NM Cinematheque: World Cinema Series February 19, 2013

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1976 | Germany | 112 min | 35 mm | Rating TBC

Showing in February for the World Cinema Series, National Museum of Singapore will be screening the German film, Satansbraten (Satan's Brew).

Satansbraten is Fassbinder’s rare, unhinged and blatant attempt at social satire through screwball comedy. While his most well-known films express a melancholic yet optimistic portrayal of humanity, in Satansbraten, he commits himself to nihilistic abandon through Walter Kranz, a troubled poet on the brink of inhumanity.

Shrouded by creative stagnancy, debts, and enthused by an ego capable of bloating into deranged proportions, Kranz shuffles through a series of identity crises as he manipulates his relationships with a madhouse entourage of family, friends, prostitutes, and real and hired admirers alike in a bid to realise his sexual appetite and delusional desire for fame.

The anarchic impulses of Satansbraten seem like a celebratory revolt against the solidification of self and identity through a relentless unleashing of desires. But through Fassbinder’s sleight of hand, the film gradually reveals how Kranz’s life and actions are in fact submerged in petty bourgeois subjectivity, and swayed by the logic of an emerging capitalism and the persistent shadow of fascism.