| Rainer Werner Fassbinder | |
|---|---|
Fassbinder on the set of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) with actress Hanna Schygulla in the background. |
|
| Born | May 31, 1945 Bad Wörishofen, Bavaria, Germany |
| Died | June 10, 1982 (aged 37) Munich, Bavaria, Germany |
| Cause of death | myocardial infarction |
| Occupation | Film director, Producer, Actor, Writer |
| Years active | 1965–82 |
| Influenced by | Douglas Sirk, Raoul Walsh, Luchino Visconti, Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht |
| Influenced | Todd Haynes, Pedro Almodovar, François Ozon, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Bela Tarr, John Waters |
| Spouse | Ingrid Caven (1970–72; div.) |
| Website | |
| www.fassbinderfoundation.de | |
Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 – June 10, 1982) was a German movie director, screenwriter and actor. He is considered one of the most important representatives of the New German Cinema.
He maintained a frenetic pace in film-making. In a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years, Fassbinder completed 40 feature length films; two television film series; three short films; four video productions; twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays; and 36 acting roles in his own and others’ films. He also worked as an actor (film and theater), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theater manager.
Underlying Fassbinder's work was a desire to provoke and disturb. His phenomenal creative energy when working, co-existed with a wild, self-destructive libertinism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, as well as being its central figure. He had tortured personal relationships with the actors and technicians around him who formed a surrogate family. However, his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social outsiders and his hatred of institutionalized violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity.
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.
Fassbinder was born in Bavaria in the small town of Bad Wörishofen, on May 31, 1945,[1] three weeks after the Americans entered the town and the unconditional surrender of Germany. The aftermath of World War II deeply marked his childhood and the life of his family.[2] Fassbinder himself, in compliance with his mother's wishes, later altered the date of his birthday to 1946 in order to enhance his status as a cinematic prodigy. It was towards his death that his real age was revealed confronting his passport.[3]
Born into a cultured bourgeois family, Fassbinder had an unconventional childhood about which he would later express grievances in interviews.[3][4] 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. The child was a year old when he was returned to his parents.[3]
Fassbinder’s mother, Liselotte Pempeit (1922–93), came from Danzig (now Gdańsk), from which many ethnic Germans had fled following the occupation of Poland by the Soviet Union. As a result, a number of her relatives came to live with them in Munich. From 1946–1951, Fassbinder lived with both of his parents;[5] he was their only child. His father, Helmut Fassbinder, a doctor with a surgery at his apartment in Sendlinger Strasse,[6] near Munich’s red light district,[3] saw his career as the means to indulge his passion for writing poetry. The doctor, who had two sons from a previous marriage, did not take much interest in the child, and neither did his mother, who helped her husband in his medical practice. Prostitutes came to Helmut Fassbinder for the medical check-up they were required to have so his son became used to seeing these women and, "he would go on feeling that there was nothing wrong or abnormal in prostitution."[5] The extended family disbanded in 1951 and the child, age six, was left alone with his mother after his parent's divorce that same year.[4]
Helmut moved to Cologne and Liselotte raised her son as a single parent. To provide for them, she rented out rooms and found employment as a translator, but tuberculosis kept her away for long periods while she recuperated.[7] Rainer was looked after by his mother's tenants and friends, but he became more independent and uncontrollable. Fassbinder spent time in the streets, sometimes playing with other boys, sometimes just watching events around him.[8] He clashed with his mother's younger lover Siggi, who lived with them when Rainer was eight or nine years old.[9] He had a similar difficult relationship with the much older journalist Wolff Eder (c1905-71), who became his stepfather in 1959.[10] Liselotte, who worked as an English- German translator, could not concentrate with her son around her and Fassbinder was often given money to go to the cinema. 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."[7]
His time at a boarding school was marred by his repeated escape and he left school before any final examinations. At the age of 15, he moved to Cologne to stay with his father,[11] but they argued frequently. He stayed though for a couple of years while attending night school, and earned a living on small jobs and helping his father, who rented shabby apartments to immigrant workers. At this time, Fassbinder wrote short plays, poems and short stories.[12] Early in his adolescence, Fassbinder identified himself as homosexual.[10]
