Rainer Werner Fassbinder

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Wildwechsel AKA Jail Bait (1973)

    1971-1980ArthouseDramaGermanyRainer Werner Fassbinder

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Hanni (Eva Mattes) is only 13, but mature at an early age. Her Franz (Harry Baer) is 19 and an unskilled worker. His relationship with the minor does not go undetected.

    Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the lad to kill her father, whose incestuous sexual attentions to her have grown unbearable. The site they choose for this deed, which gives its name to the film, is a wild-game crossing.Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Die Dritte Generation AKA The Third Generation (1979)

    1971-1980ComedyCrimeGermanyRainer Werner Fassbinder

    Quote:
    “A comedy in six parts,” each introduced with a quote taken from a public bathroom wall (“Slave seeks master to train me as his dog,” etc.). The Kaiser Wilhelm Church dominates the Berlin skyline as seen from a glass-paneled, high-rise office, a shooting takes place on a monitor. Surveillance footage? No, the ending of The Devil, Probably. Each generation has the revolutionaries it deserves, after the Baader-Meinhoff affair you’re stuck with middle-class ninnies: leader Volker Spengler secretary Hanna Schygulla, schoolteacher Bulle Ogier, composer Udo Kier, housewife Margit Carstensen. The puppet master is the industrialist (Eddie Constantine) who heralds cinema’s utopian lies (“As long as films are sad, life isn’t”); his corporate must promote security equipment, so he manipulates the radicals into kidnapping him and sits back to enjoy the clown show.Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Die Ehe der Maria Braun AKA The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

    1971-1980ArthouseDramaGermanyRainer Werner Fassbinder

    Quote:
    Maria (Hanna Schygulla) marries Hermann Braun in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. Alone, Maria puts to use her beauty and ambition in order to find prosperity during Germany’s “economic miracle” of the 1950s. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biggest international box-office success, The Marriage of Maria Braun is a heartbreaking study of a woman picking herself up from the ruins of her own life, as well as a pointed metaphorical attack on a society determined to forget its past.Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Welt am Draht AKA World on a Wire (1973)

    1971-1980GermanyRainer Werner FassbinderSci-FiTV

    Somewhere in the future there is a computer project called Simulacron one of which is able to simulate a full featured reality, when suddenly project leader Henry Vollmer dies. His successor Dr. Fred Stiller experiences odd phenomena. A good friend, Guenther Lause, disappears in the middle of a conversation and a week later nobody has ever heard of him. And those fits of dizzyness – Stiller cannot believe himself to be fool. There has to be an explanation for all this. Could Simulacron have something to do with it?Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Querelle (1982)

    1981-1990DramaGermanyRainer Werner Fassbinder

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Plot Synopsis by Brian J. Dillard (allmovie.com)
    A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they get to make love with his wife, Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau); lose, and they must take it from behind by Nono himself. One day, Lysiane reads the tarot for her lover, Robert (Hanno Poschl), and learns in the cards of his intense passion for his brother, Querelle (Brad Davis). Querelle himself soon arrives, and the brothers enact a bizarre greeting halfway between a hug and a wrestling match. Querelle, it seems, is looking for partners in a drug deal; Robert points him in the right direction. An argument about the merits of sex between men soon leads Querelle to murder his fellow smuggler, Vic (Dieter Schidor). Back at the whorehouse, Querelle loses on purpose to Nono and finds he has a taste for passive gay sex. Meanwhile, fellow sailor Gil, who looks exactly like Querelle’s brother (and is played by the same actor), murders one of his compatriots after the brute publicly impugns his manhood. Wanted by the police for both his own crime and Querelle’s, Gil goes on the lam. Querelle soon crashes his hideout, and an intense bond develops between the two murderers — a friendship that will lead Querelle to the greatest love, and the greatest treachery, of his life. Director Fassbinder was in the process of editing Querelle when he died of a drug overdose in June 1982. Gunther Kaufmann, who plays Nono, was Fassbinder’s ex-lover; the film is dedicated to another former lover, El Hedi Ben Salem, the news of whose suicide had just reached the director. Critically derided even by many of Fassbinder’s admirers, Querelle earned a Golden Raspberry award for Worst “Original” Song for “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves,” an Oscar Wilde poem set to music by Peer Raben and sung repeatedly by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau had previously starred in Mademoiselle, a Tony Richardson effort co-scripted by Genet. Look for Frank Ripploh, another pioneering German director, in a cameo.Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Wildwechsel AKA Jail Bait (1973)

    1971-1980ArthouseDramaGermanyRainer Werner Fassbinder

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Tonight I saw the infamous Wildwechsel, or Jail Bait, at the Museum of Modern Art. This movie lives up to it’s reputation as one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s darkest and most perverse movies. And that’s really saying something.

    Eva Mattes, age 18, plays Hanni, age 14. Hanni willingly has a sexual relationship with Franz, age 19 (played by Harry Baer). Hanni looks older than her age–say, 4 years older–as we cannot help but notice, since Hanni is nude or hornily pulling her clothes off in scene after scene. Franz gets busted for sleeping with a minor, but Hanni still wants him, and it all goes downhill from there.Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Der Stadtstreicher AKA The City Tramp (1966)

    1961-1970GermanyRainer Werner FassbinderShort Film

    Description: There is really nothing you could get out of this film. Not even with the weirdest mind. Even some Japanese action director would have made a more believable and satisfying 10 minutes film with this plot line. So is there anything good about it? Yes, if you would look at it as a dream. Because in a dream, nothing has to make sense. Just like this early short from Fassbinder.Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Frauen in New York AKA Women in New York (1977)

    1971-1980ArthouseDramaGermanyRainer Werner Fassbinder


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    A film version of a play Fassbinder directed in Hamburg, Clare Booth Luce’s “The Women”. It gave Fassbinder an opportunity to indulge his passion for working with women – there are forty women in the play and no men.
    The play dates from the 1930s, and Fassbinder was accused by the critics of being anti-women (a frequent criticism of late). As usual, he chose to work “against” the text, and from this has constructed an entertaining and engaging play about love between upper-class women with nothing better to do than sneer at others when things go wrong with their lives and loves.
    (the above was taken from the appendix Filmography in: Fassbinder. Edited by Tony Rayns. Revised and expanded edition. bfi, London 1980, page 115)Read More »

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Lili Marleen [+Extras] (1981)

    1981-1990DramaGermanyRainer Werner FassbinderRomance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    1938. Willie (Hanna Schygulla) and Robert (Giancarlo Giannini) are in love: She, a minor German singer who appears in a Zurich nightclub and waits for her big breakthrough. He, son of a rich Jewish family. His father (Mel Ferrer) is the head of an organization that helps Jews flee from Nazi Germany. While he is against Robert’s relationship with a German, as he feels that this could jeopardize the work of his organization, he permits Willie to accompany Robert on a secret mission to Germany. Upon their return to Switzerland the lovers find out that Robert’s father played a cruel trick on them: Willie is not allowed back into the country.Read More »

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