Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have celebrated his 76th birthday on 31 May. But four decades have passed since a heedlessly hedonistic lifestyle caught up with the dynamo driving New German Cinema, at the tragically early age of 37. Creatively fearless and frighteningly prolific, Fassbinder left behind an inconsistent, but indelible body of work and the classics and curios alike are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.
Like all good provocateurs, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a divisive figure. Take the varying views of his life and career presented in Hans Günter Pflaum's documentary, I Don't Just Want You to Love Me (1992), which judiciously depicts him as a serious artist and a perceptive commentator on postwar West German society, and Oskar Roehler's biopic, Enfant Terrible (2020), in which Oliver Masucci portrays Fassbinder as a callously cruel Svengali, who was willing to use and abuse his collaborators in order to realise his vision.
There's no question that Fassbinder could be a difficult director, whose confrontational methods and uncompromising aesthetic enthused some and bemused others. It's possible to view the bisexual auteur as both a radical feminist and a misogynist, a champion of LGBTQIA+ rights and a homophobe. He could also be polemical to the point of didacticism. Yet his acute understanding of the German psyche and his insights into class, race and ideology put him on a par with idol Jean-Luc Godard in the pantheon of political film-makers.
Fassbinder was also a workaholic, who produced a phenomenal number of plays, films and TV series in just 15 years. In addition to writing, producing and directing, he also acted in several of his own pictures, as well as appearing in the likes of Wim Wenders documentary, Room 666 (1982). CinemaParadiso.co.uk has an unrivalled selection of Fassbinder titles to discover. So, see what takes your fancy in our latest Instant Expert's Guide.
Movie Stars For Babysitters
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was born in Bad Wörishofen a few weeks after VE Day in May 1945. Although American troops had already liberated the small Bavarian town, Fassbinder's mother, Liselotte Pempeit, always urged him to give his birthdate as 1946, as she thought people would be better disposed towards a peace child.
Hailing from the Free City of Danzig that would be renamed Gdansk after it was presented to Poland after the war, Liselotte was a translator who took the advice of her doctor husband, Helmut Fassbinder, and entrusted her three month-old son to relations in the country, as he was not expected to survive a Munich winter. Sadly, this established a pattern, as the Fassbinders pursued their careers and active social lives with nary a thought for their son.
After the couple divorced in 1951, Fassbinder rarely travelled to Cologne to see his father. In fact, with Liselotte needing to work, he saw more of the boarders who shared their home. When she was hospitalised with tuberculosis, however, he started sneaking into the nearby cinema and sometimes saw four films in a single day. He often clashed with his mother's lovers and so resented her marrying journalist Wolff Eder in 1959 that he went to live with his father.
Having loathed his boarding school, Fassbinder was persuaded to take night school classes and gained insights into foreign cultures while helping Helmut maintain the apartments he leased to the gastarbeiters who had come to rebuild West Germany. Although they frequently argued, Dr Fassbinder encouraged his son to write stories, poems and plays. So, when the 18 year-old returned to Munich, he took acting lessons at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio, where he first met Hanna Schygulla, who would become one of his most gifted collaborators. During this productive period, he also wrote the play that François Ozon would bring to the screen as Water Drops on Burning Rocks in 2000.
Having been rejected by the Berlin Film School, Fassbinder returned to Munich and adopted the pseudonym Franz Walsch to make the 8mm shorts, The City Tramp (1966) and The Little Chaos (1967). Future stock company stalwart Irm Hermann appeared in both films, while the latter saw Fassbinder cast his mother under the name Lilo Pempeit, which she would use in amassing 23 credits in her son's productions.
Exploding on to the Scene
In 1967, Fassbinder joined Munich Action-Theater, where he so impressed as writer, actor and director that he was appointed head of the company after just two months. Very much an angry young man in a hurry, in April 1968, he staged a production of his own play, Katzelmacher, which he adapted for the screen the following year as his second feature. He also took the lead as the Greek migrant worker who joins the social circle of Bavarian landlady Irm Hermann, only to be ostracised for daring to date local girl, Hanna Schygulla.
