swollen and loaded as any in melodramatic cinemas and films, of course bearing the touch of Fassbinder and his influences such as Douglas Sirk. All in all one can see how Fassbinder empowers his main characters and actors through his writing to make Ali: Fear eats the soul something special in the hearts of the audience, something that will challenge them towards different beliefs.