Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of In a Year with 13 Moons
1978 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder · In a Year with 13 Moons on Sightlines
A woman walks through a slaughterhouse, talking about her childhood. Behind her the work goes on at working speed: cattle hoisted, opened, skinned. None of it is staged. Fassbinder took his camera into an actual Frankfurt abattoir, the way Franju had gone into the Paris slaughterhouses for Blood of the Beasts in 1949, and filmed the killing calmly, without commentary. Elvira Weishaupt worked in a place like this once, when she was Erwin and had the arms for it. Now she tells the story of the orphaned boy she was while the machinery does what machinery does. The shot goes on. Fassbinder doesn't cut to spare us, and he doesn't cut for shock. He cuts when the story is finished.
Everything the film knows is in that shot.
Deleuze had a name for cinema that digs this way. He called it naturalism, and the kind of image it makes an impulse-image. The idea is plain once you see it working. A naturalist film gives you two worlds at once. On top sits the derived milieu, a real dated social place: West Germany in 1978, its property speculation, its arcade offices, its televisions talking in every room. Underneath runs what Deleuze called the originary world, where nothing operates but appetite and exhaustion. The naturalist's move is to let the second show through the first without ever leaving it. So the abattoir is not a symbol dropped into Frankfurt. It is a workplace, Elvira's old one, and the horror is occupational. Her trade was turning bodies into meat. She eventually brought the trade home to her own.
In this regime acts read as symptoms, and symptoms have a direction. Deleuze called it the line of slope: once the descent starts, it does not reverse. Fassbinder builds the slope into the architecture. Five titled days, a countdown, a death visible from the first reel. That changes what suspense is for. The question is never what will happen to Elvira. It is how she will get through the afternoon.
This is worth insisting on, because the two easiest readings of the film both shrink it. Taken as an issue picture, it becomes a case study. Taken purely as biography (Fassbinder made it in the months after his lover Armin Meier killed himself), it becomes a private wound with an audience. Naturalism keeps the social cause and the drive on screen at the same time, which is exactly the tension Fassbinder announces in the prologue, where an on-screen text about moon years and emotionally governed people frames Elvira's death as written in advance. Astrology on one side. A real-estate speculator named Saitz on the other. The film never decides between them, and doesn't need to.
What's missing from all of it is action. Elvira is beaten in the opening scene and cannot fight back. She reaches Saitz and cannot make him remember the sentence that ended her life. Deleuze's term for this break is the pure optical and sound situation: a moment a character perceives with no possible response available, so that she can only look and listen. The figure that produces is not an agent but a voyant, a seer. The dossier gets it exactly right when it says the present tense of this film is largely a matter of listening. Each of the five days is a visit that alters nothing, which is Deleuze's voyage form, the trip that transforms nothing, except that here the trip has a fixed terminus.
Notice what Fassbinder refuses. There is no flashback. Deleuze separates the recollection-image, the dated flashback showing you a former present, from what modern cinema does instead, and this film does the instead. The past arrives only as speech. Elvira narrates it over the killing floor. A nun, played by the director's own mother, narrates it in a convent garden while the camera walks beside her in one long take. At the end Elvira's voice narrates off a tape machine as the living arrive too late into a room that can no longer answer. Deleuze calls a voice like this a speech act: testimony, legending, not dialogue. Its effect on the image is that the image stops explaining itself and has to be read. That is the lectosign.
The sound design pushes the same way. Fassbinder floods the film with a second stream of voices, radio and television and pop songs running under and over the human speech, ironizing it, sometimes drowning it out. Voice and body come apart by degrees until the tape recorder finishes the job. A life ends as playback.
Against that, the body. Volker Spengler's Elvira is heavy, and Fassbinder never lets you forget the weight; the performance sets a butcher's remembered bulk against a fragility with no protection on it at all. Deleuze's late cinema of the body is about precisely this, a film in which postures and attitudes rather than plot carry the time. The sharpest instance is the scene in Saitz's office where the henchmen break without warning into a choreographed routine. Nothing is dramatized. A relation is displayed: who holds power, how stupidly, how theatrically. Brecht called that a gestus, and Deleuze kept the word.