Shortly after the play premiered, the Action-Theater was disbanded amidst the political unrest erupting across Europe. But Fassbinder quickly formed the Anti-Theater troupe and insisted on ensemble members like Schygulla, Hermann, Peer Raben, Harry Baer and Kurt Raab living as a commune to ensure that everyone was immersed in the work.
Over the next 18 months, Fassbinder produced 12 plays (four of which were his own work) and developed a directorial style that melded static dialogue passages with cabaret set-pieces in a bid to combine the distanciation techniques of Bertolt Brecht and the self-reflexivity of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub, a compatriot who worked with French partner Danièle Huillet on such experimental pieces as The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), Sicilia! (1998) and Une Visite au Louvre (2004), which are available from Cinema Paradiso on a single disc.
In 1974, Fassbinder would become the artistic director of the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt. But, while he may have wanted to emulate Ingmar Bergman in working on stage and screen, there was no doubt where Fassbinder's fascination lay after he made his feature bow with Love Is Colder Than Death (1969). Chronicling the misadventures of Fassbinder's pimp, Schygulla's prostitute and Ulli Lommel's small-time gangster, the action owed much to Godard, even though German cinema had undergone its own new wave (Das Neue Kino) after a group of young hopefuls had denounced 'papa's cinema' in the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto.
Consciously keeping Dietrich Lohmann's camera still and having the characters speak in a stilted manner, Fassbinder introduced a mannered theatricality that would typify his early films, as he secured the government grants that facilitated a remarkable outpouring of creativity that was only made possible by the fact that actors and technicians alike responded to his energy and proved willing to forgive his spiralling egotism.
Fast & Furious Fassbinder
Having debuted at 24, Fassbinder flew out of the traps, while fellow Autoren Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders operated at a more sedate pace. His third feature, Gods of the Plague (1970), was a semi-sequel to his first, with Harry Baer taking over the role of Franz Walsch, as he emerges from prison and becomes embroiled with Günther (Günther Kaufmann), the black hoodlum who had killed his brother. Competing for Walsch's affections are Margarethe (Margarethe von Trotta) and Joanna (Hanna Schygulla), who is willing to do anything to keep her man.
Shooting in colour for the first time, Fassbinder shared the directorial duties with Michael Fengler on Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, a study of bourgeois ennui that sees architectural draughtsman Kurt Raab become so agitated by a myriad of petty frustrations that he snaps when wife Lilith Ungerer keeps chatting with a garrulous neighbour while he is trying to watch television. However, Fassbinder returned to monochrome for The American Soldier (both 1970), a stylised noir that sees Vietnam veteran Ricky (Karl Scheydt) return to Munich and enlist the help of buddy Franz Walsch (Fassbinder) to eliminate the underworld targets identified by some corrupt cops. Subverting the conventions of the genre, while investing them with new meaning, this is a crossroads picture for Fassbinder, as he explores the connections between desire and death.
Reuniting with Michael Fengler, Fassbinder moved on to The Niklashausen Journey (1970), a TV-movie that explores the political upheavals of the period through the life of Hans Böhm (Michael König), the 15th-century shepherd who claimed to have been inspired to preach revolution by the Virgin Mary. Blithely mixing the authentic and the anachronistic, this is a provocative denunciation of leaders and the led, whose pessimism would increasingly become a feature of Fassbinder's work.
The influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) and Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes (1969) is readily apparent and the latter also impinges upon Rio das Mortes (1971), a rare Fassbinder comedy that was based on an idea by Volker Schlondorff. Ignoring the threats of girlfriend Hanna Schygulla, Michael König persuades buddy Günther Kaufmann to join him on an expedition to Peru to find some buried treasure.
