Tag Archives: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The young toolmaker Jochen fights with his colleagues to a performance bonus. Read More »

Ricky is a cold-blooded U.S. German contract killer. After serving in Viet Nam, he returns to his home town of Munich to eliminate a few problem crooks for three renegade cops. Read More »

A beautiful young housewife, Nora, is trying to convince her tight-laced, bourgeois husband, Torvald, to give her some extra money for the holidays, even if he has to borrow it. Read More »

A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Read More »

Walter, a German anarchist poet, is short of money after his publisher refuses to give him an advance. Read More »

The main characters in this film are wives of rich men who have nothing to do because they have staff – like the cook, the maid, the hairdresser, the manicurist Read More »

In the nineteenth century, seventeen year old Effi Briest is married to the older Baron von Instetten and moves into a house, that she believes has a ghost, in a small isolated Baltic town. Read More »

Beautiful, detached, laconic, consumptive Lily Brest is a streetwalker with few clients. Read More »

Working class and middle-upper class worlds come together in this interesting look at class conflict within the gay world from the German director Reiner Werner Fassbinder. Read More »

Thomsen presents previously unseen interview footage recorded with Fassbinder throughout their fifteen-year friendship, which spans exactly the length of his career – their first encounter was at the Berlinale in 1969 where Fassbinder’s debut was famously booed (you can hear the cries of “Awful!” and “Shame!” on the archive footage), and their last was just three weeks before his untimely death.
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Margot, who lives in a comfortable middle class apartment, fears that she is losing her mind after having had her second child. Her husband Kurt, who is busy studying for an exam, does not understand her situation. Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law Lore are openly hostile to her. She resorts to valium and drink, and looks for sympathy, but to no avail.
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Germany in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of the Nazis’ rise, Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, goes slowly mad. It begins with his seating himself in a chair to observe himself making love to his wife, Lydia, a zaftig empty-headed siren who is also sleeping with her cousin. Hermann is soon given to intemperate outbursts at his workers, other businessmen, and strangers. Then, he meets Felix, an itinerant laborer, whom he delusionally believes looks exactly like himself. Armed with a new life insurance policy, he hatches an elaborate plot in the belief it will free him of all his worries.
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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.
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Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the “Black Monk” in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The “Black Monk” suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary.
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The lackluster and plodding station master Bolwieser has the (mis)fortune to be married to the town’s siren; his trusting nature leads him into serious trouble when she beds nearly every available guy.
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