Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
File:Rainer Werner Fassbinder.jpg Fassbinder on the set of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) with actress Hanna Schygulla in the background.
Born	(1945-05-31)May 31, 1945 Bad Wörishofen, Bavaria, Germany
Died	June 10, 1982(1982-06-10) (aged 37) Munich, Germany
Occupation(s)	film director, producer, actor and writer
Spouse	Ingrid Caven (1970-1972; div.)

Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 – June 10, 1982) was a German movie director, screenwriter and actor. A premier representative of the New German Cinema. Famous for his frenetic pace in film-making, in a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years Fassbinder completed 35 feature length films; two television series shot on film; three short films; four video productions; twenty four stage plays and four radio plays directed; and thirty six acting roles in his own and other’s films. He also worked as an actor (film and theater), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theater manager.

Fassbinder was distinguished for the strong provocative current underlying his work and the air of scandal surrounded his artistic choices and private life. His intense discipline and phenomenal creative energy when working were in violent contrast with a wild, self-destructive libertarianism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, as well as its central figure. He had tortured relationships in his personal life with the people he drew around him in a surrogate family of actors and technicians. However, his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity. His films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society, and the individual, thwarts it. A prodigiously inventive artist, Fassbinder distilled the best elements of his sources — Brechtian theatrics, Artaud, the Hollywood melodramas, classical narrative, and a gay sensibility into a complex body of work.

Overworked and overdosed in life, Fassbinder died at the age of 37 from heart failure resulting from a lethal interaction between sleeping pills and cocaine. His death is often considered to mark the end of the New German Cinema.

Early life

Fassbinder was in born Bavaria in the small town of Bad Wörishofen, on May 31 1945; three weeks after the Americans entered the town and three weeks after the unconditional surrender of Germany. The aftermath of World War II deeply marked his childhood and the life of his family. Fassbinder himself, in compliance with his mother, later altered the date of his birthday to 1946 in order to enhance his status a cinematic prodigy. It was towards his death that his real age was revealed confronting his passport.

Born into a cultured bourgeois family, Fassbinder had an unconventional childhood about which he would later express many grievances in interviews. At three months, he was left with a paternal uncle and aunt in the country, since his parents feared he would not survive the winter with them. There was no glass in the windows in the family apartment in Munich, nor was there anything that could be used for heating. Rainer was a year old before he saw his mother again.

Fassbinder’s mother, Liselotte Pempeit, came from Danzig, which was occupied by the Russians, so her relatives came to live with them in Munich. There were so many people living in the Fassbinder’s household that it was difficult for Rainer to decide who were his parents.

For about six years 1945–1951, Rainer lived with both his parents; he was their only child. His father, Helmut Fassbinder, was a doctor with a surgery at his apartment near Munich’s red light district. He saw his career as the means to indulge his passion for writing poetry. The doctor, who had two sons by a previous marriage, did not take much interest in the child, and neither did Liselotte, who helped her husband in his medical practice. Rainer’s parents divorced when he was six. The child was left alone with his mother after the dissolution of both his parent’s marriage and the extended family.

Liselotte raised her son as a single parent. To provide for them, she rented out rooms, but tuberculosis kept her away for long periods while she was recuperating. Rainer, who was about eight, was left in the company of the people who had rented the rooms, but with none to look after him properly, he became more independent and uncontrollable. He spent time in the streets, sometimes playing with other boys, sometimes just watching what went on. He did not get along well with his mother's young lover and his relationship with the much older journalist Wolf Elder, who became his stepfather was even worse. Liselotte, who worked as a translator, could not concentrate in the company of her headstrong son and he was often given money to go to the movies, a practice that gave birth to his obsession with the medium. Later in life, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. "The cinema was the family life I never had at home."

He was sent to a boarding school, from which he ran away repeatedly. He left school before passing any final examinations. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Cologne to stay with his father. They argued frequently. He lived with him for a couple of years while attending night school. He earned a living working small jobs and helping his father who rented shabby apartments to immigrant workers. He wrote short plays, poems and short stories. He frequented gay bars and had his first boyfriend, a Greek immigrant. In 1963 he returned to Munich.

Theatre

Encouraged by his mother, Fassbinder studied theater and for two years, 1964-1966, he attended the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich. There, he met Hanna Schygulla, who would become his most important actress. During this time, he made his first 8mm films and took on small jobs as actor, assistant director, and sound man. He failed the state examinations for actors, but wrote among others the play Just Once Slice of Bread. To gain entry at the Berlin Film School, Fassbinder submitted a film version of his play title parallels. He also entered several 8mm films including This Night (now lost), but he failed the examination exams.

He then went back to Munich, continued with his writing and made two short films in B&W, persuading his lover Christoph Roser, an aspiring actor, to finance them in exchange for leading roles. The City Tramp (1965) (Der Stadtstreicher) and The Little Chaos (1966) (Das Kleine Chaos). Fassbinder acted in both this two short films which also featured Irm Hermann. In the latter, his mother - under the name of Lilo Pempeit - played the first of many parts in her son's films.

