German ‘Sunset Boulevard’

Press, 1 November 1984, Page 10

German ‘Sunset Boulevard’

“Veronika Voss,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tale of an ageing German film star which has been likened to "Sunset Boulevard,” will start at the Academy tomorrow. Richard Corliss had the following to say in “Time” magazine: Veronika Voss wanted her substance and style to be Golden Age Hollywood. Like Sybille Schmitz, the German actress on whose life and perplexing death the film is based, Veronika is an ageing movie star on the way down and out. For Veronika, the 40s were all beautiful music and the caress of a softfocus lens; the 50s, are jangly cowboy songs and cruel chiaroscuro. Propelled by her screen writer husband (who fades out of his own picture), her producer (who finds younger actresses for his casting couch), her neurologist (who ladles out morphine) and a curious reporter (who cannot escape the lure of decadence), Veronika travels down Sunset Boulevard to a dead end. Fassbinder’s black-and-white palette turns neon into a soft blinking Cyclops eye, slices light into flickers with an overhead fan, dapples windows with rain stains, all to re-create the visual style in which Veronika could feel at home and alive.

As she sings in a final

drugged reverie that reunites the featured players of her life, “Memories Are Made of This.” She dies, as her creator would, in an overdose of glory. Fassbinder adds these notes to “Veronika Voss,” which was one of his last films: “I don’t consciously choose melodrama as a genre. Every time I tell stories about certain types of characters, I happen to make a melodrama; it seems to me the most adequate form for telling stories of passions, suffering, fears. But as for fatal-

ism, I don’t find melodramas inherently fatalistic. “I do consciously try to emulate the quality of the films that were current in the times I portray. I try to see how people then saw films and consciously try to tell my stories with similar devices. “It’s a way of making particular periods more transparent. ‘Veronika Voss’ has above all something of the serie noire, at least as I remember them. I am very particular about the materials I convert in the sound collages of all my films.

“The sports programmes, political speeches and songs that you hear throughout the films are all carefully selected and have bearing on the stories and situations.' “For me the question of whether to shoot in black and white or colour never really arose. I just knew from the start that the film had to be in black and white. “Anyway, I find black and white the most beautiful colours of the cinema, and, of course, black and white is never merely black and white.”