Regardless of potential losses

Indeed, he has had a major role in at least ten of these films. Fassbinder's mixing together of Hollywood and avant-garde forms took a variety of turns throughout his brief career. These early "filmed theater" pieces, inevitably conforming to a static, long-take style because of a dearth of funding, tended to resemble parables or fables in their brevity and moral, didactic structuring. As funding from the government increased in proportion to his success, the popular forms of filmmaking associated with Hollywood became his models.

His output from through the apocalyptic events of October a series of terrorist actions culminated in Hans-Martin Schleyer's death, etc.

A self-reflexive pastiche of the gangster film is evident as well in Der amerikanische Soldat. This attention to the mediation of other forms ultimately began to assume the direction of a critique of the "art film": The concern with the continuation of fascism into the present day received some attention in this period specifically in Wildwechsel, Despair , and Bolwieser , but it became the dominant structuring motivation in the final period —82 of Fassbinder's career.

Films as Director (under pseudonym Franz Walsch):

Here there is a kind of epic recombination of all earlier innovations in service of an understanding of fascism and its implications for the immediate postwar generation. Fassbinder's segment in Deutschland im Herbst a collective endeavor of many German intellectuals and filmmakers inaugurates this period.

In the Case with the Insects:On Fassbinder’s Top 10 | Metrograph

In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, Berlin Alexanderplatz , and Querelle are depictions of the crisis in sexual identity, and the criminal and counter-cultural worlds associated with that process, in relation to "capitalism in crisis. This final phase, perhaps Fassbinder's most brilliant cinematically, will be the one given the greatest critical attention in future years.

It is the one which evinces the keenest awareness of the intellectual spaces traversed in Germany since the years of fascism and especially since the mids , and the one which reveals the most effective assimilation of the heritage of forms associated with art and political cinema. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

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  • Life: Unspoken - a collection of poems;
  • The Janitor.
  • Lola () - Rotten Tomatoes.
  • .

Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Despite his abbreviated career that was cut short when he died of a drug overdose at age 37, Rainer Werner Fassbinder — has been ranked among the most important German filmmakers of the modern era.

Following on the experiments of the French New Wave in the s, the filmmakers of the so-called New German Cinema, of which Fassbinder was one, cultivated darker themes, often with a lurking consciousness of the horrors Germans had perpetrated before and during World War II. Fassbinder made films about outsiders of various kinds, and his films, filled with betrayal, crime, and fringe existences, were often unpleasant to watch. Few people knew Fassbinder well, for he himself was an unpleasant drug abuser who tended to drag others down with him; two of his homosexual lovers committed suicide.

Yet his films were wildly imaginative, and critics hailed many of them as masterpieces. Working with feverish rapidity, he never repeated himself. Fassbinder managed to tie many of his preoccupations together into an epic story, Die Ehe der Maria Braun The Marriage of Maria Braun , which achieved financial as well as critical success internationally. Like the early stages of Die Ehe der Maria Braun , Fassbinder's early life took place against a backdrop of a devastated Germany in which crowding, disorder, and substandard housing were the norm. Fassbinder's father was a doctor who treated prostitutes, and Fassbinder, though he was warned away from them, grew up with an open mind toward people who lived or worked on the streets.

His mother was a translator who, among other works, created the German versions of several books by Truman Capote. Fassbinder's parents divorced when he was six, and both before and after that he was left on his own for much of the time. These experiences, according to various statements made by Fassbinder himself, colored the emotional tone of his films black. When I was a child, I suffered a lot from that, but today I'm kind of happy about it.

It makes me freer than people are in general. He was especially impressed by the huge melodramas of the German-Danish-American director Douglas Sirk , whose visually imaginative style was plastered over stories that revealed layers upon layers of personal deception born of the efforts people make to live in a corrupt society.

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Sirk's films, such as Written on the Wind and the racially based tearjerker Imitation of Life , influenced the films Fassbinder would make as an adult, and even though he was a radical outsider who would hardly have fared well in Hollywood, he always professed an admiration for American films. His own work loomed large in the minds of independent American directors oriented toward social critique, such as Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. In the famously conservative German city of Munich, Fassbinder and a group of like-minded souls began to mount experimental stage productions, taking the leftist-oriented theater of German playwright Bertolt Brecht as a point of departure.

