Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven
1975 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven on Sightlines
A woman is arguing about canned sausages.
Should they go in the stew or not? Her daughter-in-law has a view; Emma Küsters has her own; the kitchen is small enough that the disagreement just circles. Late afternoon in Frankfurt. Nothing is happening.
What Emma doesn't know is that the man she's cooking for is already dead. Ernst Küsters has killed the personnel director at the soap factory and then killed himself. The stew is for nobody. The argument was settled before it started.
Fassbinder takes that position in the first minutes and never gives it up. Ernst is gone before the first frame and he doesn't come back: no flashback to the factory, no reconstruction, no last look at his face. What arrives instead is a queue of people who explain him. A tabloid reporter writes a madman. Emma's daughter (Ingrid Caven) works the notoriety into a nightclub act. A Communist couple, prosperous and gracious, receive Emma in their handsome home and restore Ernst as a martyr of his class. Then the anarchists, who need him as a reason to occupy a newspaper office. Every one of them is kind to her. Every one of them takes something.
Deleuze gives us a sharper word for this than "spin." He separates two ways a description can work. An organic description points at something that would still be there if the describing stopped; the stew exists whether or not anyone discusses it. A crystalline description builds its object and then stands in its place, so that when the account changes the thing changes with it, because there is nothing underneath to appeal to. That is Ernst's exact condition. He has no scene, no body on screen, no word of his own. He is made of accounts. Move from the newsroom to the Communists' living room and the man is replaced, not reinterpreted. Emma is the only person in the film who actually knew him, and what she knows has no institutional form. She wants him remembered as a good man. Nobody can use that.
Why bring Deleuze into a film this legible? Because without him the satire flattens into "the left is hypocritical," which is the reading that made the picture notorious around its 1975 Berlin premiere and is the least interesting thing in it. The crystalline description names something colder: not that people lie about Ernst, but that there is no Ernst left to lie about, and that Fassbinder engineered that absence by refusing to film him.
He then runs the same operation on his own film. Mother Küsters has two endings. The German version delivers Emma into the anarchists' occupation, which ends in disaster and in her death, reported in terse closing information rather than staged. The export version gives her a sympathetic night watchman who takes pity, and the two of them simply walk out. Both were released. Deleuze calls this falsifying narration: incompatible versions offered as equally available, with no vantage from which to settle them. Usually it lives inside a film. Fassbinder put it into distribution, so that how Emma ends depends on which country sold you the ticket. The discourse-image is the older name for what that leaves behind — an image that poses a problem it openly cannot resolve.
The other concept the film earns is the hardest one in Deleuze's politics. Classical revolutionary cinema could address a people that existed or was arriving. Modern political cinema, he argued, has to start from the fact that the people are missing, and its work becomes fabulation: people caught in the act of legending themselves into existence. Fassbinder's contribution is to show the legending happening and to show it being done to someone rather than by her. Everyone in this film has a people. The Communists have a proletariat, and they receive it in a home that looks nothing like a worker's home; the décor makes the argument without a line of dialogue. The anarchists have a revolutionary subject in need of a symbol. The paper has readers. Emma, the only proletarian in the building, is the residue nobody's people includes.
The staging carries all of it. Michael Ballhaus shoots frontal, tableau-like compositions, boxes people inside doorways and thresholds, and lets reflective surfaces split the image in two, a grammar taken directly from the mirrors of Written on the Wind. Fassbinder blocks the scenes so that the geometry of a room is the politics of the room: who sits, who stands, who holds the center, who gets edged toward the frame line. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls that the gest, a posture that makes a social relation visible instead of stating it. The closed set is the other half, the frame treated as a system whose main information is who is contained by whom. Rooms stop being places and become stages that outsiders keep walking onto.
