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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 - June 10, 1982) was
born into a cultured bourgeois family in the small Bavarian spa town Bad
Wörishofen. Raised by his mother as an only child, the boy had only
sporadic contact with his father, a doctor, after the divorce of his parents
when he was five. Educated at a Rudolf Steiner elementary school and subsequently
in Munich and Augsburg, the city of Bert Brecht, he left school before
passing any final examinations. A cinema addict ("five times a week, often
three films a day") from a very early age, not least because his mother
needed peace and quiet for her work as a translator, "the cinema was the
family life I never had at home."
Fassbinder
made his first short films at the age of twenty, persuading a male lover
to finance them in exchange for leading roles. He also applied for a place
at the Berlin Film School (dffb), but was refused. He acted in both his early
films: DER STADTSTREICHER (The City Tramp), which also featured Irm Hermann
(later often used in character roles); and DAS KLEINE CHAOS (The Little Chaos).
In the latter, his mother - under the name of Lilo Pempeit - played the first
of many parts in her son's films. Only after these amateur directing-scripting-acting
efforts did Fassbinder take lessons with a professional acting
studio, where he met Hanna Schygulla, his most important actress, who thanks
to him became an international star. It was through Schygulla that Fassbinder
turned his interest to the theatre.
In
1967 Fassbinder joined the Munich action-theater. He directed, acted in,
and adapted anti-establishment plays for a tightly knit group of young professionals,
among them Peer Raben and Kurt Raab, who along with Schygulla and Hermann,
became the most important members of his cinematic stock company. Jean-Marie
Straub directed the action-theater in an eight-minute version of Bruckner's Krankheit
der Jugend , using part of this stage production in his short film
DER BRÄUTIGAM, DIE KOMÖDIANTIN UND DER ZUHÄLTER (1968), with
Fassbinder as the pimp. In 1968 Fassbinder directed the first play written
by himself, Katzelmacher , a twenty-minute highly choreographed
encounter between Bavarian villagers and a foreign worker from Greece, who
with scarcely a word of German, becomes the object of intense racial, sexual,
and political hatred among the men, while exerting a strangely troubling
fascination on the women. A few weeks later, in May 1968, the Action theater
was disbanded after its theatre was wrecked by one of its founders, jealous
of Fassbinder's growing power within the group. It promptly reformed under
Fassbinder's command as the antiteater, which pursued an equally radical
and frequently provocative production policy.
The
years from 1969 to 1976 were Fassbinder's most prodigious and prolific period.
An outstanding career in the theatre (productions in Munich, Bremen,
Bochum, Nurnberg, Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt, where for two years he ran
the "Theater am Turm" with Kurt Raab and Roland Petri) was a mere backdrop
for a seemingly unstoppable outpouring of films, tv film, adaptations,
and even a TV variety show (in honour of Brigitte Mira). During the same
period, he also did radio plays and took on roles in other director's films,
among them the title part in Volker Schlöndorff's Brecht adaptation
BAAL. By 1976 Fassbinder had become an international star. Prizes at major
film festivals, premieres and retrospectives in Paris, New York, Los Angeles,
and a first critical study on his work appearing in London had made him a
familiar name among cinephiles and campus audiences the world over. He rented
a house in Paris and could be seen in gay bars in New York, earning him cult
hero status but also a controversial reputation in and out of his films.
Art house circuits avidly took up his films: because he had so many to his
credit by the time he was 'discovered' with FEAR EATS THE SOUL, the rerelease
of his earlier films, together with the steady stream of new work, made his
extraordinary productivity seem even more phenomenal. (...)
His
flamboyant and at the same time seedy life-style, his openly displayed and
well advertised homosexuality, and at the same time life and love to women,
the scandals, public outrages and bouts of self-pity ensured that in Germany
itself Fassbinder was permanently in the news, making calculatedly provocative
remarks in interviews, which nonetheless were usually shrewd and to the point.
His work often received mixed notices from the national critics, many of
whom only began to take Fassbinder seriously after the foreign press had
hailed him as a genius.
In
1972 Fassbinder began his collaboration with a highly experienced and
successful producer at West Germany's most prestigious television network,
Peter Märtesheimer of WDR. Under Märtesheimer's influence, Fassbinder
turned with even more determination to recognizably German subject matter.
Together they made, among others, the television series EIGHT HOURS DO NOT
MAKE A DAY, and in 1978 cowrote THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN , Fassbinder's
commercially most profitable film and the first in his post-war German trilogy
(the other two were LOLA and VERONIKA VOSS). For many foreign critics, his
crowning achievement was the 14-part television adaptation of Alfred Döblin's Berlin
Alexanderplatz , much maligned by the domestic press. Although for VERONIKA
VOSS Fassbinder received the Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival,
a much-coveted Oscar nomination eluded him. As had often been noted, Fassbinder
was the engine and motor (the "heart" in Wolfram Schütte's words) of
the New German Cinema. His sudden death from a vicious combination of drugs
and sleeping pills in June 1982 symbolically marked the end of the most
exciting and experimental period the German cinema had known since the 1920s.
Thomas Elsaesser
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Shooting MARTHA (1973): Rainer Werner Fassbinder and cinematographer Michael
Ballhaus
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Venice Film Festival 1980: Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla present BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ
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Shooting VERONIKA VOSS (1981): Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz, Vladimir Vizner |
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