Germany emerging through the 1970s was imbued in polemic discourse concerned with the issues surrounding German identity politics. The issues around American influences within Germany’s social and political spheres proved more convoluted igniting these discourses that would be thoroughly engaged with and explored by the New German Cinema movement.
This engagement proved the enigmatic approach encompassing American influences, one that Germüden (1994:55) defines twofold as “an attraction towards a culture that had been decisive in furnishing and shaping childhood images, tastes, and desires and a rejection of American politics and the colonizing effect of its popular culture.”
This highly politicalized and cultural discourse around New German Cinema is further …show more content…
In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder’s preoccupations and reworking of narrative is not centred about the fears and experiences of the social elitist classes but rather focuses on society’s marginalised if not relegated class, without giving prejudice to heritage nor nationality. Specifically, in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, these are society’s cleaners, bartenders and immigrant workers.
Fujiwara’s previous assertions of oppression counts as a profound component of the narrative structure of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. In her writings, Skvirsky (2008:98) comments on Fassbinder’s works, asserting that “the film is divided into two parts: the first part is a disavowal of All that Heaven Allows; the second part is a remake of the first.” She goes on to clarify this explaining that “the two parts are separated in the story by a ‘vacation’ that is not represented in the plot; they are separated on screen by an enigmatic scene in an outdoor