Rainer Werner Fassbinder And The German Theatre

Publisher description

The work of the West German artist Rainer Werner Fassbinder is as versatile as it is extensive. During the 16 years of his artistic career, Fassbinder produced more than 40 films and staged 29 plays half of which he had written himself. In doing so he not only drew on aesthetic traditions as diverse as the German folk play, the American gangster film, Hollywood melodrama, the Theatre of Cruelty and the French Nouvelle Vague, but also worked in three media simultaneously: theatre, cinema, and television. It has often been pointed out that this versatility appears to forestall any conceptualisation of Fassbinder's work from the vantage point of its production. The present work aims at exactly such a conceptualisation by exploring the interplay between his work for the different media.

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).

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

The first study in any language of the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company co-founded by Bertolt Brecht.

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