at the 1980
Venice Film Festival Beginning at the age of 21, Fassbinder made forty-four films and television dramas in 15 years, along with directing 15 plays for the theatre. These films were largely written or adapted for the screen by Fassbinder. He was also
art director on most of the early films, editor or co-editor on many of them (often credited as Franz Walsh, though the spelling varies), and he acted in 19 of his own films as well as for other directors. He wrote 14 plays, created new versions of six classical plays, and directed or co-directed 25 stage plays. He wrote and directed four radio plays and wrote song lyrics. In addition, he wrote 33 screenplays and collaborated with other screenwriters on 13 more. On top of this, he occasionally performed many other roles such as cinematographer and producer on a small number of them. Working with a regular ensemble of actors and technicians, he was able to complete films ahead of schedule and often under budget and thus compete successfully for government subsidies. He worked fast, typically omitting rehearsals and going with the first take. In 1971 through 1977, his films brought him international attention, with films modeled, to ironic effect, on the melodramas
Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood in the 1950s. In these films, Fassbinder explored how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex,
sexual orientation, politics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday
fascism of family life and friendship. Fassbinder's work as a filmmaker was honored in the 2007 exhibition
Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz, which was organized by
Klaus Biesenbach at the Museum of Contemporary Art together with
Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. For his exhibition at MoMA, Klaus Biesenbach received the
International Association of Art Critics (AICA) award.
Avant-garde films (1969–1971) Working simultaneously in theater and film, Fassbinder created his own style from a fusion of the two artforms. His ten early films are characterized by a self-conscious and assertive
formalism. Influenced by
Jean-Luc Godard,
Jean-Marie Straub and the theories of
Bertolt Brecht, these films are austere and minimalist in style. Although praised by many critics, they proved too demanding and inaccessible for a mass audience. Fassbinder's rapid working methods had begun by this stage.
Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) Shot in black-and-white with a shoestring budget in April 1969, Fassbinder's first feature-length film,
Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) (
Liebe ist kälter als der Tod), was a
deconstruction of the American gangster films of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Fassbinder plays the lead role of Franz, a small-time pimp who is torn between his mistress Joanna, a sex worker played by Hanna Schygulla, and his friend Bruno, a gangster sent after Franz by the syndicate that he has refused to join. Joanna informs the police of a bank robbery the two men have planned. Bruno is killed in the shootout, but Franz and Joanna escape.
Love Is Colder Than Death is a low-key film with muted tone, long sequences, non-naturalistic acting and little dialogue. Success was not immediate.
Love Is Colder Than Death was ill-received at its premiere at the
Berlin Film Festival. The film, however, already displays the themes that were to remain present through the director's subsequent work: loneliness, the longing for companionship and love, and the fear and reality of betrayal.
Katzelmacher (1969) Fassbinder's second film,
Katzelmacher (1969; the title is a Bavarian pejorative slang term for a foreign worker from the Mediterranean), was received more positively, garnering five prizes after its debut at
Mannheim. It features a group of rootless and bored young couples who spend much of their time in idle chatter, empty boasting, drinking, playing cards, intriguing or simply sitting around. The arrival of Jorgos, a guest worker from Greece, leads to a growing curiosity on the part of the women and the antagonism among the men living in a suburban block of apartments in Munich. This kind of social criticism, featuring alienated characters unable to escape the forces of oppression, is a constant throughout Fassbinder's oeuvre.
Katzelmacher was adapted from Fassbinder's first produced play – a short piece that was expanded from forty minutes to feature length, moving the action from a country village to Munich and delaying the appearance of Jorgos.
Gods of the Plague (1970) Gods of the Plague (
Götter der Pest) is a bleak gangster film with a winter setting, shot mostly indoors and at night. The character of Franz (from Fassbinder's first film, but now played by
Harry Baer) is released from prison, but falls back with the wrong crowd. He teams up with his best friend, a black Bavarian criminal who killed his brother, to raid a supermarket. Both men are betrayed by Franz's jilted lover Joanna who tips off the police. Franz is killed, and the film ends at his laconic funeral. Similar in plot and characters to both
Love is Colder than Death (1969) and
The American Soldier (1970),
Gods of the Plagues theme of homoerotic love would reappear repeatedly in the director's films.
