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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
AKA: Franz Fassbinder, Franz Walsch
Occupation: Director, screenwriter
Also: Actor, producer, playwright
Birth Name: Bad Wörishofen
Born: May 31, 1945, Bavaria, Germany
Died: June 10, 1982, Munich, Germany
RAINER W. FASSBINDER FILMOGRAPHY
By far the best known director of the New German Cinema, Fassbinder has also been
called the most important filmmaker of the post-WWII generation. Exceptionally versatile
and prolific, he directed over 40 films between 1969 and 1982; in addition, he wrote most
of his scripts, produced and edited many of his films and wrote plays and songs, as well
as acting on stage, in his own films and in the films of others. Although he worked in a
variety of genres - the gangster film, comedy, science fiction, literary adaptations -
most of
his stories employed elements of Hollywood melodrama from the 1950s overlaid with social
criticism and avant-garde techniques. Fassbinder's expressed desire was to make films that
were both popular and critical successes, but assessment of the results has been decidedly
mixed: his critics contend that he became so infatuated with the Hollywood forms he tried
to appropriate that the political impact of his films is indistinguishable from
conventional melodrama, while his admirers argue that he was a postmodernist filmmaker
whose films satisfy audience expectations while simultaneously subverting them.
Fassbinder
often described his early years as lonely and lacking in love and affection. His father, a
physician, and his mother, a translator, were divorced in 1951, and Fassbinder had little
contact with his father after that. From around the age of seven, Fassbinder would be sent
by his mother to the cinema so that she could work on her translation projects. He would
later claim that during this period of his life he went to the movies almost every day,
sometimes two or three times a day. He attended private and public schools at Augsburg and
Munich but left before graduating in 1964 to enroll in a private drama school. In the
summer of 1967 Fassbinder joined the Action Theater, modeled on American Julian Beck's
Living Theater. Two months later, he had become the company's co-director, and when it
reorganized under the name "anti-theater," he emerged as its leader. The group
lived together and staged a number of controversial and politically radical plays in 1968
and 1969, including some of Fassbinder's original works and adaptations. Fassbinder's work
in the theater, however, was primarily a means toward his goal of making films. He had
applied in 1965 to the Berlin Film and Television Academy but failed the entrance exam. In
the same year he wrote and directed his first film, a ten-minute short entitled
The City Tramp.
During his "anti-theater" period he made ten feature films, including
Love
is Colder Than Death (1969),
Katzelmacher (1969), and
Beware of a
Holy Whore (1971).
Influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and the theories of Bertolt Brecht, these
films are austere and minimalist in style, and 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. Using actors and technicians
from the "anti-theater" group, he was able to complete films ahead of schedule
and often under budget and thus compete successfully for government subsidies.
In search
of a wider, more sympathetic audience, Fassbinder turned for a model to Hollywood
melodrama, particularly the films of German-trained Douglas Sirk, who made
All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of
Life for Universal Pictures during the
1950s. Fassbinder was attracted to these films not only because of their entertainment
value but also for their depiction of various kinds of repression and exploitation. This
mixture of melodrama and politics is evident in Fassbinder's first commercially successful
film, The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972). But the film that brought him international
acclaim was Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
(1974), which
won the International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1974. Ali
relates a love story between a German cleaning woman in her fifties and a young Moroccan
immigrant worker. The two are drawn to each other out of mutual loneliness. As their
relationship becomes known, they experience various forms of hostility and public
rejection. Fassbinder makes it apparent that social and economic factors constrain the
couple, through his favorite techniques of double-framing shots and extremely long takes
of characters looking with objectifying gazes. At the end, Fassbinder withholds a
"happy solution" and directs our attention to the ongoing problems of migrant
workers. The overall effect of the film is to foreground the tenuous boundaries between
public and private life and to stimulate the audience to find a solution to the couple's
problems.
Enthusiasm for Fassbinder's films grew quickly after Ali. Vincent Canby paid
tribute to Fassbinder as "the most original talent since Godard," and in 1977,
Manhattan's New Yorker Theater held a Fassbinder Festival. That same year saw the release
of Despair (1977). Shot in English on a budget that nearly
equaled the cost of his first fifteen
films, Despair was based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, adapted by Tom Stoppard, and
starred Dirk Bogarde. Favorable comparisons with such revered directors as
Ingmar Bergman,
Luis Buñuel, and Luchino Visconti soon followed. But even as enthusiasm for Fassbinder
grew outside of Germany, his films seemed to make little impression on German audiences.
At home, he was better-known for his work in television (Eight Hours Are Not
a Day (1974)
and the 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)) and for a certain notoriety surrounding his
lifestyle and open homosexuality. Coupled with the controversial issues that his films
took up - terrorism, state violence, racial intolerance, sexual politics - it seemed that
everything Fassbinder did provoked or offended someone. Charges leveled against him
included anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, and anti-feminism.
With The
Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Fassbinder finally attained the popular acceptance he sought, even with
German audiences. The film recounts and assesses postwar German history as embodied in the
rise and fall of the main character, played by Hanna Schygulla. Its story of manipulation
and betrayal exposes Germany's spectacular postwar economic recovery in terms of its cost
in human values. In the years following Maria Braun, Fassbinder made "private"
films, such as
In a Year of
Thirteen Moons (1978) and The Third Generation (1979), stories
that translated personal experiences and attitudes, as well as big budget spectacles like
Lili Marleen (1981) and Lola (1982).
By the time he made his last film,
Querelle (1982),
heavy doses of drugs and alcohol had apparently become necessary to sustain his unrelenting
work habits. When Fassbinder was found dead in a Munich apartment on June 10, 1982, the
cause of death was reported as heart failure resulting from interaction between sleeping
pills and cocaine. The script for his next film, Rosa Luxemburg, was found next to him. He
had wanted Romy Schneider to play the lead.
>>
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Filmography
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