9. Sexuality in Contemporary European Film

LESTER KEYSER

It is the powerful impact of these brightly-lit images moving in black space and artificial time, their affinity to trance and the subconscious, and their ability to influence masses and jump boundaries, that has forever made the cinema an appropriate target of the repressive forces in society—censors, traditionalists, the state.

AMOS VOGEL, Film as a Subversive Art

LARGELY because they were free of the restraints of the large corporate studio, an institution liable to puritanism and conservatism, and unbridled by archaic, self-righteous production codes, European filmmakers, from the very inception of cinema, have generally been more daring and sophisticated in their explorations of human sexuality. In America, nudity, illicit sex, perversion, and even scenes of passion were all excluded from the screen in the mid-thirties by an unprecedented self-imposed censorship. Individual artists were under no such constraints on the continent, and the markedly different conditions are apparent in their films. One good example is Ecstasy, a film by Gustav Machaty, released in 1933 in Czechoslovakia, which not only featured Hedy Lamarr in the nude, but centered as its title suggests on her emerging sexual consciousness, making eroticism its principal focus.

Machaty was not, of course, alone in his probings of the erotic impulse. The German expressionists, the French surrealists, and even the Russian formalists all gave sex a prominent place in their works. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is, for all its theatrical devices, a Gothic thriller, full of repressed sexuality, rape, and murder. Its suggestive sets highlight the thin line between sanity and insanity, between the normal and abnormal, and are not far from the stylistics of von Sternberg, whose The Blue Angel introduced Lola (Mariene Dietrich) to a world every bit as mesmerized by her sexual charms as the professor (Emil Jannings) she victimized. A few years earlier in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora s Box, Louise Brooks played Lulu, a similarly hypnotic figure whose sexuality destroyed an older male.

When Dali and Bunuel first sliced open the human eye in Un Chien Andalou, they also opened the world of cinematic vision to the regions of the unconscious. Their “desperate call for murder” was a cry for a new freedom in cinema, a freedom from the conventions of narrative structure and a freedom from visual taboos. Even Eisenstein, the most intellectual pioneer in world cinema, was not deaf to this call; he went to Paris, then Hollywood, and finally Mexico in his quest for a fuller, more engaging and humane cinema. Though never completed and carelessly edited by others into three separate works, his Que Viva Mexico! remains, as Parker Tyler notes in his Classics of the Foreign Film, the world’s “sole abortive and indisputable classic to date.”¹ In Que Viva Mexico! Eisenstein began probing both the dark and light sides of human life, pinpointing the social and sexual repression permeating peasant life.

Free to range among all social strata and physical phenomena, European film-makers rejected the genres common to American films, the westerns, the gangster epics, and the lavish musicals, in favor of more individualistic visions of reality, more probing dissections of modern life. The more bizarre reaches of human behavior became common fare on European screens. Few viewers will forget, for example, the terrifyingly realistic picture of a child molester Fritz Lang presented in M, the lush treatment of lesbianism Leontine Sagan offered in Mädchen in Uniform, or the dark musings on superstition and sexuality Carl Dreyer limned in his Day of Wrath.

European filmmakers seemed especially preoccupied with the tension between mind and body, between the animal and the civilized. The modern European consciousness had obviously been formed by the discoveries of Darwin, Freud, and Marx. European filmmakers, working in the most modern of all arts, were struggling to reconcile man’s animal heritage, his subconscious drives, and his need for social structures. The apotheosis of this theme comes in the work of Jean Renoir. In his Rules of the Game, the natural proclivities of his characters are always at odds with the cherished norms of society. The madcap antics at the masquerade party are constantly played off against the need for decorum, the need for a social hierarchy. Jealousy, infidelity, and even murder are all eventually hidden behind a thin veneer of civilization. Characters controlled by more fundamental and primitive impulses hypocritically give assent to long-standing traditions of class and honor: they pay lip service to the rules of the game, which are, as the film shows, grand illusions. The film was unpopular when first released in 1939; only after the Second World War was its validity recognized.

