[The] trouble with [The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant] is that it equates methods with powers. One pitfall in latterday filmmaking is the gross overestimate of certain filmic procedures as symbology. Fassbinder thinks he can make a film of his stage play by thickly impasting some of those procedures. The confinement to one room, the slow-moving camera are assumed to create depth—partly on the ground that they contravene conventional commercial procedures. To this, Fassbinder adds some obviously arty Franco-German apparatus: the arbitrarily silent "slave," a lot of unclothed female dressmaker's dummies, a frontally naked male in a huge painting (the only male in the film). All this is facile, and it's distracting because its glibness diverts us to an awareness of Fassbinder's status-hunger. The film world still—still, after the best work of Antonioni and Bresson and Bergman and Ozu has shown us how cinema metaphors...