Fassinbiner

Though I am tempted to regard Elvira's braving of this mess as a sign of her inner health, because she is willing to see with her own eyes the destructive energies that others repress from conscious thought, I also see that she is quickly co-opted by these destructive energies. On an irrational level, this abattoir is the locus of Elvira's death wish. It's in this scene of "murder" and death that she really comes alive; we hear her talk uninterruptedly for nearly the only time in the whole film (until the very end, when her voice, on a tape recorder, is heard playing after she is already dead). She, a victim of the same systemic mass-production that has classed her as a second-rate citizen and subjected her to a different kind of butchery (the sex change), is at home here, in her element: sadly, this is what "gives life its meaning", as she says. Serenely, as if meditating, she surveys the killing of the cows and is, as it were, restored by it.

Again, these brutal, disturbing images are recontextualised by their "forced" interaction with Elvira's monologue. We hear her begin to speak just as she and Zora enter the slaughterhouse, but there's an odd disconnect to Elvira's speech in this scene: it's completely disembodied. I know that Elvira is addressing Zora in this monologue, but, when the camera shows Elvira, she's never talking; Elvira's voice is heard only when the camera is showing the grisly work of the butchers, the machinery of the slaughterhouse, the assembly line of animal death and the butchered cows. Is Fassbinder saying that this butchery is what "gives voice" to the otherwise inchoate Elvira? Is she speaking for the silenced bodies of the slaughtered cows, or are their bodies actually "speaking" for her, when she talks and talks but does not express what she needs to express the most: her pain of having been sacrificed?

A third element of this sequence is the use of a Handel organ concerto on the soundtrack: the High Baroque music gives an almost gothic air to these proceedings, suggesting both a cathedral funeral and an ecstatic, candle-lit transport of the spirit. It is to a more ancient world that this organ music properly belongs - just as, I imagine, in some earlier age, the bloodshed itself, and even Elvira's "hermaphroditism" would have had a better chance of being, or at least seeming to be, a natural part of the world. Even Elvira's obsessive, romanticised love for Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), the man for whom she had the sex change, belongs to a more archaic era.

The words of Elvira's monologue are edited to match the visuals brilliantly. When she and Zora enter the slaughterhouse, we hear Elvira talk about how, as Erwin (before her sex change), she apprenticed to a butcher (not, it turns out, her original choice of careers: she'd wanted to be a goldsmith, but that cost too much money), then she met and married Irene (Elisabeth Trissenaar),

In a Year with Thirteen Moons

the butcher's daughter. Over a shot of cows standing in a pen, helplessly waiting, Elvira says, "Her dad treated us like his property": employee and daughter are both alienated labour, and find their common ground in this condition - not love so much as a shared experience of exploitation united Erwin and Irene. When Elvira talks about Irene being a teacher and says, "Her life is more valuable than mine", Fassbinder brutally cuts to a row of cows hanging upside-down; one by one their throats are slashed with a big knife, and their life's blood gushes out. The hierarchisation of more-valuable and less-valuable lives, a normally unspoken commonplace in the social order, is shown to have an immediate consequence: the stronger kill the weaker. Later, when Elvira talks about the anxiety of her ex-lover Christoph (Karl Scheydt) that his penis was too small, how he pumped her for information about her clients' penises when she worked the streets ("as if the size of a cock was a problem for him"), we see an entire cow being skinned. It hangs upside down, a giant phallic symbol, with its skinny tail sticking uselessly up into the air, while a machine peels its "foreskin" away and lifts the entire flap up to the rafters of the ceiling: this repugnant image seems to dramatize Christoph's "penis envy" and obvious castration anxiety.

The heart of Elvira's monologue is a lengthy recitation from Goethe's verse play, Torquato Tasso. This becomes yet a fourth element of the mise en scиne in this sequence and it recontextualises the butchery in a slightly new way. Elvira is remembering how she used