Many of these serious European films were, because of the language barrier and the extreme differences in approach and content, virtually unknown to the mass audience in America. If the films were shown at all, it was usually in cosmopolitan areas or on arthouse circuits, or perhaps in an enlightened museum. Not until 1960 did a major European film capture the imagination of the American viewing public and generate long lines at box offices. Ironically, this landmark film countered American innocence with continental experience, indeed Old World decadence, in as dramatic a confrontation as Daisy Miller’s visit to the Coliseum. The new title on the neighborhood marquee came from Rome not Hollywood, and in it, Federico Fellini took a sharp look at La Dolce Vita, using his camera, he declared, to put a thermometer to a sick world. La Dolce Vita did more, however, than measure the sad changes modern life had wrought in sexuality, or indicate the symptoms of the modern malaise. La Dolce Vita revolutionized modern cinema, forcing films around the world to deal with adult themes in a serious manner. La Dolce Vita launched the so-called “swinging sixties” at the same time it brought film art to international status. For all these reasons, it is easy to agree with Andrew Sarris that “it could be argued that in . . . social impact, La Dolce Vita is the most important film ever made.”²

Like so many of his predecessors in European cinema, Fellini examines in La Dolce Vita the seemingly ineluctable chasm between man’s sexuality and his social milieu. His protagonist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is a talented man in search of a context; Marcello longs for communication, for meaningful sensual and intellectual involvement, but finds himself in a universe that seems to negate the possibility of total involvement. La Dolce Vita is in essence a chronicle of Marcello’s unsuccessful search for something more in life. He never finds the added dimension he seeks, but resigns himself to life in a desolate wasteland where sex is an opiate, a desperate and meaningless attempt to escape all-encom-passing ennui.

La Dolce Vita opens with a stunning shot of a helicopter carrying a statue of Christ. The visual shock, the ironic incongruity of the key symbol of ancient values being transported by modern technology, immediately suggests Fellini’s concern with the displacement of higher values in modern life. Fellini’s hero is a journalist who parlays the scandalous escapades of the upper class into a comfortable livelihood; the once revered savant, the writer, has been reduced to a purveyor of modern gossip in tabloid newspapers. Marcello’s gossip column is in fact the chronicle of an aimless generation cut loose from transcendent values and incapable of real carnal satisfaction.

Marcello has numerous sexual adventures in La Dolce Vita, but all his escapades leave a taste of ashes rather than providing sweet emancipation from cares. Marcello’s fleeting liaison with Anouk Aimée highlights the confusion of material goods and satisfaction which haunts capitalist society. They make love in a prostitute’s quarters, but the wealthy heiress cannot escape her nymphomania. This careless amour leads Marcello’s unstable mistress (Yvonne Furneaux) to attempt a jealous suicide. She seems caught in the dilemma of liberated sex; freedom from responsibility is too much for her to bear. Escaping from both these women, Marcello has a tempestuous night on the town with a famous American movie star (Anita Ekberg), but the glamor fades with the dawn. In the light of day, he is as lonely and lost as ever.

Fellini’s startling picture of a world devoid of feeling set the tone for many European films in the early sixties. In most of them sex is seen as just another blind alley, a futile outlet for energy in an enervating world. In 1961, for example, Michelangelo Antonioni screened L’Avventura at Cannes, announcing his creation of a cinema about the new man—an individual who finds all his aspirations crushed in the Copernican universe, a nightmarish galaxy where human beings are no longer central and the earth is only a small speck in a seemingly infinite expanse. All sense of teleology is gone in L’Avventura; the viewer is confronted with what Antonioni describes as “a detective story back to front.”³ The basic plot involves a search for Anna (Lea Massari) by her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her girl friend Claudia (Monica Vitti). During the search Sandro and Claudia become lovers, and they never find Anna. Eventually Sandro cheats on Claudia, but she forgives him. At the end of the film, Sandro and Claudia are reconciled to the fickleness of their emotions and the casualness of their relationship. In a world seemingly governed by chance, they feel no responsibility to any orders or rules; instead, they accept their desires.

Antonioni’s presentation of the search in L’Avventura emphasizes the bleakness of the island landscape and the isolation of the characters. Their sexual encounter provides the only alternative to solitude and lonely quest. Sandro and Claudia move in a vale of shadows; sex offers them a transient respite from all-encompassing mystery.

