FASSBINDER, RAINER WERNER.   Term Paper ID:20318 Click to get this paper

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Paper Abstract: Life & career of German filmmaker. Influences, style, major works. Paper Introduction: INTRODUCTION Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the most prominent and most prolific of the filmmakers of the New German Cinema, a revival of the once-vital German film industry after the first version had been destroyed by World War II. There were films made in Germany in the interim, but they were films associated with American companies or British companies and were primarily programmers, imitations of American melodramas, horror pictures, British mysteries, and the like. A serious German cinema simply did not exist in any degree that could capture the attention of the world market. In the 1960s, young filmmakers felt the need for a change and issued the Oberhausen Manifesto, generally regarded as the beginning of the New German Cinema, though of the 26 signatories only one, Alexander Kluge, would later achieve Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. INFLUENCES Fassbinder actually made two short films some time before joining theaction-theater troupe: "The City Tramp" and "The Little Chaos." Clearly,the post-Brechtian theater was an influence on the developing writer andfilmmaker, and its anarchy and anti-establishment bent would color hiswork. A serious German cinema simply did notexist in any degree that could capture the attention of the world market.In the 196 s, young filmmakers felt the need for a change and issued theOberhausen Manifesto, generally regarded as the beginning of the New GermanCinema, though of the 26 signatories only one, Alexander Kluge, would laterachieve world prominence. These characters often blindly and evenviolently lash out to defend themselves as best they can against forcesbeyond their control. . The first ofthese is noted by Fassbinder himself when he says that his 197 film Bewareof a Holy Whore marks a turning point in his filmmaking and a departurefrom the direct use of autobiographical material. the parody, the exaggeration, the stylization with which Fassbinder had previosuly tackled potential triviality are here replaced with the revelation of human reality behind the routines of melodrama, the truth behind the clichés (Sandford 75- 76).This film was one of the major critical successes of Fassbinder's career. "The Doll in the Doll: Observations on Fassbinder's Films." In Fassbinder, 25-56. By the mid-197 s he hadmade nearly 3 features in a variety of genres: gangster films, politicalsatire, screwball comedy, adaptations of classical literature, sciencefiction, a Western, and a number of domestic melodramas. He was born in 1946 at a small spa in southwestern Bavaria. The fragmentation ofimagery and the experimental use of color are seen as well in Veronika Voss(1982), Fassbinder's third film in his later period about Germany in the195 s as beset by a form of post-war despair. The outward simplicity of Fear Eatsthe Soul emphasizes the naturalness of the relationship between the blackimmigrant and the elderly Emmi and thus highlights the prejudice in thereaction of others to this union. The stylistic elements employed by Fassbinder are varied and oftenexperimental. The film has a gangster setting, which would infuse thefilms of Fassbinder's early period, and though the film is darklypessimistic, it is also marked by flashes of comic relief. The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) represents a shift in directionand a maturing of style for Fassbinder: . She left him largelyto his own devices, sending the boy off to the movies whenever possible.Sandford writes: Fassbinder's childhood clearly left its mark on him and his films: the cold, lonely lives of his characters and their desperate longing for love and affection are a reflection of his own early experience. There were films made in Germany in the interim, but theywere films associated with American companies or British companies and wereprimarily programmers, imitations of American melodramas, horror pictures,British mysteries, and the like. The camera, however, moves selectively,forcing the viewer to observe in a way that would be impossible to controlon a theater stage. A month later, tenmembers, including Fassbinder, resurfaced as the anti-teater at the MunichAcademy of Fine Arts, and in 1968 the group found a home in a bar inSchwabing. His firstoriginal play was Katzelmacher, which he would later make into his secondfeature film. He was a prolific filmmaker, turning out asmany as six films in one year, and he usually filmed quickly in a way thatgave his films immediacy without sacrificing the quality of performance.He helped extend the reach of the New German Cinema to the outside worldand contributed to a shift in thinking both about German film and aboutfilmmaking in general. "Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Alienated Vision." In Klaus Phillips (ed.). The Bremer Theater also showed Fassbinder'sfirst two films, Love Is Colder Than Death and Katzelmacher (Sandford 63-65). In his masterpiece, EffieBriest, he forces the viewer to distance him or herself from the materialthrough the use of narration and stylization, including the use ofexplanatory subtitles, to create a disjunction between the realisticportrayal on the screen and the theatricality of the viewing andinterpretive experience (Kuhn 1 1). Kuhn also notes that fundamental to an understanding of all ofFassbinder's work is his conception of his characters as the victims of animpersonal, alienated society. THE FILMS AND STYLISTIC ELEMENTS Certainly, Fassbinder's style was not fully formed with his firstfeature, Love Is Colder Than Death, but there are many elements in thisfilm that would mark the body of his work and identify themes he madeuniquely his own. His theatrical roots come to the fore in set-piece filmslike The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, all of which takes place in oneroom as if on a theater set. And yet eachtries desperately to make their thoughts and their desires their own"(Wiegand 35). The New German Cinema. Fassbinder was educated at a Rudolf Steiner school and then atsecondary schools in Augsburg and Munich before leaving school in 1964,after which he took on a number of different jobs, including office work,decorating, and a post in the archives of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. "A Cinema of Vicious Circles." In Tony Rayns (ed.) Fassbinder, 24-36. LIFE Rainer Werner Fassbinder performed as an actor and wrote the scriptsfor nearly all his films as well as directing them. The German director Douglas Sirk, who had a long Hollywoodcareer, was one such influence, and his film Imitation of Life (1959) aparticular favorite of Fassbinder's. Fassbinder isclosely identified with the New German Cinema, and it as his 1973 film FearEats the Soul that brought the New German Cinema to the attention of awider public outside West Germany (Sandford 63-64). The Hollywood film was a