448.

1. The East German dramaturge Heiner Müller adopted Brecht’s notion of Kopien (German for ‘copying’ or ‘sampling’), the practice of regarding texts by others as material to be used, imitated, and rewritten.^[1]
2. Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is the author’s third book.
3. The text is written through a series of numbered points, which provide a chaotic, fractured and reflective prose.
4. Penman seamlessly weaves between German history, film criticism and personal memoir as a means of grappling with the shadow cast by the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
5. As in Penman’s discussion of Brecht or Fassbinder, it felt fitting to employ the author’s style within this review.
6. At the time I read Penman’s text I was living in Munich.
7. The street is humid.
8. The hallway runs like the vein of an oak tree away from the worn front steps.
9. The white facade of the building creates a faux comfort from the sun.
10. Rainer Werner Fassbinder died here in 1982.
11. I can’t work out in which apartment.
12. He died on the 10th of June.
13. It is the 1st of June as I write this.
14. In the coronary reports a combination of substances killed him at the age of 37.
15. Bella, my partner, says there was a plaque that used to hang at the front of the building that commemorated his death but with time it has been removed.
16. Bella is a ballet dancer.
17. She lives next door to the building the director died in.
18. Number 76.
19. The road we live on is Clemensstrasse.
20. Bella bought me a copy of ‘Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors’ by Ian Penman for my 25th birthday.
21. Clemensstrasse is located in Schwabing-West, an affluent neighbourhood in the North of Munich.
22. The suburb is surrounded by the green stretches of Luitpold and Olympia Park.
23. The door locked on me a lot when I first moved in.
24. A German woman opened it for me every morning.
25. Her roommate, who occasionally came into view in the hallway, looked like a German version of Keith Flint.
26. He had large wounds on his shins that seemed to worsen each time I’d see them.
27. A rotating sprinkler would spray the adjacent apartments fervently every morning.
28. The apartments had a honeycomb quality in the heat, like council flats on the precipice of melting.
29. I watched the Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant for the first time whilst reading Ian’s book.
30. “What is a ghost?”^[2].
31. Penman’s structure and prose throughout the text seeks to construct an economy of impressions, in which the author can veritably give form to the ceilings and impossibilities of  biography ‘proper’.
32. Gary Indiana notes in relation to ‘memoir’ (in the forward to Pierre Guyotat’s ‘Coma’) that, “behind its costume of authenticity lies the mercantile understanding that a manufactured self is another dead object of consumption”^[3].
33. By extension the uselessness of traditional ‘biography’ is paramount to the success of Penman’s project.

YOUR

34. A crack, and then hail.
35. Bella is cooking and Arthur Russell is playing.
36. The heat is breaking over the angry blue of the Munich sky.
37. If ever a restless ghost were to move, now would be the time.
38. The trees are falling horizontal.
39. How would Fassbinder appear?
40. Would the ghost be turned toward the end of the hall, his boots his’ only recognisable feature?
41. Would his ghost be peaceful?
42. Contemptuous?
43. All ghosts are restless.
44. Unmoored, adrift, a feather of an image.^[4]
45. The way Penman develops the space of the mirror in Fassbinder’s films establishes a melancholic preoccupation with the mythos of Fassbinder himself.
46. The reflections become a kind of eschatological resting point from which the various spectral incarnations of the many Fassbinder(s) appear.
47. The nature of these hauntings provoke a plurality of mournings with which the audience contends.
48. The films exist within an economy of mimetic immanence through which the grief and the rage rotate, and refract, endlessly.
49. Perhaps the original project, the ground-zero of the director’s work, is found in this perceptual haunting.
50. In doubling both the tyrant and the laureate of German Cinema.
51. As Penman notes, “He is someone who is wildly passionate but also cynical, calculating, detached. A plotter in the calculus of despondency. An island tyrant in seas of collectivity”.
52. I read this quote as the storm intensifies through the bars of the balcony.
53. I imagine a rotting corpse.
54. I worry momentarily that I am ill.
55. I allow for images of corpses to flood my mind.
56. Mainly drawn from a collage of all of the horrific shit teenage boys seek out in video nasties.
57. I have a persecutory obsessive compulsive disorder.
58. I’m weak.
59. As a person, I think, as I lie on the floor.
60. I’m letting the carpet reassure me, as the dappled flashing light touches the broad cotton notches of the bed’s valance.
61. Part of what draws me to Fassbinder is the director’s auteur tyranny.
62. A fascination with the intersection between tyrant and sublimity.
63. The foundation of my interest in his tyranny is the director’s propensity to portray and reflect it on screen.
64. In a Year with 13 Moons captures Fassbinder’s ascetic self-hatred.
65. Christoph, although not a direct reflection of Fassbinder, seems a pointed lamentation on the nature of his kind of violence.
66. The violence of men.
67. In a Year of 13 Moons is a film about grief.
68. And, beyond grief the film is about a tyrant grappling with the creep of oblivion.
69. Penman writes: Baudelaire’s 1864 prose poem ‘Le Miroir’ deals with a man so ugly that he wants to shun all mirrors; but he reflects the revolutionary principles of 1789 which give him an equal right to glory in his image. No place in society for the Ugly. Forever out of place, it is something that cannot be co-opted, appropriated, self-uglification - a physical equivalent of the untimely.^[5]

