Max Fassbender: The German filmmaker who inspired Joni Mitchell’s ‘Two Grey Rooms’
Joni Mitchell has written songs on a wide range of subjects, from environmental issues to matters of the heart, and about many people as well. For instance, she wrote the song ‘Break Up’ about David Crosby and ‘Rainy Night House’ as an ode to Leonard Cohen.
Not all of her subjects were so famous, though. In 1982, while recording her album Wild Things Run Fast, she composed a piece of music she called ‘Speechless’, perhaps in reference to how the words wouldn’t come. The song remained lyric-less until, in 1989, Mitchell encountered the story of the often overlooked German cinematographer Max Fassbender and was inspired to finish the song she had started seven years earlier.
Born in Berlin on October 8, 1868, Fassbender contributed to countless silent films in the early 20th century. His work included Richard Oswald’s literary adaptations of The Picture of Dorian Gray (Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray, 1917) and Around the World in Eighty Days (Die Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen, 1919), as well as Oswald’s Nächte des Grauens, an early vampire film. Fassbender also worked on Arzén von Cserépy’s Colomba (1918), Hermann Rosenfeld’s The Medium (1921), and Emil Harder’s William Tell (1924), among others.
As a gay man living in Germany under Paragraph 175, a law introduced in May 1871 that prohibited and criminalised sexual encounters between two men, Fassbender had his heart broken at a young age by a male lover in his youth. The law that stopped him, and countless other Germans, from a life with their loves, was not repealed until 1994.
The story of Fassbender’s heartbreak inspired Mitchell to add lyrics to ‘Speechless’, which became the song ‘Two Grey Rooms’ and was released on her 1991 album Night Ride Home. An aching, slow and tender ballad, the song tells a story of watching a love from a distance, alone in a house with only two grey rooms, and unable to connect with the object of your desire, as if you have disappeared.
With the gentle caress of the melody and the bittersweet ache in Mitchell’s delivery—part remorse and regret, part acceptance, and part longing—you can understand why she held onto the music for so many years. It’s also clear why she was determined to find the perfect lyrics to match the spare, lonely, and yearning instrumentation.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1996, Mitchell explained of the song that “it’s a story of obsession; about this German aristocrat who had a lover in his youth that he never got over”.
She added: “He later finds this man working on a dock and notices the path that the man takes every day to and from work. So the aristocrat gives up his fancy digs and moves to these two shabby grey rooms overlooking this street, just to watch this man walk to and from work. That’s a song that shows my songs aren’t all self-portraits”.
