A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: WBCF - Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1508

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the first of its kind to engage with this important figure. Twenty-eight essays by an international group of scholars consider this controversial director's contribution to German cinema, German history, gender studies, and auteurship.

• A fresh collection of original research providing diverse perspectives on Fassbinder’s work in films, television, poetry, and underground theatre.
• Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains the preeminent filmmaker of the New German Cinema whose brief but prolific body of work spans from the latter half of the 1960s to the artist’s death in 1982.
• Interrogates Fassbinder’s influence on the seminal ideas of his time: auteurship, identity, race, queer studies, and the cataclysmic events of German twentieth century history
• Contributions from internationally diverse scholars specializing in film, culture, and German studies.
• Includes coverage of his key films including: Gods of the Plague (1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Martha (1973) (TV), World on a Wire (1973), Effi Briest (1974), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975),  Fear of Fear (1975), Chinese Roulette (1976), In a Year With 13 Moons (1978), Despair (1978), The Third Generation (1979), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) (TV), and Querelle (1982).

Leseprobe

Contents

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Life and Work

Part II: Genre; Influence; Aesthetics

Part III: Other Texts; Other Media

Part IV: History; Ideology; Politics

PART I Life and Work

1 The Other Planet Fassbinder

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

2 R. W. Fassbinder

Munich, Reichenbach Square, 2002

Fassbinder Live

The Dracula, rather than the Heart, of New German Cinema?

Fassbinder, the Production Machine

The Chronicler of the Federal Republic of Germany

His Relevance Today: Germans as Victims?

Acknowledgment

3 Rainer “Maria” Fassbinder

Fallen Apples: The Teenage Writer

Literary Projections: The Plays

“This is not an interview”: Guided Conversations

Acknowledgment

4 Five Fassbinder Scenes

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Acknowledgment

PART II Genre; Influence; Aesthetics

5 Imitation, Seriality, Cinema

Anxiety of Imitation

Imitation, Citation, Performativity

Between Homage and Reinvention

Framing Constraint

Ceremonialization of the Banal

Sense and Seriality

Acknowledgment

6 Exposed Bodies; Evacuated Identities

Stripping the Body

The Body in Distress/The Body Mutilated

7 Redressing the Inaccessible through the Re-Inscribed Body

8 Nudity and the Question

9 Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority

The Critical Production of Melodrama

Color and Interiority

Fassbinder’s Failure

10 Fassbinder’s Work

The Materials of Style

Recognizing Sirk

Style and Queer Labor

Acknowledgments

11 A Nagging Physical Discomfort

Forever Walking

In Circles

Stillness

Pacing

Past and Present

Fear

Happy Endings

Acknowledgments

12 Beyond the Woman’s Film

Eviscerating Affect? The Obliteration of Female Interiority in Fontane Effi Briest

Performances of a Dispossessed Mind in Martha

In the Inception of the Symptom: The Theater of Interiority in Fear of Fear

Mirrors, Fractures, Difference: Fassbinder’s World(s) on a Wire

13 Through the Looking Glass

Fassbinder’s Televisual Politics

Echoes of Cinema

Hall of Mirrors

PART III Other Texts; Other Media

14 Violently Oscillating

The Encounter with Minna, or Pass-Words into the Garden of Eden

An Event That Is Manifold: Now and Then Franz Kills Ida

The Whole Man, the Amputee, and the Slaughtered Animal

From Heaven to Hell in the Blink of an Eye: The Diabolical Interval

Acknowledgments

15 In Despair

Goggle-moggle and Chocky-wocky

“The mirror becomes glass”

“Through a glass, darkly”: Textuality and Identity

Problematic Doubling, Recto and Verso, Diptychs, and the Line Down the Middle

The Double Cross

“I’m coming out”

Acknowledgments

16 Declined Invitations

Musical Repetition

Whose Words in Song?