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) The last of the four films Fassbinder shot in 1969, was his first in color,
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?). It was co-directed by
Michael Fengler (the friend who had been his cameraman on the short film
The Little Chaos in 1967). Only the outlines of the scenes were sketched by Fassbinder. Fengler and the cast then improvised the dialogue. Fassbinder asserted that this was really Fengler's work rather than his. Nevertheless, the two were jointly given a directorial award for the project in the 1971 German Film prize competition, and
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? has always been considered among Fassbinder's films.
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? portrays the life of Herr Raab, a technical draughtsman married and with a small child. The pressures of middle-class life take a toll on him. A visit by a woman neighbor occasions the incident that gives the film its title. Irritated by the incessant chat between his wife and her friend while he tries to watch TV, Herr Raab kills the neighbor with a blow to the head with a candle stick and then kills both his wife and their son. Herr Raab is later found hanged in an office restroom.
The American Soldier (1970) The main theme of the gangster film
The American Soldier (Der Amerikanische Soldat) is that violence is an expression of frustrated love. A sudden frenzied outburst of repressed passion, the revelation of desire and a need for love that has been thwarted and comes too late is central here. The eponymous hit man of the title (actually a German, played by Karl Scheydt) is a cold-blooded contract killer, who returns from
Vietnam to his native Munich, where he is hired by three renegade policemen to do away with a number of undesirables. Eventually he ends up killing the girlfriend of one of the policemen with his friend Franz Walsh (Fassbinder). The film closes with the music of the song "So much tenderness", written by Fassbinder and sung by Gunther Kaufmann.
The American Soldier is the third and final installment of Fassbinder's loose trilogy of gangster pictures formed by
Love Is Colder Than Death and
Gods of the Plague. It pays homage to the Hollywood gangster genre, and also alludes to
Southern Gothic race narratives.
The Niklashausen Journey (1970) In ''
(Die Niklashauser Fahrt
), Fassbinder co-writes and co-directs with Michael Fengler. This avant-garde film, commissioned by the WDR television network, was shot in May 1970 and it was broadcast in October the same year.The Niklashausen Journey'' was loosely based on the real-life of
Hans Boehm, a shepherd who in 1476 claimed that the Virgin Mary called him to foment an uprising against the church and upper classes. Despite a temporary success, Boehm's followers were eventually massacred and he was burned at the stake. His approach was to compare the political and sexual turmoil of feudal Germany with that of the contraculture movement and the
protests of 1968. Fassbinder did not clarify the time frame of the action, mixing medieval elements (including some costumes, settings, speech and music) with those from other time periods, like the Russian Revolution, the
Rococo period, postwar Germany and the
Third World.
Whity (1970) Set in 1876,
Whity centers on the title character, a
mulatto who works as the obsequious servant in the mansion of a dysfunctional family in the American South. He is the illegitimate son of the family patriarch and the black cook. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning until several of the family members ask him to kill some of the others. He eventually kills them all and runs away to the desert with a prostitute from the local bar. The film was shot in
Almeria, Spain, in widescreen, on locations built for the Westerns made by
Sergio Leone. Its production was particularly traumatic for cast and crew.
Whity, a mixture of Euro-western and American South melodrama, was badly received by the critics and became Fassbinder's biggest flop. The film was neither picked up for theatrical release, nor was there interest for broadcasting it on television. As a result,
Whity was only seen as its premiere. It remained unavailable until the 1990s, when it began to be screened; now, like almost all of Fassbinder's films, it is available on DVD.
Rio das Mortes (1971) A whimsical comedy,
Rio das Mortes follows two young men without prospects who try to raise money to realize their dream of finding a buried treasure in
Peru using a map of the
Rio das Mortes. The girlfriend of one of them finds the notion stupid and wants to put a stop to it, but eventually the two friends find a patroness to finance their adventure. Based on an idea by
Volker Schlondorff,
Rio das Mortes was shot in January 1970 following
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, The film feels casually constructed; the humor is bland and the plot has been criticized for its sloppiness and poor character development.