VOICE

70. ..is a Dead Object.
71. I’m halfway through Ian Penman’s book.
72. The rows and rows of hot gravel have small puddles of stagnant pond water in Luitpold Park.
73. Flowing grass.
74. We, Bella and I, have been reading in the park for hours because the apartment is being viewed by prospective tenants.
75. The landlord, Carl, arrived an hour early sweating through a blue striped shirt above highly tailored, anklet cuffed, suit pants.
76. Carl’s eyes move like Erwin Leder’s in Angst (1983).
77. I imagined him eating German sausages fervently before killing sex-workers behind, an intenselyorange, OBI Baumarkt as I welcomed him into the apartment.
78. Carl would eventually terminate Bella’s lease by throwing, from a height, a large collection of glassware, artwork and posters from her first floor apartment into a ground-floor bin.
79. Fassbinder in a ‘Bayern München’ soccer jersey.
80. Before Carl arrived I finished the final scene in the Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.
81. The film ends with the dissolution of an apartment.
82. Fassbinder’s attempt to bring the appendages of Petra’s pathology to its’ barest form.
83. By removing the bed and its’ frame from the apartment Fassbinder leaves only Petra (in a green dress with big red rose), a telephone on an expensive shag rug (paired with a bottle of whiskey) and a Poussin painting.
84. I watched the film on the floor because the carpet is comfortable and there’s no room for furniture.
85. Sitting in an apartment watching Petra, whilst living next door to the apartment Rainer died in felt strangely reflective.
86. As if, the resting place Petra finds herself in mirrors the kind of chaos Rainer found next door.
87. The film end as the director did, alone in an apartment stripped of all the material, and performative, constituent parts of either character’s image.
88. “Cookie, what happened to you?” Tabea asked, laughing, as she let me in the door. She was frying up some sausages while the music of Wagner was blaring on the radio. “I just climbed the Berlin Wall”. ^[6]
89. Whilst lying in the sun of Luitpold park I noticed the loving turn in Bella’s top lip.
90. I thought about her hands resting on the starch cleanliness of a linen sheet, next door’s television and German morning programming.
91. The air in the park was full with white specks.
92. The same specks that swim in an eye, or land on the end of a tongue in summer.
93. As many publications on The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972) note, Sirkian melodrama pervades the film.
94. Peter Matthews writes in his essay 'The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: The Great Pretender’: Fassbinder seized on (and redoubled) the master's patented tricks of frames within imprisoning frames and mirrors endlessly throwing back the spiritual void.^[7]