At age eighteen in 1963, Fassbinder returned to Munich. He wanted to go to night school with the idea to eventually study theatrical science. Following his mother's advice, he took acting lessons and, from 1964–1966, attended the Fridl-Leonhard Studio for actors in Munich.[12] There, he met Hanna Schygulla, who would become one of his most important actors.[13] During this time, he made his first 8mm films and took on small jobs as actor, assistant director, and sound man.[12] At this time he also wrote the tragic comic play: Drops on Hot Stones. To gain entry to the Berlin Film School, Fassbinder submitted a film version of his play Parallels. He also entered several 8 mm films including This Night (now lost),[14] but he was turned down for admission, as were Werner Schroeter and Rosa von Praunheim, who would also have careers as film directors.[15]
He returned to Munich, continued with his writing and made two short films,The City Tramp (Der Stadtstreicher, 1965) and The Little Chaos (Das Kleine Chaos, 1966). Shot in black and white, they were financed by Fassbinder's lover, Christoph Roser, an aspiring actor, in exchange for leading roles.[16] Fassbinder acted in both of these 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.[17]
In 1967, Fassbinder joined the Munich action-theater where he was active as an actor, director and script writer. After two months, he became the company's leader. In April 1968 Fassbinder directed the premiere production of his play: Katzelmacher, the story a foreign worker from Greece who becomes the object of intense racial, sexual, and political hatred among a group of Bavarian slackers. 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.[18] It promptly reformed as the Anti-Theater (antiteater) under Fassbinder's direction.[18] The troupe lived and performed together. The knit group of young actors, included among them Fassbinder, 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.[18] Working with the Anti-Theater, Fassbinder would learn writing, directing, acting, and from which he would cull his own repertory group. Even in this period, Fassbinder productivity was remarkable. In the space of eighteen months he directed twelve plays, of these he wrote four himself and rewrote five others.
The style of his stage directing closely resembled that of his early films, a mixture of choreographed movement and static poses, taking its cues not from the traditions of stage theater, but from musicals, cabaret, films and the student protest movement.
After he made his first feature films in 1969 Fassbinder centered his efforts in his career as film director, but he maintained an intermittent foothold in the theater until his death. He worked in various productions throughout Germany and made a number of radio plays in the early 1970s. In 1974 Fassbinder took directorial control over the Theater am Turm (TAT) of Frankfurt, when this project ended in failure and controversy, Fassbinder became less interested in the theater.
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 Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) and the French New Wave cinema, particularly Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) and Week End (1967). Fassbinder developed his rapid working methods early. Because he knew his actors and technicians so well, Fassbinder was able to complete as many as four or five films per year 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, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, who started out making movies, Fassbinder's stage background was 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 surfaced in his films too where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. He also appeared in 30 projects of other directors.
By 1976, Fassbinder had gained international prominence, prizes at major film festivals, premieres and retrospectives in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and a study of his work by Tony Rayns was published, all helped make him a familiar name among cinephiles and campus audiences throughout the world. He lived in Munich when not traveling, rented a house in Paris (with ex-wife Ingrid Caven[19]) 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 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. In 1977, he was a member of the jury at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival.[20]
Fassbinder was entangled in multiple relationships with women, but more often with men. His life, always well publicized, met with gossip and media scandal. Mixing his personal and professional lives, family, friends and lovers appeared in his films. Early in his career, he had a lasting, but fractured relationship with Irm Hermann, a former secretary whom he forced to become an actress.[21] The director usually cast her in unglamorous roles most notably as the unfaithful wife in The Merchant of Four Seasons and the silent abused assistant in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Irm Hermann idolized him, but Fassbinder tormented and tortured her for over a decade.[22] This included domestic violence: "He couldn't conceive of my refusing him, and he tried everything. He almost beat me to death on the streets of Bochum ...."[23] In 1977, Hermann became romantically involved with another man and became pregnant by him. Fassbinder proposed to her and offered to adopt the child; she turned him down.[24]
Fassbinder's main romantic interest during his early period as a film director was Günther Kaufmann, a black Bavarian. Kaufmann was not a trained actor and entered cinema when, in 1969, Fassbinder fell madly in love with him. The director tried to buy his love with movie roles and expensive gifts,[25] but Kaufmann managed to destroy four Lamborghinis in a year. Like Salem, Fassbinder's next male partner, he was married and the father of two children. He appeared in fourteen of Fassbinder's films, having the leading role in Whity (1971).
