‘The City Tramp’: exploring an early film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The New German Cinema movement saw the rise of many visionaries, but few managed to be as influential as Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although he passed away at the unfortunately young age of 37, Fassbinder was a notoriously prolific director whose filmography is studded with multiple seminal masterpieces. While many fans often wonder about the great things he would have achieved if he was still around, the great artistic heights he reached during his lifetime are nothing less than astounding.
Since the very beginning, Fassbinder knew he was destined to enter the exciting domain of film and theatre. During his formative years, he studied acting and participated in student films in various capacities. In addition, Fassbinder became a well-known presence in the theatrical landscape of Munich due to his explosive projects, which transgressively tackled difficult subjects such as race, class and sexuality.
While Fassbinder’s early work in the theatre was already garnering a lot of interest, the same couldn’t be said of his first short films. Produced by Fassbinder’s partner Christoph Roser, they were influenced by the experiments conducted by the auteurs of the French New Wave – especially filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer.
That influence is evident when we see his 1966 short The City Tramp, following the misadventures of a tramp who chances across a gun lying on the road. Plagued by the burden associated with the weapon, he tries his best to get rid of it, but the two seem inextricably linked. Although Fassbinder developed a reputation for his bold experiments with colour, The City Tramp’s black-and-white strikes an interesting contrast with his later works.
During a conversation with the BFI, Fassbinder recalled: “I made two shorts in 1965 and ’66. One arose from my love of Rohmer’s Le Signe du lion, and the other one was… a little like Godard. But at that time, every idiot was making films. I felt a great need to work with a group, and I had access to this small ‘underground’ theatre in Munich where I could try the thing out. Film was always so expensive.”
While talking about working simultaneously on cinema and theatre, Fassbinder admitted that his early films could not transcend the influence of the theatre. He noted: “The films were very theatrical, just as the plays we were doing were very cinematic. I thought that the things I was achieving with actors in the theatre could be tried out in film; you find out what you can take from one medium to benefit the other. Quite soon, though, I was looking for something more purely filmic.”
The City Tramp is far from Fassbinder’s finest, but its humour is infectious. From botched suicide attempts to a strange little song about Japan to Fassbinder angrily peeing in a cameo, this early short is simply delightful.
Watch the film below.
