The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971)

Kaap Teater Ensemble and 2047 present Fassbinder in Film & Performance Venue: Aan De Braak Theatre, Stellenbosch, 11 & 12 May 2012 Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) was a German director. In a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years, Fassbinder completed 40 films; two television film series; three short films; four video productions; twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays. He also worked as an author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and actor. His phenomenal creative energy co- existed with a wild, self-destructive libertinism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema. Charles J. Fourie is a writer, director and producer. His plays have been staged in South Africa, the United Kingdom and USA. Three of his plays have been adapted for television. He has written several radio dramas and television series. His latest Afrikaans play Agterplaas was recently nominated for six KykNET Fiesta awards. His adaptation of Die Bitteren Tranen der Petra von Kant is the result of a life-long admiration for Fassbinder’s work. Aryan Kaganof is a film maker, poet, fine artist and musician. In recent years he has made several films, written three novels, published four volumes of poetry and worked on various collaborations. During 2011/12 he was artist in residence at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. He is a founder member of the African Noise Foundation and was recently nominated as Best Editor by the Africa Movie Academy Awards for his work on Man on Ground. Hilda Cronje Nieke Lombard Cintaine Schutte Carin Bester Stage manager & technician - Anton Walters Production manager – Carin Bester Aan De Braak Theatre, Stellenbosch - Johan & Christine Falck For bookings call Carin Bester (0723051525) or Johan Falck (0722662786) http://www.facebook.com/KAAPTEATERENSEMBLE http://kaganof.com/kagablog/ FRIDAY PROGRAMME 11 May 2012 14h00 ‘The Merchant of Four Seasons’ (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) This film portrays a married couple who are fruit sellers. Hans faces rejection from his family after he violently assaults his wife for not bending to his will. She leaves him, but after he suffers a heart attack they reunite, though he now has to employ other men. His restricted ability to function leads him to ponder his own futility and he literally drinks himself to death. (Entry R20) 16h00 ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) Loneliness is a common theme in Fassbinder's work, together with the idea that power becomes a determining factor in all human relationships. His characters yearn for love, but seem condemned to exert an often violent control over those around them. Fassbinder’s actresses (there are no men in the film) move in a slow, trance-like way that hints at a vast world of longing beneath the brittle surface. (Entry R20) 19h00 ‘Die Soet Trane van Petrus Pansegrouw’ (Charles J. Fourie) This stage adaptation of Die Bitteren Tranen der Petra von Kant by Charles J. Fourie transgenders the original characters into a male chauvinist world where the desire for love and the loss of power is explored in the tradition of Fassbinder’s anti-theatre. (Entry R40 and R60 adults) 21h00 ‘Fassbinder Documentary’ Interviews with the actresses and actors who worked with Fassbinder in the course of his career as film and theatre maker, throwing some light on his personality and the work methods he employed as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema of the 1970’s. (Entry Free) SATURDAY PROGRAMME 12 May 2012 12h00 ‘Ali; Fear eats the Soul’ (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) This film won the International Critics Prize at Cannes and was loosely based on Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. It details the vicious response of a family and community to a lonely aging white cleaning lady who marries a muscular, much younger black Moroccan immigrant worker. The two are drawn to each other out of mutual loneliness. (Entry R20) 14h00 ‘Querelle’ (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) Based on Jean Genet’s Jean novel Qurelle de Brest. The plot follows the title character, a handsome sailor who is a thief and hustler. Frustrated in a homoerotic relationship with his own brother, Querelle betrays those who love him and pays them even with murder. The film was the subject of much controversy, not least because of its free and provocative depiction of homosexuality and criminality. (Entry R20) 16h00 ‘The dead man 2: Return of the dead man’ (Aryan Kaganof) Independent film maker Aryan Kaganof leads an open discussion on the subversive themes found in Fassbinder’s films. Kaganof’s own short film The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man will be screened afterward. The visual and aural elements of this film explore the excesses associated with the imagination and the representation of the human body, drawing upon the philosophies of the Marquis De Sade and Georges Bataille in relation to the power and presentation of the sexual taboo. (Entry R20) 19h00 ‘Die Soet Trane van Petrus Pansegrouw’ (Charles J. Fourie) This stage adaptation of Die Bitteren Tranen der Petra von Kant by Charles J. Fourie transgenders the original characters into a male chauvinist world where the desire for love and the loss of power is explored in the tradition of Fassbinder’s anti-theatre. (Entry R40 and R60 adults) More on Rainer Werner Fassbinder THEATRE - In 1967, Fassbinder joined the Munich action-theater where he was active as an actor, director and script writer. After two months, he became the company's leader. In April 1968 Fassbinder directed the premiere production of his play: Katzelmacher, the story a foreign worker from Greece who becomes the object of intense racial, sexual, and political hatred among a group of Bavarian slackers. A few weeks later, in May 1968, the Action Theater was disbanded after its theater was wrecked by one of its founders, jealous of Fassbinder's growing power within the group. It promptly reformed as the Anti-Theater (antiteater) under Fassbinder's direction.[ The troupe lived and performed together. The knit group of young actors included among them Fassbinder, Peer Haben, Harry Baer and Kurt Raab, who along with Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann, became the most important members of his cinematic stock company. Working with the Anti-Theater, Fassbinder would learn writing, directing, acting, and from which he would cull his own repertory group. Even in this period, Fassbinder productivity was remarkable. In the space of eighteen months he directed twelve plays, of these he wrote four himself and rewrote five others. The style of his stage directing closely resembled that of his early films, a mixture of choreographed movement and static poses, taking its cues not from the traditions of stage theater, but from musicals, cabaret, films and the student protest movement. After he made his first feature films in 1969 Fassbinder centered his efforts in his career as film director, but he maintained an intermittent foothold in the theater until his death. He worked in various productions throughout Germany and made a number of radio plays in the early 1970s. In 1974 Fassbinder took directorial control over the Theater am Turm (TAT) of Frankfurt, when this project ended in failure and controversy, Fassbinder became less interested in the theater. FILM - Starting at age 21, Fassbinder made over 40 films in 15 years, along with numerous plays and TV dramas. These films were largely written or adapted for the screen by Fassbinder himself. He was also art director on most of the early films, editor or co-editor on many of them (often credited as Franz Walsh, though the spelling varies), and he acted in nineteen of his own films as well as for other directors. He wrote fourteen plays, created new versions of six classical plays, and directed or co- directed twenty-five stage plays. He wrote and directed four radio plays and wrote song lyrics. In addition, he wrote thirty-three screenplays and collaborated with other screenwriters on thirteen more. On top of this, he occasionally performed many other roles such as cinematographer and producer on a small number of them. Working with a regular group of actors and technicians, he was able to complete films ahead of schedule and often under budget and thus compete successfully for government subsidies. He worked fast, typically omitting rehearsals and going with the first take. There are three distinct phases to Fassbinder’s career. His first ten movies (1969–1971) were an extension of his work in the theater, shot usually with static camera and with deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue. The second phase is the one that brought him international attention, with films modeled, to ironic effect, on the melodramas Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood in the 1950s. In these films, Fassbinder explored how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientation, politics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday fascismm of family life and friendship. The final films, from around 1977 until his death, were more varied, with international actors sometimes used and the stock company disbanded. He became increasingly more idiosyncratic in terms of plot, form and subject matter in movies like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), The Third Generation (1979) and Querelle (1982). He also articulated his themes in the bourgeois milieu with his trilogy about women in post-fascistt Germany: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), The Angst of Veronica Voss and Lola. http://www.facebook.com/KAAPTEATERENSEMBLE http://kaganof.com/kagablog/ .

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