Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Description: Fassbinder’s version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for television develops a radical yet scrupulous reading of the play. Stripped of sentimentality and giving Nora (Carstensen) self-assurance from the start, this studio production delivers its critique of bourgeois marriage with a force rarely matched even in the theatre. The brutal prose, harshly delivered, is complemented by the unique visual spectacle which Fassbinder manages to wring from a videotape studio. Achieving effects of lighting and framing which British TV directors have never dreamed of, he makes the oppressiveness of Nora’s home as concrete as a tank-trap. Almost every scene is shot through latticework, net curtains, cut glass, ornate mirrors, so that the characters are perhaps visually obscured but always intellectually focused. All the BBC’s producers of tele-classics should be chained to chairs and forced to watch it.Read More »

Two different opinions on Händler der vier Jahreszeiten

Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmuller) betrays few traces of his eroding morale as he lyrically announces his daily merchandise into the open air. He is an unassuming fruit vendor, diligently making his rounds through the residential streets, accompanied by his highly critical wife, Irmgard (Irm Hermann). After chastising him for hand delivering an order to an ex-lover (Ingrid Caven), Hans escapes her incessant complaints by abandoning his cart and going into a nearby bar. Soon, the sad ritual of his empty existence emerges: arguing with his wife, drinking excessively, lamenting lost personal and professional opportunities.Read More »

Description: The subject of this film is a true case that happened in the city of Bremen: The story of citizen Geesche Gottfried (Margit Carstensen), widowed Miltenberger, who killed 15 people, among them her mother, her father, her children, two husbands and other persons from her immediate environs, while her fellow-citizens had considered her a respectable, god-fearing woman. In the end, she was unmasked and beheaded in 1831 – the last public execution in Bremen. Bremen Freedom is not a thriller. It is not the intention of the piece to gradually unmask the culprit. Like in a ballad, the killings are arranged in a kaleidoscope. The murderer’s motive is of interest in this play, but not how she is convicted. Geesche Gottfried murders because she wants to be free and because she does not want to be one of the men’s “pets”. “This was not a life, Michael, what mother lived there. In that case, death is a blessing for someone,” says Geesche Gottfried after murdering her own mother.Read More »

Description: Perhaps the most iconoclastic Western ever made, Whity is simultaneously entertaining and deeply disturbing. Set in April 1878, it tells the story of the title character, who is the illegitimate son – and de facto slave – of the dissolute and “dying” patriarch Ben Nicholson and his African-American servant. But Ben is only faking his illness to test the loyalty of his wife and two demented sons. Each monumentally dysfunctional family member tries to bribe and/or seduce the bisexual Whity into murdering the others in order to claim what they think is the imminent inheritance.Read More »

Wolf Gremm’s Kamikaze ‘89 gleefully engages the Eurotrash spirit of liberation from corporate culture. It places Berlin’s rabble-rousing nighthawks in the midst of a terrorist investigation that may-or-may-not implicate a fascistic media conglomerate known as The Combine. Caught in step with music and sex above politics, the libidinous partygoers remain oblivious to the rampant corruption that exists beyond the pulsating speakers.Read More »

Walter, a German anarchist poet, is short of money after his publisher refuses to give him an advance. He tries various ways of raising money, including shooting one of his mistresses and relying on the life savings of a woman from the country who is fanatically devoted to him. He also has to contend with his long-suffering wife, his fly-obsessed crazy brother, his other mistress and a police murder investigation.

A Review:

This is my favorite Fassbinder movie and this for several reasons. The most important of these is, that the movie has a rhythmical quality from the beginning to the end. Also there are literally hundreds of remarkable quotes inside. It is black humorous, funny and the overacting is terrific. It is amazing how Fassbinder manages to change the mood radically from scene to scene, how he is playing with emotion, speed and dynamic.Read More »