Bird on the Wire: Leonard Cohen’s Music in Fassbinder’s Cinema

Few collaborations in cinema feel as oddly inevitable as the one that emerged (without ever being formal) between Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Leonard Cohen. Fassbinder, long positioned as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, made films and television dramas that cut straight through social habits and emotional armour. Cohen, the Canadian poet-singer with a voice like worn velvet, built songs around regret, humour and the uncomfortable truths of intimacy. Together, their sensibilities created a mood that is immediately recognisable – Fassbinder’s restrained camerawork and moral directness meet Cohen’s bruised ballads and something softly overwhelming happens. Across the director’s body of work, Cohen’s music does more than set the tone: it becomes a kind of Greek chorus, a moral barometer for the characters’ worlds, collapsing historical boundaries and revealing the ethical stakes of their choices.

Fassbinder’s interest in Cohen begins early in his career, when he is still piecing together a style that refuses sentimentality in favour of blunt, sometimes uncomfortable truth. In Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore, 1971), Cohen’s songs “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne” fill the soundtrack as a dysfunctional film crew idles in a Spanish hotel, waiting to shoot a film that never seems to materialise. The film features six Cohen songs, spilling out of a lobby jukebox, lending the scenes a languid, slightly drowsy atmosphere. Here, Cohen’s voice becomes part of the furniture, a reminder of the stalled dreams and vague disillusionment hanging over the crew. Already one can see Fassbinder using music not to underline emotion but to reveal what his characters can’t articulate.

Beware of a Holy Whore

For his second time embracing Cohen’s songs, Fassbinder moves beyond feature films into Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, 1972), a public television series about a working-class family that he was commissioned to create. In one scene during the first episode, “Joan of Arc” plays faintly during a conversation between Jochen (Gottfried John) and Marion (Hanna Schygulla) as they discuss their lives and hopes for the future. It is a small moment, even an ordinary one, but Cohen’s ballad, full of surrender, ritual and longing, adds a kind of gentle weight. The song frames the conversation not as everyday chatter but as something unexpectedly brave, a moment of tenderness in lives shaped by labour and routine.

Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day

By 1975, Fassbinder had begun using Cohen’s work with a more pointed intention. Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht (Like a Bird on a Wire, 1975) was the first of three films he directed that year to feature Cohen songs, a forty-minute television cabaret that takes its title from Cohen’s iconic track. The special features Brigitte Mira, star of Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), and a frequent collaborator, appearing in ten of Fassbinder’s works, singing his German translation of Cohen’s lyrics, along with cabaret songs and love ballads from the 1940s and 1950s, interrupted by stories of her marriages. Fassbinder later called the project an attempt to revisit the Adenauer era, and even admitted it wasn’t wholly successful.¹ But the film captures something hard to pin down; nostalgia laced with distaste, and the strange sentimentality of mid-century German culture.

Like a Bird on a Wire

Fassbinder’s engagement with Cohen continued later that year in Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends, 1975), where “Bird on the Wire” plays as Fox sits alone in his car, smoking and listening to the song, feeling abandoned by his bourgeois lover Eugen and even his sister. The scene captures him at his lowest point, foreshadowing the tragedy to come. The next day, Fox is found dead on the floor of a train station, his body ignored by strangers, some even stopping to steal from him. Cohen’s confessional lyrics, “Like a bird on the wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free,” turn these moments into a chilling moral indictment of class cruelty and emotional indifference. The song’s refrain of apology and yearning for freedom acts as a lament not only for Fox but for a society that allows his death to go unnoticed. Fassbinder’s choice of Cohen here is not to soften the blow, it is accusatory.

Later, yet in the same year, in the made-for-television drama Angst vor der Angst (Fear of Fear, 1975) Cohen’s “Lover, Lover, Lover” and “Why Don’t You Try” weave through the story of a woman slowly unravelling inside the confines of domestic life. She plays these tracks on her record player as she drinks and drifts around her apartment, sometimes dancing, sometimes simply trying to hold herself together. Fassbinder shoots with his typical restraint, observing mundane gestures with almost clinical attention,² while Cohen’s warm but uneasy voice settles into the emotional pockets the characters cannot fill themselves. The effect is disquieting: the songs feel at once external commentary and the woman’s own submerged interior voice.

Fear of Fear

Perhaps the most daring – and final – use of Cohen appears in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). In the series’ concluding episode, as Franz Biberkopf’s mind fractures, Fassbinder plunges into a feverish montage of images: violence, tenderness, betrayal, death. Over that chaotic torrent plays Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” its confessional tone cutting strangely clean through the confusion. This is significant: it is Cohen’s last appearance in Fassbinder’s work, giving their cinematic dialogue a sense of finality. The decision to use a modern English-language ballad at the end of a story set in Weimar era Berlin collapses time, placing Franz’s despair not only within his own historical moment but in a broader, universal human register, a reminder that his suffering is not contained by history.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Across all these works, Cohen’s songs do not operate as conventional cues for emotion. They behave more like instruments of conscience. Their sparseness creates room for viewers to sit with Fassbinder’s long takes, still camera and measured blocking. Both artists share a sense that tenderness can expose rather than soothe, that apology and failure say as much about society as they do about individuals.

There is no evidence that Fassbinder and Cohen ever met. Interviews, biographies and archival notes turn up nothing. What we do have is strong contextual evidence that Fassbinder (often via composer and music-director Peer Raben) selected and curated Cohen’s recordings for diegetic use. Raben, who collaborated with Fassbinder from the earliest Action-Theatre years and frequently acted in his films, did not see himself as a conventional composer; he regarded musical choices as shared decisions rooted in the film’s thematic structure. Studies on Raben’s practice emphasizes his fascination with musical anachronism and his belief that music should create emotional and ideological friction rather than simple mood-setting.³

Fassbinder’s use of Cohen reveals a filmmaker who took soundtracks seriously, as a way to enlarge the world of the film rather than decorate it. The pairing produced some of the most memorable moments in his work: a body unnoticed on a station floor, a woman crushed by domestic pressure, a man swallowed by a city’s slide toward fascism. Cohen’s weary compassion carries these images, transforming them into something more than narrative turning points. Decades later, filmmakers still reach for Cohen to create mood, but Fassbinder understood that his songs could press harder, acting as moral texts. For Fassbinder, Cohen was never background noise; he was a creative partner whose music illuminated the fragile humanity of his characters.

Endnotes