In 1967, Fassbinder joined the Munich action-theater and in two months became the company's leader. He directed, acted in, and adapted anti-establishment plays for a tightly knit group of young actors, among them Peer Raben, Harry Baer and Kurt Raab, who along with Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann, became the most important members of his cinematic stock company. In April 1968 Fassbinder premiered directed the first play written by himself: Katzelmacher, a twenty-minute highly choreographed encounter between Bavarian villagers and a foreign worker from Greece, who with scarcely a word of German, becomes the object of intense racial, sexual, and political hatred among the men, while exerting a strangely troubling fascination on the women. A few weeks later, in May 1968, the Action Theater was disbanded after its theater was wrecked by one of its founders, jealous of Fassbinder's growing power within the group. It promptly reformed under Fassbinder's command as the Anti-Theater (antiteater). The troupe lived and performed together, staging avant-garde adaptations of classics, as well as Fassbinder's 14 politically trenchant original plays. Working with the “Anti-Theater,” he would learn writing, directing, acting, and from which he would cull his own repertory group.

Fassbinder's outstanding career in the theatre (productions in Munich, Bremen, Bochum, Nurnberg, Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt, where for two years he ran the "Theater am Turm" with Kurt Raab and Roland Petri) was a mere backdrop for a seemingly unstoppable outpouring of films, tv film, adaptations, and even a TV variety show (in honor of Brigitte Mira). During the same period, he also did radio plays and took on roles in other director's films, among them the title part in Volker Schlöndorff’s Brecht adaptation BAAL.

Fassbinder used his theatrical work as a springboard for making films; and many of the Anti-Theater actors and crew worked with him throughout his entire career (for instance, he made 20 films each with actresses Hanna Schygulla and Irm Herrmann). He was strongly influenced by playwright Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effect" and the French New Wave cinema – particularly Jean-Luc Godard (1965's Pierrot le Fou, 1967's Week End). Essential to Fassbinder's career was the rapid working methods he developed early on. Because he knew his actors and technicians so well, Fassbinder was able to complete films – as many as four or five per year – with astonishing rapidity and on extremely low budgets. This allowed him to compete successfully for the government grants needed to continue making films.

Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema (e.g., Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders) who started out making movies, Fassbinder acquired an extensive stage background that is evident throughout his work. Additionally, he learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theater management. This versatility later surfaced in his films where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. So boundless was his energy, in fact, that he appeared in 30 projects of other directors.

By 1976, Fassbinder had become an international star. Prizes at major film festivals, premieres and retrospectives in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and a first critical study on his work appearing in London had made him a familiar name among cinephiles and campus audiences the world over. He lived in Munich when not traveling, rented a house in Paris and could be seen in gay bars in New York, earning him cult hero status but also a controversial reputation in and out of his films. His films were a fixture in art houses of the time after he became internationally known with Fear Eats the Soul.

Personal life

Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived his private life closely link to his artistic output. He had tortured relationships with the people he drew around him in a surrogate family of actors (including : Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Günther Kaufmann technicians, and cameramen (notably Michael Ballhaus) , assistant director Harry Baer and composer Peer Raben. Those around him admire him deeply but recount disturbing stories of his brutality toward them, yet his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence.

Fassbinder was entangled in multiple romantic relationships with women, but more frequently with men. His personal life, always well publicized, was riddled with gossip and scandal. Early in his career, he had a lasting but fractured relationship with Irm Hermann, a former secretary whom he forced to become an actress. Irm, who idolized him, was tormented and tortured by him for over a decade. She even claimed physical abuse. “He couldn't conceive of my refusing him, and he tried everything. He almost beat me to death on the streets of Bochum ....” Eventually, she found the strength to break free of him. When in 1977, Irm Herman became romantically involved with another man and became pregnant by him; she received a proposal of marriage from Fassbinder, who also offered to adopt the child; she turned him down.

Fassbinder's main love interest during his early period as a film director was the black Bavarian, Gunther Kaufmann. Kaufmann was not a trained actor and entered cinema when, in 1970, Fassbinder fell madly in love with him. The director tried to buy his love with movie roles and expensive gifts. Kaufmman famously smashed up four Lamborghinis in a year. That he was heterosexual, married and the father of two was not a detriment for Fassbinder.

Although he was opposed to marriage as an institution, Fassbinder always felt free to contradict himself in every respect and in 1971; he married Ingrid Craven, a recurrent actress in many of his films. Their wedding reception was recycled in the film he was making at that time The American Soldier. Their relationship of mutual admiration, survived the complete failure of their two-year marriage. “ Ours was a love story in spite of the marriage”, Ingrid explained in an interview adding about the sexuality of her former husband “ Rainer was a homosexual who also needed a woman. It’s that simple and that complex”. Neither Irm Hermann, Ingrid Craven nor Juliane Lorenz, the three most important women of Fassbindrer’s life were disturbed by his homosexuality.