Although he claimed to be opposed to matrimony as an institution, in 1970 Fassbinder married Ingrid Caven, a regular actress in his films. Their wedding reception was recycled in the film he was making at that time, The American Soldier.[26] 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 her former husband's sexuality: "Rainer was a homosexual who also needed a woman. It’s that simple and that complex."[27] The three most important women of Fassbinder’s life, Irm Hermann, Ingrid Caven and Juliane Lorenz, his last partner, were not disturbed by his homosexuality.[28]
In 1971, Fassbinder fell in love with El Hedi ben Salem (c1935-82), a Berber from Morocco. Their turbulent relationship ended violently in 1974.[29] Salem, cast as Ali in Fear Eats the Soul, hanged himself in jail in 1982. Fassbinder, who barely outlived his former lover, dedicated his last film, Querelle, to Salem.
Armin Meier (1943–78), 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.[30] He also appeared in several Fassbinder films in this period. A glimpse into their troubled relationship can be seen in Fassbinder's episode for Germany in Autumn (1978). After Fassbinder broke up with him, Meier committed suicide on Fassbinder’s birthday.[31] 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 Lorenz (born 1957), the editor of his films during this period. She can be seen in a small role as the film producer's secretary in Veronika Voss.[32] According to Lorenz, they considered getting married, but never did so.[19][33] Although they were drifting apart in his last year, they were still living together at the time of his death.[34]
Media 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 reviews from the national critics, many of whom only began to take him seriously after the foreign press had hailed him as a major director.[35]
There were frequent exposés of his lifestyle in the press, and attacks from all sides from the groups his films offended.[36] His television series Eight Hours Do Not Make a Day was cut from eight to five episodes after pressure from conservatives.[36] The playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz sued over Fassbinder's adaptation of his play Jail Bait, alleging that it was obscene.[37] Lesbians and feminists accused Fassbinder of misogyny (in presenting women as complicit in their own oppression) in his 'Women‘s Picture'.[36][38] The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has been cited by some feminist and gay critics as both homophobic and sexist.[36]
Gays complained of misrepresentation in Fox and his Friends.[36] Conservatives attacked him for his association with the radical left. Marxists said he had sold out his political principles in his depictions of left-intellectual manipulations in Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven and of a 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.[36] 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 anti-semitism. Though published at the time, and quickly withdrawn, the play was not performed until 1985, after Fassbinder's death. In the turmoil, Fassbinder resigned from his directorship of that prestigious theater complex, complaining that the play had been misinterpreted.[36]
Fassbinder did little to discourage the personalized nature of the attacks on himself and his work. He seemed to provoke them by his aggressively non-conformist lifestyle, symbolized in his black leather jacket, battered hat, dark glasses and perennial scowl.[36]
By the time he made his last film, Querelle (1982), Fassbinder was using heavy doses of drugs and alcohol to sustain his unrelenting work schedule. On the night of June 9–10, 1982, Wolf Gremm, director of the film Kamikaze 1989 (1982), which starred Fassbinder, was staying in his apartment.[39] Early that evening, Fassbinder retired to his bedroom. He was working on notes for a future film: Rosa L, based on the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German revolutionary socialist.[40] Fassbinder was watching television, video and reading in between when shortly after one o'clock in the morning he received a phone call from his friend and assistant Harry Baer.[40] At 3:30 a.m, when Juliane Lorenz arrived home, she heard the noise of television in Fassbinder’s room, but she could not hear him snoring. Though not allowed to enter the room uninvited, she went in, and she found him lying on the bed, dead, a cigarette still between his lips.[39] A thin ribbon of blood trickled from one nostril.[41]
The cause of death was reported as heart attack resulting from a lethal combination of sleeping pills and cocaine.[40] The notes for Rosa Luxemburg were found next to his body.[40]
Fassbinder's remains were interred at Bogenhausener Friedhof in Munich.
Starting at age 21, Fassbinder made over 40 films in 15 years, along with numerous plays and TV dramas. These films were largely 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 many of them (often credited as Franz Walsh, though the spelling varies), and he acted in nineteen of his own films as well as for other directors.[42] He wrote fourteen plays, created new versions of six classical plays, and directed or co-directed twenty-five stage plays. He wrote and directed four 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 the first take.[42]
There are three distinct phases to Fassbinder’s career. His first ten movies (1969–1971) were an extension of his work in the theater, shot usually with static camera and with deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue.[43]
The second phase is the one that brought him international attention, with films modeled, to ironic effect, on the melodramas Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood in the 1950s. In these 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.[43]
The final 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).[43] 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 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.
