"In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's A Year of Thirteen Moons, the camera watches the prostitute Red Zora as she watches Fassbinder in a television interview. The actress is Ingrid Caven, the director's former wife and the woman with whom he claims to have his most important "elective affinity." At once provocative and revealing, the scene illustrates Fassbinder's interest in blurring the boundaries between art and life, between fiction and au ..."
"Berlin in the 1920s. Franz Biberkopf has just been released from prison after serving four years for violence that resulted in the death of a girlfriend. He returns to his old neighbourhood, Alexanderplatz, vowing to live a decent life. What he finds are unemployment lines, gangsters, prostitutes, petty thieves, and neophyte Nazis. In this sordid world there are new women: devoted Eva, vulnerable young Mieze and the dangerous, near psyc ..."
" ."The Marriage of Maria Braun" is the fourth volume in the Rutgers Films in Print Series and the most contemporary of those to appear in it thus far. Because of the enormous influence of New German Cinema and the importance of Fassbinder himself, the film is already considered a classic. "Maria Braun" is its director's attempt to recount and assess postwar German history through the personal example of his main character, played brilli ..."
The BRD Trilogy by RainerWernerFassbinder Dvd, Published 2003 by Criterion Anamorphic, Box Set, Black & White, Color, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc ISBN-13: 978-1-55940-942-1, ISBN: 1-55940-942-8
"Special Features New digital transfers with restored image and sound, enhanced for widescreen televisions; Audio commentary tracks by filmmaker Wim Wenders and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (The Marriage of Maria Braun) film critic and author Tony Rayns (Veronika Voss), and film scholar Christian Braad Thomsen (Lola); Exclusive interviews with Fassbinder's leading women Hanna Schygulla (Maria Braun), Rosel Zech (Veronika Voss), and B ..."
"Marie gehört zu Erich. Paul schläft mit Helga. Peter lässt sich von Elisabeth aushalten. Rosi treibt es für Geld mit Franz. Im Hinterhof, auf dem Spielplatz, in ihren Wohnungen treffen sie sich - einzeln, paarweise oder die ganze Gruppe: Sie öden sich an, trinken, langweilen sich und werden aggressiv... Als Jorgos, ein "Grieche" aus Griechenland, in ihre Welt einbricht und mit seinem "nix verstehn" Potenzneid und Aggression dem Fremden ..."
"... of course, that Lola is getting married in white and the ladies of the cathouse
have to show up in church, dressed accordingly?" It was really almost impossible.
We managed a fitting one whole day before shooting started. We sewed the
dress during the night. It was a dream, an absolute haute-couture model right out
of a fifties fashion magazine. At the same time my assistant, Egon Strasser, flew
to London with two empty suitcas ..."
"The Stationmaster's Wife, a drama of post-WWI Bavaria based on Oskar Maria Graf's novel Bolweiser, was originally presented as a three-hour-plus event for German television. In preparing his theatrical cut, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder shaved away the subplots and supporting characters to focus tightly on the story of railway stationmaster Bolweiser (Kurt Raab) and his philandering wife Hanni (Elisabeth Trissenaar). Set in late-19 ..."
"The first feature in the frantic career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is, like Godard's debut Breathless, a nod to the traditional gangster movie. This time, however, the tough-guy attitudes are imparted to a trio of typical Fassbinder losers, slouching about in the drab underworld of Munich. They are played by Alain Delon lookalike Ulli Lommel (who poses in a trenchcoat and film noir fedora), Fassbinder himself, and the director's blond ..."
"Fans of the prodigiously gifted Rainer Werner Fassbinder will find Beware of a Holy Whore the German director's most revealing look inside his filmmaking process. A kind of neurotic backstage comedy, the movie details the struggles of a film crew in Spain: the jealousies, tantrums, money problems. He doesn't spare himself in this process, as the movie's director (played by Lou Castel) is a petulant manipulator given to screaming fits. ..."
"An elegantly baroque exercise from the middle of his brief and brilliant career, Chinese Roulette finds Rainer Werner Fassbinder exploring the sinister side of a weekend in the country. At an isolated mansion, a husband and wife bump into each other--with their lovers in tow. Their lame daughter shows up with her mute nanny, adding to the tension, and the festivities culminate in a spiteful truth-telling game. Fassbinder choreographs th ..."
"Rainer Werner Fassbinder, already the director of almost twenty films by the age of 29, paid homage to his cinematic hero, Douglas Sirk, with this updated version of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. Lonely widow Emmi Kurowsky (Brigitte Mira) meets Arab worker Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. To their own surprise (and to the shock of family, colleagues, and drinking buddies) they fall in love. In Ali: Fear Eats the Sou ..."
"Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film begins with young Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) recounting how her mother, though in love with a young man, married an older one with an established position. That young man--now older and well-off--comes back to their town and asks for Effi's hand in marriage, which her parents grant. But gradually her husband's aloof behavior leads her into an affair with a handsome soldier--a brief affair, but one ..."
"When Hermann Kusters goes berserk at his factory and murders his manager before killing himself, a media blitz descends upon his middle-aged wife (Brigitte Mira) and her adult children. Her daughter attempts to use the situation to improve her cabaret singing career, but Frau Kusters remains distraught that her husband has been depicted in the papers as a boozing maniac. Her search for some solution leads her to the communist party ..."
"If not among the better-known films by the gifted German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "Fear of Fear" is nevertheless an absolutely characteristic work. A housewife, locked into a dull life with her distracted husband and two small children (plus nattering mother-in-law and sister-in-law living in the apartment upstairs) finds herself seized by uncontrollable anxiety. Although the wife has an affair with a doctor, there is little c ..."
"Rainer Werner Fassbinder's tribute to American gangster films is an exercise in pure pulp fantasy. Ricky (Karl Scheydt) is a German hit man who returns home after a stint in America and is hired by renegade police detectives to assassinate Berlin criminals they have been unable to nab. Ricky wistfully revisits his old neighborhood and attempts to reconcile with his estranged mother and brother--but on the job, this antihero is a hard-bo ..."