The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows.
Fassbinder’s experimental noir is a subversive, self-reflexive gangster movie full of unexpected asides and stylistic flourishes, and features an audaciously bonkers final shot and memorable turns from many of the director’s rotating gallery of players.
Fassbinder’s immersive epic follows the
hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he
attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape
of Weimar-era Germany.
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brazen depiction of the alternating currents of lethargy and mayhem inherent in moviemaking, a film crew deals with an aloof star (Eddie Constantine), an abusive director (Lou Castel), and a financially troubled production.
One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater.
Commissioned to make a working-class family drama, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, upending expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical—perspective.
A lottery win leads not to financial and emotional freedom but to social captivity, in this wildly cynical classic about love and exploitation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
This heartrendingly compassionate tragedy from Rainer Werner Fassbinder traces the final days in the life of Elvira (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman spurned by her former lover, as she reaches out desperately for understanding.
In Fassbinder’s satiric tribute to capitalism, Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute, launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale.
For his feature debut, Rainer Werner Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic, unorthodox crime drama about a love triangle involving the small-time pimp Franz (Fassbinder), his prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (future Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla), and his gangster friend Bruno (Ulli Lommel).
After her husband disappears in the last days of World War II, Maria uses her beauty and ambition to prosper in 1950s Germany. The first part of Fassbinder’s “postwar trilogy” is a heartbreaking character study as well as a pointed metaphorical attack on a society determined to forget its past.
In this anguished yet mordantly funny film, Fassbinder charts the decline of a self-destructive former policeman and war veteran struggling to make ends meet for his family by working as a fruit vendor.
After her husband kills his boss and himself, Mother Kusters becomes
drawn into the activities of the German Communist party and then a group
of anarchists.
A famous poet who hasn't written a word in two years unconsciously
plagarizes the work of Stefan George, he comes to believe he is the
reincarnation of the dead writer.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s follow-up to his international breakthrough THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN is a wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies.
Once-beloved Third Reich–era starlet Veronika Voss lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. She meets a sportswriter, and the two develop an unlikely relationship. Based on the true story of a World War II UFA star, Veronika Voss is wicked satire disguised as 1950s melodrama.
Originally made for German television, this recently rediscovered, three-and-a-half-hour labyrinth is a satiric and surreal look at the world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses.
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