Quote:
Harry Baer plays a newly released ex-convict who slowly but surely finds his way back into the Munich criminal underworld. Meanwhile, his attentions are torn between two women (Hanna Schygulla and Margarethe von Trotta) and the friend (Günther Kaufmann) who shot his brother. This sensual, artfully composed film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a study of romantic and professional futility.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder - (1970) Gods of the Plague.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 31 min
Size: 	2.41 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	790x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.372
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 571 kb/s
BPP: 	0.327
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/FDF95B935A84220/Rainer_Werner_Fassbinder_-_(1970)_Gods_of_the_Plague.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/8049F9934F57648/Rainer_Werner_Fassbinder_-_(1970)_Gods_of_the_Plague.fre.srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English, French

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Götter der Pest AKA Gods of the Plague (1970) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

PLOT: Hans is an ex-foreign legionnaire, ex-cop and a lifelong member of the middle-class. His family, especially his wife, derides him for his lack of ambition and his chosen profession: running a fruit stand. When a heart attack impedes his ability to work, his dissatisfaction turns into despair…

The Merchant of Four Seasons.1971.720p.CriterionBluRay.AVC-mfcorrea.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 28 min
Size: 	4.55 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	988x720 
Aspect ratio:  	1.372
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	6 500 kb/s
BPP: 	0.381
Audio
#1:  	German 1.0ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s (Mono)
#2:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Mono)

https://nitro.download/view/6F6EAA3D91A44D3/The_Merchant_of_Four_Seasons.1971.720p.CriterionBluRay.AVC-mfcorrea.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Händler der vier Jahreszeiten AKA The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

PLOT: Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.

Beware.of.a.Holy.Whore.1971.Rainer.Werner.Fassbinder.576p.BluRay.AAC1.0.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 43 min
Size: 	2.11 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	790x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.372
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 693 kb/s
BPP: 	0.247
Audio
#1:  	German 1.0ch AAC LC @ 136 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC SBR @ 64.0 kb/s (Commentary by Adrian Martin)

https://nitro.download/view/D75C39994189D68/Beware.of.a.Holy.Whore.1971.Rainer.Werner.Fassbinder.576p.BluRay.AAC1.0.x264.mkv

Language(s):German,Spanish,English,French
Subtitles:English, French

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte AKA Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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?

14.5GB | 3h 23m | 958×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/994F4128F6B5549/World.on.a.Wire.1973.720p.BluRay.DD2.0.x264-KG.mkv
or
https://fikper.com/eNyQJTlbFD/World.on.a.Wire.1973.720p.BluRay.DD2.0.x264-KG.mkv.html

Language:German
Subtitles:English

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Welt am Draht AKA World on a Wire [Second Sight] (1973) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In post-war West Germany, the charming Von Bohm is appointed a city’s new Building Commissioner. His morality is tested when he unknowingly falls in love with a brothel worker, Lola, the paid mistress of a corrupt property developer.

2.30GB | 1h 54mn | 960×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/524D016E3361E0F/Rainer_Werner_Fassbinder_-_(1981)_Lola.mkv

Language:German
Subtitles:English

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Lola (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A single woman in her early thirties, Martha (Margit Carstensen) is on vacation with her father in Rome when he has a heart attack and falls down dead. She reacts rather indifferently and returns home to her highly-strung mother and begins to new era of her life taking care of a completely ungrateful and insulting mother (declining an offer of marriage from her boss). After a barrage of verbal abuse and offensive remarks from her mother who see’s her as an ‘ugly old spinster’ she accepts a proposal of marriage from an equally insulting and disrespectful man, Helmuth. They honeymoon in Italy. While there Helmuth resigns Martha from the job that she loves, sends her mother to a mental institution, and lets his wife get horribly burnt in the sun while sleeping, then painfully rapes her. Martha gets back to Germany to find that Helmuth has rented them a new house, and she will not be able to return to her old home even to collect any of her things, which he says must be left behind her. At first the naive and immature Martha believes that her husbands childish temper and selfishness, his domineering possessiveness, his lack of respect, and his violent sexual preferences are just a normal part of marriage. Later, against her husbands order she leaves the house and befriends an old work-mate, Herr Kaiser, who tell her Helmuth is a sadist. While Kaiser and Martha are driving together Martha becomes convinced that her husband is following her and is going to kill her.
K Wedgwood, for IMDb

	
Martha (1974) - BluRay 576p.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 56 min
Size: 	2.57 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 835 kb/s
BPP: 	0.267
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch AC-3 @ 320 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/404ADE0C0F1BEED/Martha_(1974)_-_BluRay_576p.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

Martha.1974.720p.BluRay.AVC-mfcorrea.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 56 min
Size: 	5.36 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x720 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	5 805 kb/s
BPP: 	0.350
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch DTS @ 768 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/2E72499E3B74F60/Martha.1974.720p.BluRay.AVC-mfcorrea.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English here, Brazilian Portuguese

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Martha (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder premiered “Veronika Voss” in February 1982, at the Berlin Film Festival. It was hailed as one of the best of his 40 films. Late on the night of June 9, 1982, he made a telephone call from Munich to Paris to tell his best friend he had flushed all his drugs down the toilet — everything except for one last line of cocaine. The next morning, Fassbinder was found dead in his room, a cold cigarette between his fingers, a videotape machine still playing. The most famous, notorious and prolific modern German filmmaker was 36.

Does this film represent a premonition of his own death? It tells the story of a German actress who worked tirelessly and achieved great fame, but began depending on drugs and alcohol and eventually became so addicted that she sold her body and soul for drugs. Her fortune spent, her marriage destroyed, she began to live as an inpatient in the clinic of a sinister Berlin woman who billed herself as a psychiatrist but was also a Dr. Feelgood who strung along her patients on morphine and controlled them by withholding their supply. Their arrangement was that after Veronika Voss’s death, her suburban villa and its art treasures would be inherited by the doctor.

