Rainer Werner Fassbinder
“I Would Like to Build a House with my Films”

Some considered him to be a “problem child”, others criticized him for producing kitsch, while others recognized that he was a genius. Regardless of what one might think about him, he will forever have a place in German cinema. Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have turned 70 on 31 May 2015.

One thing you really cannot say about this exceptional director, who was born in Bavaria in 1945, is that he shared the typical German dream of building his own house, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder categorically rejected all manner of petty bourgeois institutions and norms. Instead, he preferred to build a house with his films: “Some are the cellar, others the walls, and still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house.” His oeuvre encompasses everything from sparse social studies (Katzelmacher, 1969) to ambitious literary adaptations (Fontane Effi Briest, 1974) and major productions (Lili Marleen, 1981). What all his films have in common is their radically personal way of portraying society. In Fassbinder's work, the political and the private are pretty much seamlessly intertwined.

Anti, anti! and the Fassbinder clan

Fassbinder's career began after he graduated from drama school at Munich's Action-Theater, which was run by Peer Raben, who later composed the music for many of Fassbinder's films. Fassbinder soon took over at the helm and in 1968 established its successor, the Antiteater. This is where Fassbinder's roots as a director lie. The affinity of his films with theatre is always obvious. Like his films, Fassbinder‘s plays of this era, which were often written very quickly, rebelled against the stuffy atmosphere of 1960s West Germany. At the Antiteater, which doubled as a pub, chaos reigned supreme. This is where he put together the team of actors whose faces are familiar from his films, and where he came to appreciate the group dynamics which characterized his work. Besides Hanna Schygulla, the group was joined for example by Irm Herrmann, Harry Baer, Günther Kaufmann and Ingrid Caven, who was married to Fassbinder for a period of two years. Most of the ensemble's members followed Fassbinder unconditionally, despite the fact that this sensitive artist could at times be extremely mean. Production of films was influenced by private quarrelling and his liaisons with both men and women in the group. In some cases, Fassbinder even wrote his amorous entanglements into the screenplays, as for example in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). Why exactly Fassbinder exuded such fascination to others can only be guessed at now.
 

Regardless of potential losses

Before working in theatre, Fassbinder actually wanted to start making films right away. In May 1966 he sat the entrance examination at the newly established Filmhochschule in Berlin, but was rejected. Of course, this could not put off someone like Fassbinder; as he himself explained “if you have to make films, you make them”. That same year he made his first short films, The City Tramp and The Little Chaos, before achieving his breakthrough more or less right off the bat after three years of antiteater when his first cinema films Love Is Colder than Death and Katzelmacher were shown at the Berlinale film festival in 1969. The former reaped snide remarks and jeers, but Katzelmacher, an adaptation of a theatre play of the same name, brought the director five Federal Film Prizes and the budget for his next project. From then on, Fassbinder maintained an amazing pace of production: he made forty feature length films between 1969 and 1982, as well as an elaborate television series adaptation of Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), took acting roles under other directors, and wrote theatre plays, essays and other manuscripts. This extraordinary drive – Fassbinder once shot ten films in just eighteen months! – accounts for a good part of the fascination which his oeuvre continues to exert even today. This output was made possible by Fassbinder's regular ensemble which was also in cahoots with the director on a personal level. Its members were on standby at all times and were ready to perform several different functions on set. The group shot their initial films within just a few days, almost without any money, Fassbinder repeatedly launching himself into projects with shaky financing: “This is the only way we can make films: by making them regardless of any potential losses”.

German-style Hollywood cinema

Thanks among other things to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Martha (both 1974), Fassbinder advanced to become the enfant terrible and the “rock star” of New German Auteur Cinema – and the subject of social dispute. With Garbage, the City and Death, an allegedly anti-Semitic play which was not performed for a long time, Fassbinder provoked a veritable scandal in 1976 – and became infamous once and for all as the bogey of the middle classes, a role he seems to have embraced with a certain mischievous glee. Nonetheless, the often harsh opposition he met with from certain spheres of society was by no means detrimental to Fassbinder's success. He made what are perhaps his most enduring films towards the end of his life: the so-called BRD-Trilogie (or FRG Trilogy), comprising The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale Film Festival in 1982), can be seen as the culmination of his oeuvre. The films stand for Fassbinder's theory of the tentative break between Nazi Germany and economic miracle Germany. From a stylistic and narrative perspective the BRD-Trilogie, unlike the early more theatre-like works, is an example of genuine German-style Hollywood cinema.

Such a bold and certainly ingenious filmmaker

Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in Munich at the age of 37 in 1982 – probably due to drug abuse and overwork. Juliane Lorenz, his flatmate and partner of the time who had previously edited 14 of his films, found him with a burnt-out cigarette in his hand, the television still on in the background. One could almost imagine that the world had simply moved on, leaving this restless figure behind.

To this day, the German cinema scene has been lacking such a bold and certainly ingenious filmmaker like Fassbinder – someone who really shakes things up and actually has something to say. In this sense the myth about Fassbinder's death marking a turning point in German cinema is not unfounded: “The cultural scene needs someone like me”, Fassbinder remarked in a television interview in 1976. One would like to agree.