Made for television, this was barely seen for decades, but it's available on DVD through CinemaParadiso.co.uk! Let's hope we can also soon bring you missing Fassbinder titles like Whity, a revisionist tale of the American South that was filmed on the Spaghetti Western lot at Almeria in Spain. Tensions during the making of this film prompted Fassbinder to disband the Anti-Theater company and form Tango Films to make Pioneers in Ingolstadt (both 1971), another rarely seen offering that drew on a Marieluise Fleißer play for its story about a maid (Hanna Schygulla) who falls for a soldier (Harry Baer) who has come to her town to build a bridge.
The fact these films are not currently on disc suggests a tailing off of form at the end of a remarkable period of productivity. But Fassbinder roared back with Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), a variation on Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) that enabled the German to channel the frustrations he had experienced while filming Whity. He also takes the role of the production manager trying to keep the cast and crew of 'Death in Spain' onside while waiting for star Eddie Constantine and director Lou Castel. He proves to be such an egotistical dictator, however, that the actors and technicians rebel. Touching on such pet topics as self-expression, brutality, sexual obsession and cruelty. this is one of the most honest works of auto-criticism in screen history and it would remain Fassbinder's personal favourite.
Enfant Terrible
While his first 10 films had brought him domestic and festival attention, Fassbinder was still an unfamiliar name on the burgeoning arthouse circuit. His studies of outsiders struggling for acceptance and a share in West Germany's Economic Miracle were deeply personal. But they were also wildly contradictory and so stylistically austere that they represented a 'counter-cinema'.
Taking stock during an eight-month break from working, Fassbinder came to a realisation. 'Every decent director,' he told an interviewer. 'has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It's a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple's relationship, one partner destroys the other.'
Fuelled by this new determination to expose the federal republic's moral bankruptcy in the post-Nazi, Cold War world, Fassbinder embarked upon a six-year spree that yielded several masterpieces bearing the influence of such Douglas Sirk melodramas as All I Desire (1951), Magnificent Obsession (1957), All That Heaven Allows (1955), There's Always Tomorrow, Written on the Wind (both 1956) and Imitation of Life (1959).
Fassbinder scored his first box-office hit with The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), which is set in Munich in the 1950s and explores the plight of greengrocer Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller), who slumps into a depression after suffering a heart attack and asks old Foreign Legion comrade Harry (Klaus Löwitsch) to help his wife, Irmgard (Irm Hermann). The Sirkian influence is evident throughout, as it is with The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), an adaptation of one of Fassbinder's own plays that he shot in just 10 days. Set in the Bremen apartment of reclusive fashion designer Petra (Margit Carstensen), the action reveals how aspiring model Karin (Hanna Schygulla) supplants her mentor's long-suffering assistant, Marlene (Irm Hermann), in an effort to worm her way into Petra's affections.
Abetted by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus in bringing a new sophistication to his visuals, Fassbinder seemed set to conquer West German cinema. Typically, therefore, he next opted to make a small-screen profile of 1830s serial killer Geesche Gottfried (Margit Carstensen) in Bremen Freedom and the 478-minute mini-series, Eight Hours Are Not a Day (both 1972). This five-parter took a soap operatic approach to both the relationship between factory floor employee Jochen Epp (Gottfried John) and office worker Marion Andreas (Hanna Schygulla) and the shifting fortunes of their struggling tool company.
The class war would also inform the currently unavailable teleplay, Jail Bait, a rather lurid adaptation of a Franz Xaver Kroetz play about underage sex that is set in the industrial north in the 1950s. Also broadcast in 1973, World on a Wire saw Fassbinder attempt a science-fiction topic for the first and only time in reworking Daniel F. Galouye's novel, Simulacron-3. Owing much to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), the 205-minute story follows cybernetics expert Dr Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), as he becomes convinced that his predecessor's death was highly suspicious.