A similarly bleak and highly abstract view of human sexuality dominates Last Year at Marienbad, a stylized and ambiguous film directed by Alain Resnais which caused a sensation in Europe in 1961. Resnais filmed Last Year at Marienbad entirely at the Nymphenburg in Bavaria, using ceaseless tracking shots through ornate corridors, repetitious narration, and complex, almost architectural, arrangements of characters to transform Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay into cinematic poetry.

For all its emphasis on the corridors of memory and the relativity of time and perception, Last Year at Marienbad is basically a love story concerning a married woman (Delphine Seyrig), her husband (Sacha Pitoeff), and a would-be lover (Giorgio Albertazzi). The dehumanization of these characters, their utter lack of emotion, is suggested by their lack of names; in the screenplay, they are identified only as A, M, and X. The world in which they move is still and silent; they seem lost in an overpowering hotel. Resnais has indicated that the very size of the rooms in which his characters move was a conscious use of psychoanalytic imagery; the rooms are large, he notes, to “indicate a tendency to narcissism.”⁴ Throughout the film, M’s memory of the last year is constantly contradicted by the physical reality documented on screen. His fantasy of a love affair is clearly at odds with reality. M is locked in his illusory memories, trapped by his own narcissism; he is an isolated pawn in a world he cannot comprehend and cannot escape.

The icy detachment of Last Year at Marienbad provided a definitive and unforgettable portrait of the ennui, sexual boredom, and alienation in modern life. European filmmakers were fascinated, however, by the possibilities inherent in the triangular relationship of A, X, and M. Love triangles were, of course, a staple of literature and cinema, but the new young filmmakers did not accept the normal focus in such narratives: the resolution of the triangle in a traditional pairing. Instead they explored the dynamics of the triangle, concentrating their attention on the evolving sexual code it entailed. The apparent failure of normal relationships forced filmmakers to study new patterns of sexuality.

Perhaps the most famous ménage à trois in the history of cinema appears in François Truffaut׳s Jules and Jim. Truffaut, the enfant terrible of the Cahiers group, treats his principals with tender affection in a film as notable for its lyricism as its sexual candor. At the center of the film is Kathe, stunningly portrayed by Jeanne Moreau, an immensely vibrant character, mysterious, forceful, capricious, and highly desirable. She is the great temptress, who seduces both Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre), two youthful chums. Kathe first marries Jules, but when the relationship fails, she marries Jim; the three then live happily together for a while. Jim decides to leave, but Kathe cannot stand the idea. She drives a car off a bridge, killing both Jim and herself, leaving Jules to mourn his lover and his friend.

Truffaut’s tragic idyll is most notable for its sparkling joie de vivre. When Kathe, Jules, and Jim are together, the screen seems incandescent with passion. Their bicycle trips, picnics, and frenetic wanderings around Paris have a charm and an excitement far removed from the dreary despair of L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita. Life as Jules, Jim, and Kathe live it is vibrant and vital; their sexual relationships are life-giving and meaningful. When the trio is together, Kathe is happy: she chooses death rather than the dissolution of the triangle.

Jean-Luc Godard’s vision of the love triangle in Le Mépris (Contempt), released a year after Jules and Jim, is not so rosy as that of his colleague on the Cahiers staff. Once again the woman of the triangle, Camille Javai (Brigitte Bardot), is all-important; Bardot seems to be playing herself, the international sex kitten and symbol of the sensual life. Camille’s husband Paul (Michael Piccoli), who is working on a film based on The Odyssey, cannot satisfy her; she feels only contempt for him. But the American film producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) she runs away with also fails her. She decides to leave them both, but just as she asserts her freedom, she too dies in a car accident.

Camille’s sexuality seems to be destroyed by relationships which try to contain her free spirit. Both Jeremy and Paul are too possessive; they want to reduce everything to a simple compact, an eternal pair. Camille is less interested in control and seems much more in tune with the flow of life. The triangle is, to her, a natural thing. Her life deals in triangles. The men cannot handle the conflict, however, as they search for lost ideals. Their attempt to recapture the classic ideal of The Odyssey, their dependence on Fritz Lang, the old master, to direct their efforts, and their inability to cope with the female aptly named Camille, suggest their detachment from modern realities. Their failures as lovers reflect their inadequacies as thinkers and as artists. Yet ideas and ideals have become so central for them that more basic, amorphous emotions are beyond them.