Rio das Mortes is best remembered for a scene unrelated to the plot, as the girlfriend, played by Schygulla, dances to
Elvis Presley's "
Jailhouse Rock" on the jukebox in the company of an oafish leather-jacketed youth, played by Fassbinder. It follows two young women whose lives are transformed when army engineers (the pioneers of the title) arrive to their town to build a bridge. One of the women flirts from soldier to soldier, but her friend falls in love only to be abandoned. Shot in November 1970,
Pioneers in Ingolstaldt was commissioned for television. Fassbinder wanted to bring the plot from the 1920s to contemporary Germany, but the producers, fearing to offend the German army, refused. A compromise did not satisfy any of the parties, and midway through the project Fassbinder lost interest in it. The tensions and bitterness that had surrounded the making of
Whity led Fassbinder to dismantle the collective project of the Anti-Theater as a production company. Instead, he founded his own production company: Tango films.
Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) Beware of a Holy Whore was based, like many of Fassbinder's films, on a personal experience – the shooting of his earlier film, the revisionist western
Whity (1970). The film shows an egomaniacal director, beset by a stalled production, temperamental actors, and a frustrated crew. When asked what the movie he is making is about, he replies: "brutality." The film ends with a typical Fassbinder-esque irony, as the crew gang up on the director.
Beware of a Holy Whore marked the end of Fassbinder's avant-garde period. It presented such an embittered and radical self-critique that his future films would have to be quite different from the ones made before. After spinning out ten films in not much more than a year (this film was shot only a few months after
Whity) in a frenzied burst of creativity, his anti-film anti-theater drive seemed to conclude.
German melodramas (1971–1976) After
Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Fassbinder took an eight-month break from filmmaking. During this time, he turned for a model to Hollywood melodrama, particularly the films German émigré
Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood for
Universal-International in the 1950s:
All That Heaven Allows,
Magnificent Obsession and
Imitation of Life. Fassbinder was attracted to these films not only because of their entertainment value, but also for their depiction of various kinds of repression and exploitation.
The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) Fassbinder scored his first domestic commercial success with
The Merchant of Four Seasons (
Händler der vier Jahreszeiten, 1971). The film portrays a married couple who are fruit sellers. Hans faces rejection from his family after he violently assaults his wife for not bending to his will. She leaves him, but after he suffers a heart attack they reunite, though he now has to employ other men. His restricted ability to function leads him to ponder his own futility. He literally drinks himself to death.
The Merchant of Four Seasons uses melodrama as a style to create critical studies of contemporary German life for a general audience. It was Fassbinder's first effort to create what he declared he aspired to: a cinematic statement of the human condition that would transcend national boundaries as the films of
Michelangelo Antonioni,
Ingmar Bergman and
Federico Fellini had done. It is also his first realization of what he learned from Sirk: that people, however small they may be, and their emotions, however insignificant they may seem, could be big on the movie screen. Love turns into a power struggle of deception and betrayal. The story centers on Hanni, a precocious 14-year-old schoolgirl who starts a relationship with Franz, a 19-year-old worker in a chicken processing plant. Their romance faces the opposition of the girl's conservative parents. Franz is sentenced to nine months in prison for having sex with a minor. When he is released on probation, they continue their relationship and Hanni becomes pregnant. Afraid of her father's anger, she persuades Franz to kill him. When Franz returns to prison for this murder, Hanni tells him that their child died at birth and that their love was "only physical". Originally made for German television,
Jail Bait was based on a play by
Franz Xaver Kroetz, who violently disagreed with Fassbinder's adaptation, calling it pornographic. The luridness of its theme furthered the controversy.
World on a Wire (1973) His only
science fiction film,
World on a Wire (
Welt am Draht, 1973), was a departure for Fassbinder. An adaptation of the pulp sci-fi novel
Simulacron-3 by
Daniel F. Galouye, it was made as a two-part, 205-minute production for television using
16mm film stock during a hiatus from the lengthy production of
Effi Briest and in the same year as
Martha and
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. A story of realities within realities,
World on a Wire follows a researcher, working at the institute of
cybernetics and future science, who begins to investigate the mysterious death of his mentor. He falls deep into the cover up behind a computer capable of creating an artificial world with units living as human beings unaware that their world is just a computer projection. Made in contemporary Paris, the film was stylistically inspired by
Jean-Luc Godard's
Alphaville (1965) and in its theme of artificial humans wanting to reach real life anticipated
Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner (1982).
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) Fassbinder first gained international success with
Fear Eats the Soul (
Angst essen Seele auf, 1974). This film was shot in 15 days in September 1973 with a very low budget, ranking among Fassbinder's quickest and cheapest. Nevertheless, the impact on Fassbinder's career and in overseas release remains cemented as a great and influential work. It won the International Critics Prize at
Cannes and was acclaimed by critics everywhere as one of 1974's best films.