Fassbinder's next picture also had a celebrated antecedent, as the frowned-upon romance between Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows was reworked in Fear Eats the Soul (1974) to expose racism in Munich in the aftermath of the 1972 Olympic massacre. Focussing on the response of the family and friends of 60 year-old cleaner Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira) to her romance with Moroccan gastarbeiter Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), the action was filmed in just 15 days and won the International Critics Prize at Cannes. Still relevant almost five decads on, this fine film is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso on high-quality DVD and Blu-ray.
Making his sixth appearance in a Fassbinder film since their meeting in a Paris bathhouse, Ben Salem would meet a tragic end after their relationship ended and he hanged himself in a French prison in 1977. The news was withheld from Fassbinder for five years, by which time lover Armin Meier had also taken his own life on the director's 33rd birthday. It's all the more ironic, therefore, that Fassbinder would prove to be such an acute commentator on the abusive nature of relationships in films like Martha (1974), a 16mm TV-movie version of the Cornell Woolrich story, 'For the Rest of Her Life', that sees Constance librarian Margit Carstensen rush into marriage with the kindly Karlheinz Böhm, who turns out to be a controlling monster.
Having reinterpreted Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House for television as Nora Helmer, Fassinder attempted his most ambitious literary adaptation to date with Effi Briest (both 1974), which bore the impressive subtitle, 'Many People Who Are Aware of Their Own Capabilities and Needs Just Acquiesce to the Prevailing System in Their Thoughts and Deeds, Thereby Confirm and Reinforce It.' Based on the 1895 novel by Theodor Fontane and taking an unprecedented 58 days over two years to film, the monochrome narrative reveals the fate of 17 year-old Effi (Hanna Schygulla) after she marries the much older Baron Geert von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck) and throws herself into a passionate affair with the dashing Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel).
Despite artfully combining Douglas Sirk's approach to storytelling with the visual gambits that Josef von Sternberg had devised for his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich (see Cinema Paradiso's Getting to Know article), Fassbinder was criticised in some quarters for disrespecting his source. But this remains among his finest achievements and the strain involved in holding the production together meant that his next offering was the 40-minute teleplay, Like a Bird on a Wire (1975), which starred Brigitte Mira as a torch singer looking back on her love life between songs that reflect German attitudes to defeat and disgrace during the postwar recovery. Sadly, this is one of a number of Fassbinder projects from this period that have yet to secure a UK disc release, so we shall content ourselves with mentioning them in passing.
Arthouse Darling
Although it belongs to the previous timeframe, Fox and His Friends (1975) reveals a new maturity to Fassbinder's work, as he became less of an activist and more of an artist. Directing himself in a starring role for the only time, he set out to depict the gay scene on its own terms and, consequently, this became one of the first films in which homosexuality is treated as a given and not an issue.
First seen working at a carnival, Franz 'Fox' Bieberkopf (Fassbinder) is a naive fellow whose life changes when his boss lover is arrested for tax fraud and he wins 500,000 marks in a lottery. Spotting a chance to get his hands on some easy loot, the bourgeois Eugen (Peter Chatel) latches on to Fox and coaxes him into spending lavishly and making a investment in his father's ailing printing business. Eugen also gets Fox to pay for a holiday in Morocco, only for the relationship to turn sour upon their return.
Attacked in certain circles for its depiction of the gay clique, this is anything but a homophobic picture, as Fassbinder avers that same-sex affairs are governed by the same emotions and deceptions as hetersexual ones. Indeed, by dedicating the film to Armin Meier, he could even have been trying to apologise for exposing this barely literate former butcher's boy to the vicissitudes of his rollercoaster lifestyle.
Fassbinder would contemplate their union again while arguing with Lilo Pempeit in his segment of Germany in August (1978), a portmanteau snapshot of the impact on West German society of the Red Army Faction, whose violent history is examined in Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) and Andreas Veiel's If Not Us, Who? (2011). Cinema Paradiso can also offer a variation on the theme in Hans Weingartner's The Edukators (2004), which explores the legacy of the RAF on German youth.