Around the body, the frame. Fassbinder shot this one himself, which he almost never did, and the compositions are the most mediated in his work. Elvira is seen through doorways, over banisters, past window frames, in mirrors, boxed in by the furniture of her own life. The method has a source and he never hid it. Sirk's All That Heaven Allows made décor into an instrument of social judgment, so that a cluttered room could convict a society. Written on the Wind showed that feeling could be pitched to excess and then denied any moral resolution. Fassbinder takes that further than Sirk was allowed to: melodrama with the catharsis surgically removed. Dreyer's Gertrud is present in the long held takes of figures turned away from one another inside severe rooms. Godard's Vivre sa vie is present in the chaptering, a life in decline cut into titled sections with the distance kept deliberate. His own The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant had already built the single cluttered interior as a trap; 13 Moons takes that trap outdoors and discovers it is the same trap.
So what did the film do? It fused two things cinema had kept apart. Documentary fact, meaning the real killing floor and the real machinery, and melodramatic excess, meaning a story of love and sacrifice at full pitch. Franju had the abattoir without the confession. Sirk had the confession without the abattoir. Laying a woman's autobiography over industrial slaughter in one unbroken take is Fassbinder's own invention, and it gives the monologue a truth-value no set could supply. You cannot accuse the scene of exaggerating, because the worst thing in it is simply happening. The film also proved that a picture could be built almost entirely out of listening, that testimony and recorded voice could do the work scenes and flashbacks used to do, and that a body could be a film's real text.
It remains a touchstone and a point of contention in arguments about trans lives on screen, and part of the reason is that it refuses to settle Elvira into a martyr or into a subject who arrives. She is not explained. She is accompanied.
Which leaves the question the film won't close. Was Elvira destroyed by a careless sentence, if only you were a girl, or by a world in which such a sentence is binding? Fassbinder puts the evidence for both on screen and declines to rule. Watch it again and watch who listens. Almost nobody does, inside the film. The camera does, all the way to the end, and the camera was his.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Elvira the ex-butcher narrating her life on a working killing floor; acts throughout read as symptoms of a compulsion rather than as decisions.
- naturalism — Beneath the social surface of 1978 Frankfurt (speculation, television, arcade offices) the film exposes a world of pure drive and appetite; the prologue's astrological fatalism sits in ironic tension with the concrete economic causes.
- originary-world — The abattoir sequence, shot on location amid actual industrial slaughter, so that the machinery of killing supplies the scene's charge directly.
- derived-milieu — Saitz's arcade offices, the real-estate speculation, Elvira's kitsch-crowded apartment and the empty streets — a dated concrete milieu revealed as the surface of the abattoir world.
- entropy / degradation — The five titled days structure the film as a countdown, so that scenes accumulate as stations on the way to a foregone death.
- pure optical & sound situations — Elvira is beaten by hustlers in the opening riverside scene and cannot respond; she reaches Saitz and cannot make him account for the remark that changed her body.
- voyant — The dossier's own formulation: the present tense of the film is largely a matter of listening; Elvira endures the nun's account and Red Zora's presence rather than acting on anything.
- voyage-balade-form — The five-day itinerary of encounters — Red Zora, the estranged wife and daughter, the nun, the suicidal stranger, Saitz — none of which alters her situation.
- acte de parole — The slaughterhouse monologue, the nun's extended convent-garden account of the orphaned Erwin, and the final tape-recorded testimony: a dramaturgy of retrospection in which the story is told rather than shown.
- the readable image — The image stops carrying its own meaning and must be deciphered against the spoken past — long-held shots whose sense arrives through testimony rather than through what is visibly happening.
- audiovisual-disjunction — Radio and television chatter running under and over the drama, commenting on and drowning the human speech; culminating in Elvira's recorded voice narrating from a tape machine to a room that can no longer answer.
- attitudes & postures — Volker Spengler's performance sets the butcher's remembered brawn against Elvira's present fragility; the body's weight and stillness carry the film's duration.
- the-gest — Saitz's henchmen breaking into an incongruous choreographed routine in his office — a stylized rupture of realism that displays a power relation instead of dramatizing it.
- the closed set (cadre) — Characters repeatedly framed through doorways, windows, banisters and mirrors, with deep cluttered interiors and hard divisions of the frame keeping Elvira boxed in — the Sirkian décor-as-prison method.
- temps mort — Editing that favors long-held shots and lets scenes run past comfort; the extended tracking takes of the slaughterhouse walk and the convent-garden monologue unspooling in real time.