Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Film Career

Film Career

Starting at age 21, Fassbinder made over 40 films and TV dramas in 15 years, along with directing numerous plays for the theatre. These films were largely written or adapted for the screen by Fassbinder himself. He was also art director on most of the early films, editor or co-editor on many of them (often credited as Franz Walsh, though the spelling varies), and he acted in nineteen of his own films as well as for other directors. He wrote fourteen plays, created new versions of six classical plays, and directed or co-directed twenty-five stage plays. He wrote and directed four radio plays and wrote song lyrics. In addition, he wrote thirty-three screenplays and collaborated with other screenwriters on thirteen more. On top of this, he occasionally performed many other roles such as cinematographer and producer on a small number of them. Working with a regular group of actors and technicians, he was able to complete films ahead of schedule and often under budget and thus compete successfully for government subsidies. He worked fast, typically omitting rehearsals and going with the first take.

There are three distinct phases to Fassbinder’s career. His first ten movies (1969–1971) were an extension of his work in the theater, shot usually with a static camera and with deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue.

The second phase is the one that brought him international attention, with films modeled, to ironic effect, on the melodramas Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood in the 1950s. In these films, Fassbinder explored how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientation, politics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday fascism of family life and friendship.

The final films, from around 1977 until his death, were more varied, with international actors sometimes used and the stock company disbanded (although the casts of some films were still filled with Fassbinder regulars). He became increasingly more idiosyncratic in terms of plot, form and subject matter in movies like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), The Third Generation (1979) and Querelle (1982). He also articulated his themes in the bourgeois milieu with his trilogy about women in post-fascist Germany: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), The Angst of Veronica Voss and Lola.

"I would like to build a house with my films," Fassbinder once remarked. "Some are the cellars, others the walls, still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house."