Movies: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Beautiful, detached, laconic, consumptive Lily Brest is a streetwalker with few clients. She loves her idle boyfriend Raoul who gambles away what little she earns. The town's power broker, called the rich Jew, discovers she is a good listener, so she...

This is a 45 minute interview with RWF in the kitchen in a house he had rented close to Paris at that time. Four years before his untimely death the interview shows a quite relaxed and patient Fassbinder who answers all kinds of (often contrafactual ...

Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the anger of her father, whose inces...

A childish wife reveals surprising strength when faced with blackmail. Based on A Doll's House by Ibsen, this is a video recording made for German television....

Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Bla...

Nightclub singer La Paloma succumbs to the persistent courting of a chubby rich admirer and marries him. Before the marriage, she was thought to be dying, but soon she is well. She believes her husband's love has cured her, but her efforts to love hi...

Peter grew up during the economic miracle, bereft of parental care and love. Learning early on that interpersonal relationships are based on the principles of exchange or purchase, he abides by these rules and gives generous presents to his family an...

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A young man named Jürgen joins the military. As much as he tries to make a heroic career as a soldier in a rearmed West Germany, he fails utterly and ends up in a bizarre sanatorium....

Inspired by the real life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX Century. Mathias stole from the riches to give to the poor, becoming a hero for the rural people, and a popular social rebel. He was...

A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She def...

Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight nai...

An adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "The Lady Larkspur Lotion" created by Douglas Sirk with the assistance of his film students and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It depicts the conflict between a dreamy, delusional heroine and her brusque, practical lan...

An African-American GI retires from the US Army in West Berlin to live with his (white) girlfriend, who already has a baby with another black man. After an argument with her family, she deserts him as well. Despite finding a job and a new place to li...

An intriguing Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice over narration. Sudden Wealth is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry ...

The main characters in this film are wives of rich men who have nothing to do because they have staff – like the cook, the maid, the hairdresser, the manicurist, the governess, the teacher, the tailor etc. – who work for them. Naturally, the wives th...

Berta, a naive young maid, searches for love when the army engineers come to town to build a bridge....

Douglas speaks about some of the stars he has directed like Asta Nielsen, Lili Dagover, Zarah Leander, George Sanders, Signe Hasso, Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Wyman and many others....

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