The following year, Fassbinder returned to the theme of rampant consumerism in I Only Want You to Love Me (1976), a fact-based teleplay on the theme that money can't buy love that sees construction worker Vitus Zeplichal fail to appease his neglectful parents by building them a house and then sink into debt and despair after moving to Munich with his aspirational new wife, Elke Aberle. Ironically, Fassbinder was best known in his homeland for his television work and his outspoken views on the burning issues of the day. Overseas, however, he had become a fixture on the arthouse circuit and his films from 1976 onwards came to rely less on stock company regulars and plotlines that were dictated by budgets and shooting schedules.
A case in point is Chinese Roulette (1976), which features Jean-Luc Godard's wife and muse, Anna Karina, as the French hairdressing mistress of Alexander Allerson, a Munich bourgeois who has arranged a weekend away at the country mansion run by Brigitte Mira and her pretentious son, Volker Spengler. However, thanks to the scheming of his 12 year-old disabled daughter, Andrea Schober, Allerson finds himself sharing the premises with wife Margit Carstensen and her paramour, Ulli Lommel. Famed for the climactic parlour game that gives the film its name, this darkly comic thriller not only dissects German cant with scalpel-sharp acuity, but it also feels like payback for Fassbinder's own miserable childhood.
Having mini-seriesed Oskar Maria Graf's 1931 novel, Bolweiser, as The Stationmaster's Wife (1977), Fassbinder made his first film in English. Scripted by Tom Stoppard from a Vladimir Nabokov novel, Despair (1978) stars Dirk Bogarde as exiled Russian chocolatier Hermann Hermann, who is less interested in the rise of National Socialism in the Berlin of the early 1930s than in persuading his homeless dopplegänger to help him escape the stifling existence he abhors with his vulgarly grasping spouse, Lydia (Andréa Ferréol). Earning comparisons with such auteurs as Luchino Visconti, Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman, this offbeat saga set the agenda for what would prove to be Fassbinder's final flourish.
Live Fast, Die Young
Fassbinder began this remarkable phase in reflective mood and In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) remained among his favourite films, as it helped him cope with the loss of Armin Meier. A treatise on the destructive power of love, the action follows Elvira Weisshaupt (Volker Spengler) on an acerbically sentimental journey to the places that had driven him to Casablanca for a sex change in the hope of pleasing his callous lover, Anton Saitz (Gottfried John). In addition to writing and directing the film, Fassbinder also served as production designer, cinematographer and editor and, in reinforcing the personal nature of the project, he also found roles for both his mother and ex-wife, Ingrid Craven.
Despite telling one interviewer that he had been so low that he had considered becoming a farmer in Paraguay, Fassbinder continued to throw himself into his work and he reunited with Hanna Schygulla for what would become his best-known feature, The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Exposing the cynical exploitation that underpinned the Economic Miracle driven by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, this Germanicised 'woman's picture' centres on Maria Braun (Schygulla), as she is widowed during the war and hooks up with an African American GI (Günther Kaufmann). When her husband (Klaus Löwitsch) returns from the war, Maria allows him to take the blame for her lover's accidental death and takes up with an industrialist (Klaus Löwitsch), who nurtures her head for business.
Channelling Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck at their most calculating, Schygulla excels in the title role. Fassbinder also achieved new levels of potency and poetry, but he remained true to his film-making ideals and used the money he garnered from his box-office success to make The Third Generation (1979), a further rumination on the domestic scene that has Hanna Scygulla, the secretary of industrialist Eddie Constantine, conspire in his kidnapping with Volker Spengler and his cohorts including history professor Bulle Ogier and housewife Margit Carstensen. However, the terrorists soon discover they have been set up by a state intent on using the threat they pose to introduce draconian security measures.
The way in which politics seeps into everyday life was a common theme in Fassbinder's oeuvre and it reaches its apogee in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), an adaptation of Alfred Döblin's classic study of Weimar society that ran for a glorious 931 minutes over 13 episodes. At the heart of the action is Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht). a small-time crook who drifts into the orbit of gangster Reinhold Hoffman (Gottfried John) after being released from prison. Coping with the loss of an arm after a car crash, Biberkopf takes solace in the friendship of Eva (Hanna Schygulla) and the love of a kind-hearted prostitute named Mieze (Barbara Sukowa). But the sadistic Hoffman has no truck with happy endings.