Fear Eats the Soul was loosely inspired by Sirk's
All That Heaven Allows (1955). It details the vicious response of family and community to a lonely aging white cleaning lady who marries a muscular, much younger black Moroccan immigrant worker. The two are drawn to each other out of mutual loneliness. When their relationship becomes known, they experience various forms of hostility and public rejection. Gradually, their relationship is tolerated, not out of real acceptance, but because those around the good-hearted old lady realize their ability to exploit her is threatened. As the external pressures over the couple begin to subside, internal conflicts surface.
Martha (1974) Fassbinder's main characters tend to be naifs, either men or women, who are rudely, sometimes murderously, disabused of their romantic illusions. Shot on 16mm film and made for television,
Martha (1974) is a melodrama about cruelty in a traditional marriage. The plot focuses on the title character, a spinster librarian. Soon after the death of her father while on vacation in
Rome, Martha meets a wealthy civil engineer, who sweeps her off her feet. They encounter each other again at a wedding in her hometown of
Constance and soon marry. However, their married life becomes an exercise for her husband to express his sadism and for Martha to endure her masochism. Her husband shows his desire for her violently, leaving marks on her body. He obsessively controls her life, her diet, her taste in music and her interests, until she is confined to their house. Martha's initially positive wish to be liked by her oppressive and abusive husband pushes her to such an extreme that she becomes deranged, leading to her own permanent physical paralysis.
Effi Briest (1974) Effi Briest was Fassbinder's dream film and the one in which he invested the most work. While he normally took between nine and 20 days to make a film, this time it required 58 shooting days, dragged out over two years. The film is a period piece adapted from
Theodor Fontane's classic
novel of 1894, concerning the consequences of betrayed love. Set in the closed, repressive Prussian society of the
Bismarck era, the film paints a portrait of a woman's fate completely linked to an unbending and utterly unforgiving code of social behavior. The plot follows the story of Effi Briest, a young woman who seeks to escape her stifling marriage to a much older man by entering into a brief affair with a charming soldier. Six years later, Effi's husband discovers her affair with tragic consequences. The film served as a showpiece for Fassbinder's muse and favorite actress
Hanna Schygulla, whose detached acting style fitted the roles the director created for her. Fassbinder made her a star, but artistic differences while making
Effi Briest created a split that lasted for some years, until Fassbinder called her back to take the role of Maria Braun.
Like a Bird on a Wire (1975) Like a Bird on a Wire (
Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht) is a forty-minute television production featuring
Brigitte Mira, the main actress in
Fear eats the Soul, singing cabaret songs and love ballads from the 1940s and 1950s. Between songs, she drinks and talks about her husbands. The title is borrowed from
Leonard Cohen's song "
Bird on the Wire", with which the program ends. Fassbinder considered this project "an attempt to do a show about the
Adenauer era. For us it certainly wasn't entirely successful. But the film does reveal the utter repulsiveness and sentimentality of the time" he explained.
Fox and His Friends (1975) Many of Fassbinder's films deal with homosexuality, in keeping with his interest in characters who are social outsiders, but he drew away from most representations of homosexuals in films. In an interview at the 1975
Cannes Film Festival, Fassbinder said about
Fox and His Friends: "It is certainly the first film in which the characters are homosexuals, without homosexuality being made into a problem. In films, plays or novels, if homosexuals appear, the homosexuality was the problem, or it was a comic turn. But here homosexuality is shown as completely normal, and the problem is something quite different, it's a love story, where one person exploits the love of the other person, and that's the story I always tell". In
Fox and His Friends (
Faustrecht der Freiheit, 1974) a sweet but unsophisticated working-class homosexual wins the lottery and falls in love with the elegant son of an industrialist. His lover tries to mold him into a gilt-edged mirror of upper-class values, all the while appropriating Fox's lottery winnings for his own ends. He ultimately destroys Fox's illusions, leaving him heartbroken and destitute. Fassbinder worked within the limits of Hollywood melodrama, though the film is partially based on the plight of his then lover Armin Meier (to whom the film is dedicated). The film is notable for Fassbinder's performance as the unlucky Fox, in a self-directed starring role.
