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Auteur List: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
September 11 - December 31



Please submit a list of no less than ten and no more than twenty films/TV series/documentaries directed by RWF in ranked order to me, matt, by 12 PM Central Standard Time on Friday, December 31, 2021. Documentaries and films not directed by RWF are not eligible (not even if he wrote it, starred in it, or it's suggested he "ghost-directed" it).

Participation for this list should be easier than for Cary Grant or Catherine Deneuve because of the lower number of films under consideration and the general wide availability of most of the films.

DISCUSSION IS OPEN! Get your stompin' shoes on and let's gooooooo!



LINK TO RESULTS

Is this an actual thing?

(It's Rainer, though - or did he like to be known as a queen?)

Matt has seniority here, so if he wants to run this list he can run this list

Really cool. Like the lengthier timeline too.

Rayon Vert wrote: Sat Sep 11, 2021 10:15 pm Is this an actual thing?

(It's Rainer, though - or did he like to be known as a queen?)

Oops, this was supposed to be a Rob Reiner Auteur List, but autocorrect messed it up. I guess we’re stuck with this weird German guy now.

And it’s only as real as you and any other participants make it! What better way to spend the holiday season than with miserable people determined to make everyone around them just as miserable? Get the whole family together over some drinks to watch The Merchant of Four Seasons! Watch Martha with a date! Get the gal pals together to cheer on girlbosses Maria Braun and Petra von Kant! Celebrate the high life with Fox and Veronika Voss!

swo17 wrote: Sat Sep 11, 2021 10:25 pm Matt has seniority here, so if he wants to run this list he can run this list

True, but also worth noting for the record that Matt reached out to me first, and I am only too happy to have someone passionate about it leading the list! So yes Rayon Vert, it’s as real as it gets

What the hell. I'm in. I've watched only three Fassbinder films, and those like 13 years ago. Gotta to start filling in these gaps.

And of course my copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz is somewhere in my parents' house many kilometers away, so that one's out. Time to go see what the library has.

Will the mysterious Arrow box of new Fassbinder restorations make it in time?

I've never participated in any of these list projects, but this is one for me. Thanks Matt!

I own most of his readily available films on disc, but I'd love to use this as an excuse to track down some of the more rare films, which I've never seen. I see a few things appear to be on YouTube in terrible quality, with English subs (Theater in Trance, Like a Bird on a Wire, Nora Helmer, Bremen Freedom). Is this the only way to see them?

Would love to also find Lili Marleen, Germany in Autumn, Wildwechsel, and Women in New York, if anyone has any info where to find these.

Germany in Autumn is on the RWF Volume 2 DVD set by Artificial Eye, although I see it's fetching a hefty price now. I see it's also on a 2018 French Carlotta blu-ray set (also volume 2) but I imagine the subtitles are in French only.

Mr Sausage wrote: Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:07 am I've watched only three Fassbinder films, and those like 13 years ago. Gotta to start filling in these gaps.

You've got me beat; I actually haven't ever seen a Fassbinder feature in its entirety. That puts me really far behind the proverbial (and subject-appropriate) eight ball, so I can't 100% promise I'll see enough to submit a list, but the 3.5-month window should help with that.

Rayon Vert wrote: Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:42 am Germany in Autumn is on the RWF Volume 2 DVD set by Artificial Eye, although I see it's fetching a hefty price now. I see it's also on a 2018 French Carlotta blu-ray set (also volume 2) but I imagine the subtitles are in French only.

It's also on an Edition Filmmuseum DVD

I’ve seen sixteen Fassbinder-directed films. Really liked two of them, a few more were okay, the rest I didn’t care for or worse, and I think I’ve done more than my due diligence and have no interest in seeing more. But I wish many happy returns to my fellow mods if they undertake the RWF Challenge

Be sure to pick up your matching t-shirts on Etsy

Which were the two with your seal of approval?

The one illustrated above (Faustrecht der Freiheit) and Die Niklashauser Fart were my favorites, though I didn’t think they were amazing or anything. This just isn’t my guy!

I've been watching a little Fassbinder lately (Chinese Roulette, In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Marriage of Maria Braun, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) and I haven't hated anything so far, so I'll join in too. I liked Merchant of Four Seasons when I saw it a few years ago, and Fox and his Friends I saw in my teens and wouldn't mind revisiting. I gave up on Berlin Alexanderplatz a few episodes in.

