One always gets the sense that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was entirely sincere in his affection for Douglas Sirk and mid-century Hollywood melodrama. His was a self-reflective cinema, but not a self-excoriating one. Melodrama, for him, is not just a manipulative fallacy or an ideological construct so much as a tragic mode of narrating the tensions between internal desire and external conditions. Fassbinder’s gaze, which seems to breach the prison of the skin and pull forth the evanescence of desire itself, seems genuinely descended from the expressionist tradition. His films aren’t deconstructions of his inspirations so much as meditations on them, ones that, because they actualize and then shatter the characters’ wildest fantasies and most disturbing dreams, expose the cracks in their hopes and articulate the jaggedness of their imaginations.

Veronika Voss was perhaps Fassbinder’s most obvious reflection on his cinematic origins, and that comes with enough baggage to risk turning the film into an obvious allegory of his love for classic cinema rather than a genuine interrogation of it. Veronika Voss is a relatively apparent variation on Sunset Boulevard: a titular former celebrity (played by Rosel Zech), desperate to reengage her career after the point where mainstream German cinema has cast her aside, increasingly confronts the limits of her drug addiction and the conflicting demands of an abusive doctor (Annemarie Duringer) who derives satisfaction from keeping Voss under her thumb. His final film released during his life time, the relative straightforwardness of Veronika Voss’s situation implies the consummatory quality of a director knowingly at the end of his time on earth, offering a final effigy for the inspirations that fueled him.

Yet this is no honorary replaying of an old standby, nor a mere post-modern ode to his fascinations. Veronika Voss is not Norma Desmond. Rather than a toxic statue striving to fully absorb Old Hollywood ghoulishness and exaggeration for her own malformed, abused ego, Voss is a drifting angel caught in modernity’s moonlight. Demond’s needs were gravitational, coaxing the entire film into her orbit. Voss’s are electromagnetic, loosely centering a field of particles, each character compromised by each other, everyone working a disruptive but also often empathetic malice upon each other as they harness one another for various ends. Fassbinder’s film isn’t the story of a lone, maddened, monomaniacal soul exerting force on others but a nebula in which everyone trying to fulfill their self-lacerating needs and hopes causes each other to come undone, in which individuals emit, radiate, and dissipate together for better or worse. Near the end of his career, perhaps because it sees him fading into the netherworld of cinematic afterlife, the liminal space where the dream factory goes to play afterhours, Veronika Voss feels like a ghostly transmission from another world, laying bare a dream Fassbinder has of artistic rapture – film fulfilling your dream life, allowing you to transcend into an artistic ether – that he can’t believe even as it lingers in his mind and shivers into his soul.

Even if it was just an updated Sunset, Fassbinder’s casual mastery of the screen space makes an undying case for itself, and for cinema’s resurrectional, immortalizing promise. Some of this is simply classically-mounted sculpting, a psychological scaffolding where cinema invisibly delineates the emotional fissures and volatile values otherwise entombed within the characters’ souls, elevating them to mythological status. When Voss asks for a role as the mother of a new starlet in a film, and a film executive responds “I’d never dare offer you something like that,” she haughtily intones “that’s why I have to ask,” and Fassbinder bestows her with a slight push into her bruised but undaunted ego to suggest how her inner emission is controlling her outer senses. This is the rare moment in which she turns the hallucinatory narcotic of stardom into a kind of exalted dominion, in which she successfully turns her exhausted body into a display of undaunted mind.

That’s just the good old-fashioned, garden variety greatness though. More telling is the film’s modulation of expressionistic texture, in which shadows and streams of light explore the ambivalence of nearly every character on screen. In the scene immediately after Veronika’s empowering but delusional declaration, two writers ponder her fate amidst dark flickers of light, as though vacillating between one world of melancholy hope and another of cruel pragmatism. Her fate, we see, is shaped by networks outside her control, forces, both real and imagined (and how similar those can be), that are no less sympathetic to her plight but no more capable of acting to alleviate it as they negotiate the tribunal of sheer existence.

However, if Veronika Voss is haunted by expressionism, it is not necessarily of it. The generally realistic spaces and unextended shadows don’t so much lay bare internal truths as expose the brittle, febrile textures of surface beauty. These are not shadows leaping out of the characters, revealing a truer self, nor are they metaphysical encroachments from another world. Fassbinder’s is not an example of Paul Schrader’s individualized “transcendental” style exerting the inner ocean as a more soulful realm beyond the physical senses and the exterior world but, rather, a cinema of mutual engagement and survival in and with that world.

When one character worries about Voss’s fate and Fassbinder offers her face in close-up on the left side of the screen, counterposed by a blinding white light on the right, he dramatizes the tension between a naturalistic space and an evanescent revelation that exists just outside visible matter’s purview. The light doesn’t emanate exclusively from the character, exercising supremacy over the screen. Instead, it emerges in the interaction of self and society, marking the gap between hope and tragedy, the difficulty, but also the necessity, of this-worldly articulations of otherworldly desires. Other white lights throughout the film seem to both form and diffuse the characters, solidifying them and rendering them more flexible, allowing the people to bleed into their dreams and muddying those dreams, or barring them, via however translucent a barrier, from those dreams. Their amorphous aspirations become fleeting enclosures, Fassbinder gathering their needs and their limits into a scorching grayscale blues.

Befitting his romanticism, Fassbinder’s film offers moments of tenuous fulfillment, tender respites of genuine reverie in which the soul is satiated and the film justifies Voss’ statement that “one can make dreams, just like that.” Yet, tellingly, these are never on set. In the one display of Veronika’s on-screen acting, Fassbinder figures the camera as an invasion of privacy, one that promises to enhance and extend her selfhood but instead infiltrates her being. The camera is a violating object, one that beckons her to invite it into her presence, to pierce her veil. No harmonious solution of camera, actor, and self, Fassbinder’s world is a savage battleground of worrisome currents and toiling energies only barely contained by the sheen of temporary symmetry. Adoration and annihilation are so violently enmeshed here, the empowering gaze also the rending spirit. For Fassbinder, the guardians of our dreams are irreparably entangled with the poisons of our reality.

Score: 10/10