In 1971, Fassbinder fell in love with El Hedi ben Salem, a Berber from Morroco, their turbulent relationship ended violently in 1974. Salem, famously cast as Ali in Fear Eats the Soul, hanged himself in jail in 1982. Fassbinder who barely outlived his former lover, dedicated to Salem his last film Querrelle.

Armin Meier, a former butcher who was almost illiterate and who had spent his early years in an orphanage was Fassbinder's lover from 1974 to 1978. After Fassbinder broke up with him, Meier took his own life on Fassbinder’s birthday. He was found dead in their apartment only days later. Devastated by Armin’s suicide Fassbinder made In a Year with Thirteen Moons to exorcise his pain.

In the last four years of his life, Fassbinder's companion was Juliane Lorentz, editor of his films from that period. They were about to get married in different occasions and even had a mock wedding ceremony during a trip to the USA, but actually never did marry. They were still living together at the time of his death.

Addicted to alcohol and drugs, particularly whiskey, valium, and cocaine, Fassbinder left this world in the same way as many of his cinematic creations: overworked, overwrought, and finally overdosed on life.

Controversy

The scandals and controversies ensured that in Germany itself Fassbinder was permanently in the news, making calculatedly provocative remarks in interviews. His work often received mixed notices from the national critics, many of whom only began to take him seriously after the foreign press had hailed him as a great director.

Fassbinder’s reputation in his own country was entangled almost continually in controversy. There were frequent exposés of his lifestyle in the press, and attacks from all sides from groups his films offended. His television series Eight Hours do no Make a Day was cut from eight to five episodes after pressure from conservatives. The playwright Franz Xaver Koetz sued over alleged obscenity in Jail Bait (based on a play of his). Lesbians and feminist accused Fassbinder of misogyny (in presenting women as complicit in their own oppression) in his “Women ‘s picture”. Gays complained of misrepresentation in Fox and his Friends. Rightists attacked him for his association with the radical left. Marxists said he had sold out his political principles in his sardonic depictions of left-intellectual manipulations in Mother Kuster’s Journey to Heaven and of late-blooming terrorist in The Third Generation. Berlin Alexanderplatz was moved to a late night television slot amid widespread complaints that it was unsuitable for children. The most heated criticism came for his play Garbage, the City, and Death, whose scheduled performance at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt was cancelled early in 1975 amid charges of antisemitism. In the turmoil Fassbinder resigned from his directorship of that prestigious theater complex, bitterly complaining about what he considered misinterpretation of the play.

Fassbinder did little to discourage the personalized nature of the attacks on himself and his work. He seemed to provoke them, by his aggressively anti-bourgeois lifestyle, symbolized in his black leather jacket, battered hat, dark glasses and perennial scowl.

Death

By the time, he made his last film, Querelle (1982), heavy doses of drugs and alcohol had apparently become necessary to sustain his unrelenting work habits. On the night of June 9 -10 Wolf Gremm, director of the film Kamikaze 1989, which starred Fassbinder, was staying in his apartment. At 3:30 a.m, when Juliane Lorentz arrived home, she heard the noise of television in Fassbinder’s room, but she could not hear him snoring. Thought not allowed going into the room uninvited, she went in, and she found him laying on the bed, dead, a cigarette still between his lips. It was ten days after his thirty-seventh birthday.

The cause of death was reported as heart failure resulting from a lethal interaction between sleeping pills and cocaine. The script for his next film, Rosa Luxemburg, was found next to him.

Fassbinder's cinematic works

Starting at age 21, Fassbinder made over forty films in fifteen years, along with numerous plays and TV dramas. These films were nearly all written or adapted for the screen by Fassbinder himself. He was also art director on most of the early films, editor or co-editor on a lot of them (often credited as Franz Walsh), and he acted in nineteen of his own films as well as for other directors. He wrote fourteen plays, created new versions of six classical plays, and directed or co-directed twenty-five stage plays. He wrote and directed radio plays and wrote song lyrics. In addition, he wrote thirty-three screenplays and collaborated with other screenwriters on thirteen more. On top of this, he occasionally performed many other roles such as cinematographer and producer on a small number of them.

Working with a regular group of actors and technicians, he was able to complete films ahead of schedule and often under budget and thus compete successfully for government subsidies. He worked fast, typically omitting rehearsals and going with first take. The result is that tough his total body of work is extraordinarily rich in cinematic texture and form, not one of his films is quite a perfect masterpiece. His films tackle a wide variety of topics and range from the astounding to the amateur. They give an incisive picture of post-war Germany, at first through ironic and nearly plotless deconstructions/pastiches of Hollywood genre cinema with a formally experimental and astute provocative political edge, yet they remain relevant to urban life in contemporary times and human relationships. Some of the films (especially the ones centering on a group rather than a single victim figure) are also endowed with a decidedly dark edge.

In 1972, Fassbinder began his collaboration with a highly experienced and successful producer at West Germany's most prestigious television network, Peter Märtesheimer. Under Märtesheimer's influence, Fassbinder turned with even more determination to recognizably German subject matter. Together they made, among others, the television series Eight Hours do not Make a Day, and in 1978 co wrote The Marriage of Maria Braun, Fassbinder's commercially most profitable film and the first in his post-war German trilogy with Lola and Veronika Voss. For many critics, Fassbinder crowning achievement was the 14-part television adaptation of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz , much maligned by the German press. Although for Veronika Voss Fassbinder received the Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival, a much-coveted Oscar nomination eluded him.

