Wednesday, January 21 at 7pm
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany 1973) 93 min. 35mm. With Brigitte Mira, El Hedi Ben Salem, Irm Hermann. German with English subtitles.
The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow (Mira) meets a much younger Arab worker (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise—and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder expertly wields the emotional power of classic Hollywood melodrama to expose the racial tensions underlying contemporary German culture.
“The entire movie is constructed, both formally and in its content, around looking. The amazing thing that this does in the movie is that it freezes both parties — the looker and the lookee — in the look and it sets them in these very rigid positions that [Fassbinder] uses both dramatically and aesthetically.”
— Todd Haynes, Criterion interview
Wednesday, January 28 at 7pm
Stella Dallas
King Vidor (U.S. 1937) 105 min. DCP With Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Anne Shirley.
In Stella Dallas, Barbara Stanwyck created one of the most indelible heroines of Hollywood’s Golden Age: a rough-around-the-edges millworker’s daughter who, even after she schemes her way up a peg on the social ladder, can’t quite shake her working-class ways as she does whatever it takes to give her daughter (Shirley) a better life. This is 100-proof melodrama in its purest, most undistilled form, ruthlessly wringing pathos from its nerve-touching themes of class, motherhood, and self-sacrifice. Through it all, Stanwyck is a miracle, pouring every ounce of Brooklyn brass and just-below-the-surface vulnerability she’s got into the endearingly crude Stella, before going in for the kill with the titanic heartbreak of the impossible-to-forget ending (Film at Lincoln Center program notes).