Fassbinder Is Baal Is Fassbinder
From today’s vantage, this nearly lost film opens a window into a formative phase of the New German Cinema. Schlöndorff could not have known its documentary value at the time, but among other things, Baal stands as a remarkable record of the young Fassbinder. The Fassbinder persona as we have come to know it is fully present in his incarnation of Baal: the heedless pleasure-seeking, the improbable magnetism, the sly awareness and skilled exploitation of power dynamics. Brecht moved from the relatively free-form provocations of Baal to the Marxist principles of epic theater. But for Fassbinder—who died at age thirty-seven, leaving behind more than forty films—this scabrous vision of doomed and destructive genius would acquire an air of uncanny prophecy.
