The further adventures of Franz (here, Harry Baer) and Joanna (Hanna Schygulla) and their friends: Fassbinder begins to create, with his antiteater actors, a stable of characters whose names, and bits of whose lives, will circulate through many films to come. Gods of the Plague is a gritty lowlife gangster flick in which the camera gets all the best lines. Sam Fuller comes to mind. But Fassbinder doesn't just distill the American/French gangster film down to its Dead End; he's clearly in the ancient underworlds of G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box) and Fritz Lang. (For starters, try the mirror shot in Joanna's dressing room in which even Dietrich makes an appearance.) Franz Walsch (curiously, the nom-de-scissors of the editor on these early films as well) is a smalltime crook, just out of jail, who is loved by three women-baby-faced prostie Schygulla, working girl Margarethe von Trotta, and weird Ingrid Caven-and whose blaze of glory comes in the white heat of a supermarket aisle. Peer Raben's music is essential to this and every other Fassbinder film. Repeated Sunday, July 6.