The survivors of the old Fassbinder crew gather one last time to shoot a remake of Pasolini’s Salò. Meanwhile, the producer sends an agent to Hollywood to meet Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad and others on a mission to raise money and get ex-Visconti superstar Helmut Berger to appear in the film.Read More »
KAFFEEHAUS, DAS
(nach Carlo Goldoni)
“In Ridolfo’s coffeehouse, citizens meet to talk about money, friendship, love, and honor. This is a modernistic staging for television of a play by Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), the Venetian playwright whose many works preserve in scripted form the improvisational productions of the Italian commedia dell’arte.”Read More »
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, Read More »
Summary:
A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.Read More »
Plot:
Written and directed by newcomer Chris Kraus, this German art-house family drama centers around the eccentric Jesko (Jürgen Vogel), who, despite his debilitating condition, – he is dying of cancer and only his mother’s bone-marrow could save him – makes a visit to his father, Gebhard (Dietrich Hollinderbaumer), and brother, Ansgar (Peter Davor), on the day that Ansgar is scheduled to take over the family company. What Jesko doesn´t know, is that his mother, who went insane 20 years ago, ran away and got drug addicted, was found and brought back.
Interesting plot, beautiful photography, well-written dialogue, well-developed characters.Read More »
A successful fashion designer abandons a sado-masochistic relationship with her female assistant in favor of a love affair with a beautiful young woman.Read More »
Synopsis:
A wealthy couple, with a daughter Angela, a young teen who walks with crutches, tells each other they are off for the weekend on business (he to Oslo, she to Milan). Actually, both are meeting their lovers, and both go to the family’s county home, Traunitz castle. Surprising each other, there’s sophisticated laughter; they decide to continue as planned. Dinner, however, is interrupted by the arrival of Angela and her mute attendant, also named Traunitz. The next day, the child initiates a game of “Chinese roulette,” in which one team tries to guess which of them the other team is thinking of by asking questions. The game has an edge of cruelty and the results are explosive.Read More »
Quote:
“A comedy in six parts,” each introduced with a quote taken from a public bathroom wall (“Slave seeks master to train me as his dog,” etc.). The Kaiser Wilhelm Church dominates the Berlin skyline as seen from a glass-paneled, high-rise office, a shooting takes place on a monitor. Surveillance footage? No, the ending of The Devil, Probably. Each generation has the revolutionaries it deserves, after the Baader-Meinhoff affair you’re stuck with middle-class ninnies: leader Volker Spengler secretary Hanna Schygulla, schoolteacher Bulle Ogier, composer Udo Kier, housewife Margit Carstensen. The puppet master is the industrialist (Eddie Constantine) who heralds cinema’s utopian lies (“As long as films are sad, life isn’t”); his corporate must promote security equipment, so he manipulates the radicals into kidnapping him and sits back to enjoy the clown show.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 »