Ali - Fear Eats The Soul/Bd

Brigitte Mira Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Overview

Rainer Werner Fassbinder not only directed Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf), but also scripted the film, designed the sets, and produced. Brigitte Mira heads the cast as a lonely German cleaning woman, who enters into an affair with equally lonely--and much, much younger--Moroccan mechanic El Hedi Ben Salem. They marry, despite the shocked, bigoted reactions of those around them. This thinly disguised remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (cult favorite Sirk was one of Fassbinder's personal heroes) won the international critic's prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Product Details

Release Date:	06/30/2014
UPC:	0715515127219
Original Release:	1974
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[Color]
Time:	1:33:00
Sales rank:	15,796

Special Features

New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Jürgen Jürges, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; Introduction from 2003 by filmmaker Todd Haynes; Interviews from 2003 with actor Brigitte Mira and editor Thea Eymész; Shahbaz Noshir's 2002 short story Angst Isst Seele Auf, which reunited Mira, Eymész, and Jürges to tell the story, based on real events, of an attack by neo-Nazis on a foreign actor while on his way to a stage performance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's screenplay; Signs of Vigorous Life: New German Cinema, a 1976 BBC program about the film movement of which Fassbinder was a part; Scene from Fassbinder's 1970 film The American Soldier that inspired Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Trailer; Plus: an essay by critic Chris Fujiwara

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Brigitte Mira	Emmi
El Hedi Ben Salem	Ali
Barbara Valentin	Barbara
Irm Hermann	Krista
Peter Gauhe	Bruno
Rainer Werner Fassbinder	Eugen
Liselotte Eder	Mrs. Munchmeyer
Gusti Kreissl	Paula
Elma Karlowa	Actor
Lilo Pempeit	Actor
Hark Bohm	Actor
Peter Moland	Actor
Margit Symo	Actor
Marquard Bohm	Gruber
Walter Sedlmayr	Angermayer
Hannes Gromball	Actor
Rudolf Waldemar Brem	Actor
Karl Scheydt	Albert

Technical Credits

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder	Director,Producer,Screenwriter
Thea Eymesz	Editor
Jürgen Jürges	Cinematographer
Helga Kempke	Makeup

Editorial Reviews

The apex of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's discipleship to the great Douglas Sirk, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is much more than a Munich-set crossbreeding of All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. Despite the film's 1970s setting, not much has changed from Sirk's 1950s in terms of the strife that awaits a mismatched couple -- in this case, a hopeful middle-aged washwoman (a squashed Brigitte Mira) and a well-built Moroccan immigrant worker (El Hedi Ben Salem). From an uncaring family to the lingering racism of shrill neighbors, Fassbinder erects as many barriers to the couple's relationship as Germany can muster (Berlin Wall notwithstanding). In the tradition of melodrama, this overload leads to copious exaggerations -- mannered acting, deep-shadowed lighting, and expressionist colors -- that are all keyed to sweeping emotions. Yet the result is, as in the case of Sirk, much more complex and satisfying than preachy realism. A perennial favorite of Fassbinder fans as well as a critical favorite at Cannes, Ali shows that, long before Far from Heaven, another director raided Sirk in hopes of teasing out emotional and political hypocrisies.

Barnes & Noble - Eddy Crouse