 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946-1982) | |
|
Controversial and prolific German director and playwright, who attracted attention with his politically committed and disillusioned stage plays and films. Fassbinder's central theme was the political and social corruption of postwar Germany. He wrote most of his plays in 1968-71 for his own "anti-theatre" in Munchen. Fassbinder completed 41 films. Among his best-known works include The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Berlin Alexanderpatz (1980), based on Alfred Döblin's novel and made for television, and Effi Briest (1974), based on Theodore Fontane's novel from 1894. "To show the narrative on film is like the author telling a story, but there's a difference. When one reads a book, one creates - as a reader - one's own images, but when a story is told on screen in pictures, then it is concrete and really "complete" One is not creative as a member of a film audience, and it was this passivity that I tried to counter in Effi Brief. I would prefer people to "read" the film. It's a film which one cannot simple experience, and which doesn't attack the audience... one has to read it. That's the most significant thing about the film." (Fassbinder in Fassbinder, ed. by Tony Rayns, 1976) Rainer Werner Fassbinder was born in Bad Wöshofen into a bourgeois family. His father was a doctor. When he was five, his parents divorced, and Fassbinder was raised by his mother as an only child. In his youth, Fassbinder started to attend movies compulsively. He dropped out of school and worked in odd jobs. His enrollment at the Berlin Film School was turned down. Fassbinder began his career as an actor in fringe theatre in Munich, where founded his own theatre company, becoming friends with Hanna Schygulla, who acted in several of Fassbinder's films. Some of the members of the Action-Theater, which he had joined, worked with off and on until his death. His play, Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, was based on an actual murder case, committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the English moors. In Bremen Freedom, also based on historical events, a woman systematically eliminates the men and women who are on her way. In the late 1960s Fassbinder started to work with the cinema under the influence of Jean-Luc Godard, but also the American gangster movies and such directors as Howard Hawks, John Huston, and Raoul Walsh influenced him deeply. Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) was a crime film, which connected everyday oppression people experience with criminal actions. "What you are left with when you've seen this movie isn't that six people were murdered, that a few deaths occurred, but that these were poor people who didn't know what to do with themselves, who were simply plopped down as they were, and weren't given the option - no, let's not go too far here - who simply don't have any options." (Fassbinder in The Anarchy of the Imagination, 1992) In his first film Fassbinder acted under the role name Franz Walsch - referring both to Raoul Walsh and Franz Biberkopf, who played the leading role in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderpatz. Fassbinder's mother was in his second amateur short, and later appeared in many films under the name of Lilo Pempeit. As a creator of social melodramas Fassbinder owed much to Douglas Sirk, who created from ridiculous scripts enjoyable and personal films. Much of Fassbinder's work was financed by television. Among his over 40 full-length films are The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), Veronika Voss (1982), and fourteen-part television film Berlin Alexanderplaz (1980), Fassbinder's masterpiece. During his most prolific period between 1969 and 1976, Fassbinder made theatre productions in Munich, Bremen, Bochum, Nuremberg, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, he did four radio plays, and took roles in other director's films, including the title part in Volker Schlöndorff's Brecht adaptation Baal (1970). Brecht's influence is seen in a number of Fassbinder's works, among them Effi Briest, in which the director's aim was to create a distance between the audience and what is happening on the screen in the spirit of Brecht's "alienation effect". "Through that built-in "distance," the audience has a chance to discover its own attitude to society," Fassbinder explained. Fassbinder created his works fast. He operated with a group of close friends, and appeared as an actor in several of his own films, often under the name Fitz. "The cinema was the family life I never had at home," he once said. Fassbinder's friends characterized the director 'lunatico', irresponsible, ironic, mean, and very generous. For a short time he was married with his one of his leading ladies, Ingrid Caven. His film scripts were unpolished, the dialogue mannered, and the décor sparse. In spite of this, the impact of the scenes was spellbinding. Fassbinder took his film work seriously, and was devasted when he failed to receive the main prize for The Marriage of Maria Brown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978. Veronika Voss won the Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin Festival but often the director's films aroused hostile feelings among cinema audiences. Between the years 1977 and 1979 Fassbinder directed three of his most personal film, that touched his own problems and the situation in Germany, when terrorism was rising. He saw New Germany heartless, materialistic and intolerant. Fear Eats the Soul (1974) told the story of Ali, a lonely Moroccan mechanic, and a lonely widowed cleaning lady, Emmi, who is much older than he. Despite the hostility that surrounds them, they marry and face the racial and other prejudices. Deutchland im Herbst (1978) showed how terrorism grows from disappointments in private life, In einem Jahren mit 13. Monden (1978) focused on the transsexual Erwin/Elvira; it was a desperate cry in life when death in the only solution, and Die Dritte Generation (1979), in which a computer sales man finances a group of terrorists. Fassbinder's own opinions about terrorism were ambivalent - he showed understanding to their political goals but criticized their desperate acts. Berlin Alexanderplatz was a fifteen-and-a-half-hour epic made for German television. Alfred Döblin's famous novel had been performed as a radio play some years earlier, in 1976. The story traced the life of Franz Biberkopf, who tries to lead what he thinks is an honest existence. He is surrounded by thieves, whores, pimps, killers, and Nazis. Elisabeth Trissenaar, Hanna Schygulla, and Barbara Sukowa were his girlfriends, the elegant score was by Peer Raben and cinematography by Xavier Schwartzenberger. Fassbinder dealt with relations that are based on violence, falseness, and oppression. Although he was homosexual, he is perhaps best remembered by his fascinating female figures, played by Schygulla, Caven, or Barbara Sukowa. Women were for him symbols of different social, political and ideological situations. Veronica Voss, Lola, Maria Braun and others reflected the director's view that women are ruled the men and their values. According to Fassbinder, the stronger exploit the weaker, and "love is colder than death". Hanna Schygulla was Fassbinder's diva, Marlene Dietrich, whom he put up on a pedestal and who rose into world fame from his films. Fast living and fast working Fassbinder died of drug overdose in Munich, at the age of 36, on June 10, 1982. He was completing the cutting of Querelle, based on Jean Genet's play. In the story a French sailor discovers his true homosexual nature in an infamous whosehouse. The film was rejected even by Fassbinder's admirers. His death marked symbolically the end of the most experimental period of the German cinema since the 1920s. For further reading: I Fassbinders spejl by Christian Braad Thomsen (1975); Fassbinder, ed. by Tony Rayns (1976); 'Reading the Writerly Film' by William R. Magretta in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta (1981); Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Filmemacher by Kurt Raab and Karsten Peters (1982); Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Christian Braad Thomsen (1983); Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. by Peter Jansen and Wolfram Schütten (1983); Die Anarchie der Phantasie, ed by Michael Tötenberg (1986); Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Plays, ed. by Denis Calandra (1992); The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes by Rainer Werner Fassbinder et al (1992); Television, Tabloids, and Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture by Jane Shattuc (1994); Fassbinder's Germany by Thomas Elsaesser (1995); Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film As Private and Public Art by Wallace Steadman Watson (1996) Filmography:
Actor:
Plays as director:
|