One year later, the brilliant young Polish director, Roman Polanski, dealt with the same primitive drives, again in the context of a triangle, in his Knife in the Water. In Polanski’s work, coscripted by Jerzy Skolimowski, almost all pretense of civility is gone. The film portrays an almost Oedipal conflict between the cynical married man Andrzej (Leo Niemczyk) and a young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Melanowicz) for the attention of Andrzej’s wife Christine (Jolante Umecka). Cut off from civilization on a yacht, the men reenact a veritable totem feast. The tension is palpable as Andrzej and the young man constantly taunt each other, compete in petty games, and finally fight over trivial objects. In the background constantly is the real prize, Christine, whose provocative bathing attire creates an aura of pervasive sexuality.

The emerging emphasis on the battle of the sexes, on the ritualistic combat intrinsic in the mating game, led European filmmakers into even bleaker visions of dominance and submission as the key elements in human sexuality. The conflict involved, of course, not only heterosexual love, but relations between individuals of the same sex. Ingmar Bergman, for example, scandalized European audiences in 1963 with his somber story of two sisters, The Silence. Viewers were so disturbed by this picture of human sexuality that Bergman was deluged with hate mail and received a number of threats on his life.

The Silence is a critical film in the history of sexuality on screen; it pictures a universe almost beyond emotions, beyond sexuality, but still haunted by the physical vestiges of the old drives. Susan Sontag clarifies this phenomenon in her essay “The Aesthetic of Silence.” Words, she writes, are key links to the past, the building blocks of memory; to destroy continuity, she asserts, is to go “to the end of each emotion or thought. And after the end, what supervenes (for a while) is silence.”⁵

Bergman’s two sisters, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) have been traveling in a foreign city. What they intended, Ester reveals, was “a lovely pleasure trip to the most beautiful place on earth.” Instead they find they cannot escape their natures and are lost in a city where they cannot fathom the language. The two sisters almost seem opposite facets of one personality, Ester the mind, and Anna the body. Ester is a scholar, a linguist, who cannot control her lesbian urges; she spends her time locked in the hotel, wracked by a terrible cough, constantly eating and smoking. To allay her sexual tension, she masturbates, but still finds no peace. Anna is young and voluptuous. Her nudity in the bath is a constant temptation to Ester. Yet Anna can find no meaningful release for her energy; she makes love with a man in the hotel, but the act has no meaning. Eventually she leaves Ester dying in the foreign city, and continues her journey to a distant home with her son, Johan.

Bergman’s portrait of the two women, neither of whom can find wholeness or integrity in their lives, makes their sexual drives seem a cruel cosmic joke. Ester and Anna cannot satisfy each other, and they cannot find release in the alien world they inhabit. Inevitably, they hate themselves and each other. As they try to satisfy their needs, they find themselves tearing at each other. Anna’s body is both a temptation and a reproach to Ester; Ester’s civility and culture, a cruel comment on Anna’s vulgarity.

Bergman had originally intended The Silence as a study of two men. In England, Joseph Losey, a displaced American, stayed with masculine characters in his own involved study of dominance and subservience in sexual relationships. Based on a powerful screenplay by Harold Pinter, Losey’s The Servant introduces still another level to the fray: his film is as much about the conflict of social classes in England as it is about the topsy-turvy affair of the master (James Fox) and the butler who eventually dominates him (Dirk Bogarde). Sex became a perfect metaphor for Losey; the seesawing of power in the homosexual liaison of Fox and Bogarde was his mirror of the similar lack of stability in English society. The individual’s drive for power vis-à-vis his mate became a paradigm in The Servant for the larger power politics so central in a decade of revolution and upheaval.

