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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
(1946 - 1982)
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 Querelle
(1982)
Brad Davis and Jeanne Moreau star in this steamy
take on Jean Genet's homoerotic novel of sexual obsession and
murder in a seedy seaport. Franco Nero is Qurelle's commanding
officer who falls hard for the swaggering, sexually brazon sailer.
A tale of passion, violence, degradation and intense sexual
submission
Director: Werner Rainer Fassbinder
Starring: Brad Davis, Jeanne Moreau,
Franco Nero
 Fox
and His Friends (1975)
Fassbinder's first specifically male gay-themed
film is a richly textured and powerful drama of the relationship
between two gay men of vastly different social backgrounds. A
lower-class carnival entertainer, Fox (played by Fassbinder),
finds himself suddenly flush after winning 500,000DM in a lottery.
He soon becomes involved in an ill-fated romance with gold-digging
Eugen, a rich, manipulative young man. The eternal class struggle
and the continued exploitation of the poor and working class is
tragically played out as the unwitting Fox is swindled out of his
money and self-respect by his bourgeois lover and his family.
(German with English subtitles)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter
Chatel, Harry Baer, Kurt Raab
Films directed by Fassbinder:
Some Texts about Fassbinder:
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By Gary Morris for Bright
Lights Film Journal
Excerpt:
Few filmmakers lived their private lives more
publicly than Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), and few have
had those lives so relentlessly linked to their artistic output.
Starting at age 21, this self-created enfant terrible made over 40
films in 15 years along with numerous plays and TV dramas, but he
still managed to become a well-known habitué of New York's
leather bars in the '70s, easily recognized and often photographed
in his trademark leather jacket, dirty jeans, and perpetual scowl.
His films were a fixture in art houses of the time, but his
personal life, always well publicized, was riddled with gossip and
scandal...
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By Petri Liukkonen
Excerpt:
"The cinema was the family life I never had
at home."
Controversial and prolific German director and playwright, who
attracted attention with his politically committed and unillusory
stage plays and films. Fassbinder's central theme was the
political and social corruption of postwar Germany. He wrote most
of his plays in 1968-71 for his own "anti-theatre" in
Munchen. Fassbinder completed 41 films...
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Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Excerpt:
By far the best known director of the New German
Cinema, Fassbinder has also been called the most important
filmmaker of the post-WWII generation. Exceptionally versatile and
prolific, he directed over 40 films between 1969 and 1982; in
addition, he wrote most of his scripts, produced and edited many
of his films and wrote plays and songs, as well as acting on
stage, in his own films and in the films of others. Although he
worked in a variety of genres-the gangster film, comedy, science
fiction, literary adaptations-most of his stories employed
elements of Hollywood melodrama from the 1950s overlaid with
social criticism and avant-garde techniques. Fassbinder's
expressed desire was to make films that were both popular and
critical successes, but assessment of the results has been
decidedly mixed: his critics contend that he became so infatuated
with the Hollywood forms he tried to appropriate that the
political impact of his films is indistinguishable from
conventional melodrama, while his admirers argue that he was a
postmodernist filmmaker whose films satisfy audience expectations
while simultaneously subverting them...
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By Phillip Lopate for Hard
Press
Excerpt:
It is a curious fact that, in the New York of
the '70's, the films of this quintessentially gay director
functioned as hot dates for straight couples. (I realize that
Ingrid Caven has insisted, in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma,
that Fassbinder was bi-sexual, but I still maintain that his was
largely a gay aesthetic: the camp treatment of melodrama, the
stylization of women's romantic emotion, the emphasis placed on
cruising and tricks, etc.) Their aphrodisiac effect came, I
suspect, from the coldness with which he portrayed sex. Especially
sex between men and women...
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Excerpt:
"What I would like is to make Hollywood
movies, that is, movies as wonderful and universal, but at the
same time not as hypocritical, as Hollywood."
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the
phenomenons of the cinema. Perhaps the first openly homosexual
major director, he was the most prolific filmmaker since the
silent era, once making nine in a twelve month period. But,
despite this assembly line productivity, and his continuous
obsession with Hollywood kitsch, his body of work remains
uniquely personal and distinctive throughout. Always
controversial, despite numerous awards and critical huzzas, he
has elicited wide ranging evaluations from such disparate
critics as conservative historian Paul Johnson—"perhaps
the most gifted film director even Germany has produced"—
to distinguished film historian David Shipman—sample: "an
example of the second-rate imitating the third-rate."
This site has short descriptions of several
films, with photos.
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
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Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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