"I would like to build a house with my films," Fassbinder once remarked. "Some are the cellars, others the walls, still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house."[44]
Working simultaneously in theater and film, Fassbinder created his own style out of fusion of the two artforms. His ten early films are characterized by a self-conscious and assertive formalism. Influenced by Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and the theories of 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.
Released in 1969, Fassbinder's first feature-length film Love is Colder than Death (1969) (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod), was a deconstruction of the gangster film genre. Fassbinder dedicated the film to his cinematic mentors: Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Marie Straub. Success was not immediate: Love is Colder than Death was ill received at the Berlin Film Festival, but marked the beginning of the successful careers of the film's three leading actors: Hanna Schygulla, Ulli Lommel and Fassbinder himself.
His second film, Katzelmacher (1969), (Bavarian slang for 'foreign worker'), was received more positively, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. It featured an immigrant from Greece who encounters violent xenophobic slackers when 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 oeuvre. Katzelmacher was adapted from Fassbinder's first produced play – a companion feature to Jean-Marie Straub's 10-minute stage adaptation of Ferdinand Bruckner's three-act play, Sickness of Youth (1926) for the underground Action Theater.
The main theme of the gangster film The American Soldier is that violence is an expression of frustrated love.[45] The eponymous hit man of the title (actually a German, played by Karl Scheydt) wipes out half the Munich underworld for the corrupt police. American Soldier pays homage to the Hollywood gangster genre, it also alludes to Southern Gothic race narratives like Band of Angels (1957), directed by Raoul Walsh, another Fassbinder influence.
Beware of a Holy Whore was based, like many of 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 a frustrated crew. When asked what the movie he is making is about, he replies: brutality. The film ends with a typical Fassbinder-esque irony, as the crew gang up on 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 made before. After spinning out ten films within two years in a frenzied burst of creativity, his anti-film anti-theater drive seemed pretty much exhausted.
After Beware of a Holy Whore, Fassbinder took an eight-month respite from filmmaking. During this time, Fassbinder turned for a model to Hollywood melodrama, particularly the films German émigré Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood for Universal-International in the 1950s: All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life. 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.
Fassbinder scored his first domestic commercial success with The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) (Händler der vier Jahreszeiten).[46] The film portrays a married couple who are fruit sellers. Hans faces rejection from his family after he violently assaults his wife for not bending to his will. She leaves him, but after he suffers a heart attack they reunite, though he now has to employ other men. His restricted ability to function leads him to ponder his own futility. He literally drinks himself to death.
The Merchant of 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 as the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini had done.[44] 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.[44]
Loneliness is a common theme in Fassbinder's work, together with the idea that power becomes a determining factor in all human relationships. His characters yearn for love, but seem condemned to exert an often violent control over those around them. A good example is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), (Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant), adapted from one of Fassbinder's plays. The title character is a fashion designer who lives in a self-created dreamland and the action is restricted mostly to her lavish bedroom. After the failure of her second marriage, Petra falls hopelessly and obsessively in love with a working-class, cunning young woman who wants a career in modeling. The model's exploitation of Petra mirrors Petra's extraordinary psychological abuse of her silent assistant. 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.
Jailbait (Wildwechsel) (1973), also known as Wild Game Crossing, is a bleak story of teenage angst, set in industrial northern Germany in the 1950s. Like in many other of his films, Fassbinder analyses lower middle class life with characters who, unable to articulate their feelings, bury them in inane phrases and violent acts.[47] Love turns into a power struggle of deception and betrayal. The story centers on Hanni, a precocious fourteen-year-old schoolgirl who starts a relationship with Franz, a nineteen-year-old worker in a chicken processing plant. Their romance faces the opposition of the girl’s conservative parents. Franz is sentenced to nine months in prison for having sex with a minor. When he is released on probation, they continue their relationship and Hanni becomes pregnant. Afraid of her father’s anger, she persuades Franz to kill him. Back in prison, Franz is told by Hanni that their child died at birth and that their love was "only physical".[48]
Originally made for German television, Jailbait was based on a play by Franz Xaver Kroetz who violently disagreed with Fassbinder’s adaptation, calling it pornographic.[49] The luridness of its theme further the controversy.