Fassbinder and His Circles

17 Fassbinder’s France: Genet’s Mise-en-Scène in Fassbinder’s Films

Fassbinder’s “France”

Dressing and the Undressed in Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

The “Surreal Landscape” of Fassbinder’s Querelle

Conclusion: “I would like to speak about Smerdyakov”

18 Un-framing the Image

Painting as Mute Theater

The Suffering God17

Inside the Theater Box: Camera, Movement, and Pose

Parerga: Unframed Again

Posing; Poseurs

“Marlene is not Marlene”

Masochistic Theatricality

19 A Novel Film

A Film about Fontane

The Film is the Book

A “fear-inducing apparatus”, twice

Effi, Blurring

Instetten, Still

Adaptation

The Blank Screen

20 Swearing and Forswearing Fidelity in Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

Introduction

A. Family Relationships

B. Some Forms and Effects of Divergence

Conclusion

PART IV History; Ideology; Politics

21 “There Are Many Ways to Fight a Battle”

I

II

III

IV

22 A Generation Later and Still Unrepresentable?

The Third Generation

Acknowledgments

23 Two Kinds of Excess

Fassbinder, Sierck, Harlan

Lili Marleen and Opfergang

Fassbinder and Fascist Aesthetics

A New Jew Süss?

Excess and Intent

24 Jolie Laide

25 Impossible, Impolitic

26 “So Much Tenderness”

27 Rainer, Rosa, and Werner

Restoring a Counter-Public

Queer Auteur Fassbinder: “More than Gay”

Von Praunheim and Fassbinder, Pro and Contra Movements

Universal Film above versus Tendentious Film for the Movement

Fassbinder and Schroeter: Melos, Polis, Camp

28 Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends and Gay Politics in the 1970s

The Dismissal of Fox by Gay Activist Critics in the 1970s

The Gay Cinematic Apparatus and the Normalizing of Homosexuality

The Challenge to Art House and Mainstream Cinemas

Acknowledgement

29 Querelle’s Finality

Querelle and Critical Discourse

Homosexuality, Crime, and Death

Querelle and Barebacking

Barebacking, Fantasy, and Gay Desire

Querelle, Barebacking, and Queer Abjection

Selected Bibliography

Index

Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors

The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose work constitutes what is referred to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons. Whether Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergmann, Capra or the Coen Brothers, each volume, composed of 25 or more newly commissioned essays written by leading experts, explores a canonical, contemporary, and/or controversial auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multi-dimensional capacity. Individual volumes interrogate any number of subjects – the director’s oeuvre; dominant themes; well-known, worthy, and under-rated films; stars, collaborators, and key influences; reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency in the scholarly world.

Published

1. Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann

2. Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague

3. Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker

4. Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager

Forthcoming

5. Companion to Pedro Almodovar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Brigitte Peucker to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder / edited by Brigitte Peucker.p. cm. – (Wiley-Blackwell companions to film directors)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9163-0 (hardback : alk. paper)1. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 1945–1982–Criticism and interpretation. I. Peucker, Brigitte.PN1998.3.F37C66 2012791.43′0233092–dc23

