Seeing Fassbinder at Work - and not remembering much

Elisabeth Trissenaar and Kurt Raab. Scene from “Bolwieser” (1977)

One of the lasting memories of my late childhood was the day I spent on a film set. 

It was in late November 1976.

The film that was shot was a drama called “Bolwieser” (in English: The Stationmaster’s Wife). The film was directed by none less than Rainer Werner Fassbinder, back then possibly at the height of his productivity. It was based on Oskar Maria Graf’s novel of the same name and starred major German actors, mostly from the “Fassbinder Family” - a group of actors who regularly worked with Fassbinder, including the likes of Barbara Sukowa, Gottfried John and Udo Kier, to name just two or three that might be known outside Germany.

Fassbinder and the production firm Bavaria had decided to shoot the film in my hometown, a small town in northern Bavaria called Hof, and a train station in the Franconian Forest, in the village of Marxgrün. One of the reasons, and I am speculating here, why Bavaria Film may have chosen my unglamorous hometown (and the season) may have been that for some lucky circumstances, Hof had — and still has — one of major film festivals in Germany. Given the film’s gloomy subject, an unhappy marriage between a stationmaster and his infidel wife, Hof’s gloomy fall atmosphere was more than fitting. 

I didn’t know anything at the time, and I’ve never been to a film set. I was eleven years old and a very insecure child. My parents had separated shortly before, and my father was living with another woman. He was in his late thirties. For some reason, he ended up as an extra for a courtroom scene where the main character, the stationmaster Bolwieser, was convicted for lying under oath and sent to prison. Thinking about the day now, it must have been late November, because later that day we drove the two hours to Nuremberg to go and see the famous Christmas market.

The location scouts had chosen a former cafe close to my hometown's train station, to be exact: Cafe Moltke on Bahnhofstrasse on the corner to Moltkestrasse, also known as Cafe Keckeisen, after its owner. It had been closed years earlier, but I remember the ground floor shop of the cafe was still stacked with tin boxes of Karlsbader Oblaten, a Czech specialty. The court scene was staged upstairs in a room that also served as a dance floor when the cafe was still open. It seemed as if time had stood still since World War II.

When my father and I arrived at the cafe, I was deeply impressed how busy everyone was. The “courtroom” was packed with people, with a huge camera, operated by the great Michael Ballhaus, set up at the back of the room for the shot of the judge over the heads of the public. The judge’s desk was set up on a small stage, where otherwise a band would have played. The air in that fairly large room was already thick with cigarette smoke: Fassbinder was a notorious chain smoker, and I guess some other people in there, too. In hindsight I sometimes wondered how they managed that this didn’t show up in the film later on.

While my father got dressed (he had to wear a robe as he played one of the court officials, and I am pretty sure he wore his own as he was a court official in real life) and made up, I was assigned a place close to the exit where nobody stumbled across me but which gave me a good view of what was going on. 

Looking at the courtroom scene over 45 years later, it strikes me how complex this was. For the room to look larger, Ballhaus and Fassbinder had set up a large mirror at a slight angle behind the judge. This allowed the camera to film not only the judge, but also the faces and not the backs of the public in attendance. There were shots of Bolwieser (played by Kurt Raab) and his attorney (Gottfried John) to the left of the judge’s desk. The prosecutor’s desk, where my father was positioned, was set up to the left seen from the judge. 

It all looks much tighter and more claustrophobic than I remember, but it also seems clear that while I was on set, they only shot the frontal view of the judge, and not the shots showing the defendant and not when he was sent to prison and guarded out of the courtroom. That is actually when my father’s stern-looking, black mustached face appears on screen for a couple of seconds. 

My father and I later fell out and we have never really spoken about this day, but I am grateful that he took me there to get a glimpse of two of the greats of German cinema (Fassbinder and Ballhaus) at work even if I couldn’t appreciate it back then because I was too young.