A science fiction film, World on a Wire (Welt am Draht, 1973) was a departure for Fassbinder. An adaptation of the pulp sci-fi novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye, it was made as a two part, 205 minute production for television using 16 mm film stock during a hiatus from the lengthy production of Effi Briest and in the same year as Martha and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
A story of realities within realities, World on a Wire follows a researcher, working at the institute of cybernetics and future science, who begins to investigate the mysterious death of his mentor. He falls deep into the cover up behind a computer capable of creating an artificial world with units living as human beings unaware that their world is just a computer projection. Set in 1970s Paris, the film was stylistically inspired by Jean Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and in its theme of artificial humans wanting to reach real life anticipated Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.[50]
Fassbinder first gained international success with Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (Angst essen Seele auf). This film was shot in 15 days in September 1973 with a very low budget ranking among Fassbinder's 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 was loosely inspired on Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. It 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. When their relationship becomes known, they experience various forms of hostility and public rejection. Gradually, their relationship is tolerated, not out of real acceptance, but because those around the good-hearted old lady realize their ability to exploit her is threatened. As the external pressures over the couple begin to subside, internal conflicts surface.
Fassbinder’s main characters tend to be naifs, either men or women, who are rudely, sometimes murderously disabused of their romantic illusions. Shot in 16 mm and made for television, Martha (1974) is a melodrama about the cruelty of a traditional marriage.
The plot focuses on the title character, a spinster librarian. Soon after the death of her father while on vacation in Rome, Martha meets a wealthy civil engineer who sweeps her off her feet. They encounter again at a wedding in her hometown of Constance and marry. However their married life becomes an exercise for her husband to express his sadism and for Martha to endure her masochism. Her husband shows his desire for her violently leaving marks on her body. He obsessively controls her life, her diet, her taste in music and her interest until she is confined to their house. Martha’s initially positive wish to be liked by her oppressive and abusive husband push her to such an extreme that she becomes deranged leading to her own permanent physical paralysis.
Effi Briest was Fassbinder’s dream film and the one in which he invested the most work. While he normally took between nine and 20 days to make a film, this time it required 58 shooting days, dragged out over two years.[51] The film is a period piece adapted from Theodor Fontane's classic novel of 1894, concerning the consequences of betrayed love. Set in the closed, repressive Prussian society of the Bismarck era, the film paints a portrait of a woman's fate completely linked to an unbending and utterly unforgiving code of social behavior. The plot follows the story of Effi Briest, a young woman who seeks to escape her stifling marriage to a much older man by entering into a brief affair with a charming soldier. Six years later, Effi’s husband discovers her affair with tragic consequences.
The film served as a showpiece for Fassbinder's muse and favorite actress Hanna Schygulla, whose detached acting style fitted the roles the director created for her. Fassbinder made her a star, but artistic differences while making Effie Briest created a split that lasted four years, until Fassbinder called her back to take the role of Maria Braun.
Like a Bird on a Wire is a forty minutes television production featuring Brigitte Mira, the main actress in Fear eats the Soul, singing cabaret songs and love ballads from the 1940s and 1950s. Between songs she drinks and talks about her husbands. The title is borrowed from Leonard Cohen's song Like a bird on the Wire, with which the program ends.
Fassbinder considered this project " an attempt to do a show about the Adenauer era. For us it certainly wasn’t entirely successful. But the film does reveal the utter repulsiveness and sentimentality of the time" he explained.[52]
Many of Fassbinder’s films deal with homosexuality, in keeping with his interest in characters who are outsiders to 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”.[53]
In Fox and His Friends (1974) (Faustrecht der Freiheit) a sweet but unsophisticated working-class homosexual wins the lottery and falls 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 illusions, leaving him heartbroken and destitute.
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 performance as the unlucky Fox, in a self-directed starring role.
Fox and His Friends has been deemed homophobic by some and overly pessimistic by others.[54] 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 indictment of Fox as an active participant in his own victimization, a familiar critique found in many of the director's films.
Interested in and deeply critical of West Germany political situation, Fassbinder made three films dealing with contemporary issues of his country: Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975), Germany in Autumn (1978) and The Third Generation (1979).
In Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (Mutter Küsters Fahrt zum Himmel), Emma Küsters, a kind old widow, becomes the center of media and political attention after her husband, a factory worker, killed his supervisor and then himself when lay offs were announced. Wherever Mother Küsters turns for comfort and assistance she meets either rejection or exploitation. Journalist, left wing political extremist and even her family take advantage of Mother Küsters’s personal tragedy to advance their own agendas. At age thirty and already in the mid point of his career as a filmmaker, Fassbinder was inspired by the German classic film Mother Krauser’s trip to Happiness (1929) directed by Phil Jutzis.
Made for German television, Fear of Fear is a physiological drama about a middle class house wife, locked into a dull life with a distracted husband, two small children and openly hostile in laws. She becomes addicted to valium and alcohol overwhelmed by an irrational anxiety and fear of her inexorable descent into madness.
Fear of Fear is similar in themes to Martha, which also portrays the effect of a dysfunctional marriage in an oppressed housewife, the central role in both films is played by one Fassbinder’s favorite leading ladies, Margit Carstensen.
I Only Want You to Love Me (1976) (Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt) tells the story of Peter, a construction worker in jail for manslaughter. His life is recounted in a series of flashbacks. A hard working man, Peter spends his spare time building a house for his cold unloving parents. He marries and finds a job in another city, but in his desperate yearning for affection he tries to buy the love of those around him with expensive gifts which soon makes him fall in a spiral of debt. When he sees his own unrequited love for his parents reflected during an argument in a bar, he kills a man who serves as a proxy for his father.
The film, made for television and shot during a pause while making Satan's Brew, it is based on a true account taken from For Life, a book of interviews edited by Klaus Antes and Christiane Erhardt. It was also Fassbinder's personal reflection in his longing for love during his childhood and adolescence.
In a time of professional crisis, Fassbinder made Satan's Brew (1976) (Satansbraten) a bleak amoral comedy that pays homage to Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Stylistically far from the melodramas that made him known internationally, Satan's Brew gave way to a new phase in Fassbinder’s career.
In Satan's Brew, a neurotic poet suffering from writer's block; struggles to make ends meet while dealing with a frustrated long suffering wife, a half witted brother and various prostitutes and masochist women who drift in and out of his life. He convinces himself to be the reincarnation of the gay romantic poet Stefan George (1868-1933) after he plagiarizes his poem The Albatros.
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". In 1977, the New Yorker Theater in Manhattan held a Fassbinder Festival.
However, as enthusiasm for Fassbinder grew outside of Germany, his films still failed to impress the native audience. At home, he was better known for his television work and for his open homosexuality. Coupled with the controversial issues of his films — terrorism, state violence, racism, sexual politics — it seemed that everything Fassbinder did provoked or offended someone.
After completing in 1978 his last low-budget and very personal ventures (In a Year of 13 Moons and The Third Generation) he would concentrate on making films that were becoming increasingly garish and stylized. But Fassbinder's acclaimed TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz were a naturalistic adaptation of the two-volume novel by Alfred Döblin, which Fassbinder had read many times.
Chinese Roulette (Chinesisches Roulette) is Fassbinder's only film dealing with childhood. A gothic thriller with an ensemble cast, the story follows a twelve year old crippled girl who, out of hate for her parents lack of affection, arranges an encounter between them with their respective lovers at the family country estate. The film centers on a truth guessing 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 and ask them question about people and objects. The game is played at the suggestion of Angela, the disabled 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"; it is her mother she is describing.[55]
There are no happy endings in Fassbinder’s films. His protagonists, usually weak men or women with masochistic tendencies, pay a heavy price for their victimization. A case in point is The Stationmaster's Wife (Bolwieser). The film is based on a 1931 novel, Bolwiser: the novel of a husband by the Bavarian writer Oskar Maria Graf. The plot follows the downfall of Xaver Bolwieser, a rail way stationmaster submitted to the will of his domineering unfaithful wife, whose repeated infidelities completely ruin Bolwiser’s life. Broadcast as a two part television series, The Stationmaster's Wife was shortened to a 112 minute feature film and released in the first anniversary of Fassbinder's death.[56] The film stars Kurt Raab, Fassbinder's close friend who the director usually cast as a pathetic man.[57] Raab was also set designer of Fassbinder's films until their friendship and professional relationship broke up after making this film.