Fox and His Friends has been deemed homophobic by some and overly pessimistic by others. The film's homosexuals are not, surprisingly, any different from the film's equally lecherous heterosexuals. The film's pessimism is far outweighed by Fassbinder's indictment of Fox as an active participant in his own victimization, a familiar critique found in many of the director's films.
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) In ''
Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven (Mutter Küsters Fahrt zum Himmel''), a
melodrama, Emma Küsters becomes the center of media and political attention after her husband, a factory worker, killed his supervisor or his supervisor's son and then himself when lay offs were announced. The film drew on both Sirk's melodramas and Weimar-era workers' films, connecting the genres to tell a political coming-of-age story about Mother Küsters, who seeks to understand what led to her husband's actions and how to respond. The film is very critical of the era's politics and media, as the people to whom Emma Küsters turns all exploit her and her experience. The media, communists, anarchists and even her own family members all take advantage of Mother Küsters's tragedy to advance their own agendas.
Fear of Fear (1975) Made for German television, ''
(Angst vor der Angst'') is a psychological drama about a middle-class housewife, locked into a dull life with a distracted husband, two small children, and openly hostile in-laws. She becomes addicted to
valium and alcohol overwhelmed by an irrational anxiety and fear of her inexorable descent into madness.
Fear of Fear is similar in theme to
Martha, which also portrays the effect of a dysfunctional marriage on an oppressed housewife. The central role was again played by
Margit Carstensen.
I Only Want You to Love Me (1976) I Only Want You to Love Me (
Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt, 1976) tells the story of Peter, a construction worker in jail for manslaughter. His life is recounted in a series of flashbacks. A hard working man, Peter spends his spare time building a house for his cold unloving parents. He marries and finds a job in another city, but in his desperate yearning for affection he tries to buy the love of those around him with expensive gifts which soon makes him fall into a spiral of debt. When he sees his own unrequited love for his parents reflected during an argument in a bar, he kills a man who serves as a proxy for his father. The film was made for television and shot during a pause while making ''Satan's Brew
. Based on a true account taken from For Life'', a book of interviews edited by Klaus Antes and Christiane Erhardt, it was Fassbinder's personal reflections on childhood and adolescence.
''Satan's Brew'' (1976) In a time of professional crisis, Fassbinder made ''
Satan's Brew (Satansbraten'', 1976) a bleak amoral comedy that pays homage to
Antonin Artaud's
theatre of cruelty. Stylistically far from the melodramas that made him known internationally, ''Satan's Brew
gave way to a new phase in his career. In Satan's Brew'', a neurotic poet suffering from writer's block struggles to make ends meet while dealing with a frustrated long suffering wife, a half witted brother and various prostitutes and masochist women who drift in and out of his life. He convinces himself to be the reincarnation of the gay romantic poet
Stefan George (1868–1933) after he plagiarizes his poem
The Albatros.
International films (1976–1982) Enthusiasm for Fassbinder's films grew quickly after
Fear Eats the Soul.
Vincent Canby paid tribute to Fassbinder as "the most original talent since Godard". In 1977, the New Yorker Theater in Manhattan held a Fassbinder Festival. However, as enthusiasm for Fassbinder grew outside of Germany, his films still failed to impress the native audience. At home, he was better known for his television work and for his open homosexuality. Coupled with the controversial issues of his films – terrorism,
state violence, racism, sexual politics – it seemed that everything Fassbinder did provoked or offended someone. After completing in 1978 his last low-budget and very personal ventures (
In a Year of 13 Moons and
The Third Generation) he would concentrate on making films that were becoming increasingly garish and stylized. However, his TV series
Berlin Alexanderplatz was a naturalistic adaptation of the two-volume novel by
Alfred Döblin, which Fassbinder had read many times.
Chinese Roulette (1976) Chinese Roulette (
Chinesisches Roulette) is a gothic thriller with an ensemble cast. The film follows a twelve-year-old crippled girl, Angela, who, due to her parents' lack of affection, arranges an encounter between them with their respective lovers at the family country estate. The film climaxes with a truth-guessing game. The players divide into two teams, which take it in turn to pick out one member of the other side and ask them question about people and objects. The game is played at the suggestion of Angela, who plays against her mother. When the mother asks: "In the
Third Reich, what would that person have been?", Angela's answer is "Commandant of the
concentration camp at
Bergen Belsen"; it is her mother she is describing.
