The Great Acting Blog: “The Acting In Fassbinder’s Fear Of Fear”

Margit Carstensen in Fassbinder’s Fear Of Fear.

Fassbinder’s Fear Of Fear is a quite brilliant tale about Margot, whose harmonious family life with husband Kurt and daughter Bibi, unravels as she begins to suffer from anxiety attacks leading to alcoholism, an illicit affair, and a spell in a mental hospital. Margit Carstensen’s performance as Margot is sensational, and marked as it is by a spectacular emotional acuity. However, one of the really striking aspects about this film is the general excellence of all the performances; from Irm Hermann and Brigitte Mira as Carstensen’s nagging in-laws, to Adrian Hoven’s seduce-and-destroy Doctor Merck, to all the performances in between, each possesses a precision and intensity.

“I find it awful when a person in a film talks the way people talk in real life. In my opinion that robs a thought of its general force. It eliminates the general state of fearfulness. How should I put it? It reduces everything to something the moviegoer can reject, simply because he doesn’t happen to speak this dialect, doesn’t move this particular way in real life. In my opinion artificiality offers the only possibility for giving a broad spectrum of moviegoers access to the specific world of an artistic work”.

It’s hard to know what process Fassbinder and his actors went through, but due to their predominantly theatrical background, one would assume that there would have been a decent rehearsal period, which means that there was an opportunity to shape the performances, fitting them into Fassbinder’s overall vision for the film. Furthermore, Fassbinder wrote the script himself, and so would have created the structure he wanted the performances to slot into. This all helps to create the uniformity of style which the actor’s performances possess. This, coupled with the considerable talents of the actors Fassbinder employed, would help to explain the general level of excellence. But what of the style?  I would describe the acting in Fear Of Fear as distilled; there is a clarity of idea and action in each scene, which leads to very precise intentions, everything we see the actors do is deliberate, and therefore meaningful. Fassbinder blocks the actors very carefully, almost to the point of choreography. This all adds up to the “artificiality” Fassbinder mentions – we are witnessing performances rather than snap-shots of life. This artificiality is characteristic of “the specific world of an artistic work”, or, put another way, artificiality renders a work artistic. 

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