The most successful (and, having made 41 films in 13 years, the most prolific) director to emerge from the New German Cinema movement in the 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder emerged as perhaps the most acute observer of human relationships since Douglas Sirk (an acknowledged influence). His favourite themes included the outsider rejected by society, and his own feelings of rejection and alienation during the oppressive 'Wirtschaftswunder' of 1950s West Germany, as seen in the films included in the first box set of his work to be released in the UK.
Made when he was just 25, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok boasts a marvellous performance from Kurt Raab as a middle-class businessman quietly going insane through the monotony of his job and the disappointments of his family life. This pioneering film makes heavy use of improvisational scenes and long takes, leading to a vérité ambiance, and was famously described by the director as “the most disgusting film I ever made”.
In one of his most vicious assaults on the bourgeoisie, he raped the conventions of the classic “women’s pictures” to produce Martha in 1974, a demented, sadistic melodrama that at times feels almost like a horror film. The film is unusually camp for Fassbinder, with garish colours, jet-black comedy and plenty of heightened emotion, and features a brilliant performance from Margit Carstensten (better known for The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant). A bastard mix of Buñuel and Almodovar, Martha is truly one of a kind.
In 1978 Fassbinder started a trilogy of films centred around three women that traced the history of the BRD (Bundesreuplik Deutschland). The Marriage of Maria Braun launched his career in the west, and the second film, Lola, brilliantly reworked Josef Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel to comment on the moral bankruptcy of postwar Germany, using prostitution as a metaphor for the cost of prosperity. Borrowing the saturated primary colours of both Sirk and Vincente Minelli, the film expertly satirises the allure of capitalism.
This box set also includes I Don’t Just Want You To Love Me, a 90-minute documentary that features interviews with those who worked with Fassbinder, and that acts as an ideal introduction to the auteur’s work.
One of the most acclaimed and controversial post-war German filmmakers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder created a prolific and extraordinarily influential body of work. This first volume of his films features Lola, Martha, Why Does Herr R Run Amok? and the documentary I Don’t Just Want You To Love Me.
Lola (1981) was conceived as a homage to Josef Von Sternberg’s ‘The Blue Angel’, and is a biting satire of capitalist greed starring Barbara Sukowa as the eponymous cabaret singer and call girl.
Why Does Herr R Run Amok? (1970) is a savage, provocative portrait of middle-class banality and alienation that follows the monotonous daily routines of the mild-mannered Herr R until one evening he finds that he can take no more.
In Martha (1974), a young woman is slowly stripped of her freedom by her sadistic, tyrannical husband. Fassbinder’s bold homage to Douglas Sirk’s 1950s Technicolor melodramas finds him at his most wickedly perverse and stylistically assured.
I Don’t Just Want You To Love Me is a documentary in which Fassbinder’s friends and closest colleagues remember him in this documentary profile which also includes interviews with Fassbinder himself and excerpts from his work.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Vol 1)