Many European films in the late sixties develop Losey’s theme, using repressed sexuality and a drive for more liberated relationships as an emblem of a similar political quest for more responsive institutions, for greater involvement in the process of government. In 1968, for example, Lindsay Anderson focusses on the collapse of the class system in England exacerbated by a youthful revolt. Set entirely in a boy’s school, Lindsay’s film If is an ironic commentary on the values encapsulized in Kipling’s poem of the same name. His hero, Mick (Malcolm McDowell), is the victim of an outmoded and repressive Victorian education. He and his colleagues find all their natural drives frustrated in a closed universe where sex is suppressed or sublimated. When the boys act up, they are beaten savagely or humiliated under cold showers. Away from the masters, however, their primitive urges find release in the rhythms of the “Missa Luba” and in impassioned affairs with a local waitress (Christine Noonan). Finally, the breach between the system and its servants becomes irremediable and the boys turn on the masters in an orgiastic guerilla attack. All their fantasies explode in a cathartic battle. Lindsay’s sympathies are obviously with Mick and his girl. Commenting on the many images of repressed sexuality in the film, the images of physicals, masturbation, and forbidden pinups, and of a frustrated wife’s nude walk through the boys’ dormitory, Lindsay argued that his vision of the school was a vision of an institution “that frustrates the natural instincts in the body;” given this context, the boys’ revolt is, Lindsay feels, “a pure violent expression of sex.”⁶

The dichotomy between restrictive institutions and liberated sexuality is the central thesis of Dusan Makavejev’s kaleidoscopic ode to Wilhelm Reich, WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Makavejev began research on his film in 1969 and shot most of the footage in 1970. Completed, the film was banned in Yugoslavia. There is good reason for a totalitarian state to look askance at Makavejev’s art. Beginning with the theories of a man who died in an American prison because he would not deny his beliefs, Makavejev explores not only the concept of a vital force Reich felt man must rediscover to be free, but stops along the way to document the rise of hard-core pornography in America, to lambaste the failure of the Russian revolution to free people from a possessive, capitalistic attitude to sex, and to urge the development of a new freer sexual consciousness that would topple all institutions. WR: Mysteries of the Organism is revolutionary both in technique and in content. Makavejev rejects a traditional narrative mode; rather, he presents a collage of striking images. Viewers must supply the connections; their visceral responses to juxtaposed images of Stalin at Christmas, of transvestites in a lower East Side gallery, of groupies plaster-casting penises, and of Reichian therapy sessions, are the substance of the film. If a viewer is free enough to allow his thoughts to wander outside traditional structures, he has taken the first step to the freedom both Reich and Makavejev extol.

Makavejev’s call for freedom and a liberated sexuality is hammered home by his refusal to turn the camera away from scenes rarely treated in earlier cinema. Nudity pervades the film, with every intimate detail of the sex act in plain view; the film is also crowded with images of the outer reaches of sexuality, epitomized in the presence of Jim Buckley, the editor of Screw magazine, whose erect penis becomes a work of art. It is no wonder that Amos Vogel calls the film “one of the most important subversive masterpieces” in modern cinema.⁷ Makavejev not only calls for liberation; he leads cinema to new freedom by his example.

The movement towards a new permissiveness is undoubtedly the major revolution in European film of the seventies. Fellini’s image of a sick world had, young filmmakers felt, begged the question. How could one talk about sickness, they asked, when man is only obeying his most fundamental drives? Instead of castigating man for some mysterious fall from grace, the new generation of filmmakers preached a gospel of acceptance in their films. Sexuality became their new desideratum, the one contact man had with Nature and the cosmic in a world where institutions had gone astray.

It is hard to overestimate the dimensions of this shift in attitudes towards sexuality. In the new European cinema, all the old taboos were broken and the guilt associated with sexual promiscuity rejected. Even incest, once the horror of every society, could not withstand the new tide of freedom. In The Murmur of the Heart, a delightful comedy by Louis Malle, the sexual education of fourteen-year-old Laurent (Benoit Ferreux) includes an interlude with his mother Clara (Lea Massari). The act is presented as a positive, indeed lovely and touching, moment in his life. Neither mother nor son is traumatized; they accept their sexual episode as a part of life, a stage in a natural cycle. They are beyond taking the conventions of the society in which they move seriously. Sex, in The Murmur of the Heart, seems one of those private things humans have to gird themselves against the insanity around them. Malle’s family would have enjoyed themselves at the very parties that bored Fellini’s Marcello. They can accept their own irrelevance in the cosmic scheme by holding on to simple pleasures.

Sex as a refuge from the absurdity of everyday life is an even more explicit theme in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Alienated from everything around them, Paul (Marlon Brando) and Jeanne (Maria Schneider) set up an apartment in Paris where they can satisfy their innermost desires, free from problems of identity and position in the larger world. In the apartment, they work out the dynamics of dominance and subservience in an increasingly unconventional series of erotic acts. Outside, they are plagued by relatives, lovers, material concerns, politics, and religion. In the apartment, they really live; it is their dream world. When the ideal fails, the result is death.