major influence on Fassbinder, though hereshaped it to his own purposes even as he sought to recreate it on aGerman basis. This is Fassbinder's most theatrical film; it was basedon his play, and the original five-act structure is retained. The films after thisperiod have a greater social relevance and broader audience appeal,examining such themes as homosexuality (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,1972; The Fox and His Friends, 1974); the problems of the immigrant workerin Germany (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1973); the bankruptcy of the Left(Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, 1975); and feminist issues (Effi Briest,1974). INTRODUCTION Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the most prominent and mostprolific of the filmmakers of the New German Cinema, a revival of the once-vital German film industry after the first version had been destroyed byWorld War II. His childhood was filledwith literature and art, but still it was a lonely childhood. He produced and editedfilms and also composed music and wrote songs. New York: Da Capo, 198 .Töteberg, Michael and Leo A. Works CitedElsaesser, Thomas. The New GermanCinema was now a reality, and Fassbinder would become one of its mostprolific and prominent representatives. (Sandford 64). New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984.Sandford, John. Hebegan attending a private drama school, and in 1967 he joined one of thefringe theater groups in Munich, the action-theater, where he first actedin, then directed, then wrote adaptations of various plays. The final period noted by Kuhncomes with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) as Fassbinder achieved hisdream of creating the German Hollywood film (79). In his later films, such as Despair (1977), Fassbinder's work becomesmore complex. Kuhn cites thescene in which a motorcycle policeman is killed, and as he clutches hisstomach and doubles over he exclaims in English, "Oh, boy": Fassbinder's sense of irony comes to the fore in this sequence, in which he cites the genre he is emulating only to estrange the viewers by frustrating their expectations. Hisfather was a doctor and his mother a translator. As with Godard ten years earlier, imitations is scarcely the right word. This manipulation of viewer expectations plays an increasingly greater role in his later gangster movies (Kuhn 8 ). Yet, it must also be noted that using this theatrical style has ajarring effect for viewers used to conventional cinematic solutions.Throughout his career, Fassbinder tended to estrange the viewer by creatinga disjunction between expectation and delivery. From his earliest works, Fassbinder's writing and directing wereintensely personal statements, and a sense of desperate loneliness, clearlyderived form his childhood, infuses much of his work. CONCLUSION Fassbinder died in 1982. . In 1965, a body was set up to help subsidize newfilms by young directors, and a breakthrough occurred in 1966 when a filmproduced by Alexander Kluge received eight awards at the Venice Biennaleand several other films by young filmmakers achieved prominence as well.Opposition from the established film community, however, brought aboutlegislation that scotched the new movement, or at least set it back, untilthe Film/Television Agreement of 1974 which provided for grants for therealization of promising filmscripts (Sandford 13-16). Run Amok?,197 ). The film evokes memories of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows: "The melodrama of Sirk's films has become an important point of referencefor Fassbinder in his attempts to make German films in the Hollywoodmanner" (Sandford 84-85). The styleand content match: "Life for Petra is theater; the artificiality of herlife is underscored by a theatrical rather than a cinematic mise-en-scène"(Kuhn 95). Baltomore: Johns Hopkins, 1992.Wiegand, Wilfried. In the end, the victims become themselves theoppressors: Fassbinder's characters all seek human contact and warmth but are unable to break out of their innate loneliness and isolation to achieve a real communion with others. Fassbinder's early films were either largely derivative Hollywood-style gangster movies such as Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), Gods of thePlague (1969), and The American Soldier (197 ), or overt critiques of petit-bourgeois German society (Katzelmacher, 1969; Why Does Herr R. The police closed the theater on an excuse,claiming faulty electrical cables first and then that the theater hadbecome "political cabaret" contrary to its license. Kuhn finds thatFassbinder's development can be delineated in three phases. . Sandford notes that "the action-theater was very much of itstime, anarchic, subversive, and critical, reflecting and reacting to theevents of the day" (64). . He also addressed social issues in a way thathelped open the cinema to new examinations of homosexuality, feminism, andsimilar concerns. . He was also aplaywright, television writer, and radio writer. . Mirror imagery had long marked Fassbinder's style, and inDespair it reaches its height and achieves a thematic position in a filmabout reflections and distortions (Sandford 99-1 ). . London: British Film Institute, 1977.Kuhn, Anna K. Assorted influences can be found on Fassbinder's work at differentperiods. New York: Tanam Press, 1981.----------------------- 1 Not in the whole film. The film in this way addresses both theartificiality of racial prejudice and the neglected needs and rights of oldpeople. Fassbinder has acknowledged the importance of Sirk ininterviews: ". Kuhn notes: "Common to all, however, are the outsider 'hero,' thetheme of alienation, and (with the exception of Herr R.) stylized, staticcamera work and stylized acting" (79). Never. . actually ever since I saw his films and tried to writeabout them, Sirk's been in everything I've done" (Töteberg and Lensing 12). Fassbinder has noted that thecharacters live in prisons, separated from real life, and that in all theirlives "nothing is natural. His parentsdivorced in 1951, and the boy stayed with his mother. The Anarchy of the Imagination. What intervenes in both cases is an unhappy consciousness, a mixture of love of cinema and an acute sense of a historical position very different from the Hollywood of the Forties and Fifties, and an equally problematic discrepancy between movie-buff and movie-maker (Elsaesser 27). New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 197 s, 76-123. Prototypically modern creatures, they lack a means of self-expression (Kuhn 8 ). Lensing (eds.). In 1969, Fassbinder's work found a place in "establishment"theater at the Bremer Theater. With his first film, there is already evidence of astylistic gesture towards the aesthetic demands of commercial filmmaking inthe approach taken toward the material: Like Godard, Melville and others, Fassbinder started out by imitating American movies, in particular gangster films. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

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