"Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant" is a movie with a very strong sense of stage. The story unfolds in a closed space. The structure of the story is "screen", with a lot of lines and rare background music. These elements all make the movie look more like a stage play than a movie.
The director of the film, Fassbender, is not only lingering about the performance of the stage play. The complicated scene scheduling and the convenient performance of photography are enough to see the skill and ingenuity of the director and photography. Patina's apartment, or the bedroom, becomes the only scene in the film. The main prop in the story is the bed, followed by the typewriter. The six women went around, all the emotional entanglements of falling in love and killing each other happened, developed, and ended in this room. The so-called staged, roughly refers to the single scene, the props are simple, and the freehand nature is strong. For movies only, the rich outdoor space allows the lens to be liberated, and the realism makes the movie different from other visual arts. The diversified audiovisual language of movies will inevitably strengthen the richness and emotional tension of the characters. Fassbender did not violate the conventional language of the film, but only expressed the audiovisual language to the extreme, and his personal stylization was obvious. In Ballhaus’s shot, the metal bed frame is a bright color in the picture, but it does not steal the spotlight. The background of the whole bedroom in a single color has some bright colors, which increases the sense of layering and space in the picture.
Similarly, Patina and Karin wore dresses with a strong sense of decoration. The metallic colors on their bodies are also the highlights in the picture, but these highlights are only supplements to the level of the picture and are not eye-catching. The costumes of the characters also use materials with strong drape, which deliberately avoids the appearance of large curves in the picture, breaking the deliberately created tough, boring, and lacking fluidity of the picture texture. The character's heart is so distorted, but she has to sit tightly closed one layer after another.
Ballhaus realized that Fassbinder needed to isolate the space of the discipline object, and after proper arrangement and distribution of the enclosed space, it could be better understood, supervised and controlled. The film’s photography style is clear, with a strong atmosphere of hypocrisy, pretentiousness, exaggeration and hollowness
.", January 2018 (No.106))