There are three distinct phases to Fassbinder’s career. The first ten or so movies (1969 -1971) were an extension of his work in the theater, shot usually with static camera and with deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue. The second phase is the one that brought him international attention, with films modeled, to ironic effect, on the melodramas Douglas Sirk made for Universal in the 1950s. In this films Fassbinder explored how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientation, politics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday fascism of family life and friendship. The final batch of films, from around 1977 until his death, were more varied, with international actors sometimes used and the stock company disbanded (although the casts of some films were still filled with Fassbinder regulars). He became increasingly more idiosyncratic in terms of plot, form and subject matter in movies like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), The Third Generation (1979) and Querelle (1982). He also refined his 'victim cycle' in more cinematic terms and articulated his themes in the bourgeois milieu with his trilogy about women in post-fascist Germany : The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), The Angst of Veronica Voss and Lola. His masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz was also made in this period.

Avant-garde films (1969-1971)

Working simultaneously in theater and film, Fassbinder created his own style out of fusion of the two forms. His ten early films are characterized by a self-conscious and assertive formalism. Influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and the theories of Bertolt Brecht, these films are austere and minimalist in style. Although praised by many critics, they proved too demanding and inaccessible for a mass audience. It was during this time, however, that Fassbinder developed his rapid working methods. In this period, his most prolific, Fassbinder made such controversial films about human savagery such as Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971) and Whity (1971). Two of his best early films are: Beware of a Holy Whore and The American Soldier, the former a black comedy of difficult movie making and sexual frustration, the latter a gangster film.

Love is Colder than Death (1969)

Fassbinder's first feature length film Love is Colder than Death (1969) (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod) already showed that he had Godardian talent by deconstructing the gangster film genre. However, unlike Godard, its desolate and lonely worldview made the film's content more than just a celebration of cinephilia. Fassbinder dedicated the film to his cinematographic mentors: Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Marie Straub. Success was not immediate for him. Love is Colder than Death was ill received at the Berlin Film Festival, but was the beginning of the successful careers of the three leading actors of the film: Hanna Schygulla, Ulli Lommel and Fassbinder himself.

Katzelmacher (1969)

His second film, Katzelmacher (1969), (Bavarian slang for 'foreign worker'), was better received, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. It featured an emigrant from Greece who encounters violent xenophobic slackers in moving into an all-German neighborhood. This kind of social criticism, featuring alienated characters unable to escape the forces of oppression, is a constant throughout Fassbinder's diverse oeuvre. The film stylistically bare and stage-bound treatment enhanced its sad poetry. Katzelmacher was adapted from the first play written by Fassbinder - a companion feature to Jean-Marie Straub's reductive, ten-minute stage adaptation of Ferdinand Bruckner's three-act play, Sickness of Youth (1926) for the underground Action Theater. Profoundly influenced by the radicalism of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater estrangement and dispossession, Katzelmacher serves as a brutal and compelling reflection of socially tolerated inhumanity and marginalization.

The American Soldier (1971)

The main theme of the gangster film The American Soldier is that violence is an expression of frustrated love. From the very first scenes, it is evident that for the American soldier the gun has the function of a phallus. The minimal and unrealistic plot and stylistic poverty heightening the mood of depressed urban life as the eponymous hit man of the title (actually a German, played by Karl Scheydt) goes about wiping out half the Munich underworld for the corrupt police. The American Soldier pays homage to the Hollywood gangster genre, it lacks the conviction and energy of its models but offer only ersatz ennui as compensation. American Soldier also alludes to Southern Gothic race narratives like Band of Angels (1957), directed by Raoul Walsh, another of Fassbinder's influences, to whom he paid tribute by adopting the pseudonym Franz Walsch as editor in the credits of his early films.

Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)

Beware of a Holy Whore was based like so many Fassbinder’s films on a personal experience, the shooting of his earlier film the revisionist Western, Whity (1970). The film shows an egomaniacal director, beset by a stalled production, temperamental actors, and frustrated crew. When asked what the movie he is making is about, he says : brutality. The film ends with typical Fassbinder-esque irony as the crew gang up the director. Beware of a Holy Whore marked the end of Fassbinder’s avant-garde period. It presented such an embittered and radical self-critique that his future films would have to be quite different from the ones that went before. After spinning out ten films within two years in a frenzied burst of creativity, his anti-film anti-theater drive had pretty much exhausted itself.

German melodramas (1972-1976)

After Beware of a Holy Whore, Fassbinder took an eighteen-month respite from filmmaking. During this time, Fassbinder turned for a model to Hollywood melodrama, particularly the films of German-trained Douglas Sirk, who made All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life for Universal Pictures during the 1950s. Fassbinder was attracted to these films not only because of their entertainment value, but also for their depiction of various kinds of repression and exploitation. This mixture of melodrama and social critique is evident in Fassbinder's first commercially successful film, The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972). However, the film that brought him international acclaim was Fear Eats the Soul (1974), which won the International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1974.

