The Fassbinder Method
“So: completion come what may.”
Readers! This holiday season, I am reminded once again of the durable and awesome power of deadlines. Currently I’m in the midst of a series of rolling book deadlines—I met a big one just before Thanksgiving, and now I have another two or three to meet in the coming two or three months—and I have to say: I feel amazing? I mean, I feel terrible—I’m barely moving my body, barely leaving the house, utterly unfit for human company—but at the same time I am practically vibrating with the rare (for me) sensation of actually getting it done, human company and my human body be damned.
Of course there are moments when I can’t help but think . . . Doesn’t this passage in front of me deserve a little more time and consideration—indeed, wouldn’t this book be better served by finally getting things right rather than blearily bullying toward the next (frankly somewhat arbitrary) due date?
But then I think: No time for that, bozo, keep going! And as I go, I’ve been drawing strength from the first few pages of Ian Penman’s 2023 biography of the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (which is, unfortunately, all I’ve had time to read so far). Titled Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, the book is structured as a series of numbered vignettes, most of them just a paragraph or two long—a system that seems to have been Penman’s way of dealing with his own epic deadline crunch.
As Penman tells us in the opening vignettes, this is a book he first considered writing in the years after Fassbinder’s death, in 1982, but never managed to get off the ground. Restarting the project at the beginning of Covid lockdown, Penman figured that he should begin by rewatching Fassbinder’s key films with a notebook in hand. Big mistake! Immediately bogged down again, Penman had a realization: “I decided the only way it would get written at all is if I imposed a Fassbinder fiat on myself. … So: completion come what may. Just sit down and write something rather than holding on to endless revision, rejig, reassessment.”
He continues, in what is a kind of mission statement for the entire project:
How to recapture him in all his stubborn, unyielding, messy glory. How to proceed in the spirit of ? I decided to try and write the way Fassbinder himself worked: get straight to it and get going right away. The very opposite of what Robert Musil called an aesthetic of postponement. And so I gave myself a three- to four-month time frame. Yes, I had been thinking about doing this for a long time, but that was precisely the problem: I might and probably would go on thinking about it forever, and never get anything started never mind finished, the way he always did, while alive, month on month, year on year, without fail.
In the next section, Penman tells us that the biography we are holding was written “from around the beginning of March towards 10 June”— a phenomenally compressed time frame for a two-hundred-page biography. And what I’ve had time to read so far is absolutely true to Fassbinder’s spirit of creative restlessness/relentlessness. This is a filmmaker, after all, who in a career lasting less than two decades completed forty feature films (nineteen of them in a five-year stretch between 1969 and 1974), plus twenty-four plays, two television serials, and sundry other projects.
I’m looking forward to reading more about how Fassbinder did it (pretty sure stimulants were involved)—I’ll plan to report back in the New Year. In the meantime, wishing you all a restorative holiday season and some absolutely crushing deadlines in 2025.
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I am not at all an expert in Fassbinder’s films, but I dearly love this one from 1974—a poignant and scathing reimagining of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows—currently available to stream on the Criterion Channel. (The film’s opening epigram: “Happiness is not fun.”)
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Thanks Mason! I enjoyed reading about your Fassbinder/Penman/Currey method of pushing past perfectionism — but honestly, this post was worth reading just for the photo of Fassbinder in his net shirt! Best of luck with your next set of deadlines (or lifelines?!), and I look forward to more Subtle Manoeuvres in the New Year. 🥂
Congrats on meeting the first deadline, Mason! I know the feeling of wanting to spend more time on words. I often wish I could spend an entire week working on a single sentence--a month working on 4 sentences--a year working on 52 sentences...there's something that seems so zen about that schedule to me. Although, the reality is that I'd probably get bored. 😂