“That’s the only thing you have as a soldier; the women.”
Pioniere in Ingolstadt (1971) was filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ninth film in three years. The film adapts Marieluise Fleißer’s play of the same name but moves the location to Weimar era Munich. Fleißer’s play was a favorite of Bertolt Brecht’s who was highly influential in how Fassbinder adapted the work. Fassbinder had staged Pioniere in Ingolstadt for the theater before and was met with Fleißer’s approval. Fassbinder’s filmed version elaborates upon this earlier staging, adding the influence of Jean-Luc Godard to the mix in addition to Brecht.
Pioniere in Ingolstadt follows the love lives of Alma (Irm Hermann) and Berta (Hanna Schygulla) when a troop of soldiers comes to their quiet suburb in order to build a much needed bridge. The two women are complete opposites. Alma is an “all together very modern woman” who views romance as transactionary and works as a prostitute. Berta is a virtuous romantic who cannot see how men prey upon her. For Berta sex is equated with love.
The men in the lives of Alma and Berta are all interchangeable. They are a rakish lot whose uniforms render them as identical to the viewer as much as too Alma and Berta. The soldiers delude themselves to escape the hierarchy of a patriarchal military system designed to oppress individuality. The women, on the other hand, scheme and plot in order to assert themselves in society’s patriarchal designs. Of both groups only Berta is ignorant of how these systems oppress and control different individuals. For Berta there is only the naive notion that love conquers all.
The sergeant Willy (Klaus Löwitsch) abuses his power out of spite and envy. He is a sadist of the first order. Those soldiers that he abuses in turn look to exploit the women of the town. Alma, fully aware of this, accepts money for romantic liaisons; essentially inverting the soldiers’ power play. Alma is like Willy in that she sees how the structure of power works and the ways that people navigate those power dynamics. Alma can exploit soldiers because she sees in them the same futility and weakness that Willy sees.
Out of frustration the soldiers turn to violence. There is the emotional violence of sexual conquest and the physical violence of assault. Both erupt suddenly out of frustration. The townspeople, male and female, are the victims of these “attacks”. The whole film, from the average enlisted man to Berta and Alma, is constructed of dominant and subordinate power dynamics jockeying for control and independence beyond social and political systems.
This dichotomy of power relationships is the center piece of Fassbinder’s career as a filmmaker. In Pioniere in Ingolstadt he renders this preoccupation in a series of theatrical two-shots, grouping the dom and sub together. The performances are dreamy and aloof in Brechtian fashion. The focus of a scene is read as much for its melodrama as for its blocking and framing. And Fassbinder is happy to let long scenes play out as static tableaus.
The antithesis to this aesthetic strategy comes in the form of the troop. When together the soldiers are shot in wide shots or in a succession of rapid close ups. The soldiers, singing their marching songs, are rendered as one. In these scenes, whether drilling or building the bridge, Fassbinder also inserts coy homoerotic images. This reiterates the unity of the soldiers as well as the irrelevancy of women to the daily life of a soldier. For the soldiers the women are as much a commodity as the soldiers are to them.
All of this leads to the final shot of Berta on the ground in the park sobbing “We forgot love” after losing her virginity to the soldier Karl (Harry Baer). It’s a shot that recalls John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) in equal measure. In this moment Berta has lost. It’s a heartbreaking and hopeless conclusion to a film obsessed with bitter power dynamics. The fact that the shot is constant and only changes with the use of a zoom is a part of its power. This image and the line “We forgot love” is the thesis of the entire film.