The Merchant of the Four Seasons (1972)

Fassbinder scored his first domestic commercial success with The Merchant of the Four Seasons (1971) (Händler der vier Jahreszeiten). The film portraits a fruit merchant, who in spite of his efforts faces rejection from both his wife and his mother. After his human spirit is crushed by a cruel society and his own futility, he drinks himself literally to death. The Merchant of the Four Seasons is as critical of its lecherous, hypocritical German society as it is with the victims who seemingly perpetuate their own damnation.

The Merchant of the Four Seasons introduced a new phase of Fassbinder’s filmmaking, using melodrama as a style to create critical studies of contemporary German life for a general audience. It was Fassbinder's first effort to create what he declared he aspired to: a cinematic statement of the human condition that would transcend national boundaries like the films of Antonioni, Bergman, and Fellini. It is also his first realization of what he learned from Sirk—that people, however small they may be, and their emotions, however insignificant they may seem, could be big on the movie screen.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

Loneliness is a common theme in Fassbinder's work, together with the Strindbergian idea that power becomes a determining factor in all human relationships. His characters yearn for love, but seemed condemned to exert an often violent control over those around them. A good examples is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), (Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant), adapted from one of the fourteen plays Fassbinder penned. The title character is a fashion designer who lives in a self-created dreamland, a languid, overripe environment that lacks any reference to the world outside its walls. After the failure of her second marriage, the classy, autocratic Petra falls hopelessly and obsessively in love with a working-class, cunning young woman who wants a career in modeling. The model exploitation of Petra mirrors Petra's extraordinary psychological abuse of her silent maid. Fassbinder portrays the slow meltdown of these relationships as inevitable, and his actresses (there are no men in the film) move in a slow, trance like way that hints at a vast world of longing beneath the beautiful, brittle surface. The director's theatrical origins, so evident in Petra von Kant, resonate throughout, his films. Sometimes this manifests as a kind of stylized way of acting, with slow, self-conscious gestures, and sometimes in a dazzlingly, often suffocating artificial mise en scène. The film is both a provocative comment on the representation of love in Hollywood women's films and a tribute to the garish genre itself, exploring the tortured connections between desire and power.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has been cited by some feminist and gay critics as both homophobic and misogynistic, perhaps because it shows the kind of class exploitations that spill over from mainstream society into the lives of women and lesbians. Although this remains one of Fassbinder's most controversial films – in part for its severely limited depiction of lesbian’s lives – it is also one of his most powerful, for both its volcanic emotional force and the unparalleled visual imagination it displays.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Fassbinder first gained international success with Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (Angst essen Seele auf). Even for his quick output on low budgets, this movie, shot in 15 days in September 1973, ranked among his quickest and cheapest. Nevertheless, the impact on Fassbinder’s career and foreign cinema remains cemented as a great and influential work. It won the International Critics Prize at Cannes and was acclaimed by critics everywhere as one of 1974's best films.

Fear Eats the Soul details the vicious response of family and community to a lonely aging white cleaning lady who marries a muscular, much younger black Moroccan immigrant worker. The two are drawn to each other out of mutual loneliness. As their relationship becomes known, they experience various forms of hostility and public rejection. The good-hearted cleaning lady is only absolved of her “crime” when those around her realize their ability to exploit her is threatened. Fassbinder makes it apparent that social and economic factors constrain the couple, through his favorite techniques of double-framing shots and extremely long takes of characters looking with objectifying gazes. The overall effect of the film is to foreground how it is possible to defend oneself against society and somehow manage it, despite everything.

Martha (1973)

Fassbinder’s main characters tend to be naives, either men or women, who are rudely, sometimes murderously disabused of their romantic illusions, which threaten the social and philosophical status quo. In Martha (1973), a melodrama about the cruelty of a bourgeois marriage, an impulsive woman with a hunger for life marries a wealthy, sophisticated man, who hates her spontaneity, innocence, and sheer sense of self and tries to remake her as a reflection of his own bourgeois interests. Martha’s initially positive wish to be liked by those around her push her to such an extreme that she is prepared to enjoy her own oppression. She eventually accepts it as a natural condition of life and even takes a certain pleasure in it. This film also contains one of Fassbinder’s most harrowing scenes: when the husband forces Martha to stay in the sun too long; he is so turned on by her naked, burned-red body that he rapes her, ignoring her agonized screams.

Effie Briest (1974)

Effi Briest was Fassbinder’s dream film and the one in which he invested the most work. While he normally took between nine and twenty days to make a film, this time it required fifty-eight shooting days, dragged out over two years. The film is a masterful period piece adapted from Theodor Fontane's classic novel, concerning the consequences of betrayed love. Set in the closed, repressive Prussian society of the Bismarck era, the film tells the story of Effi Briest, a young woman who seeks to escape her stifling marriage to a much older man by having and affair with a charming soldier. Six years later, Effie’s husband discovers her affair with tragic consequences. Although Fassbinder rarely used historical settings, as he does here, this film sums up, and expands upon, the themes and stylistics of his earlier works and pointed to his films yet to come.

