You'd think that with a life as crazed as his was -- oceans of drink, drugs, sleazy sex, suicidal male lovers, and tormented wives -- Rainer Werner Fassbinder wouldn't have had time to make movies. He did, though, cramming into a 15-year career a whopping 40-plus features, 16 of which are being shown at "Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Another Look" in sparkling new 35mm prints.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von
Kant.
Details
The Fassbinder retrospective begins on
Friday, Aug. 29, with
The Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant at 7 p.m. (and
continues through Sept. 24)
Admission is $4-8
(510) 642-1124
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Films also screen at the Roxie Cinema,
3117 16th St. (at Valencia), S.F.
Admission is $4-8; call 863-1087 or visit www.roxie.c
om for a complete schedule.
Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft (at
Bowditch), Berkeley
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Fortunately, his legacy is less subject to the kind of melodrama that marked his life. The Pacific Film Archive's retrospective offers a strong sampling of Fassbinder's breakthrough blend of theatricality (he was a key player in the German "anti-theater" movement), class critique, and absurdist humor. In Fox and His Friends (1974), a haute queen destroys a sweet but unsophisticated working-class homosexual (played by Fassbinder), stealing his lottery winnings and trying to mold him into a gilt-edged mirror of upper-class values. A remake of Douglas Sirk's cutting 1950s drama All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973) shows the brutal response of family and community to a lonely 60ish white widow who marries a muscular young black Moroccan. Fans of Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven will find this an intriguing (and surely superior) variant of Sirk's masterpiece. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1971) is a stylized study of a lesbian love triangle that takes place in one of the most suffocating of cinematic spaces -- the self-consumed title character's dreamy, hermetic designer home.
The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Fassbinder's biggest popular success, tracks the rise of a self-made woman (Hannah Schygulla) as a metaphor for the resurgence of Germany after World War II. This riveting portrait skewers both a character and a culture, with Maria's climb to power based on a complex web of cruelties and deceits. German history again gets trounced in Veronika Voss (1982), a harrowing exercise in paranoia starring Rosel Zech as a former Third Reich star whose comeback is sabotaged by a sadistic female doctor who drugs and imprisons her.
Fassbinder, whose influence flows richly through the work of Jim Jarmusch, Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, François Ozon, and other luminaries of independent cinema, distilled the best elements of his sources -- Brechtian theatrics, Artaud, Hollywood studio gloss, classical narrative, and a gay sensibility that wasn't ghettoized -- into a body of work that still resonates. More than simply a critic of the prevailing order (though he was that), Fassbinder was equally wary of the right and the left in his search for larger truths. Reviled as misogynistic, anti-German, even anti-Semitic, Fassbinder loved his losers. He's been called the heart of the New German Cinema. That heart stopped when the director died of an overdose of whiskey and drugs on June 10, 1982, slumped over an editing table, at work to the end.
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