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Angst Essen Seele Auf (Fear Eats the Soul, 1973) was the thirteenth feature film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Its directorial style and narrative content are markedly different from the style and content of his earlier films, such as Warum Läuft Herr R. Amok? (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? 1969), in the United States at least probably the best-known of Fassbinder's works. From the earlier to the later film Fassbinder's style moved from a spare cinema vérité use of pale, washed-out colors and a hand-held camera, not unlike the ascetic "minimalist" films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, to a lushly colored Hollywood style similar to the American films of Douglas Sirk. Simultaneously, narrative moved from ultra-realist slice-of-life to exaggerated and potentially emotional melodrama, from an account of several tedious and enervating days in the life of a technical draftsman to the chance encounter, love affair, and unhappy marriage of an aging Putzfrau (cleaning woman) and a young Moroccan Gastarbeiter (laborer). Throughout most of Fassbinder's work, however, and certainly within both Warum Läuft Herr R. Amok? and Angst Essen Seele Auf the thematic implications and the basic, underlying significance of each film has remained the same: the oppressive dichotomy and mutual antagonism of personal emotion and social form, of personal freedom and social restriction, of personal honesty and social dishonesty, of personal normality and social perversity, of personal happiness and social propriety.
At one point in Angst Essen Seele Auf two neighbors of the couple speak with their landlady's son and ask if he cannot "do something about" the couple. The landlady's son, in a gesture of decency almost unique in the film, asks what they would have him do since the couple seems happy enough. One neighbor replies: "But happiness, Herr Gruber, what's that? Anyway, there is such a thing as decency." This remark is characteristic of the nigglingly destructive social attitudes and pressures which inexorably destroy all possibilities of personal happiness, a theme that Fassbinder expressed at the beginning of Angst Essen Seele Auf by the epigraph "Das Glück ist nicht immer lustig." ("Happiness is not always fun.")
In Angst Essen Seele Auf-more than in any other Fassbinder film, I believe-this conflict of the personal and social and the oppression of the personal...