Effi Briest is a visually sumptuous film with rich period detail and production design, shot with striking black and white cinematography. Nevertheless the film's elegance only superficially conceals the rigidity of the moral code of the patriarchal society that suffocates and finally destroys the heroine.

Fox and his Friends (1974)

Many of Fassbinder’s films dealt with homosexuality, keeping with his interest in characters that were deemed outsiders by society. However, he drew away from most representations of homosexuals in films. In an interview at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, Fassbinder said about Fox and his Friends: “It is certainly the first film in which the characters are homosexuals, without homosexuality being made into a problem. In films, plays or novels, if homosexuals appear, the homosexuality was the problem, or it was a comic turn. But here homosexuality is shown as completely normal, and the problem is something quite different, it’s a love story, where one person exploits the love of the other person, and that’s the story I always tell”.

In Fox and His Friends (1974)(Faustrecht der Freiheit) a sweet but unsophisticated working-class homosexual fall in love with the elegant son of an industrialist. His lover tries to mold him into a gilt-edged mirror of upper-class values and ultimately destroys his love illusions, leaving him heartbroken and destitute after completely crushing his life.

Fassbinder, worked within the limits of Hollywood melodrama (though the film is partially based on the plight of his then lover Armin Meier, to whom the film is dedicated). The film is notable for Fassbinder's remarkably believable performance as the unlucky Fox, in his only self-directed starring role. The subject of victimized innocence at the center of the film, is one that Fassbinder took many times, but never so obviously, plainly and naturalistically.

Fox and His Friends has been deemed homophobic by some and overly pessimistic by others. The film's homosexuals are, not surprisingly, any different from the film's equally lecherous heterosexuals. Moreover, the film's pessimism is far outweighed by Fassbinder's humane indictment of Fox as an active participant in his own victimization, a familiar critique found in many of the director's films. Fassbinder’s:The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and his Friends (1974), Satan’s Brew, In a year with Thirteen moons and Querelle (1982) have overtly gay themes.

Chinese Roulette (1976)

For many years, Fassbinder had been saying he would try to stop interfering with the lives of his actors and crew and maybe this is a reason for the Fassbinder stock company's demise around the time of Satan's Brew and Chinese Roulette (1976). These films both explore group behavior in an extremely critical way.

In Chinese Roulette a wealthy married couple say goodbye before going off for the weekend, which each intends to spend separately abroad. However, at their country house the two unexpectedly meet again, in the company of their respective lovers. Their twelve-year-old crippled daughter had arranged this encounter out of hate for her parents lack of affection. The film centers on a truth game Fassbinder often played with his friends. The players divide into two teams, which take it in turn to pick out one member of the other side. This side then has to find out who has been picked by asking such questions as “ What kind of animal is the person most like ? The game is played at the suggestion of Angela, the crippled daughter, who plays on the opposite side from her mother. When the mother asks: “ In the third Reich, what would that person have been? Angela’s answer is “ Commandant of the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen ,” and it is her mother she is describing.

International films (1977-1982)

Enthusiasm for Fassbinder's films grew quickly after Fear Eats the Soul. Vincent Canby paid tribute to Fassbinder as "the most original talent since Godard," and in 1977, Manhattan's New Yorker Theater held a Fassbinder Festival. That same year saw the release of Despair (1977). Shot in English on a budget that nearly equaled the cost of his first fifteen films, Despair was based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, adapted by Tom Stoppard, and starred Dirk Bogarde. Favorable comparisons with such revered directors as Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, and Luchino Visconti soon followed. However, even as enthusiasm for Fassbinder grew outside of Germany, his films seemed to make little impression on German audiences. At home, he was better known for his work in television (Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1974) and the 15½-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)) and for the notoriety surrounding his lifestyle and open homosexuality. Coupled with the controversial issues that his films took up - terrorism, state violence, racial intolerance, sexual politics - it seemed that everything Fassbinder did provoked or offended someone.

Although films like Despair (1977) and Lili Marleen (1980) became increasingly garish, Fassbinder's masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz was a naturalistic adaptation of the two-volume, novel by Alfred Doeblin, which Fassbinder had reread many times.

The “BRD” (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) trilogy — The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Lola (1981), and Veronika Voss (1982)— show his breathtaking command of the formal narrative, the social critique, and the wide canvas. Still, he never loses the personal in his search for the universal in either the large-scale melodramas or the more focused narratives.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)

Fassbinder’s greatest success came with The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Eh der Maria Braun,) (1979). He finally attained the popular acceptance he sought, even with German audiences. The film was the first part of his trilogy on 'the entire history of the Federal German Republic' that was completed with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982). All three films center on women in Germany after World War II. These films offer careful analysis of the social make-up of those years in terms of dissidence and the changing and unchanging nature of Germany through that period. Stylistically these films are more assured than before with the help of bigger budgets.

