Schatten der Engel
Switzerland,
1976, 105 min
Shown in 1983
CREDITS
- dir
-
Daniel Schmid
- prod
-
Michael Fengler, Jordan Bojilov
- scr
-
Daniel Schmid
- cam
-
Renato Berta, Carlo Varini
- editor
-
Ila von Hasperg
- cast
-
Ingrid Caven, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Irm Hermann, Ulli Lommel, Klaus Lowitsch
The late Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a provocateur who delighted in offending all self-righteous and complacent sensibilities. Near the end of his life he concentrated on outraging the New Left with his satire of infantile terrorism, The Third Generation, and the gay community with his brutally grotesque rendering of Genet’s Querelle. Fassbinder’s most controversial production was his play The Garbage, The City and Death, which was attacked by the German cultural establishment as anti-semitic for its depiction of a rich and powerful Jewish land speculator. Fassbinder himself insisted that the outrage was based more on German guilt for the past than on the play itself. As filmed in 1976 by Swiss director Daniel Schmid (himself Jewish, Schmid considers the charges of anti-semitism “a serious, wholesale misreading of the text’s premise,” the play became Shadow of Angels, and features a cast of familiar Fassbinder actors playing Frankfurt prostitutes, pimps, sadistic police, perverted businessmen and civic hypocrites. Given its notoriety, and the fact that Fassbinder plays a major role as Ingrid Caven’s pimp, Shadow of Angels is long overdue for release in this country as a key contribution to the ongoing debate on the New German Cinema’s enfant terrible.
—Tom Luddy
FACTOID #232
Our first seminar at the Festival was entitled Censorship and the Actor’s Art: A Symposium, featuring panelists Michael Mayer and Lou Greenspan at Grace Cathedral, October 24, 1966.
