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7:00 PM
Goethe-Kino: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Rainer Werner Fassbinder + Intro
Film | Cinema Screening
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Goethe-Institut London, London
- Price £6, £3 Concessions and for Goethe-Institut language students & library members.
- Part of series: Goethe-Kino 2026
For our November Goethe-Kino, presented in collaboration with Aurora Metro Books, we are delighted to screen Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s acclaimed adaptation of his own stage drama. The screening will be preceded by an introduction.
About the Film
Petra von Kant is a successful, self-assured fashion designer who, after two marriages to men, falls in love with Karin, a younger woman from a very different background. Karin moves into Petra’s apartment and accepts her financial and emotional support, yet remains elusive, pursuing relationships with men alongside her affair with Petra. Their increasingly unequal relationship unfolds under the watchful gaze of Petra’s silent assistant Marlene, whose devotion is met only with humiliation and neglect. When Karin ultimately leaves to return to her husband, Petra’s carefully controlled facade collapses into despair. With men remanning an off-screen, the film creates a highly stylised, female world of shifting power dynamics, desire, and emotional dependency.
Adapted from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s own stage play, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was acclaimed by West German critics and received German Film Awards for the performances of Margit Carstensen and Eva Mattes, as well as for Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography. Remaining largely faithful to the theatrical original, the film unfolds entirely within Petra’s apartment and retains the play’s five-act structure, yet Fassbinder and Ballhaus transform the confined setting into a richly cinematic space. Through expressive camerawork, meticulously composed interiors, extravagant costumes, and recurring visual motifs, the apartment becomes a reflection of Petra’s emotional state and growing sense of entrapment. While some feminist critics have argued that the film reinforces negative stereotypes of lesbian relationships, Fassbinder maintained that its central concern is not sexuality itself but the mechanisms of love, power, and emotional exploitation.
West Germany, 1972, colour, 124 mins. With English subtitles. Director and Screenplay (based on the play of the same title): Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Katrin Schaake, Eva Mattes, Gisela Fackeldey.
If you would like to read the play, it is available from Aurora Metro Books in a dual edition that also includes the play Blood on the Neck of the Cat (Blut am Hals der Katze), translated by Anthony Vivis and with a foreword by Martin Hall.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946-1982) was a filmmaker, playwright, actor and theatre director who became one of the defining figures of post-war West German cinema. Renowned for his uncompromising and prolific output, his work explored themes of power, alienation, desire and social oppression, often exposing the hypocrisies of post-war German society.
After leaving school at sixteen, Fassbinder joined Munich’s experimental Action-Theater, where he began writing, directing and acting. When the company was shut down by the authorities in 1968, he co-founded the anti-teater collective, a radical ensemble whose members would become key collaborators throughout his film career.
Fassbinder made his first feature film in 1969 and, over the course of just thirteen years, completed more than forty films alongside numerous stage productions, establishing himself as one of the most productive and influential directors of his generation. His major works include Katzelmacher (1969), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), all of which examine human relationships through the lens of class, gender, sexuality and power.
Among his greatest achievements is the celebrated BRD Trilogy: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982), which together offer an incisive portrait of post-war West Germany. He also adapted Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz into a landmark 14-part television epic in 1980. Fassbinder died in Munich at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind one of the most influential bodies of work in European cinema.
Location
50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2PH
United Kingdom