Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the most prominent and important authors of post-war European cinema. Thomas Elsaesser is the first to write a thoroughly analytical study of his work. He stresses the importance of a closer understanding of Fassbinder's career through a re-reading of his films as textual entities. Approaching the work from different thematic and analytical perspectives, Elsaesser offers both an overview and a number of detailed readings of crucial films, while also providing a European context for Fassbinder's own coming to terms with fascism.

The Department of Germanic Studies of the University of Victoria in Canada provides information about the German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946-1982). The department offers a biographical sketch of Fassbinder, as well as a filmography of movies produced by him.

Examines anti-Semitism in Reinar Fassbinder's artistic work especially his ill-famed play of 1975, Der Muell, die Stadt und der Tod, i.e. the phenomenon of cultural anti-semitism in post war Germany. Fassbinder was many times accused for embodying (implicitly or explicitly) some anti-Semitic of Fascist elements in his works. In this undertaking I attempt to confront these allegations historically and analytically.

A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the first of its kind to engage with this important figure. Twenty-eight essays by an international group of scholars consider this controversial director's contribution to German cinema, German history, gender studies, and auteurship. A fresh collection of original research providing diverse perspectives on Fassbinder’s work in films, television, poetry, and underground theatre. Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains the preeminent filmmaker of the New German Cinema whose brief but prolific body of work spans from the latter half of the 1960s to the artist’s death in 1982. Interrogates Fassbinder’s influence on the seminal ideas of his time: auteurship, identity, race, queer studies, and the cataclysmic events of German twentieth century history Contributions from internationally diverse scholars specializing in film, culture, and German studies. Includes coverage of his key films including: Gods of the Plague (1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Martha (1973) (TV), World on a Wire (1973), Effi Briest (1974), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975), Fear of Fear (1975), Chinese Roulette (1976), In a Year With 13 Moons (1978), Despair (1978), The Third Generation (1979), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) (TV), and Querelle (1982).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the most innovative practitioner of New German Cinema. He worked at breakneck speed and in fourteen years made forty-four films, including Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). Fassbinder ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity, and his films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society defeats that desire. In Fassbinder, Christian Thomsen, a close friend of the director, illuminates Fassbinder's body of work while revealing his insider views of a man who, despite a furious temper, manic working habits, and rampant drug addiction, supported an extended family- including his mother, a string of male lovers, lovelorn women, and even a pair of frustrated wives-with his intoxicating and prolific imagination. This book, like Fassbinder's often-used image of the mirror, brilliantly reflects the sexual, political, and overwhelmingly human contradictions inherent in the life of this intensely creative man and the remarkable films he directed. Christian Braad Thomsen is a Danish filmmaker and scholar.

This book is an attempt to trace and illuminate, through interviews with colleagues, friends, and contemporaries, different perspectives about Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Fassbinder's version of modern post-civilized terror was, like much else about his work, ahead of its time. --San Francisco Chronicle

Watson's draws on a wide assortment of Fassbinder interviews--many of which are not available in English--and on theoretical and critical approaches employed in the Frankfurt School, performance and reception theories, gay and lesbian film theory, and studies of melodrama and camp. Watson also incorporates his own interviews with Fassbinder's mother and with the woman who served as Fassbinder's film editor and companion during the final four years of his life. A comprehensive, balanced study, 'Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder' also features an annotated bibliography, extensive notes, a filmography of Fassbinder's works, and a listing of films and television programs that examine Fassbinder and his achievements."--Back cover.