On the composition and rhythm of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

Fassbinder made over forty films in thirteen years, a rate of production that was almost certainly fatal — he died at thirty-seven — and that produced work of wildly variable quality alongside genuine masterpieces.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is one of the masterpieces: a love story between a sixty-year-old German cleaning woman and a Moroccan immigrant worker, made in the style of Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s.

The Sirk influence is not casual. Fassbinder understood that Sirk used melodrama's artifice — the heightened color, the swooning camera, the orchestral score — to create a critical distance from his subject matter: the emotional excess of the form commenting ironically on the emotional repression of its content.

Fassbinder uses the same artifice, but his subject is a relationship that German society cannot accept, and his irony is directed at German society rather than at his protagonists. The film uses Sirk's vocabulary against Sirk's social context: the woman and the man are not ridiculous for feeling what they feel. The society that mocks them is what's ridiculous.