Fassbinder's Favorites

11/1/13 to 12/14/13

This sidebar to our Fassbinder retrospective offers a taste of the director's favorites, crammed full of all the fantastic things that make life worth living, ranging from the Hollywood melodramas and genre films that he adored to French masterpieces from Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson.

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Past Films

  • Johnny Guitar

    • Saturday, December 14 6:30 pm

    Nicholas Ray (U.S., 1954). Saloonkeeper Joan Crawford faces Mercedes McCambridge and her vengeful mob in Ray's baroque, gender-bending Western passion play. Fassbinder named it one of his top ten favorite films. (110 mins)

  • Vivre sa vie

    • Friday, November 22 7 pm

    Jean-Luc Godard (France, 1962). Godard's fragmentary portrait of a prostitute makes Anna Karina an object of endless visual fascination, and inspired Fassbinder to cast Karina in Chinese Roulette. “A film of extraordinary purity. ” (Manny Farber). (85 mins)

  • Pickpocket

    • Friday, November 15 7 pm

    Robert Bresson (France, 1959). A Parisian thief's anguish and redemption are played out in Bresson's austere yet compassionate reworking of Crime and Punishment. “It is one of those consummate works of art which in one flash pales everything you have ever seen . . . an unmitigated masterpiece” (Paul Schrader). (75 mins)

  • Written on the Wind

    • Friday, November 1 8:50 pm

    Douglas Sirk (U.S., 1956). Robert Stack, Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, and Dorothy Malone star in Sirk's fever-dream of a melodrama about the emotional wreckage of an oil-rich family. “In Written on the Wind the good, the ‘normal,' the ‘beautiful' are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one's compassion,” observed Fassbinder. (99 mins)