The Marriage of Maria Braun recounts and assesses postwar German history as embodied in the rise and fall of the title character, played by Hanna Schygulla. Her story of manipulation and betrayal exposes Germany's spectacular postwar economic recovery in terms of its cost in human values. A cultural shift has occurred in the aftermath of the war, and government mandates cannot repair the damage to the human soul. Even Maria's corporate success is a consequence of a figurative act of prostitution. Episodically, despite her increasing wealth, Maria prefers to return to a demolished, abandoned building surrounded by faint sounds of reconstruction, emphasizing the country's incomplete recovery from the war. Although Maria yearns for a happy life with her husband, the Marriage of Maria Braun is not about an enduring love, but rather, the idea that true love has no place in an exploitative and emotionally detached world of materialism and economic struggle.

In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978)

In the years following Maria Braun, Fassbinder made "private" films, such as In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) and The Third Generation (1979), stories that translated personal experiences and attitudes, as well as big budget spectacles like Lili Marleen (1981).

Fassbinder most personal and bleakest work is In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden). The film follows the tragic life of Elvira, a transsexual formerly known as Erwin. In the last few days before her suicide, accompanied by a prostitute friend, she decides to visit some of the important people and places in her life. In a memorable sequence, Elvira wanders through the slaughterhouse where she worked as Erwin, recounting her history amidst the meat-hooked corpses of cattle whose slit throats rain blood onto the floor. In another scene, Elvira returns to the orphanage where she was raised by nuns and hears the brutal story of her beginnings. Fassbinder's camera relentlessly tracks the nun (played by his mother) who tells Elvira's story; she moves with a kind of military precision through the grounds, recounting the story in blazing detail, unaware that Elvira has collapsed and can no longer hear. This film combines irony with a great deal of heartfelt feeling. The strange lighting effects and often fragmented and dark compositions place this among Fassbinder's most experimental films and one of his harshest and most sincere investigations of minority urban life.

In a Year of Thirteen Moons was explicitly personal, a reaction to Armin Meier's suicide. In addition to writing, directing, and editing, Fassbinder also designed the production and served as cameraman, and this concentration of power may have inspired some of the extraordinary images of the film. Like in the earlier films where the space for personal monologue and storytelling is expanded for even very minor characters, Elvira's brutally honest tape-recorded interview in the final moments combines with the image for one of Fassbinder's most moving and penetrating moments in his films.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

Returning to his explorations of German history in the early '80s, Fassbinder finally realized his dream of adapting Alfred Doeblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1980. A monumental TV series running more than 13 hours, with a two-hour coda released in the U.S. as a 15-hour feature, it became his crowning achievement. The director's interest in the related themes of love, life, and power culminated in "Alexanderplatz." The wunderkind of the postwar German film was mesmerized by the figure of Franz Biberkopf, the proletarian protagonist" in Doeblin's novel and Fassbinder often insisted: "I am Biberkopf." The story, set in late-1920s Berlin, became a compelling suggestion for the roots of Nazism, as well as a superbly acted, engrossing human drama. According to Fassbinder the film is "The story of two men whose little lives on this earth are destroyed because they never get the opportunity to muster up the courage even to recognize, much less be able to admit to themselves, that they desire each other in an unusual way."

Querelle (1982)

Fassbinder did not live to see the premier of his last film Querelle, based on Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest. Adapting Genet's peculiar brand of existential homoeroticism to film would seem impossible, but Fassbinder dove into the project with relish.

The film deals with various forms of sexuality and love. Querelle is a kitschy wonderland of fetishized homosexual romance, cluttered with archetypal gay imagery from leather men to sailors to a tortured fag hag played by Jeanne Moreau. The backdrop is a kind of permanent orange sunset, as if the world were at its end, with the architecture a landscape of vague alleys and parts of ships and huge phallic columns that overshadow the action. Fassbinder exploits the sexual and criminal tensions in this enclosed space, particularly in scenes involving the title character. The film did not match the provocative intellectual vision of Genet's novel but captured the mood of his writing through the stylized presentation.

Filmography

All titles written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder unless stated otherwise.

