01. This Night
02. Der Stadtstreicher
(The City Tramp)
03. Das kleine Chaos
(The Little Chaos)
04. Liebe ist kälter als der Tod
(Love Is Colder Than Death)
05. Katzelmacher
06. Götter der Pest
(Gods of the Plague)
07. Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?
(Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?)
08. Rio das Mortes
09. Das Kaffeehaus
(The Coffeehouse )
10. Whity
11. Niklashauser Fart
(The Niklashausen Journey)
12. Der amerikanische Soldat
(The American Soldier)
13. Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte
(Beware of a Holy Whore)
14. Pioniere in Ingolstadt
(Pioneers in Ingolstadt)
15. Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
(The Merchant of Four Seasons)
16. Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant
(The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant )
17. Wildwechsel
(Jail Bait)
18. Acht Stunden sind kein Tag
(Eight Hours Don't Make a Day)
19. Bremer Freiheit
(Bremen Freedom)
20. Welt am Draht
(World on a Wire)
21. Nora Helmer
22. Martha
23. Angst essen Seele auf
(Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)
24. Fontane Effi Briest
(1972-1974)
(Effi Briest)
25. Faustrecht der Freiheit
(Fox and His Friends)
26. Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht
(Like a Bird on a Wire)
27. Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel
(Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven)
28. Angst vor der Angst
(Fear of Fear)
29. Ich will doch nur, dass ihr mich liebt
(I Only Want You to Love Me)
30. Satansbraten
(Satan's Brew)
31. Chinesisches Roulette
(Chinese Roulette)
32. Bolwieser (TV)
(The Station Master's Wife; TV version)
33. Bolwieser (Kino)
(The Station Master's Wife)
34. Frauen in New York
(Women in New York)
35. Despair - Eine Reise ins Licht
(Despair)
36. Deutschland im Herbst
(Germany in Autumn)
37. Die Ehe der Maria Braun
(The Marriage of Maria Braun)
38. In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden
(In a Year with 13 Moons)
39. Die dritte Generation
(The Third Generation)
40. Berlin Alexanderplatz
(1979/1980)
41. Lili Marleen
42. Lola
43. Theater in Trance
44. Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss
(Veronika Voss)
45. Querelle
Chaos as Usual
Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder
by Juliane Lorenz
Fassbinder Film Maker
by Ronald Haynman
Fassbinder's Germany
History, Identity, Subject
by Thomas Elsaesser
Fassbinder: Life and Work of a Provocative Genius
by Christian Braad Thomsen
Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius
by Christian Braad Thomsen
Fine Cuts
The Art of European Film Editing
by Roger Crittenden
Personal Experience And the Media
Media Interplay in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Work for Theatre, Cinema And Television
by Klaus Ulrich Militz
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
by Laurence Kardish, Juliane Lorenz
Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre
by David Barnett
Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Film As Private and Public Art
by Wallace Steadman Watson
About me: 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 Fass binder 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 pro duction 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 seeming ly 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
Who I'd like to meet: "I'd rather sit in some joint in the desert boozing with Marlene Dietrich"
~From the film Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte
i've become the head of the Disorganization for the disorganized, as well as the chair for the Dept. of Misinformation for the misinformed. _______________________eli
Hello, how are you? Many thanks for your friendship and support. We are back on tour in Germany and Austria this month and thank you for allowing us to post the following tour information:
Hallo liebe Freunde,
wir werden Oktober und November dieses Jahres wieder auf Tour durch Deutschland und zum ersten mal auch Österreich sein:
26.10 Stuttgart / Laboratorium 28.10 München / Feierwerk 29.10 Fulda / Kulturkeller 30.10 Bochum / Bahnhof Langendreer 31.10 Halle / Objekt 5 01.11 Göttingen / Musa 02.11 Innsbruck / Treibhaus 03.11 Bad Reichenhall / Magazin 4 04.11 Linz / Posthof 05.11 Frankfurt / Brotfabrik 06.11 Leverkusen / Leverkusener Jazztage 07.11 Jazzhaus / Freiburg 08.11 Aachen / Ludwig-Forum
www.prime-tours.com
Wir hoffen euch schon sehr bald dort zu sehen und wünschen bis dahin alles Gute !!! Tschüss!!!!
All the best, enjoy yourself and please stay in touch! DANKE!!!
