Eight Hours Don't Make a Day and Marxist Melodrama
German cinema's great misanthrope finds his heart on the factory floor
Rainer Werner Fassbinder did not waste time coddling his characters, his colleagues, or his audience. From his starting point in film, Love is Colder Than Death (1969) at the age of 24, to his premature death 13 years and 39 films later, Fassbinder developed a reputation as someone whose favored approach to filmmaking was as a kind of emotional torture chamber/self-flagellation exercise. Which is part of what makes his 1972-3 TV series, Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, notable: within the series’ eight hours spread across five episodes, hardly a shred of cynicism or irony can be found. What he creates instead is a genuine love letter to the working class, to the young and the old, that finds in its political discourse a perfect embodiment of televisual drama, and in its soap opera a perfect realization of political principles.
Between a combination of his untimely death of accidental drug overdose, his controversial and outsized public image, and the profoundly impressive work he was able to consistently put onscreen at a torrid pace, Fassbinder has become something of a mythologized figure in film history, but even in his early work it’s obvious that he was a rare talent who was more than worthy of the esteem. His work always wore its influences on its sleeve, initially serving as a clear replication of French New Wave-style experimentation, often circling back to Hollywood noir pastiche, which was a mode that served him fine even if it wasn’t terribly revolutionary; after some engagements with Brecht, Straub-Huillet, and especially Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder really hit his groove and found his specialty for icy, ironic melodramas often targeting the petit bourgeoisie. Sympathetic impositions are rare commodities in Fassbinder’s oeuvre, even among the proletarian figures; instead, a carefully composed distance is often maintained, opening the floor for certain judgmental attitudes to develop towards the characters and situations. Fassbinder’s work has developed a reputation coming to suggest a level of contempt for some of the people he depicts, sometimes communicated directly at his subjects (Katzelmacher’s (1969) band of miserable, xenophobic layabouts, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul’s (1974) spiteful racists) and sometimes at his subjects’ inability to cope amid the world’s trials (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) and The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) both see their eponymous characters commit suicide in the face of modernity’s uncaring emptiness), and it’s possible to apply a reading to his work that centers an impulse of sadism to his artistry, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has articulated (the piece as a whole is an excellent survey of Fassbinder, I would recommend reading it). Such is the intensity of the response that this kind of distanced gaze can elicit that Fassbinder had been criticized as misogynistic, homophobic (despite being openly bisexual), antisemitic, and politically extreme at different points in his career; I’ve seen less than one third of his films so I can’t say one way or another towards some of these claims, but I will say I think there’s a fine line between cruelty for prejudice’s sake and cruelty resulting from a certain cynical fetishism.
This kind of recurring attitude is part of what makes Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day so interesting, because from the very first scene to its very ending there is a sense of unconditional compassion for every person on screen. Initially commissioned by German public television as a series about the working class, Fassbinder took the assignment and ran with it, to such effective lengths that the series was prematurely cancelled amid right-wing outcry. The five episodes that exist turn TV soap opera into something more akin to the socialist realist agitprop being produced on the other side of the wall from Fassbinder, but does so in a way that recalls the abilities of Sirk in Hollywood to package subversive, challenging political critique into a resonant dramatic form.
The series opens with a classic Fassbinder scene of a family gathering threatening to erode amid the gravity of unspoken tensions and petty grievances. It’s Oma’s (Luise Ullrich) birthday, and celebrating the occasion are her miserably elitist daughter Aunt Klara (Christine Oesterlein), her obstinate son Wolf (Wolfried Lier), his wife Kathe (Anita Bucher), their son Jochen (Gottfriend John) and daughter Monika (Renate Roland), her tyrannical husband Harald (Kurt Raab) and daughter Sylvia (Andrea Schober), and Jochen’s friend Manfred (Wolfgang Zerlett). Champagne gets popped, people get slapped, Klara basically talks shit on the rest of the family, it’s an unhappy affair; or, it would be were it not for the effervescent grace and good humor of Oma, and for Jochen’s indomitable good spirit. He leaves to get some more champagne and at the automat runs into a woman named Marion (Hanna Schygulla); the two hit it off, and he brings her back to the party. This group forms the core around which the series constellates around, from Jochen’s and Marion’s work colleagues to Oma’s newly acquired romantic partner (Gregor, played by Werner Finck) and her civic activities.
The series for the most part develops two primary narrative threads that occasionally cross over: the story of Jochen and Marion’s relationship, and the story of Jochen’s workplace. Jochen is a factory worker as part of a group that manufactures tools used in industrial machinery. Numerous issues arise that threaten the harmony and well-being of Jochen and his peers: in episode one, the group is behind schedule as a result of an excessively tight development deadline, and so Jochen comes up with a modification to the parts they’re making that gets the job done early but loses them the performance bonus they would have originally received; the group’s foreman dies unexpectedly in episode one, and so episode three sees a conflict emerge between the group, who wants one of their own to be elevated to foreman, and the outsider that the company ends up installing in that position; episode five sees news come around that the factory is moving to a new location on the other side of the city which throws off the quality of life maintained by many of the workers, leading to scrambles for housing and ultimately a negotiation with management to have the workers autonomously manage their own duties. The drama takes on a quotidian, mundane nature that rather than risking dullness strikes a note of recognizable, compelling realism that is refreshingly free of the sadistic, miserablist element found in Fassbinder’s other melodramas and in social realism writ large. Instead, the hard work of the characters finds itself rewarded more often than not.
The intertwining of political theory and soap opera melodramatics proves to be the series’ most satisfying and impressive feature, each episode functioning as its own demonstration of Marxist thought within a wonderfully realized televisual structure. Conversations about the alienation of labor, direct action, and worker-owned sites of production never feel like didactic lectures towards a working-class audience, but rather as spontaneously emerging solutions to the social problems facing the protagonists. The more discursive method is obviously not without merit, but for a piece designed for wide broadcast on German public television, Fassbinder cannily understood that a more effective (if more difficult) approach is to integrate revolutionary ideas within an accessibly legible vehicle of entertainment, carried as much by its slice-of-life joys as by its intellectual rigor. Jochen, Marion, and Oma are all truly aspirational characters, each one exhibiting a level of cleverness, industriousness, and generosity that’s rare not only in Fassbinder’s work but in television as a whole. Jochen in particular carries himself with a degree of dignity and assuredness that working class characters are rarely afforded, never defeated by his circumstances even as they may seem too complex to surmount on first glance, even more striking qualities given John’s unconventional leading man appearance.
If a criticism exists of the series, one could say that the positive results that seem to always come from the characters exercising their power as individuals and collectives is too optimistic or naive for a realistic depiction of society as strictly bureaucratic and neoliberal as West Germany in the post-economic miracle years. While it is consistently, uncharacteristically positive, I would argue that that positivity gives it its secret strength as a work of art. This is a TV series whose great affective achievement is that it does not leave one in a state of dispassionate appreciation, but instead succeeds at an invigorating renewal of one’s engagement with the world, a show that makes you want to go out and do something productive and help others and talk to your loved ones and maybe do a little bit of syndicalism along the way. It’s utopian, but not in a literary way, it envisions a utopia of ordinariness within our own reality that could so easily be achieved if we demanded it. The title of the series, Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, is a mantra that we see followed through on — to the working class, work is surely a significant part of life, but it isn’t, nor should it be, everything. There is time for love, and drinks, and education, and so much else that constitutes the human experience. That a famous cynic such as Fassbinder was able to channel his hope into such a sustained piece is perhaps the biggest miracle of it all.