Fassbinder made three films in English, a language he was not proficient in: Despair (1978), Lili Marleen (1980) and Querelle (1982). All three films have international stars and are very ambitious, yet each faced artistic and commercial problems.[58] Despair is based upon the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, adapted by Tom Stoppard and featuring Dirk Bogarde. It was made on a budget of 6,000,000 DEM, exceeding the total cost of Fassbinder’s first 15 films.
Despair – A journey into the Light (Despair – Eine Reise ins Licht) tells the story of Hermann Hermann, an unbalanced Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, whose business and marriage have both grown bitter. The factory is close to bankruptcy, and his vulgar wife is chronically unfaithful. He hatches an elaborate plot to take a new identity in the belief it will free him of all his worries. The story of Hermann’s descent into madness is juxtaposed against the rise of National Socialism in Germany of the 1930s
In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden) is Fassbinder most personal and bleakest work. The film follows the tragic life of Elvira, a transsexual formerly known as Erwin. In the last few days before her suicide, she decides to visit some of the important people and places in her life. In one sequence, Elvira wanders through the slaughterhouse where she worked as Erwin, recounting her history amid the meat-hooked corpses of cattle whose slit throats rain blood onto the floor.[59] In another scene, Elvira returns to the orphanage where she was raised by nuns and hears the brutal story of her childhood. Fassbinder's camera tracks the nun (played by his mother) telling Elvira's story; she moves with a kind of military precision through the grounds, recounting the story in blazing detail, unaware that Elvira had collapsed and can no longer hear it.
In a Year of Thirteen Moons was explicitly personal, a reaction to Meier's suicide.[60] In addition to writing, directing, and editing, Fassbinder also designed the production and served as cameraman.
Fassbinder’s greatest success was The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun). He finally attained the popular acceptance he sought, even with German audiences. The title character is an ambitious and strong willed woman separated from her husband towards the end of World War II. The plot follows Maria Braun's steady rise as a successful business woman during the Adenauer era, but her professional achievements are not accompanied by personal happiness.[61] Maria’s dream of a happy life with her husband remains unfulfilled. The film, constructed in the Hollywood tradition of women's pictures presenting a woman overcoming hardships, serves also as a parable of the West Germany economic miracle embodied in the character of Maria Braun. Her story of manipulation and betrayal parallels Germany's spectacular postwar economic recovery in terms of its cost in human values.[62]
The film was the first part of a trilogy that was completed with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982). All three film center on women during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s.
The economic success of The Marriage of Maria Braun allowed Fassbinder to pay his debts and he embarked on a personal project, The Third Generation (1979) (Die Dritte Generation), a black comedy about terrorism. However Fassbinder had difficulties finding financing backing for this project which was ultimately made with a small budget and borrowed money.[63] As he did with In a Year of Thirteen Moons, Fassbinder worked as his own cameraman.[64]
The film follows a group of leftist bourgeois aspiring terrorists who kidnap an industrialist during carnival season unaware of the fact that they have been manipulated by the capitalist and the authorities whose hidden agenda is that terrorism would create demand for security hardware and allow harsher security measures by the government. The actions of the ineffectual cell of underground terrorists are overlaid with a soundtrack filled with newscast, voiceovers, music and gibberish. The political theme of the film aroused controversy.
Returning to his explorations of German history, Fassbinder finally realized his dream of adapting Alfred Döblin'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. It was the culmination of the director's inter-related themes of love, life, and power.
Berlin Alexanderplatz centers on Franz Biberkopff, a former convict and minor pimp, who tries to stay out of trouble but is dragged down by crime, poverty and the duplicity of those around him. His best friend, Reinhold, makes him lose an arm and murders Franz’ prostitute girlfriend, Mieze. The love triangle of Franz, Reinhold and Mieze is staged against the rising tide of Nazism in Germany. The film emphasized the sadomasochist relationship between Biberkopff and Reinhold stressing its homoerotic nature.
Fassbinder had read the book at age fourteen; later claiming that it helped him survive a “murderous puberty”. The influence of Döblin's novel can be seen in many of Fassbinder’s films most of whose protagonists are named Franz, some with the surname Biberkopff like the naïve working class lottery winner in Fox and his friends, who is played by Fassbinder himself. He also took the pseudonym of Franz Walsh for his work as editor on his own films: Walsh was a oblique homage to director Raoul Walsh.