The film opens in 1955 with Voss (Rosel Zech) looking at one of her own pre-war classics (that’s Fassbinder himself in the audience, leaning on the seat-back behind her). There was a time when she was welcomed in the offices of producers, greeted by headwaiters, recognized on the street. That time has passed, and it is painful to hear her remind people who she is — or was. One night, drinking without funds in a cabaret, she falls into conversation with a soft-faced sportswriter named Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), who is old enough to remain under her spell. She grandly says she will pick up the check, then “allows” him to do it, and invites him to come home with her. All the furniture in her villa is covered in white sheets, the electricity is disconnected, and she has them light candles “because they are so much more flattering to a woman.” The star struck journalist has without realizing it walked into the last act of Veronika Voss’s life.

Ending their evening suddenly, Veronika demands to be taken to the clinic of Dr. Katz (Annemarie Duringer), one of the stylish lesbians often found in Fassbinder films (“The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant”). This clinic could be imagined as the setting for a bizarre Fred Astaire dance number. It’s all blindingly white — walls, floors, furniture, grand staircases, everyone’s clothing. In an eerie touch, a wall of windows looks upon a waiting room, where other patients peer in needfully. Katz lives with a woman apparently her lover, and another constant companion is an African-American G.I. and drug dealer (Günther Kaufmann). This man is in the background of countless shots, never says anything, lurks when needed like a security guard, and was Fassbinder’s sometime lover and an actor in many of his films (including the one he made just before his one, “The Marriage of Maria Braun”).

We observe Veronika’s frantic relationship with Katz, who berates her sadistically, and extracts details of the hours with Robert Krohn. Finally Veronika is shown to her narrow, cell-like room, and given the drugs she craves. In this room, and throughout the clinic, we hear incongruous American country & western songs (“The Battle of New Orleans,” “16 Tons”). In “Maria von Braun,” where Günther Kaufmann plays Maria’s G.I. lover, similar music is heard, probably via Armed Forces Radio, a reminder of the presence of American occupying forces in postwar Germany. At Veronika’s own “farewell” party, she performs “Memories Are Made of This,” in a low, throaty torch-song voice perhaps intended to remind us of Marlene Dietrich. Indeed, Fassbinder’s focus on Rosel Zech’s reminds me of von Sternberg’s Dietrich in “The Blue Angel.”

When Robert Krohn returns that day to his own apartment and girlfriend Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), he is almost proud to tell her where he spent the night, and she, also a writer for the newspaper, accepts this as an expression of his nature; she wants to know what Voss was like. Krohn, whose beat is hockey, convinces his editor he has lucked upon a major scoop about the decline and fall of a star.

Throughout Fassbinder’s work we find such figures, great stars, mannered, decadent, in various stages of their decay. This film was inspired by the real life of Sybille Schmitz, a German star of the 1930s who also fell athwart of a clinic supplying drugs. Many critics look at Veronika Voss and are reminded of Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard.” Perhaps the association is intentional. When Veronika finally, with great difficulty, wheedles a bit part from her former agent, the director of the scene (Volker Spengler) wears glasses and has his hat pushed back on his head, Wilder-style. She only has two lines in her scene, but blows them again and again. She’s rattled and craves a fix. She is watched by Robert Krone and by her ex-husband Max Rehbein (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who wearily explain to the sports writer that his former wife is a hopeless addict.

Two other patients of Dr. Katz figure importantly: A sweet elderly couple named the Treibels. Their story figures tragically in the history of Germany, as you will find. The psychiatrist, indeed, seems poised at the center of a cynical web of postwar corruption, including drug authorities and the police; when they twitch the web, she senses it immediately.

Fassbinder (1945-1982) was an immensely productive filmmaker. In his 37 years he directed 40 features, 24 stage plays and two long TV miniseries (notably “Berlin Alexanderplatz”). His death seems to have interrupted this flow in mid-stream. Powerfully influenced by the heavily stylized works of the German-Danish-American director Douglas Sirk (“Written on the Wind”), he may have worked at a feverish pace but his films always look carefully planned. In this film, for example, he evokes period b&w with a diversity of wipe shots, iris shots, pans, tracking, and the careful positioning of foregrounds. In other films he often uses zooms-in to underline dramatic points. His films are visually mannered, formal, and far from seeming improvised; the visual strategy of “Veronika Voss” suggests he was moving even closer toward the classic Hollywood style.

What an impression he made when he was alive! At Cannes every year he seemed to have at least one film, and you would see him at Le Petit Carlton, the famous bistro behind the Palais du Festival, on rue Felix-Faure, behind the Hotel Carlton. Fassbinder and his posse would be gathered inside, close inside the doorway. looking as discontented as usual. In August of 1983 at the Montreal Film Festival, as his close friend the director Daniel Schmid and I both served on the jury of the World Film Festival, the ghost of Fassbinder seemed almost like another presence in the city, Fassbinder had attended the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, nine months before his death, I remember him at dinner, unshaven, defensive, always smoking, ignoring the food and ordering a bottle of Cognac to be placed before him.

During the last weeks of his life, Schmid said, during those sad telephone calls at three in the morning, Fassbinder often repeated the same thing. “He would shout at me: How are you able to just sit there and look outside the window? How can you? How can you just sit on a rock and look at the sea? How can everybody else be so lucky?”

2.68GB | 1h 44m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/C56C50CD0C8094B/Rainer_Werner_Fassbinder_-_(1982)_Die_Sehnsucht_der_Veronika_Voss.mkv

Language:German
Subtitles:English

The post Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.