Fassbinder had been obsessed with the novel since he was 14 and his epic achievement clearly influenced the masterwork completed by fellow new waver, Edgar Reitz, whose various components are Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984), Heimat 2: Chronicle of a Generation (1993), Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (2005), Heimat Fragments: The Women (2006) and Home From Home: Chronicle of a Vision (2014). All of these exceptional films are available from Cinema Paradiso, but may we recommend that you start with the last.
Fassbinder remained in the past for Lili Marleen (1981), an English-language melodrama based on singer Lale Andersen's autobiographical novel, The Sky Has Many Colours. Handsomely mounted, the story turns on the forbidden love affair between variety singer Willie (Hanna Schygulla) and Robert Mendelsson (Giancarlo Giannini), a Jewish composer who is forced to flee to Switzerland in 1938. As the war progresses, Willie strives to keep in contact, even though her signature tune has made her a nationwide celebrity and a darling of the Nazi hierarchy. The same year also saw Fassbinder make the almost forgotten documentary, Theatre in Trance (1981), which captured the Theatres of the World Festival in Cologne.
He returned to fiction a few months later with Lola (1981), the second part of the postwar trilogy that he would complete with Veronika Voss (1982). Like Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), Lola took its cues from Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel, Professor Unrat. Set in Coburg in 1957, it charts the dangerous liaison between prudish building commissioner Von Böhm (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and the alluring Lola (Barbara Sukowa), the star turn at the bordello owned by shifty property developer, Schuckert (Mario Adorf).
Rosel Zech headlined Veronika Voss, which borrowed from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) to reimagine the career of Sybille Schmitz, a leading lady at UFA during the Nazi era who is discovered living in obscurity in Munich in 1955 by besotted sports reporter Robert Krohm (Hilmar Thate), who learns that she is being exploited by conniving neurologist Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer). Impeccably photographed in black and white by Xavier Schwarzenberger, this fascinating insight into the period covered in Rüdiger Suchsland's fine documentary, Hitler's Hollywood (2017), earned Fassbinder the coveted Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
Yet it would prove to be his penultimate picture, as Fassbinder wound down the curtain with Querelle (1982), an adaptation of Jean Genet's 1947 novel, Querelle de Brest, which saw a return to the rougher, readier style that had characterised his earlier work. The Frenchman had made his own distinctive contribution to homoerotic cinema as the director of Un Chant d'amour (1950), while his writing would also inspire Tony Richardson's Mademoiselle (1966) and Christopher Miles's The Maids (1975). But no one interpreted Genet with such raw vigour as Fassbinder, who cast Brad Davis as Belgian sailor Georges Querelle, who embarks upon a voyage of self-discovery after meeting brothel madam Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), her husband Nono (Günther Kaufmann) and Gil (Hanno Pöschl), a construction worker on the run for murder.
Ever restless, Fassbinder managed an acting swan song as the detective investigating a series of corporate bombings in Wolf Gremm's Kamikaze 1989 (1982), However, heavily dependent upon drink and drugs to maintain his phenomenal output, Fassbinder was found dead in his Munich apartment on 10 June 1982. He had seemingly suffered a heart attack caused by a combination of sleeping pills and cocaine. Beside him was a script for a biopic about a fabled Marxist agitator that he hoped would star Romy Schneider. Four years later, Margarethe von Trotta cast Barbara Sukowa in Rosa Luxembourg (1986).
Fassbinder once said, 'I would like to build a house with my films. Some are the cellars, others the walls, still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house.' The critics may still be divided, but Cinema Paradiso users only have to type in the titles discussed here to see that Rainer Werner Fassbinder left behnd a cinematic edifice that will long endure.
