Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)
Within Fassbinder’s ouevre, Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is immediately distinctive for its hope. A 5 part TV series made shortly after his turn towards more accessible narrative forms, the show sees Fassbinder riffing not on despairing Sirkian melodrama, but the familial daytime soap (or as subtitled in the film, A Family Series). While characters in Fassbinder’s films typically find themselves crushed by a mixture of interpersonal cruelty and societal injustice, the central family unit and factory workers of Eight Hours showcase an alternate reality where characters demonstrate the clarity of identifying and acting upon ways to improve their lives.
The film opens on a birthday party for Oma (Louise Ullrich), the family matriarch and grandmother to Jöchen (Gottfried John), who spends his days working at a factory producing machine parts. Fassbinder proceeds to equally split his time between the family’s travails (e.g. Oma and her boyfriend Gregor’s plan to open a kindergarten, Jöchen’s sister Monika’s marital troubles) and the process of Jöchen and his coworkers obtaining increasing amounts of power at their factory (e.g. a strike to receive a bonus, a team-wide collaboration to help one of their own become a foreman). Each episode is titled after two characters, and centers compassionate acts of solidarity.
What Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day movingly exhibits is a sense of possibility, founded on the idea that humans are kind, and change is possible. Fassbinder, whose signature use of mirrors and uncanny framing are on full display, never pretends that it’s easy or conceivable to overturn larger power structures. Instead, he grants his characters control over their immediate surroundings (facilitated by the soap opera genre trappings), as they make tangible, methodical improvements to their material existence. As pithily explained by one of Jöchen’s coworkers, the show asks if “the way things are is so ingrained in us that we can’t imagine things any other way”.
It’s hard to overstate how delightful it is to watch Eight Hours (the various couplings are almost Demy-esque by the end!). The show allows all of Fassbinder’s regular cast the rare opportunity to utilize their movie-star charm. Hanna Schygulla is radiant as the poofy-haired Marion, and as Oma, Ullrich is one of Fassbinder’s liveliest presences, with a playful gleam emanating from her eyes. Margit Carstensen makes a brief turn as a suburban mom, gossiping in a department store before storming city hall to advocate for Oma’s kindergarten. Such joy allows for Fassbinder to experiment with new formal techniques, such as using abrupt zooms to comedic effect, and reconfigure his trademark techniques such as his intricate blocking, to unexpectedly solidary ends.
The most intensely moving aspect of the film remains Fassbinder’s depiction of the factory workers, who for the most part demonstrate the utmost care towards each other. He constructs the factory as a surreal, sci-fi inflected locale, outfitted with hulking teal machinery, and within this labyrinthine space, he formally delineates the power of these characters’ camaraderie. Within the factory, he utilizes weaving tracking shots to follow the flow of information from worker to worker. They’re ineffably beautiful as the camera navigates the factory, continuously reframing and connecting characters in the process. Elsewhere, he uses repeated long shots of the workers taking communal showers, capturing extended, disarming moments of male communion.
In its existing form, Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is actually unfinished, as only 5 of an intended 8 episodes were produced, the last three of which were reportedly much darker. Such foreknowledge doesn’t diminish the sheer galvanizing power of this five episode version. Fassbinder presents us with a precious vision of agency, where humanity and action create a fragile happiness within a modernist wasteland.
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is available to stream on the Criterion Channel