GLR November-December 2023

ESSAY

Loving Fassbinder A KRAM H ERRAK

I PROBABLY HAD the same reaction as the rest of the audience in 1974 while watching Ali: Fear Eats the Soul for the first time. I must have been around fifteen or six teen, being slowly introduced to arthouse film as my cu riosity and passion for cinema grew, and I was beginning to hear the name of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the film ( Angst essen Seele auf in the original German) I was sur prised by the Arab music I heard, and by the appearance of El Hedi ben Salem on the screen—tall, dark-skinned, and unmis takably Berber. Over the next hour and a half, I sat mesmerized by the beautiful magic of Fassbinder’s film, which was so sim ple yet so profound. Being Moroccan and seeing a Moroccan actor in such a wonderful film filled me with great pride and joy. The moment the credits rolled, I had to know more. The Arab star of the film, El Hedi ben Salem m’Barek Mo hammed Mustapha, was born in 1935 in the midst of the French occupation of Morocco. He had an upbringing and an early adult life that were typical for the time, and they could not have foretold what the future held in store for him. He came from an old Berber tribe by the name of Haratin, which had small pop ulations in Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, and Tunisia. The Haratin are believed to be the descendants of former Sub-Sa haran slaves. They are Muslims and known to be hard workers, taking jobs in agriculture, physical labor, and occasionally war. At the age of fifteen, Salem* married a thirteen-year-old girl, and together they settled in a small village near the Atlas Moun tains in Morocco. Very little is known about Salem’s life in Mo rocco, except that it was unremarkable for its time and place, and that he and his wife had five children. At the age of 36, Salem left his wife and children and headed for Europe, finding himself in France, where he met the person who would change his life forever, for better or for worse. He met Fassbinder in 1971 at a gay swimming pool in Paris, and they hit it off and started a romantic relationship, which meant that Salem had become part of the director’s infamous entourage. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) is a significantly more recognizable name than is El Hedi Ben Salem, and, in cinephile circles, he needs no introduction. As a director, actor, and playwright, he was one of the pioneers of the German New Wave in cinema, and he remains one of the most important names in German film history. Born in 1945 to a doctor father and a translator mother who split up shortly after his birth, he _______________________ * El Hedi ben Salem is properly referred to by his full name to distin guish him from his father, but here we’ve adopted the convention of calling him simply “Salem” for the sake of brevity. Akram Herrak is a writer and film critic from Morocco, writing for multiple online magazines about film and literature. He is also a mu sician, a photographer, and a semi-professional chess player.

grew up with his mother and her many lovers, some of whom he quarreled with. Having a busy single mother meant that he grew up with very little company or authority, so the movie house became his babysitter. In Germany during World War II, all movie productions were strictly controlled by the Ministry for Public Enlighten ment and Propaganda and all films made in that period were produced with the sole purpose of indoctrinating the masses. After 1945, Germany, like many other countries that partici pated in the war, started receiving American films that were made during the war. Having earned their profits back home, U.S. promoters exported these films at such low prices that they crushed any local competition. So, young Fassbinder grew up absorbing the works of Michael Curtiz, Orson Welles, and Dou glas Sirk, watching at least one film a day throughout his child hood, sometimes up to four.

El Hedi ben Salem in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974.

In these years, he and his mother were often separated be cause she was recovering from tuberculosis, and he was looked after by friends and acquaintances. He got used to a certain free dom and became a young delinquent. He also came out as a ho mosexual at a very young age. He was sent to boarding school but left before his final exams at age fifteen, going to live with his father in Cologne. The two didn’t get along, but living with his father allowed him to immerse himself in the world of liter ature and drama while doing random jobs during the day to earn money. At age eighteen, he returned to Munich in order to attend night school in drama, which he did for two years. During that period, he met many people who would become permanent members of his clique and his team, and who would work with him for the remainder of his career, most notably Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann. He joined what was known

TheG & LR

10