Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Plot:
Baal explores the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.Read More »

Quote:
One of the most controversial productions by the late German writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was his stage play The Garbage, the City and Death; when he sought to film the play in Germany, Fassbinder was denied state funds on the basis of a charge of anti-Semitic content. Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid, a film-school colleague and longtime friend of Fassbinder’s, undertook the project in 1976, employing Fassbinder’s now-familiar repertory company including Fassbinder and his then-wife Ingrid Caven. Set amid the Frankfurt lowlife–prostitutes, pimps, sadistic police and perverted businessmen–the story concerns a streetwalker (Caven) who is reportedly too chic for her own good and can’t make a go of it among her only available clientele. She is brutalized by her pimp (portrayed by a very slim Fassbinder), who continues to send her out on the streets while he indulges his preference for men. Luck comes her way in the form of a Jewish businessman (Klaus Lowitsch); he hires her only to listen to him talk and, occasionally, pose as his bride in the murky nocturnal street scene.Read More »

Viola Shafik’s documentary explores the story of El Hedi ben Salem, a lover and collaborator of provocative German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.Read More »

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.Read More »

Quote:
Based on the personal recollections of Danish film journalist Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands is an episodic but thorough examination of the man and his works. Starting with the terrible reception of his first feature film Love Is Colder Than Death at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, the bio-doc builds through photographs, stills, audio recordings and filmed interviews a portrait of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his loose but consuming relationships with his family and the extended families he created around him. [MARK WILSHIN, Dog and Wolf]Read More »

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…Read More »

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

A soldier and a beautiful blonde on a train to Harrisburg.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 »