Last Tango in Paris inverts all the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Sex emerges as the positive pole of human life, whereas civilization, restraint, and self-control are viewed as negative traits. A similar inversion is evident in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a film based on Anthony Burgess’ celebrated novel. The novel was a cautionary tale about the dangers of behavior modification in modern society; government could, it shows, reduce its citizens to little wind-up automatons. Kubrick is not as concerned, however, with the problem of free will. His presentation of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) emphasizes instead the vitality of the young hoodlum. Though Alex is a sadist who finds joy in brutality and destruction, he is still shown as more likeable than the shallow, hypocritical zombies who try to remold him. Sex is so plasticized in Alex’s world that his blood and guts approach, his savage rapes and brutal actions, seem alternatives to a total lack of feeling, a deadly clinical detachment. Kubrick’s sympathy for Alex shocked the normally tolerant and sophisticated Pauline Kael, who published a lengthy tirade accusing the director of “sucking up to the thugs in the audience.”⁸ As usual, Kael’s interpretation of the film is a good one. Like many other European filmmakers, Kubrick is willing to accept any expression of sexuality as more desirable than any social restraint.

Pauline Kael was not, of course, the only one shocked by A Clockwork Orange. The progressive trend in European films, the self-conscious espousal of a new permissiveness, has disoriented many cinema-goers. With each new assault on traditional values, a furor has erupted. Fellini was soundly denounced for the decadence of La Dolce Vita; Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism was banned in many countries ; and Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris inspired innumerable law suits. Liliana Cavani’s most recent effort, The Night Porter, continues the tradition. The Night Porter was confiscated in Italy and condemned by the Church, yet audiences all over the world are lining up to see Cavani’s operatic depiction of a sadomasochistic love affair.

The Night Porter is a graphic film; director Cavani forces her audience to see all that sadism entails. In the concentration camp where Max (Dirk Bogarde) first meets Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), the depicting of humiliation and torture is relentless. The audience sees Max abusing the nude Lucia, cutting her arm only to lick the wound, forcing objects up her vagina, and teaching her the pleasures of fellatio in chains. Years later, when Max and Lucia meet in Vienna, it is clear that they both enjoyed their bizarre actions and they voluntarily relive their old games.

Max’s one attempt at explaining his strange infatuation is ambiguous and disjointed: “It all seems lost . . . something happens . . . ghosts take shape in the mind . . . this phantom with a voice and a body.” Max, now a hotel porter who wants to live as a churchmouse, obviously thought his fascist days, those twisted days in the camps when prisoners were his playthings, were all gone—sad, unexpected aberrations in a more orderly universe. Then Lucia reappears and the old itch comes back. The “ghosts” form in his mind and the phantom is once again incarnate. Lucia can no more explain her obsession than Max can. When she is discovered chained in the apartment where she and Max hide from the world, she can only purr that “Nothing is changed . . . there is no cure . . . Max is more than the past . . . I’m alright here . . . I’m here of my own free will.” Both she and Max eventually die rather than give up their obsession. Perverse as their world may seem to outsiders, they are the Romeo and Juliet of Cavani’s film, star- crossed lovers destroyed by forces larger than themselves.

Cavani’s The Night Porter may be the most daring recent film but its willingness to explore seemingly bizarre sexual relationships exemplifies a healthy new freedom in European cinema, a willingness to take chances in the quest for insight. Young directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany’s most prolific film genius, are not afraid to tackle seemingly impossible subjects. His latest work, Angst Essen Seele Auf Ali, concerns a love affair between a sixty-year-old French cleaning woman (Brigitte Mira) and a young Moroccan emigrant (El Hedi Ben Salem). In this unlikely liaison, Fassbinder isolates some universal themes about xenophobia, prejudice, and the abiding humanity which binds old and young together. He does so without skirting any of the sexual problems Ali faces in a love affair with a woman twice his age. Fassbinder and most of the newest talents on the European film scene have come to see sexuality in a new perspective. These new directors are creating a mature cinema which treats the immense range of sexual experiences as part of human life. They are neither obsessed by sex nor fearful of it. Their expanded vision augurs well for the future of European films.