Germany

Quote:
Maria (Hanna Schygulla) marries Hermann Braun in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. Alone, Maria puts to use her beauty and ambition in order to find prosperity during Germany’s “economic miracle” of the 1950s. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biggest international box-office success, The Marriage of Maria Braun is a heartbreaking study of a woman picking herself up from the ruins of her own life, as well as a pointed metaphorical attack on a society determined to forget its past.Read More »

Somewhere in the future there is a computer project called Simulacron one of which is able to simulate a full featured reality, when suddenly project leader Henry Vollmer dies. His successor Dr. Fred Stiller experiences odd phenomena. A good friend, Guenther Lause, disappears in the middle of a conversation and a week later nobody has ever heard of him. And those fits of dizzyness – Stiller cannot believe himself to be fool. There has to be an explanation for all this. Could Simulacron have something to do with it?Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Brian J. Dillard (allmovie.com)
A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they get to make love with his wife, Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau); lose, and they must take it from behind by Nono himself. One day, Lysiane reads the tarot for her lover, Robert (Hanno Poschl), and learns in the cards of his intense passion for his brother, Querelle (Brad Davis). Querelle himself soon arrives, and the brothers enact a bizarre greeting halfway between a hug and a wrestling match. Querelle, it seems, is looking for partners in a drug deal; Robert points him in the right direction. An argument about the merits of sex between men soon leads Querelle to murder his fellow smuggler, Vic (Dieter Schidor). Back at the whorehouse, Querelle loses on purpose to Nono and finds he has a taste for passive gay sex. Meanwhile, fellow sailor Gil, who looks exactly like Querelle’s brother (and is played by the same actor), murders one of his compatriots after the brute publicly impugns his manhood. Wanted by the police for both his own crime and Querelle’s, Gil goes on the lam. Querelle soon crashes his hideout, and an intense bond develops between the two murderers — a friendship that will lead Querelle to the greatest love, and the greatest treachery, of his life. Director Fassbinder was in the process of editing Querelle when he died of a drug overdose in June 1982. Gunther Kaufmann, who plays Nono, was Fassbinder’s ex-lover; the film is dedicated to another former lover, El Hedi Ben Salem, the news of whose suicide had just reached the director. Critically derided even by many of Fassbinder’s admirers, Querelle earned a Golden Raspberry award for Worst “Original” Song for “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves,” an Oscar Wilde poem set to music by Peer Raben and sung repeatedly by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau had previously starred in Mademoiselle, a Tony Richardson effort co-scripted by Genet. Look for Frank Ripploh, another pioneering German director, in a cameo.Read More »

Quote:
Tonight I saw the infamous Wildwechsel, or Jail Bait, at the Museum of Modern Art. This movie lives up to it’s reputation as one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s darkest and most perverse movies. And that’s really saying something.Read More »

Description: There is really nothing you could get out of this film. Not even with the weirdest mind. Even some Japanese action director would have made a more believable and satisfying 10 minutes film with this plot line. So is there anything good about it? Yes, if you would look at it as a dream. Because in a dream, nothing has to make sense. Just like this early short from Fassbinder.Read More »

A film version of a play Fassbinder directed in Hamburg, Clare Booth Luce’s “The Women”. It gave Fassbinder an opportunity to indulge his passion for working with women – there are forty women in the play and no men.
The play dates from the 1930s, and Fassbinder was accused by the critics of being anti-women (a frequent criticism of late). As usual, he chose to work “against” the text, and from this has constructed an entertaining and engaging play about love between upper-class women with nothing better to do than sneer at others when things go wrong with their lives and loves.
(the above was taken from the appendix Filmography in: Fassbinder. Edited by Tony Rayns. Revised and expanded edition. bfi, London 1980, page 115)Read More »

Description: Fassbinder’s version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for television develops a radical yet scrupulous reading of the play. Stripped of sentimentality and giving Nora (Carstensen) self-assurance from the start, this studio production delivers its critique of bourgeois marriage with a force rarely matched even in the theatre. The brutal prose, harshly delivered, is complemented by the unique visual spectacle which Fassbinder manages to wring from a videotape studio. Achieving effects of lighting and framing which British TV directors have never dreamed of, he makes the oppressiveness of Nora’s home as concrete as a tank-trap. Almost every scene is shot through latticework, net curtains, cut glass, ornate mirrors, so that the characters are perhaps visually obscured but always intellectually focused. All the BBC’s producers of tele-classics should be chained to chairs and forced to watch it.Read More »

Two different opinions on Händler der vier Jahreszeiten

Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmuller) betrays few traces of his eroding morale as he lyrically announces his daily merchandise into the open air. He is an unassuming fruit vendor, diligently making his rounds through the residential streets, accompanied by his highly critical wife, Irmgard (Irm Hermann). After chastising him for hand delivering an order to an ex-lover (Ingrid Caven), Hans escapes her incessant complaints by abandoning his cart and going into a nearby bar. Soon, the sad ritual of his empty existence emerges: arguing with his wife, drinking excessively, lamenting lost personal and professional opportunities.Read More »

Description: The subject of this film is a true case that happened in the city of Bremen: The story of citizen Geesche Gottfried (Margit Carstensen), widowed Miltenberger, who killed 15 people, among them her mother, her father, her children, two husbands and other persons from her immediate environs, while her fellow-citizens had considered her a respectable, god-fearing woman. In the end, she was unmasked and beheaded in 1831 – the last public execution in Bremen. Bremen Freedom is not a thriller. It is not the intention of the piece to gradually unmask the culprit. Like in a ballad, the killings are arranged in a kaleidoscope. The murderer’s motive is of interest in this play, but not how she is convicted. Geesche Gottfried murders because she wants to be free and because she does not want to be one of the men’s “pets”. “This was not a life, Michael, what mother lived there. In that case, death is a blessing for someone,” says Geesche Gottfried after murdering her own mother.Read More »