Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (#128) (Criterion Collection)[USA]

[Horhay]

Release Date: September 30, 2014
Purchase: TBD

Germany
1974
93 minutes
Color
1.33:1
German

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow (Brigitte Mira) meets a much younger Arab worker (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise—and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder expertly uses the emotional power of classic Hollywood melodrama to expose the racial tensions underlying contemporary German culture.

Disc Features:

1. New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
2. Introduction from 2003 by filmmaker Todd Haynes
3. Interviews from 2003 with actor Brigitte Mira and editor Thea Eymèsz
4. Shahbaz Noshir’s 2002 short Angst isst Seele auf, which reunites Mira, Eymèsz, and cinematographer Jürgen Jürges to tell the story, based on real events, of an attack by neo-Nazis on a foreign actor while on his way to a stage performance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s screenplay
5. Signs of Vigorous Life: New German Cinema, a 1976 BBC program about the national film movement of which Fassbinder was a part
6. Scene from Fassbinder’s 1970 film The American Soldier that inspired Ali
7. Trailer
8. PLUS: An essay by critic Chris Fujiwara