The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant utilizes different stylistic techniques to represent women. The film is almost fully composed of static compositions. These compositions constantly remind us of Petra’s entrapment. They not only signify Petra’s physical isolation in her apartment, the only location of the film, but also her entrapment as a woman in a male dominated society. The overt uses of bars of shadows cast on Petra also function for this same reason. Fassbinder also uses his mise-en-scène to flesh out some of his themes, specifically with the reproduction painting of Poussin’s Midas and Dionysus that covers the frame throughout much of the film. The painting, as Lynne Kirby points out (in his brilliant essay "Fassbinder's Debt to Poussin"), “acts as a constant source of actions, positions, and behaviors on the part of the actors, offering an array of postures and relations of power mimicked by Petra, Karin and other characters." The painting also introduces a male into the all female world of the film, foreshadowing the patriarchy that will ruin Petra and Karin’s relationship. The film employs a highly formalist style, that is counterbalanced by a number of mysterious elements. John and Ann White (in their essay "Marlene’s Pistol and Brady’s Rule: Elements of Mystification and Indeterminacy in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Film Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant") claim that the film constantly pushes realism “in the direction of the rationally inexplicable and deliberate mystification." The Bitter Tears also places high importance on the costumes (especially since Petra is a fashion designer). As Kirby (same article) points out the film uses fashion and style as a way to bring forth the claim that fashion works to “produce woman as a particular historical figure of male desire." Fashion is also one of the manners in which Fassbinder discloses the historical specificity of the film. All the costumes in the film, from “Sidonie’s flapper dresses” to “Mama’s Nazi-era mannish suit,” reference the historical period of the rise of Fascism in Germany, as well as the relation between Fascism and fashion. Similarly to Fascism, fashion works as mass conformity creating “social-sexual uniforms." Although the film cannot be read as strictly set in Fascist times because the records Petra plays are from the 1950s and 1960s, the Fascist allusion should not be ignored. Fassbinder uses this ambiguous historical setting as a way of expanding specific themes he wanted to explore. He utilizes the costumes to recall Fascist politics and Petra’s similarities with them, but he also uses the music in a similar sense. The soundtrack works to conjure a sense that even if Petra, in many ways, acts as a Fascist she also wants to escape this Fascist world and enter the more progressive world of The Platters and The Walker Brothers. Fassbinder is not interested in just fascism but grander themes represented in fascism but that also apply to societies before and after fascism. In doing so Fassbinder complicates the relationships between past and present, hinting at the old and common saying “history repeats itself.”