Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (Rainer Werner Fassbiner, 1972) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Jacopo Fiorancio

Having now watched all five episodes (and indeed, all eight hours) of Eight Hours, I find it all very much of a piece with Fassbinder's mature aesthetic, even if the tone is quite a bit different. By 1972, Fassbinder was well into his Sirk obsession, but for the most part that's absent from this series, apart from the typically extreme spatial organization and use of sudden close-ups. Maybe it's because this was conceived as a "family series," as each episode announces. There's just a remarkable optimism coursing throughout Eight Hours, from the concrete (the factory workers repeatedly taking control of their destinies via collective action) to the theoretical.

Certain characters (Jochen's father Wolf; Marion's co-worker Irmgard) continually serve as Brechtian mouthpieces for conservative ideology. "That's the way it's always been." "Workers are a different type of person." "If it's important, the city will do it. They understand how to do things." "Don't listen to that greasy Italian, what does he know." And almost every time, Fassbinder proves the skeptics wrong, showing that with effort and understanding, a better world is indeed possible. Two years later, Fassbinder will make a 180° turn with Fear Eats the Soul, a film that adopts the Sirkian mold to demonstrate almost scientifically that racism is so pernicious and destructive that it will always overwhelm any person's (or couple's) sincere attempts to defeat it.

The official history states that Fassbinder intended to produce three more episodes, but WDR either ran out of money or nixed it in order to facilitate other projects. I am not sure what more of Eight Hours would have accomplished, although those who've read the treatments say that the whole series takes a darker, more pessimistic turn. I'll admit that I'm kind of glad Fassbinder wasn't able to take the project down that road, if only because Eight Hours is a valuable specimen of Fassbinder's more populist, commercial instincts. Given the assignment to make a miniseries about the working class, Eight Hours avoids miserablism and instead uses the medium of public television to reintroduce leftist thinking to a West German audience that by 1972 was used to such ideas being discarded as naive idealism at best, terrorist ideology at worst. (It's no accident that this commission coincided with the leftist SPD chancellorship of Willi Brandt.)

If there's one significant problem with Eight Hours, it's a structural one. The five episodes are given titles corresponding to various character couplings: Jochen and Marion; Grandma and Gregor; Franz and Ernst; Harald and Monika; and Irmgard and Rolf. In terms of screen time, the majority of Eight Hours focuses on Jochen, Marion, Grandma, and Gregor, and this dominance is in no way confined to their titular episodes. Really, the most self-contained of the episodes is the third one. Franz (Wolfgang Schenck) is the self-effacing workman who wants to become the new foreman, but can't master the math. Ernst (Peter Gauhe) is the outside hire for the job Franz wants, and only after the workers relentlessly haze him do they discover that he doesn't want to be foreman, and is glad to help Franz pass the qualifying exam.

This episode, frankly, is a bit too narrowly focused compared with the other four. In fact, it feels a bit like Season Two of The Wire, in that it foregrounds work politics to the exclusion of the characters' personal lives, making it the most overtly didactic. While the fourth episode does address the end of Monika's (Renate Roland) marriage to right-wing dickhead Harald (Kurt Raab), it ends up being just as much about Jochen and Marion's impending nuptials and, in a broader sense, a referendum on the institution of marriage itself. All the major couples are seen in moments of strife as well as affection, suggesting that Marion and Jochen have as much of a chance at success as any other couple.

Jochen's arrogant co-worker Rolf (Rudolf Waldemar) hooks up with Marion's equally aloof co-worker Irmgard (Irm Hermann) at Marion and Jochen's wedding party, and this seems to set up some sort of reversal in the series. After all, these are two characters who reliably parrot conservative platitudes (or general defeatism) throughout Eight Hours. An episode examining their relationship might have provided an opportunity for Fassbinder to either deepen and humanize these status-quo ideologues, or to observe their traditional ideas coming up hard against a changing reality. But there's little to no focus on Rolf and Irmgard, and all the attention is back at the factory, where an impending move to a new facility prompts the team to bargain their way into a progressive, self-directed work mode. In possibly the intellectual highlight of the series, Marion argues that the team's success belies a deeper failure. Yes, they have more autonomy. But in fact they worked harder, and generated more profit for the company.

What do you know? Fassbinder saw the neoliberal / Silicon Valley obsession with "team building" and "worker buy-in" coming down the pike. We should've paid more attention.