“Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression”
-Fassbinder
Mae Mercer backed up by Sunnyland Slim on piano, Sonny Boy Williamson on harmonica and Hubert Sumlin on guitar.
What came unbidden to me the first time I watched this remarkable clip was how I much I suspected that Ranier Werner Fassbinder would have thrilled to this theatrically staged, but authentically tragic, blues number.
That is, considering Fassbinder's admitted fascination with the American melodramas
( melodrama - literally music and drama) of Douglas Sirk... and with Sirk's uncanny ability to infuse extreme artifice with believable emotion. That paradoxical combination, exemplified in the American director's infamous Imitation of Life - and as evidenced, at an even more distant ironic remove, in Fassbinder's parable of damnation... Station Master's Wife.
Lately
Updated Photo June 2010
- Roger Boyce
- Christchurch, New Zealand
- Expat American living and working in New Zealand. I have a long-established painting practice and occasionally write criticism for Art in America, Sculpture, Art New Zealand and ARTNET - among others. Where I come from the only people who read visual art criticism and review are the artist ,his dealer and the artist's mother.
The Illuminated Joyce