Fassbinder was influenced by the radical French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and by the general revolutionary spirit that grew among European young people around the especially violent year of After Fassbinder's group Action-Theater was shut down by the police, he co-founded a second troupe called Anti-Theater and continued to write plays and radio plays even after beginning to devote most of his intense energy to films.


  1. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner.
  2. Movies in Theaters?
  3. ;
  4. In The Falling Light.
  5. Several of his Anti-theater plays were later collected in books. Several of the actors and production artists Fassbinder met and worked with in Munich's theater scene became the nucleus of the creative talent he would draw on in his films.

    Fassbinder realized his homosexual orientation as a teenager and never attempted to conceal it, although he briefly married actress Ingrid Caven in Only a few of his films dealt with gay themes, and he was criticized by some in the gay community for his negative portrayals of gay characters. Others defended him, however, pointing out that nearly all of the characters in Fassbinder's films were portrayed negatively, regardless of background or sexual orientation.

    I was a fan of the odd transitions and crazy coloring every time Armin Mueller-Stahl was getting mad. I can't say that it's a movie i'll watch over and over, but it's extremely well made and unique. I'm a bit of a beginner when it comes to Fassbinder, but "Lola" strengthened my suspicion that he's not destined to be a favorite of mine. There's a lurid, degenerate quality to this tale which just dragged me down, and not in a good way.

    FASSBINDER, Rainer Werner

    This eventually becomes tiring. The defocused dissolves used as scene transitions also seem rather tacky. The acting is excellent, however, and the story's portrait of corrupt bureaucracy still has resonance. And on two trivial notes, I greatly enjoyed the minor character of the simpering secretary I wish we had seen more of her , and it was quite endearing to see the lead actor play some decent violin!

    Great quirky performances, but I'm not so hot on the story. More Top Movies Trailers Forums. Season 7 Black Lightning: Season 2 DC's Legends of Tomorrow: Season 4 Doctor Who: Season 11 The Flash: Season 5 This Is Us: Season 3 Saturday Night Live: Season 4 The Walking Dead: Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows View All Photos 4.

    A homage to Von Sternberg's 'The Blue Angel,' Fassbinder's film follows a stuffy municipal building commissioner who loses his heart to Lola, a sluttish entertainer. Documentary , Drama , Special Interest. Barbara Sukowa as Lola. Armin Mueller-Stahl as Von Bohm. Mario Adorf as Schuckert. Matthias Fuchs as Esslin. That same year he made his first short films, The City Tramp and The Little Chaos, before achieving his breakthrough more or less right off the bat after three years of antiteater when his first cinema films Love Is Colder than Death and Katzelmacher were shown at the Berlinale film festival in The former reaped snide remarks and jeers, but Katzelmacher , an adaptation of a theatre play of the same name, brought the director five Federal Film Prizes and the budget for his next project.

    From then on, Fassbinder maintained an amazing pace of production: This extraordinary drive — Fassbinder once shot ten films in just eighteen months! This output was made possible by Fassbinder's regular ensemble which was also in cahoots with the director on a personal level. Its members were on standby at all times and were ready to perform several different functions on set.

    The group shot their initial films within just a few days, almost without any money, Fassbinder repeatedly launching himself into projects with shaky financing: German-style Hollywood cinema Thanks among other things to Ali: With Garbage, the City and Death , an allegedly anti-Semitic play which was not performed for a long time, Fassbinder provoked a veritable scandal in — and became infamous once and for all as the bogey of the middle classes, a role he seems to have embraced with a certain mischievous glee.

    Nonetheless, the often harsh opposition he met with from certain spheres of society was by no means detrimental to Fassbinder's success. He made what are perhaps his most enduring films towards the end of his life: The films stand for Fassbinder's theory of the tentative break between Nazi Germany and economic miracle Germany.

    From a stylistic and narrative perspective the BRD-Trilogie, unlike the early more theatre-like works, is an example of genuine German-style Hollywood cinema. Such a bold and certainly ingenious filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in Munich at the age of 37 in — probably due to drug abuse and overwork. Juliane Lorenz, his flatmate and partner of the time who had previously edited 14 of his films, found him with a burnt-out cigarette in his hand, the television still on in the background. One could almost imagine that the world had simply moved on, leaving this restless figure behind.

    To this day, the German cinema scene has been lacking such a bold and certainly ingenious filmmaker like Fassbinder — someone who really shakes things up and actually has something to say.