The inheritance here is unusually traceable. Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (1929) hands over the armature: a working-class mother wrecked by family catastrophe and then picked over by everyone around her, on a downward journey. Fassbinder keeps the shape and sours the title, swapping a journey to happiness for a journey to heaven. Kuhle Wampe (1932) supplies the method of burying political debate inside melodramatic situations and building episodically. Sirk supplies the surface: All That Heaven Allows for the woman framed and indicted by her own décor, Imitation of Life for the fusion of the suffering mother with a critique of grief as merchandise, including the ironic scoring register that feels and dissects at once. Peer Raben's music does precisely that, lending Emma real pathos while marking the pathos as something the other characters intend to sell. That doubled voice is Deleuze's free indirect discourse in its political form, the film's view and the character's view held inside one utterance without collapsing together. You can hear it in the casting: Brigitte Mira's warmth set against an ensemble playing with Brechtian cool. Fassbinder had found the recipe four years earlier in The Merchant of Four Seasons, where Ballhaus's static frontal tableaux first turned melodramatic feeling into cold diagnosis; Ballhaus carried that precision to Hollywood and built a second career on it.
Now watch what happens to Emma as an agent. Classical cinema promised that a person who perceives a wrong can act to change it. Emma perceives the wrong with complete clarity and acts constantly. She goes where she is invited, speaks when asked, signs on. Every act is absorbed as material by whoever invited her. She ends as a spectator of her own cause — Deleuze's seer, the one who can only watch and endure, produced here not by war ruins but by a press office and a comfortable sofa. Her daughter's nightclub number is the same conversion at speed, a murder turned into a stage turn, what Deleuze calls the attraction-image: action transposed into spectacle rather than acted.
Fassbinder made this fast and cheap with the troupe he used every few months, and that matters. Melodrama was built to certify suffering, to make you feel that what the heroine feels is true. He kept the machine intact and aimed it at the people who operate machines like it, the newspaper included, whose entire authority rests on a promise not to invent. Minor-key by his standards, and permanent, because the question it asks has only gotten louder: what would it look like to stand with someone without speaking for them? The camera gives the only answer the film trusts. Frontal, level with her, holding still.
Next time, watch the chairs. Fassbinder tells you who owns a scene before anyone opens their mouth.
Concepts in play
- crystalline-description — Ernst Küsters is dead before the first frame and never appears; the reporter's 'deranged killer,' the Communists' 'martyr of the working class' and the anarchists' 'symbol for direct action' each compose him and replace the previous version, with no independent Ernst on screen to check them against.
- people-are-missing — Every faction claims to speak for the working class while the actual worker's widow is passed hand to hand; the bourgeois Communist couple receive Emma in a comfortable home whose décor silently argues that 'the people who speak for the proletariat live nothing like it.'
- falsifying-narration — The film exists in two released endings — the bleak German version in which Emma dies in the anarchist occupation of the newspaper offices, and the export version in which a night watchman takes pity and the two simply leave together — neither framed as the true one.
- fabulation / legending — The narrative advances through a sequence of would-be rescuers who each 'reframe the dead man to suit their agenda' — the legend of Ernst Küsters manufactured in incompatible editions by everyone except the widow who knew him.
- the-gest — Fassbinder blocks actors 'so that the geometry of a room encodes the politics of a scene: who sits and who stands, who is centered and who is pushed to the frame's edge' — the Brechtian construction inherited from Kuhle Wampe.
- the closed set (cadre) — Ballhaus's composed, frontal, tableau-like framings, doorways and thresholds that box characters within the apartment, and the 'slightly airless, over-composed quality that turns naturalistic settings into stages.'
- the seer (voyant) — Emma wants only to have her husband remembered as the good man she knew; she is 'the constant against which each self-interested reading is measured,' delivered successively into new hands while each episode negotiates over her without her.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The catastrophe happens off-screen before the film begins and nothing Emma does can touch it; her every cooperative act — with the press, the Communists, the anarchists — is absorbed as material by the party that invited her.
- attraction-image — Ingrid Caven as the daughter who converts the family tragedy into a nightclub act: the murder-suicide restaged as a stage turn rather than acted upon.
- free-indirect-discourse-political — Peer Raben's score 'can lend Emma's suffering genuine pathos while framing that pathos as something the film's other characters are eager to exploit,' doubled by the gap between Brigitte Mira's warmth and the ensemble's Brechtian coolness, which the film treats as a dramatic argument in itself.
- discourse-image — The satire poses the problem of who may speak for the dead and never resolves it; the coexistence of the two endings leaves the question standing as a question, the 'happy' export version reading as a sardonic comment on audience appetite.