Rainer Werner Fassbinder
VIRALUX wrote, performed and produced the ‘The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty’ for a night of performance, curated by Michael Curran, based on the work of the German filmmaker and theatre director Rainer Werner Fassbinder at Camden Arts Centre, London (October 2005).
I wrote the text drawing on a broad range of Fassbinder sources including interviews with Fassbinder and his collaborators, dialogue from his films and plays as well as excerpts from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, a text that Fassbinder regarded as central to his directorial methods and authorial contentions. My pitch shifted vocals are a mischief-making play on the voice of authority - a question of “who’s the boss?” when it comes to meaning, power and gender. Nina Power writes more about this in her essay on machine voices.
For the video, we captured a few seconds of Fassbinder footage from an interview. The selection was based on moments when the camera was on him but he was not speaking. We edited the video to the track we had composed. During the Camden Arts Centre performance, the vocals were performed live to the video.
The daily moods of the final certainty : text
Oh. I want to do a film.
The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty, that’ll be the title.
Cheerfulness that’s characterised as cheerfulness by the usual signs usually isn’t the real thing.
Mandrax.
I could only tell you that when I shot my first take, it was more fantastic than the most fantastic orgasm I ever had.
Gib mir eine Zigarette, bitte.
There’s this strange compulsion to work, which is certainly a strength and a weakness at the same time.
Overeating.
Life doesn’t become manageable and accessible until the moment when death is accepted as the true aspect of existence.
<coughs>
As a child I was very egocentric.
It’s much more important how language sounds than what its concrete content is.
Three hours of sleep a night.
I’m a romantic anarchist.
Stuffed rolled up socks into the front of his underpants.
<coughs>
To make many, many films so that my life would become a film.
I really grew up like a little flower.
3 Valium 10
I’d say I’m manic-depressive, and I just try to be as depressive as seldom as possible.
Like a stone on which the same water drips, day in, day out.
I only want you to love me.
Anti-theatre
I’m my own father.
Women, men, Jews, Germans and movies.
<coughs>
You look to me like your body would smell bad.
Smoking, he was smoking. Smoker. Smoking. Smoking.
Cocaine freezes the brain.
I’m immune to self-pity, though at one level motivated by little else.
Everything visible will appear covered with a sort of hoar frost, glittering ice, whether winter or summer, glasses and windows would be covered with ice flowers.
Fear eats the soul.
One becomes sadistic and masochistic at the same time.
Two bottles of bourbon a day.
He had an ability to flirt with his ugliness.
<coughs>
Within 15 minutes he took it all again.
In all practical cruelty there is a sort of superior determinism to which the torturer/executioner is himself subject.
Rauchen rauchen.
He was a boy whose soul had changed into an alligator.
Love is colder than death.
All of you suck me dry.
A little chaos.
God the father.
Essentially, cruelty means strictness, diligence, implacable resolution, irreversible and absolute determination.
One cigarette after another.
I know of almost no relationship I’d call beautiful.
All feelings are potentially exploitable.
Cruelty is above all lucid, a sort of rigorous discipline, submission to necessity.
I’m trying to find out what kind of person I have become.
The one who loves less has more power but the power does not always compensate for the strain imposed by emotional dependence.
Assessment of the present situation, blackish brown to black, in any case mediocre and amphibian.
It’s a film about someone trying, with all their means possible in this society, to find his identity.
Only the man who is really identical with himself can be free from fear of fear.
Dead, a cigarette still between his lips.
VIRALUX Fassbinder’s Jukebox, Camden Arts Centre, London 2005 photos by Michael Curran