INSIDE

95. The body of a cadaver.
96. Carl has finished at the apartment and we are travelling home from Marienplatz.
97. The tram is filled with a leaden air that smells of grass and yeast.
98. Moments lapse between the tram stopping and a string of plain clothed transit police entering the compartment.
99. Square jaws, with sunken and recessed eyes.
100. The guards are wearing fake designer clothing.
101. Two of them have silver chains stuck against their necks.
102. Their shirts are Balenciaga and Bottega knock-offs.
103. A fake political campaign t-shirt and a graffiti laden high collar shirt, printed slightly ajar to the original designs, which we later google.
104. The third guard is middle-aged, sweating and scarred from the bottom of his ear to the edge of his cheekbone.
105. We haven’t bought tickets.
106. He gestures to us to get off the tram.
107. He takes my I.D. and after a brief interlude, we are forced onto the next tram and escorted to the nearest bank.
108. As I begin to resist, he pushes me behind a large delivery van whilst Bella is being held by the other guard.
109. He holds in his hand my recently shaved throat as spit covers my face.
110. He begins to swear mutedly in German to avoid attention, as his hand presses deeper into my skin.
111. Once inside the bank he directs me to the ATM.
112. His hands are swollen, and the chain he has on his wrist sways dramatically as he points at the cash machines, whilst his choking hand rests in his pocket, concealed.
113. He takes €320, mutters “nice day”, and waddles through the electronic doors, as an announcement rings out over the foyer.
114. Ingrid Caven with husband Jean-Jacques Schuhl. ‘ALAMY’ imprint covering the photograph, Jean-Jacques using a cane.
115. In my dream that night there’s a person in the room next to us.
116. They’re stomping.
117. One item after the other clangs against the expanding, heat-worn, floorboards.
118. The creak of the floorboards moves toward the crescendo of cracking beneath a master bed.
119. A rattle spreads across the boards when they lie down.
120. As if a handful of marbles were being thrown from beneath the mattress.
121. In my dream I walk up the entrance stairs of adjacent building, which are covered in green moss.
122. I think about power washing them, and the sheen of raw concrete.
123. I place my hand on the rail to remind myself of the formal practice of ascending stairs.
124. A white cat slowly strides toward the back of the apartment building.
125. The amenity of the handrail is a reminder of falling.
126. The blinds of the apartment are wooden and drawn with one panel hanging broken.
127. The security door is pinned against the white brick facade of the building and black boots sit next to it.
128. The toes of the boots are damp.
129. I use my right hand to knock three times firmly, and once weakly, against the wooden door.
130. A man answers the door with his penis cupped, and obscured, by his hand, his head is bent downward yet his eyes make contact with mine.
131. “…I’m from downstairs, I just wanted to ask, if you wouldn’t mind, just with the banging, we’ve been struggling to sleep, and I didn’t want to be strangers, so I thought I’d ask” hoping he understands English.
132. He lifts his head.
133. His features are dark, with a strong brow.
134. He smiles broadly, menacingly, as if trying to diffuse the situation by broadening his face. You can be narrow, it’s ok to be narrow, I’m not the police. He adjusts his hand, bows his head further toward the floor.
135. The man’s hair is thinning around the front of his skull, patches protrude above beads of sweat.
136. A strong smell of sweat emanates into the hallway.
137. He says something in German.
138. The door closes again as the silhouette of his naked body, uncovered, becomes evident in the lead light. 139. The next morning I awake and read more of the Ian Penman’s book.

140. I sit in the garden and watch as the cat from my dream begins to stalk along the roses in the backyard.
141. Its’ back moving in a wave like motion, closer and closer to the floor. One foot, one foot, one foot.
142. The swooping German birds are resting on the fence.
143. I wait around to see what happens.

ME

144. I’m thinking about El Hedi ben Salem as I write this.
145. Tonight Bella is in La Bayadere.
146. I catch the same tram on which we were violated the day before.
147. I think about the spit moving down my forehead.
148. The theatre is adorned in red curtains.
149. Angel busts hover above a rotund audience.
150. An infinity lingers around my finger tips as I run them along the velvet balustrades.
151. The stairs to the seats are made of immense marble, like the interiors of a Bertolucci film.
152. The Conformist (1970).
153. The carpets have the same smell as my grandmother’s rugs.
154. The kind of smell which emanates from carpet fibres being exposed to an evening breeze.
155. The conductor enters in a flash, and the lights dim.
156. The room become large and sparse.
157. She enters stage left.
158. I grip my right leg tightly, as if I’m holding onto the remnants of a transitory body.
159. I want to write toward her.

LIKE BEATING

WINGS

160. Ian Penman’s text speaks to the swirling multiplicity of reflections which introduce Fassbinder anew to every audience.
161. It is in this spirit that the text grapples with a kind of latent melancholic reading of the place of cinema, and perhaps more importantly, loses itself in the frayed ends of the author’s own recollections.
162. I finish Ian Penman’s book in English Garden.
163. Surrounded by those big German flies. And, 164. I sit on the Balcony with Bella on the 10th of June.

165. Only a television can be heard next door.
166. Armin Meier looks directly into the camera.
167. Fassbinder in a leopard print robe with a gun in his hand.
168. La La La^[8]