Year	English title	Original title	Notes
1965	This Night	This Night	Short. Nonextant.
1966	The City Tramp	Der Stadtstreicher	Short.
1966/67	The Little Chaos	Das Kleine Chaos	Short.
1969	Love Is Colder Than Death	Liebe ist kälter als der Tod
1969	Katzelmacher (aka Cock Artist)	Katzelmacher	Based on his play.
1970	Gods of the Plague	Götter der Pest
1970	The Coffee House	Das Kaffeehaus	TV film. Based on a play by Carlo Goldoni.
1970	Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?	Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?	Co-directed with Michael Fengler. Script improvised.
1970	The American Soldier	Der Amerikanische Soldat
1970	The Niklashausen Journey	Die Niklashauser Fahrt	TV film. Co-directed with Michael Fengler. Script improvised.
1971	Rio das Mortes	Rio das Mortes	TV film.
1971	Pioneers in Ingolstadt	Pioniere in Ingolstadt	TV film. Based on a play by Marieluise Fleisser.
1971	Whity	Whity
1971	Beware of a Holy Whore	Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte
1972	The Merchant of Four Seasons	Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
1972	The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant	Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant	Based on his play.
1972-1973	Eight Hours Are Not a Day	Acht Stunden sind kein Tag	TV series, 5 episodes.
1972	Bremen Freedom	Bremer Freiheit	TV film. Based on his play.
1973	Jail Bait	Wildwechsel	TV film. Based on a play by Franz-Xaver Kroetz.
1973	World on a Wire	Welt am Draht	TV film in two parts. Based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye. Co-written with Fritz Müller-Scherz.
1974	Nora Helmer	Nora Helmer	TV film. Based on A Doll's House by Ibsen (German translation by Bernhard Schulze).
1974	Ali: Fear Eats the Soul	Angst essen Seele auf	Inspired by Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.
1974	Martha	Martha	TV film. Based on the story "For the Rest of Her Life" by Cornell Woolrich.
1974	Effi Briest	Fontane - Effi Briest oder: Viele, die eine Ahnung haben von ihren Möglichkeiten und Bedürfnissen und dennoch das herrschende System in ihrem Kopf akzeptieren durch ihre Taten und es somit festigen und durchaus bestätigen	Based on the novel by Theodor Fontane.
1975	Like a Bird on a Wire	Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht	TV film. Co-written with Christian Hohoff and Anja Hauptmann.
1975	Fox and His Friends	Faustrecht der Freiheit	Co-written with Christian Hohoff.
1975	Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven	Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel	Co-written with Kurt Raab. Based on the short story "Mutter Krausens Fahrt Ins Glück" by Heinrich Zille.
1975	Fear of Fear	Angst vor der Angst	TV film. Based on the novel by Asta Scheib.
1976	I Only Want You to Love Me	Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt	TV film. Based on the book Lebenslänglich by Klaus Antes and Christiane Erhardt.
1976	Satan's Brew	Satansbraten
1976	Chinese Roulette	Chinesisches Roulette
1977	Women in New York	Frauen in New York	TV film. Based on the play by Clare Boothe Luce.
1977	The Stationmaster's Wife	Bolwieser	TV film in two parts. Based on the play by Oskar Maria Graf.
1978	Germany in Autumn	Deutschland im Herbst	Fassbinder directed 26-minute episode for this omnibus film.
1978	Despair	Despair - Eine Reise ins Licht	Screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov.
1978	In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden	In a Year of 13 Moons
1979	The Marriage of Maria Braun	Die Ehe der Maria Braun	Co-written with Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer.
1979	The Third Generation	Die Dritte Generation
1980	Berlin Alexanderplatz	Berlin Alexanderplatz	TV series, 14 episodes. Based on the novel by Alfred Döblin.
1981	Lili Marleen	Lili Marleen	Based on Der Himmel hat viele Farben, the autobiography of Lale Andersen. Co-written with Manfred Purzer and Joshua Sinclair.
1981	Theater in Trance	Theater in Trance	Documentary.
1981	Lola	Lola	Co-written with Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer.
1982	Veronika Voss	Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss	Co-written with Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer.
1982	Querelle	Querelle	Co-written with Burkhard Driest. Based on the novel Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet.

Documentaries about Fassbinder

• The Many Women of Fassbinder
• Life, Love and Celluloid
• Fassbinder in Hollywood
• Life Stories: A Conversation with Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• I Don't Just Want You to Love Me: Feature-length documentary of Fassbinder's life and career
• RWF Last Works
• Fassbinder's Women

Bibliography

• Baer, Harry, Ya Dormiré cuando este Muerto ,Seix Barrall, 1986, ISBN-10: 8432245720
• Braad Thomsen, Christian Fassbinder: Life and Work of a Provocative Genius , University of Minnesota Press, 2004, ISBN 0816643644
• Hayman, Ronald, Fassbinder Film Maker , Simon & Schuster, 1984. ISBN 0671523805
• Katz, Robert, Love is colder than Death : The Life and Time of Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Random House, 1987, ASIN: B000OP6C1M
• Lorenz, Juliane, edit Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Sutton Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1557832625

File:Rainer Werner Fassbinder book.jpg

Fassbinder

Other References

• Watson, Wallace, ‘‘ The Bitter Tears of RWF , Sight and Sound, 1992
• Pipolo, Tony, ‘‘ Straight from the Heart: reviewing the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Cineaste, 2004.

External links

• http://www.fassbinderfoundation.de
• http://www.rafamorata.com/fassbinder.html
• Rainer Werner Fassbinder at IMDb
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• filmportal.de including biography, filmography, photos, texts
• Overview of Fassbinder's cinematic and theatre careers
• Holy Whore: Remembering Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Fassbinder Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
• Interview with Hanna Schygulla about Fassbinder
• Short film clip with Fassbinder's editor Julianne Lorenz
• Essay on Fassbinder's Films in German
• Rainer Fassbinder's Gravesite
• DVD review of Whity