R. W. Fassbinder

One of the heirs of Young German Cinema. (Bad Wörishofen, May 31, 1945 – Munich, June 10, 1982), Rainer Werner Fassbinder was an indefatigable screenwriter and film and television director, as well as a prolific author and theater director.

He had studied Dramatic Art and formed the famous Munich Antitheater with a group of actors. The Aristotelian conception of staging influenced his film narrative as much as the American melodramatic style, since he was also a student and debtor of Douglas Sirk ‘s melodrama . In this way, the accentuated psychologist attitude of Fassbinder and the conventions of the genres, always within a creative classicism, would go from topical and expository simplicity to the most decadent and immoral sophistication, as happens in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant ( 1972).

Provocation and pessimism about the human condition were two of his constants as an author, seasoned with a bitter sense of humor. Somewhat obsessed with sociopolitical denunciation ( Mama Kusters’ Journey to Happiness , Maria Braun’s Marriage ) and the most denigrating deviations ( The Law of the Strongest , A Year with Thirteen Moons ), he became known to the world public with We are all called Ali(1973). This film, awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, exposes the relationship between a sixty-year-old widow and an immigrant Moroccan worker; and from this, Fassbinder would become one of the most controversial, complex and sometimes boring filmmakers of that “last batch” of Junger Deutscher Film.           

In 1980, he returned to his usual and suffocating theme with a story from the Nazi era, A song… Lili Marleen , starring his iconic actress Hanna Schygulla (previously Ingrid Caven had been, with whom she was married for two years despite her recognized homosexuality). Here she recounts the drama of a cabaret artist, Lale Andersen, who made that song famous and who was, despite herself, a promoter of Nazism. With this film, she once again reflected on oppression and would influence the dialectic of exploiters-exploited, with her particular vision of relationships between humans and impotence for social change. Although she, sometimes, she achieves it through violent ruptures: revolution, homicide, mythologised suicide. All this, within the scheme of the class struggle and with a cynical and surreptitiously anarchist tone. Hence the rejection of the German PC against this anarchist filmmaker, whom they paradoxically branded as reactionary.

Later, his new criticisms of the status of postwar Germany would arrive with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss’s Anxiety (1982). And, finally, his latest production De él Querelle (1982), a hard work that was based on a dream piece by Jean Genet . Likewise, his taste for the decadent and his sleaze is combined with a certain formal virtuosity, as can be seen, for example, in his ambitious television series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), later transferred to the big screen. Rainer Werner Frassbinder gave his fable-films a certain air of unreality, not without obscenities and with a creative style that was imprisoned by a baroque aestheticism. Debtor at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godardand influenced by the masters of the expressionist movement, the skepticism of this author looms over Fatality or the inexorable Destiny of humans. For this reason, his work usually has a hopeless ending and free interpretation. The long-suffering Fassbinder – “I just want to be loved,” he said -, who lived in Munich even protected by two bodyguards, had created some 40 titles for film and television, apart from his stage works and short films, when he died accidentally from a fatal combination of pills and cocaine.