A motorcycle-jacketed, leather-bar Lothario by night, a critically lauded, freakishly prolific cinematic wunderkind by day, Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived in the eye of the hurricane and died of "an overdose on life." His fame rests on his expository manipulations, his classical...
[more]A motorcycle-jacketed, leather-bar Lothario by night, a critically lauded, freakishly prolific cinematic wunderkind by day, Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived in the eye of the hurricane and died of "an overdose on life." His fame rests on his expository manipulations, his classical narrative, and his use of long takes to capture the pace and surging emotions of ordinary life. Fassbinder's conscious debt to American culture, reflected in his homages to Douglas Sirk and John Ford, was molded during his adolescence, when he would see upwards of 15 Hollywood films a week in defiance of austere, postwar German aesthetics.
Unapologetically homosexual, Fassbinder fled to Munich's gay underworld as a 15-year-old, haunting bars and clubs as a male prostitute and shocking his family. Drawing on a vast catalogue of artistic influences, from Thomas Mann to Antonin Artaud's anti-theater, he began to mold his own distinct worldview whose core is one of societal despair. In allegories that savagely indict bourgeois social conditions, Fassbinder employed Brechtian alienation effects to achieve his films' impacts. His frenetic energy led him to produce 40 feature films in a meteoric 12-year career.
Manic and overworked, Fassbinder conducted a personal life that became the stuff of tabloid legend. A fixture in the New York leather scene, he had a string of suicidal lovers and was accused of violence by both his partners and his actors. Fassbinder fought his personal demons both onscreen and off, eventually succumbing to his own self-destructive tendencies. His films detail the acute longing for love and freedom in a world where society, and the individual, often defeat it. His main characters tend to be unsophisticated people who embody a romantic worldview and who come to be disabused, sometimes fatally, of their idealistic notions.
Fassbinder was not simply a opponent of the status quo, but, as an equal-opportunity critic of the right and the left, he held up a mirror to class expectations, revealing an ugly picture that caused him to be maligned as misogynist, traitorous, and even homophobic. His visually stylized canvases portrayed three distinct social universes: a drab, sleazy middle class; the hard, lacquered polish of the rich and famous; and the remote elegance of the past. All are connected by a sense of unrelenting coldness, an absence of all comfort and human charm. Homes become uninhabitable mausoleums, bitter dwellings for Fassbinder's romantic pessimism. Glass abounds as a symbolic and Brechtian device that both bars and allows communication, its qualities of transparency and solidity suggesting Fassbinder's claustrophobic sense of reality.
Despite his assembly-line productivity and his obsession with classic-cinema kitsch, Fassbinder created a body of work that remains uniquely personal and distinctive throughout. Always wildly controversial, Fassbinder could be called "perhaps the most gifted film director Germany has ever produced," and at the same time be reviled as "an example of the second-rate imitating the third-rate." A fixture in art houses, Fassbinder alchemized the best elements of his sources -- the theatrical techniques of Brecht and Artaud, the Hollywood studio look, classically controlled narrative, and a gay sensibility that transcended the ghetto -- into a staggering body of work that continues to illuminate and agitate audiences.
[show less]
