The failure of the political protest movement was a defining event for Fassbinder's generation. In this key film of its period, akin to Godard's Weekend in France, Fassbinder and codirector Michael Fengler use a true story of a fifteenth-century social and religious uprising to, in Fassbinder's words, "show how and why a revolution fails." In 1476, a shepherd, Hans Böhm, who claimed to have seen the Mother of God, preached a doctrine against vested privilege to some thirty thousand followers. Five months after his vision he was burned at the stake. The film brings in quotations from Camillo Torres, the Black Panthers, the student movement, Weekend, and Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes. The renegade lay preacher is arrested by both German police and American M.P.s, and the auto-da-fe takes place in an auto graveyard. Among other antiteater members (Irm Hermann, Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla), Fassbinder plays the "Black Monk," a young leather-jacketed follower of the preacher, and Margit Carstensen (Petra von Kant), a wealthy woman who confuses religious and sexual fervor.