''The Stationmaster's Wife'' (1977) There are no happy endings in Fassbinder's films. His protagonists, usually weak men or women with masochistic tendencies, pay a heavy price for their victimization. ''
The Stationmaster's Wife (Bolwieser
) is based on a 1931 novel, Bolwieser: The Novel Of a Husband'' by the Bavarian writer
Oskar Maria Graf. The plot follows the downfall of Xaver Bolwieser, a railway stationmaster submitted to the will of his domineering and unfaithful wife, whose repeated infidelities completely ruin Bolwieser's life. Broadcast initially as a two-part television series, ''The Stationmaster's Wife'' was shortened to a 112-minute feature film and released in the first anniversary of Fassbinder's death. The film stars
Kurt Raab, Fassbinder's close friend whom the director usually cast as a pathetic man. Raab was also set designer of Fassbinder's films until their friendship and professional relationship broke up after making this film.
Germany in Autumn (1978) Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst) is an
omnibus film, a collective work of eight German filmmakers including Fassbinder,
Alf Brustellin,
Volker Schlöndorff,
Bernhard Sinkel and
Alexander Kluge, the main organizer behind the project. They took a look at the wave of guilt and paranoia that afflicted
West Germany's society and its authorities in the months between the kidnapping and murder of industrialist
Hanns Martin Schleyer by
Red Army Faction members and the deaths of
Andreas Baader,
Gudrun Ensslin and
Jan-Carl Raspe in
Stammheim Prison. The film is a document about terrorism and its sociopolitical aftermath. It begins with Schleyer's wake, a segment filmed by Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlöndorff, and it ends with the tumultuous joint funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in Stuttgart.
Despair (1978) Fassbinder made three films in English, a language in which he was not proficient:
Despair (1978),
Lili Marleen (1980) and
Querelle (1982). All three films have international actors and are very ambitious, yet each faced artistic and commercial problems.
Despair is based upon the 1936
novel of the same name by
Vladimir Nabokov, adapted by
Tom Stoppard and featuring
Dirk Bogarde. It was made on a budget of 6,000,000
DEM, exceeding the total cost of Fassbinder's first 15 films.
Despair – A Journey into the Light (
Despair – Eine Reise ins Licht) tells the story of Hermann Hermann, an unbalanced Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, whose business and marriage have both grown bitter. The factory is close to bankruptcy, and his vulgar wife is chronically unfaithful. He hatches an elaborate plot to take a new identity in the belief it will free him of all his worries. The story of Hermann's descent into madness is juxtaposed against the rise of
National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930s.
In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) In a Year of Thirteen Moons (
In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1978) is Fassbinder's most personal and bleakest work. The film follows the tragic life of Elvira, a
transsexual formerly known as Erwin. In the last few days before her suicide, she decides to visit some of the important people and places in her life. In one sequence, Elvira wanders through the slaughterhouse where she worked as Erwin, recounting her history amid the meat-hooked corpses of cattle whose slit throats rain blood onto the floor. In another scene, Elvira returns to the orphanage where she was raised by
nuns and hears the brutal story of her childhood. Fassbinder's camera tracks the nun (played by his mother) telling Elvira's story; she moves with a kind of military precision through the grounds, recounting the story in blazing detail, unaware that Elvira had collapsed and can no longer hear it.
In a Year of Thirteen Moons was explicitly personal, a reaction to his former lover Armin Meier's suicide. In addition to writing, directing, and editing, Fassbinder also designed the production and worked as the cameraman. When the film played in the New York Film Festival in October 1979, critic
Vincent Canby (who championed Fassbinder's work in the United States) wrote, "Its only redeeming feature is genius."
The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) With
The Marriage of Maria Braun (
Die Ehe der Maria Braun), his greatest success, Fassbinder finally attained the popular acceptance he sought with German audiences. The title character is an ambitious and strong-willed woman separated from her husband towards the end of World War II. The plot follows Maria Braun's steady rise as a successful businesswoman during the
Adenauer era. Maria's dream of a happy life with her husband remains unfulfilled. Her professional achievements are not accompanied by personal happiness. The film, constructed in the Hollywood tradition of "women's pictures" presenting a woman overcoming hardships, serves also as a parable of the West Germany economic miracle embodied in the character of Maria Braun. Her story of manipulation and betrayal parallels Germany's spectacular postwar economic recovery in terms of its cost in human values. The film was the first part of a trilogy centered on women during the post-war "
economic miracle" which was completed with
Lola (1981) and
Veronika Voss (1982).
