Why Does Herr K. Run Amok?

Rainer Werner Fassbinder - 1970
This is a really terrific little film. Grainy stock, going from cheap dirty room to little room, no tripod in sight, mumbling actors. The camera often starts quite close, this film is made up of dialogue scenes, and swishes back and forth (voices often offscreen). It can zoom in, rove away to look for someone else. The closeness means we are quite often surprised to find someone else is there; we suddenly realise Herr K.'s wife is also in the room, and the agony increases. We'll then move to an establishing shot to get the full weight of the horror.
The thing is, this film truly doesn't depart from what ordinary bourgeois conversations are made up of. Yet it manages to be completely fascinating, surely down to that intimate, claustrophobic camera and the brutal mounting edit, to observe all this. This is really hell captured, with all its grubby soft furnished trimmings.
This film is structurally very similar to 'Jeanne Dielmann', and it also works by achieving a kind of hypnosis, while at the same time allowing distance for us to observe and judge. Ackerman is surely a lot more systematic in her use of space and time, this film perhaps feels more direct, made by a passionate nature.