The Films Of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: A Retrospective

“I’d like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be,” German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder once declared, likely half-seriously, half facetiously.

Fassbinder died in 1982, at the age of 37, from a lethal combination of painkillers and copious quantities of cocaine. Legend has it he was working right up to the moment of his death, and pages and notes from an unfilmed script were found next to his body. In anyone else’s case, this might be mythmaking, but Fassbinder’s back catalogue does prove he was a man constantly, constantly at work: in the course of his short lifetime, as if hemorrhaging emotions and ideas, the uber-prolific filmmaker made an astounding 40 feature films, two television series, three shorts and 24 stage plays. Which begs the question, what have we done with our day? However this frenetic pace exacted a heavy toll; his drug-fueled work ethic was beneficial neither to him nor to those he worked with and many of his relationships (most notably with actress Irm Hermann ) were complex (Fassbinder’s bisexuality a factor here) and borderline abusive. He attracted bitter, personal criticism in the press, but at the same time he was fiercely loyal to his collaborators, often employing the same actors over and over again, at least until he alienated them. He was undoubtedly a difficult man, so incandescent with creative and chemical energy that in retrospect it seems inevitable that, burning so brightly, he would burn out early.

But in the midst of his tumultuous personal and professional lives, he became a great director, in his best moments attaining a level of craftsmanship and deeply felt emotion that rather belies his gonzo, wildchild reputation. His finest films show a filmmaker somehow both compassionate and almost aggressively unsentimental in his unromanticized portraits of suffering, lost souls. A central figure in that generation of German cinema that also produced Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders , of course, anyone who made as many films as Fassbinder did wasn’t going to knock it out of the park every time—he himself equated making movies to building houses and some films were plumbing or messy wiring—but there are several bleak classics in his oeuvre, and it’s rare to find one of his films that isn’t worth watching to some degree.

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