Rainer Werner Fassbinder

8/29/03 to 9/24/03

Katzelmacher, September 6, 7|

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Past Films

VERONIKA VOSS
- Wednesday, September 24 5:00 PM
"Like most of Fassbinder's best films, this is about a loser: a fading movie star of the '40s who finds the '50s bearable only with the help of morphine. Shot in gleaming B&W...reminding us, long after Melville and his whale, that white can be as terrifying as black."-N.Y. Film Festival
SATAN'S BREW
- Wednesday, September 24 7:05 PM
"Fassbinder doesn't make 'comedies'...he makes ironies, and he's never been more brilliantly ironic than in this examination of a sadistic anti-hero," played by Kurt Raab.-Soho Weekly News
MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN
- Saturday, September 20 7:00 PM
A factory worker goes postal, making his widow one old and very confused poster girl for the Left. A brittle Brechtian parable of political exploitation that had the distinction of being banned from the Berlin Film Festival. Can't take a joke, or even a tragedy.
FOX AND HIS FRIENDS
- Friday, September 19 7:00 PM
Fassbinder is the star of this powerful psychodrama in the guise of a fable, in which a good-natured prole wins the lottery and is skillfully, ruthlessly exploited by his wealthy boyfriend. A great example of the director's vision of "love as the most insidious instrument of repression."
FEAR OF FEAR
- Wednesday, September 17 5:30 PM
Margit Carstensen portrays a young mother in the grip of anxiety. Vincent Canby called this small film "perfectly sculpted...a distillation of reality-a dream in which everything counts."-N.Y. Times
CHINESE ROULETTE
- Wednesday, September 17 7:20 PM
Fassbinder out-Buñuels the master in this camp satire on the haute bourgeoisie starring Anna Karina and Margit Carstensen. "The humor fits the cruelty like a boot fits a groin."-Time Out
EFFI BRIEST
- Saturday, September 13 6:30 PM
Fontane's 19th-century novel adapted into a classic and elegant film. "What Fassbinder has achieved with detachment and easy grace is a kaleidoscopic perspective on the moral attitudes taken by all those involved with Effi...delicately and willfully portrayed by Hanna Schygulla."-Judy Stone, S.F. Chronicle
BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE
- Friday, September 12 7:30 PM
"In this film about filmmaking (not to mention the tortuous Fassbinder scene), the director cast Lou Castel as a director, calling it 'a comedy about myself as seen from the outside.'"-Village Voice
THE AMERICAN SOLDIER
- Wednesday, September 10 5:30 PM
Fassbinder called this film about a Vietnam vet in Munich "a study of a perfect killer." David Denby called it "a film esthete's dream of a gangster movie, all languorous gesture and sullen aggression."-N.Y. Times
GODS OF THE PLAGUE
- Wednesday, September 10 7:10 PM
A lowlife gangster flick in which the camera gets all the best lines. With Schygulla, Von Trotta, Ingrid Caven. With short Little Chaos.
KATZELMACHER
- Sunday, September 7 5:30 PM
The name means "troublemaker," fitting for Fassbinder, who cast himself as a despised immigrant worker, the butt of bored youth in a Munich backwater. "A gritty, low-budget tour de force."-Village Voice. This screening does not include short.
GODS OF THE PLAGUE
- Sunday, September 7 7:20 PM
A lowlife gangster flick in which the camera gets all the best lines. With Schygulla, Von Trotta, Ingrid Caven.
LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH
- Saturday, September 6 5:00 PM
"A restless and sombre foray into the black-and-white world of the Hollywood gangster film as interpreted by B-movie mavericks [and] stripped bare by Fassbinder."-Time Out
KATZELMACHER
- Saturday, September 6 7:00 PM
The name means "troublemaker," fitting for Fassbinder, who cast himself as a despised immigrant worker, the butt of bored youth in a Munich backwater. "A gritty, low-budget tour de force."-Village Voice. With short City Tramp.
THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN
- Friday, September 5 7:00
Hanna Schygulla became the new Dietrich with her ironic performance as an emblem of Germany's postwar economic miracle. "Brilliantly complex...splendid and mysterious."-N.Y. Times
THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT
- Friday, September 5 9:20
A fashion designer is slowly unraveled by love. Fassbinder divas Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen in "a haute-couture lesbian pajama party with silken, knowing dialogue."-New Yorker
THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS
- Wednesday, September 3 7:00
"Arguably Fassbinder's masterpiece, this deadpan, crystalline evocation of petit bourgeois misery inaugurated a new phase in his career, coinciding with his growing reputation abroad."-Village Voice
ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL
- Wednesday, September 3 8:50
The unlikely love between a washerwoman in her sixties and a Moroccan guest worker twenty years her junior is the subject of Fassbinder's bitter and touching homage to Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.
THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN
- Sunday, August 31
Hanna Schygulla became the new Dietrich with her ironic performance as an emblem of Germany's postwar economic miracle. "Brilliantly complex...splendid and mysterious."-N.Y. Times
ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL
- Saturday, August 30 5:00 PM
The unlikely love between a washerwoman in her sixties and a Moroccan guest worker twenty years her junior is the subject of Fassbinder's bitter and touching homage to Douglas Sirk.
THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS
- Saturday, August 30 7:00
The story of a hapless fruit peddler told as "a virtuoso balance of soap opera, social comedy, irony, politics, farce, and brilliant ensemble acting."-New Yorker Films
THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT
- Friday, August 29 7:00 PM
The well-crafted world of a famous designer is slowly unraveled by the treachery of love. "A haute-couture lesbian pajama party with silken, knowing dialogue."-David Denby, New Yorker '03

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

8/29/03 to 9/24/03

Starting Labor Day weekend and continuing through mid-September, we have the opportunity to look again at films of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982), presented in new 35mm prints created for a touring program on the twentieth anniversary of the artist's death.

Fassbinder seemingly overnight went from enfant terrible to being the driving force behind the New German Cinema, and one of the most influential artists of the postwar European scene, with a prodigious output as director, actor, author, and playwright. With a stock team of collaborators from the antiteater troupe, Fassbinder created a mirror for postwar German society in the individual souls of his characters, from the put-upon peddler in The Merchant of Four Seasons to the drug-addicted movie star of Veronika Voss, all of them playing a sucker's game, with only a director's love to lend them dignity. Fassbinder, who escaped an unhappy childhood into cinema, was seemingly incapable of a boring shot, and yet was able to infuse tenderness into the most perverse situation. In this he surpasses even his Hollywood mentor, the German émigré Douglas Sirk, whose melodramas, Fassbinder said, “convinced (me) that love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.” This reprise of his work will introduce a new generation of viewers to the deeply felt humanity his films daringly explore.

Judy Bloch

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The Fassbinder touring retrospective is presented by Wellspring, in association with The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation. The PFA presentation is supported in part by Goethe-Institut in San Francisco.