2011041431

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contributors

Janelle Blankenship is Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Graduate Faculty in Global Film Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Theory & Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. Her publications include numerous essays on German film history, film theory, and literary modernism, and a special issue of the journal Polygraph on Media and Spatiality in Deleuze and Guattari.Eugenie Brinkema is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her doctorate in 2010 from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her articles on film, violence, sexuality, and psychoanalysis have appeared in journals including differences, Camera Obscura, Criticism, and Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Recent work includes a chapter for the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Michael Haneke.Paul Coates is a Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He has taught at McGill University and at the Universities of Athens (Georgia) and Aberdeen. His publications include The Story of the Lost Reflection (1985), The Double and the Other (1988), The Gorgon’s Gaze (1991), Lucid Dreams: The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (ed.) (1999), Cinema, Religion, and the Romantic Legacy (2003), and The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (2005). His next book, on color, is forthcoming with the British Film Industry.Elena del Rio is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh, 2008), and has contributed numerous essays to journals and edited volumes focusing on issues intersecting cinema and the body.Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and since 2006 has been a Visiting Professor at Yale. Among his recent books as author are: Weimar Cinema and After (2000); Metropolis (2000); Studying Contemporary American Film (2002, with Warren Buckland); Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino (2002); European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005); Terror und Trauma (2007); Hollywood Heute (2009), Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2010, with Malte Hagener).Victor Fan is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Cinema and Modern Chinese Literature at McGill University, East Asian Studies. He specializes in Chinese and British Cinemas, Contemporary Hollywood, New Media, and Film Theory, and he is a working filmmaker and composer. His essays have appeared in Film History, Screen, and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.Caryl Flinn is the author of New German Cinema: Music, History and the Matter of Style; Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman; Strains of Utopia: Gender and Nostalgia in Hollywood Film Music, and co-editor of Cinema and Music. She has published a variety essays on film music, pop culture, German film, camp, and gender theory. Flinn has been teaching at the University of Arizona since 2001, where currently she is Professor and Head of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.Rosalind Galt is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2011), The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (2006) and co-editor of Global Art Cinema: New Histories and Theories (2010). Recent publications include articles on the Catalan avant-garde, on cinematic masochism, and on Michael Haneke.Elena Gorfinkel is Assistant Professor in Art History & Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her writing has appeared in Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media, Cineaste, World Picture, and in a number of edited collections. She is editor, with John David Rhodes, of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (Minnesota University Press, 2011) and is writing a book on American sexploitation film of the 1960s.Ronald Gregg is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Director of Film Programming at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He teaches courses on classical and contemporary Hollywood, and experimental and queer cinema (both Hollywood and avant-garde). His most recent publications include “Queer Performance, Youth and YouTube” in Jump Cut and “Queering Brad Pitt: The Struggle between Gay Fans and the Hollywood Machine to Control Star Discourse and Image on the Web” in LGBT Identity and Online New Media.Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film and Television, Boston University. He is the author of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (2003), the editor of A Companion to Michael Haneke (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and the co-editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s History of American Film. He is a contributing editor of Cineaste magazine.Frances Guerin teaches in the Department of Film Studies, University of Kent. She is author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minnesota University Press, 2005), Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming, 2011), and co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma Memory and Visual Culture (Wallflower, 2007). Her essays have appeared in journals such as Cinema Journal, Screening the Past, Film and History, and in numerous anthologies. In 2008–10 she was the Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum.Randall Halle is the Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include German visual culture and film theory, critical theory, queer theory, and social philosophy. His essays have appeared in journals such as New German Critique, Screen, German Quarterly, and Film-Philosophy. He is the co-editor of After the Avant-Garde (Camden House, 2008), Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, and the double special issue of Camera Obscura on Marginality and Alterity in Contemporary European Cinema (44 & 46). He is the author of Queer Social Philosophy: Critical Readings from Kant to Adorno (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (University of Illinois Press, 2008).Laura J. Heins is an Assistant Professor teaching in the departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She has published essays on German film and television from the 1920s–1950s, and is currently finishing her first book, entitled The Domestic War: Film Melodrama and German Fascism.Claire Kaiser is a Germanist who is a tenured Assistant Professor at the University of Bordeaux 3 in France. She teaches German civilization at the Department of Germanic and Scandinavian Studies, as well as German film in the Performing Arts division. She has written extensively on the identity of the subject in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films and her current research focuses on the relationship between film, history, and memory.Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films; Model Homes; The Milk of Inquiry; Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender; and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol; Cleavage; Jackie Under My Skin; The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist); and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.Leo A. Lensing is Professor of Film Studies and German Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the co-editor, with Michael Töteberg, of The Anarchy of the Imagination (1992), a collection of Fassbinder’s essays and interviews. His other work includes books and articles on topics in German literature, as well as articles on the relationship between film and literature during the 1920s and 1930s and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. He regularly teaches courses on the New German Cinema and on the films of the Weimar Republic.Juliane Lorenz is an author, filmmaker, film editor and producer and the President of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (RWFF), based in Berlin and in New York (FF Inc.). From her initial meeting with Fassbinder in 1976 they had an intense professional, artistic, and personal relationship; Lorenz worked on 14 of his films. After Fassbinder died in 1982, she continued to be a highly acclaimed European film editor and collaborating with Werner Schroeter and Oskar Roehler, among others. Since 1986 she has been writing and directing documentary films; she has published Chaos as Usual: Conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1995) and edited Fassbinder’s In the Land of the Apple Tree, Poetry and Prose, 1962–63, 2005). In 1992 Lorenz initiated the comprehensive Fassbinder retrospectives in Berlin (1992), and at New York’s MoMA (1997), as well as at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2005). A milestone of Ms. Lorenz’ accomplishments was the restoration of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, released in 2007.Joe McElhaney teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College and the Ph.D. program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (SUNY Press) and Albert Maysles (University of Illinois Press), and the editor of Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (Wayne State University Press). He is currently editing A Companion to Fritz Lang for Blackwell Publishing.Laura McMahon is the Rosamund Chambers Research and Teaching Fellow in French at Girton College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (Legenda, forthcoming 2011) and the co-editor of Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture (Peter Lang, 2008). Her work on French cinema, philosophy, and theory has appeared in Paragraph, Modern and Contemporary France,Studies in French Cinema, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Film-Philosophy.Tobias Nagl is Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He has published extensively on German film history and is the author of the award-winning study Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino (“The Uncanny Machine: Race and Representation in Weimar Cinema”) (edition text+kritik, 2009). His scholarly interests include post-colonialism and critical race studies, avant-garde film, black diasporic cinema, film history and theory.Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and a Professor of Film Studies at Yale University, and editor of this volume. She is currently at work on Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Earlier books include The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford University Press, 2007), Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton University Press, 1995), and Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (Yale University Press, 1987). She is the author of many essays on questions of representation in film and literature and serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the Combined Program in Film at Yale.Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (2007) and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007). His articles have appeared in New German Critique, Modern Language Review, and Art History. Most recently he has co-edited the collections The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010) and Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (2008). He is currently editing Blackwell’s Companion to Werner Herzog.Brian Price is Associate Professor of Film and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics and co-editor of On Michael Haneke (with John David Rhodes) and Color, the Film Reader (with Angela Dalle Vacche). He is a founding editor of World Picture.Eric Rentschler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University where he also serves on the Committee on Film and Visual Studies. His books include West German Film in the Course of Time (Redgrave, 1984) and The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard University Press, 1996). He is the editor of German Film and Literature (Methuen, 1986), West German Filmmakers on Film (Holmes & Meier, 1988), Augenzeugen (Verlag der Autoren, 1988; second updated edition 2001, with Hans Helmut Prinzler), and The Films of G.W. Pabst (Rutgers University Press, 1990). His current book project is “Haunted by Hitler: The Return of the Nazi Undead” (to be published by Harvard University Press).John David Rhodes is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2007), the co-editor of On Michael Haneke (2010), and The Place of the Moving Image (forthcoming 2011), and a founding co-editor of the journal World Picture. He is also the author of a forthcoming monograph on Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. His essays have appeared in Log, Modernism/modernity, Framework, and various edited collections.Nadine Schwakopf earned a law degree at Passau University in Germany, as well as a Master’s degree in French Studies from the University of Montréal, Canada, with a thesis on Claude Cahun and Unica Zürn. Currently, she is a student in the Ph.D. program of Yale University’s German Department. Her main interests lie in the fields of media theory, gender studies, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction.Elke Siegel received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and is an Assistant Professor of German Studies at Cornell University. She has published articles on Thomas Bernhard, Rainald Goetz, Ludwig Binswanger, and others, and has authored monographs on the Swiss writer Robert Walser and friendship in Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka. Currently, she is working on a study of the diary from the eighteenth century to the present.Olga Solovieva studied German and Comparative Literature and Film at the Moscow State University, FU Berlin, UMass, Amherst, and Yale, has taught in Film Studies Programs at Smith College, Yale, and Georgia Tech, and has published on film in Film Comment, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Zhongguo xueshu (China Scholarship), and Italian Culture.