The Third Generation (1979) The economic success of
The Marriage of Maria Braun allowed Fassbinder to pay his debts and to embark on a personal project,
The Third Generation (
Die Dritte Generation, 1979), a black comedy about terrorism. Fassbinder found financial backing for this film difficult to acquire and it was ultimately made on a small budget and borrowed money. As he did with
In a Year of Thirteen Moons, Fassbinder worked again as the film's cameraman. The film concerns a group of aspiring terrorists from leftist bourgeois backgrounds who kidnap an industrialist during carnival season unaware that they have been manipulated by the capitalist and the authorities whose hidden agenda is for terrorism to create a demand for security hardware and to gain support for harsher security measures. The actions of the ineffectual cell of underground terrorists are overlaid with a soundtrack filled with newscast, voiceovers, music and gibberish. The political theme of the film aroused controversy.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) Returning to his explorations of German history, Fassbinder finally realized his dream of adapting
Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel
Berlin Alexanderplatz. A
television series running more than 13 hours, with a two-hour coda (released in the U.S. as a 15-hour feature), it was the culmination of the director's inter-related themes of love, life, and power.
Berlin Alexanderplatz centers on Franz Biberkopf, a former convict and minor pimp, who tries to stay out of trouble but is dragged down by crime, poverty and the duplicity of those around him. His best friend, Reinhold, makes him lose an arm and murders Franz' prostitute girlfriend, Mieze. The love triangle of Franz, Reinhold and Mieze is staged against the rising tide of Nazism in Germany. The film emphasized the sadomasochist relationship between Biberkopf and Reinhold stressing its homoerotic nature. Fassbinder had read the book at age 14; later claiming that it helped him survive a "murderous puberty". The influence of Döblin's novel can be seen in many of Fassbinder's films most of whose protagonists are named Franz, some with the surname Biberkopf like the naïve working class lottery winner in
Fox and His Friends, who is played by Fassbinder. He also took the pseudonym of Franz Walsch for his work as editor on his own films: Walsch was an oblique homage to director
Raoul Walsh.
Lili Marleen (1981) Fassbinder took on the
Nazi period with
Lili Marleen, an international co production, shot in English and with a large budget. The script was vaguely based on the autobiography of
World War II singer
Lale Andersen,
The Sky Has Many Colors. The film is constructed as a big, tear-jerking
Hollywood melodrama in its depiction of the unfulfilled love story between a German variety singer separated by the war from a Swiss Jewish composer. Central to the story is the
song that gives the film its title. Fassbinder presents the period of
Nazi Germany as a predictable development of German history that was staged as spectacle supported by hate. Filmed with a morbid nostalgia for
swastikas, showbiz glitz and as a cloak-and-dagger romance, the main theme of
Lili Marleen is the question: is it morally justifiable to survive under National Socialism, as the naïve singer does by having a successful career?
Theater in Trance (1981) Theater in Trance is a documentary which Fassbinder shot in Cologne in June 1981 at the "Theaters of the World" Festival. Over scenes from groups such as the
Squat Theatre and the
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch Fassbinder spoke passages from
Antonin Artaud as well as his own commentary.
Lola (1981) Lola tells the story of an upright, new building commissioner who arrives in a small town. He falls in love with Lola, innocently unaware of the fact that she is a famed prostitute and the mistress of an unscrupulous developer. Unable to reconcile his idealistic image of Lola with reality, the commissioner spirals into the very corruption he had sought to fight out.
Veronika Voss (1982) Fassbinder won the
Golden Bear at the
32nd Berlin International Film Festival for
Veronika Voss. The original German title,
Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, translates as "The longing of Veronika Voss". Set in the 1950s, the film depicts the twilight years of the title character, a faded Nazi starlet. A sports reporter becomes enthralled by the unbalanced actress and discovers that she is under the power of a villainous doctor who supplies her with the drugs she craves so long as she can pay the exorbitant fee. Despite the reporter's best attempts, he is unable to save her from a terrible end.
Querelle (1982) Fassbinder did not live to see the premiere of his last film,
Querelle, based on
Jean Genet's novel
Querelle de Brest. The plot follows the title character, a handsome sailor who is a thief and hustler. Frustrated in a homoerotic relationship with his own brother, Querelle betrays those who love him and pays them even with murder. ==Personal life==