Fassbinder took on the Nazi period with Lili Marleen, an international co production, shot in English and with a big budget. The script was vaguely based on the autobiography of World War II singer Lale Andersen, The Sky Has Many Colors.[65] The film is constructed as a big, tear-jerking Hollywood melodrama in its depiction of the unfulfilled love story between a German variety singer separated by the war from a Swiss Jewish composer. Central to the story is the song that gives the film its title.
Fassbinder presents the period of the Third Reich as a predictable development of German history that was staged as spectacle supported by hate. Filmed with a morbid nostalgia for swastikas, showbiz glitz and as a cloak-and-dagger romance, the main theme of Lili Marleen is the question: is it morally justifiable to survive under National Socialism, as does the naïve singer by having a successful career?[66]
A documentary which Fassbinder shot in Cologne in June 1981 at the "Theaters of the World" Festival. Over scenes from groups such as the Squat Theatre and the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch Fassbinder spoke passages from Antonin Artaud as well as his own commentary.[67]
Sex as a means for the strong to manipulate the weak is a frequent motif in Fassbinder's work. This is one of the themes in Lola, which tells the story of an upright, new building commissioner who arrives to a small town. He falls in love with Lola, innocently unaware of the fact that she is a famed prostitute and the mistress of an unscrupulous developer. Unable to reconcile his idealistic image of Lola with reality, the commissioner spirals into the very corruption he had sought to fight out.
Lola was loosely based on Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) and its source novel, Professor Unrat (1905), by Heinrich Mann.[68] In The Blue Angel, a cabaret singer leads a sanctimonious teacher to his ruin, and "Lola" is the name of the character portrayed by Marlene Dietrich. Unlike the earlier film – of little stylistic resemblance to Lola – Fassbinder equally emphasizes his leading man and leading woman, rendering them compellingly, and giving added thematic resonance to how both are corrupted: the weak-willed commissioner by submitting to Lola, and Lola by submitting to the sham values of materialism.
Fassbinder finally achieved recognition in his own country when he won the Golden Bear at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival with Veronika Voss.[69] The original German title, Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, translates as "The longing of Veronika Voss". Set in the 1950s, the film depicts the twilight years of the title character, a faded Nazi starlet. A sports reporter becomes enthralled by the unbalanced actress and discovers that she is under the power of a villainous doctor who supplies her with the drugs she craves so long as she can pay the exorbitant fee. Despite the reporter’s best attempts, he is unable to save her from a terrible end.
Veronika Voss was inspired as much by Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), as by the life of performer Sybille Schmitz.[70] While the stories of the two films are distinct, there is a similarity between the pathologically self-deluding characters of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and Veronika Voss. The film was shot in high-contrast black and white.
Fassbinder did not live to see the premiere of his last film, Querelle, based on Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest.[71] The plot follows the title character, a handsome sailor who is a thief and hustler. Frustrated in a homoerotic relationship with his own brother, Querelle betrays those who love him and pays them even with murder. His story unfolds in a surreal, phallic setting lighted with an orange glow. The film was the subject of much controversy, not least because of its free and provocative depiction of homosexuality and criminality. It was shot in English with unnaturalistic dialogue and flat acting style.
Some of the filmmakers who have been influenced by Fassbinder include: Pedro Almodovar, Bela Tarr, Todd Haynes, Kathryn Bigelow, John Waters, François Ozon, Richard Linklater, Harmony Korine and Gus Van Sant. Additionally, filmmakers Michael Haneke, Aki Kaurismäki, and Fatih Akin have been compared to Fassbinder in terms of style and content, although all three filmmakers have stated in interviews that Fassbinder was not a direct influence on their work.
All titles written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder unless stated otherwise. According to Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder had no part in making of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, that was realized off his idea by Michael Fengler, his assistant.[72]
| Year | English title | Original title | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1965 | This Night | This Night | Short. Lost. |
| 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 | Video recording for German TV. Based on a play by Carlo Goldoni. |
| 1970 | Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? | Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? | Co-directed and written (improvisation instructions) with Michael Fengler. |
| 1970 | The American Soldier | Der amerikanische Soldat | |
| 1970 | The Niklashausen Journey | Die Niklashauser Fahrt | TV film. Co-directed with Michael Fengler. |
| 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 | Video recording for German TV. 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 | 16mm 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 a Year of 13 Moons | In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden | |
| 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 | 16mm TV film 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 im 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. |
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