Acknowledgments

Juliane Lorenz, President of the Fassbinder Foundation, has been a source of inspiration and support for this venture. The Foundation’s important work of releasing digitally re-mastered DVDs of Fassbinder’s films ensures that Fassbinder’s work is increasingly – and more beautifully – available to scholars and fans.

Heartfelt thanks go to Jayne Fargnoli, Executive Editor at Wiley-Blackwell, for her enthusiastic sponsorship of this project, and for the patience with which she oversaw its completion. Her open-mindedness and well-informed opinions have made it a pleasure to work with her. I have also had good advice from editors of other volumes in the Companion series – especially from Roy Grundmann, Tom Leitch, and Brad Prager – and I thank them for their counsel and support.This volume could not have been completed without the help of Lucian Ghita, a candidate for the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University, who assisted me with computer-related and other matters essential to preparing the manuscript for publication.

As ever, and most importantly, my husband Paul H. Fry has been a vital source of support. Essex, too, has contributed to my peace of mind during the process of assembling this volume.

Introduction

Brigitte Peucker

Despite the untimely death that ended his career at the age of thirty-seven in 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains the preeminent filmmaker of the New German Cinema, the international presence of which was established in the 1970s. There is a large body of work: during a career that spanned sixteen years, Fassbinder directed thirty-six feature-length films (primarily from his own scripts), two television series (the second, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1979–80, is over fifteen hours long), four short films, two documentaries for television, twenty-four stage plays, and four radio plays. He wrote, co-wrote, or adapted thirty-one plays; his poetry has recently been published. As an actor Fassbinder performed in thirty-six films (many of them directed by others) and in any number of plays. Under the pseudonym Franz Walsch, Fassbinder co-edited many of his own films, and he is known to have taken over the camera from time to time. An auteur par excellence, Fassbinder imposed his unique aesthetic on his co-workers as well as his texts, acquiring a reputation as something of a tyrant in the process.

During a two-year stint in underground theater, Fassbinder was the central figure in an ensemble of actors with whom he worked closely in the years of filmmaking that followed. The Action-Theater group, which Fassbinder joined in 1967, and of which he soon became the leader, dissolved, then reformed to become the antiteater in June 1968. Alongside the experimental plays this collective collaborated upon, they began to work in film. Their first feature, Love is Colder than Death, was shot in 1969, one of eleven feature-length films produced by this group with Fassbinder as its director. Undoubtedly his theater work shaped Fassbinder’s filmmaking, but no more than the films he’d watched avidly since early childhood. There were the Hollywood films of Douglas Sirk, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Josef von Sternberg, Nicholas Ray, and Orson Welles, as well as the European art films of Max Ophüls, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Noted less frequently as an influence on Fassbinder is the German cinema of the Weimar period, from which he learned a great deal about mise-en-scène and the image. Intertextual in the extreme, straddling high and low culture, Fassbinder’s films reference not only filmic and theatrical traditions, but a rich literary and visual culture as well.

Of particular interest, too, is the way Fassbinder’s films locate themselves with respect to the cataclysmic events of German twentieth-century history. While obviously in evidence in Despair (1977) and the films that Fassbinder retrospectively called the BRD trilogy, the Nazi period, its anticipation, and its aftermath find their way into most of his films. Intense controversy has been generated by the perceived politics of several of his texts: charges of anti-Semitism most notably surround the play Garbage, the City, and Death (1974–75), and its several attempted stagings. Needless to say, his films’ orientation towards the politics of the late 1960s and 1970s is also centrally significant: whether they address the effects of capitalism and the “economic miracle” or problems of race and gender, Germany’s socio-political world enters the texture of Fassbinder’s films directly and indirectly, reflected in mise-en-scène and narrative alike. Fassbinder’s filmic responses to terrorist activities are complex and diverse, as suggested by his contribution to Germany in Autumn (1977), as well as to Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) and The Third Generation (1978–79), both of which outraged the German left. Given his sexual orientation, it is surprising that Fassbinder’ s highly personal approach to filmmaking resulted in only two explicitly lesbian and gay films – films that were often faulted by contemporary gay critics – but much of his work suggests a queer subject position that begs for queer theory approaches.

Long revered by historians and theorists of cinema, the director who was once the enfant terrible of the German scene is now touted by an international cultural establishment. Major retrospectives of his films were held in Berlin and Paris in 2005. Re-mastered prints of Fassbinder films released on DVD by the Fassbinder Foundation have in past years contributed to his international reputation – witness the stir created in the , the , and in numerous film journals by the 2007 release of , Fassbinder’s epochal film. It is an ideal time, then, to revisit Fassbinder’s cinematic achievements with a comprehensive volume of new critical essays, one that expands the existing field of study by positioning his films within a broad range of filmic as well as cultural issues. Fassbinder’s oeuvre demands interdisciplinary approaches: this volume draws primarily on new work by scholars from the fields of Film Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, French and German Studies, from Comparative Literature and the Arts. The collection’s many contributors hail from the UK, Europe, and Canada as well as the United States. Their approaches are diverse; their work both well informed and fresh.