Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
- Brigitte Mira: Emmi Kurowski
- El Hedi ben Salem Ali
- Barbara Valentin: landlady Barbara
- Irm Hermann: daughter Krista
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder: son Eugen
- Karl Scheydt: Albert Kurowski
- Elma Karlowa: Woman Kargus
- Gusti Kreissl: Paula
- Walter Sedlmayr: Angermayer, Chandler
- Doris Mattes: Woman Angermayer
- Liselotte Eder: Woman münchmeyer
- Hannes Gromball: Upper at Osteria
- Katharina Herberg: girl at the pub
- Rudolf Waldemar Brem: pubs guest
- Peter Moland: Chef in Auto Repair
- Margit Symo: Hedwig
- Peter Gauhe: Bruno Kurowski
- Helga Ballhaus: Yolanda
- Elisabeth Bertram: Frieda
- Kurt Raab: Car mechanic
- Ingrid Caven
Fear Eats the Soul (working title: All Turks called Ali ) is a melodrama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Germany and also internationally regarded as a seminal work of the director.
Action
Emmi Kurowski, a widowed cleaning woman over 60, enters an oriental bar in Munich - partly because it's raining, partly out of curiosity, where the music comes from. Because he has nothing better to do and is animated by a friend to Ali, a twenty years younger Moroccans with moderately good knowledge of German, Emmi asks to dance. They talk, he accompanies her home, may even spend the night with her. It created feelings between the two, and despite incipient hostile atmosphere at Emmis children, neighbors and colleagues, the two eventually marry.
But the resistors grow: The neighbors gossip about the unlikely pair, the fellow cut Emmi, the grocer Angermayer refuses the two to use, and Emmis children are stunned - her son Bruno destroyed rage even Emmis TV. Desperate whether all the hostility breaks Emmi with a beer garden visit during which she will not be operated with Ali from the waiters, but only stared at, in tears, and they decide to bring their honeymoon and then to seek a new beginning.
And indeed looks after returning from the world completely different. The couple will apparently accepted, albeit for selfish reasons: Angermayer complimented Emmi back to his shop in, because he did not want to give up the revenue it brings, but; Emmis children need them as a babysitter; the neighbors could use a strong and above all reliable man in the house well, and the ladies find a new victim, through which they can mouthing, and they note, moreover, that Ali so not the stereotype of the dirty, rotten foreigners corresponds to which they ( and not only them ) have in mind.
However, with the apparent acceptance come to the problems between Emmi and Ali: The atmosphere between them is frosty. When Emma begins to treat Ali as a useful object, rather than as human beings with the need for tenderness and affection, Ali goes back more often to the pub, in this film found its beginning, and gets both of the landlady Barbara. He stayed with her and is eventually no longer home to Emmi until these visits him at his place of work. She tells him that she understands his needs, that she wanted to give him his freedom, but he still should please come back - because interrupts Ali together: In the hospital, explained a doctor that Ali has a stomach ulcer, like so many foreign workers who suffer from poor conditions. Since migrant workers no spa stay is granted, however, and one can only operate the ulcer will experience has shown again and again. Emmi cries Ali's bedside.
General
Fear Eats the Soul leads in Fassbinder 's work is his adaptation of the Douglas Sirk films on as they were two years ago already initiated by the film The Merchant of Four Seasons. Here it is primarily the film All That Heaven Allows, which provides the structural model. Its importance has Fear Eats the Soul get in that it combines the Hollywood melodrama of Sirk with the consideration of German everyday reality. Unlike many films of that time Cooper renounced the cinematography by Michael Ballhaus. Instead, the photographic aesthetics of Jürgen Jürges to unpretentious, the subject proper narrative. The visual presentation should not distract from the actual story here. The film belongs with about 260,000 DM budget to the more favorable Fassbinder films. Fassbinder himself shone in the role of unfriendly film - son- of Brigitte Mira.
The ungrammatical title is a quote from the film and reflects the limited knowledge of German protagonists Ali resist.
The film was premiered on 05 March 1974 in Munich.
Prices
Fear Eats the Soul won, among other critics awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 and the German Film Award in Gold for Brigitte Mira as best actress.
Reviews
" [... ] Melodrama that analyzes the brightness with cool disregard of minorities and the mechanisms of social oppression. At the same time popular and bitterly ironic narrative, Cooper seeks a broad audience, without denying personal obsessions and without loss of critical sharpness. - Interesting from 16 "
" Fear Eats the Soul is therefore in no way be understood as a kind of true melodrama (that would be hypocritical Hollywood), but concrete as a kind of utopia, but Hawks also non-teaching and pieces of direct teaching content, but the viewer to compare the alienated, typed film world and its own life-world forces. Thus, the film accuses though and sees itself as a moral institution ', it is understood, however, sent not to let the accusations stick to people / characters or nebulous conditions, but in what takes place between the people of action and dialogue. Fear Eats the Soul is still a high current film, since the lines of conflict between young and old, familiar and strange queue again and again. "
" Fassbinder formally very strongly oriented to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk's film brings the exact word meaning something very Precise to the point., Fear Eats the Soul ' is certainly and most importantly a film against the flowering racism - and to that extent is this 30 year old movie ( unfortunately) as recent as 1974, but the film goes far beyond that.. Fassbinder's extremely minimalist form of filming, the dialogues, the scenery, the gestures and facial expressions focuses on the history not only on the essentials, the concentrate, the nitty-gritty. It shows how subjective well-being, dissatisfaction, distress, coupled with a learned, instilled ( German ) tradition that on everything, strangers ', ' Other ', ' otherness ' negative refers, projection creates to this negative one in the projected itself to give personal expression in the other: in the construction of what is commonly called and meaner way ( in this case, and in this story ), foreigner '. "
Effect
The film, which has influenced filmmakers throughout the world, also exists in a theater version of the author. The Yılmaz Arslan Filmproduktion GmbH produced in 2003 also Shahbaz Noshirs short film Fear eats the Soul, which tries to capture the true story of a xenophobic assault on a cast of the stage version on the way to the playhouse with subjective camera.
Similarly, the title for the German language version of an episode of the American television series The Simpsons was used.
The title has also developed over time a dictum in which "fear" or "soul" is replaced by a theme-specific expression.