My (elderly) mother has expressed an interest in Stoppard films, and I recall her liking Ali Fear Eats the Soul when we watched it together, so I'm considering renting her Despair. IMDb doesn't indicate disturbing content, and I'm getting the impression skimming through reviews that this is one of his more straightforwardly narrative films.

I'm interested in seeing more Schygulla/Fassbinder, plus Veronika Voss & Lola.

The first time I watched Berlin Alexanderplatz I thoroughly disliked it for the first 13 hours but by the time it ended I immediately wanted to see it again. Those are some of my favorite kinds of experiences

I have thoughts on Despair that I may expand on further after a rewatch, but I do want to say now that I don’t think it lives up to the names in the credits (though in fairness, I don’t think any film possibly could). It’s not Fassbinder or Stoppard or Bogarde or even Ballhaus at their best. And it’s not a good adaptation of a Nabokov novel (though I seriously doubt such a thing could exist, even if one very good film does bear some resemblance to something he once wrote). It and Querelle are notable examples of international prestige cinema of the time, films seemingly made to appeal purely to jet-setting film festival audiences—a tradition which continues proudly to this very day!

swo17 wrote: Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:27 am

Rayon Vert wrote: Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:42 am Germany in Autumn is on the RWF Volume 2 DVD set by Artificial Eye, although I see it's fetching a hefty price now. I see it's also on a 2018 French Carlotta blu-ray set (also volume 2) but I imagine the subtitles are in French only.

It's also on an Edition Filmmuseum DVD

And it was released on DVD in the US by Facets in 2010 as part of their “Alexander Kluge Collection,” probably still available used or at libraries.

I've seen ten scattered over the years, a handful several times, and I've had pretty varied reactions even when revisiting some of them—I've loved and disliked Petra, Ali, and Fox on various watches, for example. Fassbinder's unflinching cruelty can so easily overwhelm the already overwhelming emotional complexity of his stories to the extent that distaste over-rides any appreciation I might have for how skillfully it's done. I'll be curious whether that gets worse or better with a more intentional and concentrated tour of his filmography.

As for Berlin Alexanderplatz, I never made it past the fourth episode, which I recall being so harrowing that I couldn't muster the courage to continue.

Should we go ahead and get a ruling on whether Fassbinder's acting credits in other directors' work will qualify?

Oh whoops–we already have!

I didn’t do write-ups of what I’ve watched in the past several weeks but I’ll try summarizing my experience. As I wrote in the other thread, I started in on the filmography some years ago now but interrupted myself having gotten not very far in. So I rewatched those early experimental/avant-garde/metafictional features – Love Is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher, Gods of the Plague, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Rio das Mortes, The Niklashausen Journey, The American Soldier – and have to say I enjoyed them more this time around. (Gods of the Plague was still a tough, somewhat impenetrable slog though, and the late 60s/early 70s Godardian The Niklashausen Journey, a lot of tableaux scenes, à la Wind from the East, while fun in parts ends up in the end feeling a little tiresome – while on the contrary the perverse Herr R. I really liked from the get-go). I think I may have been a bit down in the dumps the first time around, so I had a more critical distance this go-round. It helped watching the films having a reading companion in the Christian Thomsen book that provides context and enables to better understand and appreciate the director’s vision and the development of his artistic journey. I found myself getting attached to watching that development unfold, and part of the pleasure is watching Fassbinder use the same company of actors in all of the movies (a pleasure which continues later on even though the Antiteater commune is disbanded).

From here on out, though, it’s all virgin territory to me. Beware of a Holy Whore is a remarkable film-about-filmmaking that sums up and self-critiques all of that earlier work but is definitely executed on a higher, very impressive level. The Adrian Martin commentary (on the 2016 Arrow blu-ray set) was illuminating, especially in picking up on the differences between the extremely long takes that make up the first half of the film where it’s all about the film’s participants lounging around and behaving miserably with one another in the hotel lobby, and the second half where the actual film-making starts and the cuts just get quicker and quicker and more disorientating, including jumps forwards and backwards, and we begin to wonder at times if we’re watching Fassbinder’s film or the film in the film. (Fun fact: this is one of Bob Dylan’s favorite movies.)

Fassbinder changes his style radically after this, moving in the direction of much more mainstream, commercially accessible films, inspired by the discovery of Sirk’s 1950s melodramas, which comes through powerfully and unmistakably in the viewing. I can’t remember seeing a filmmaker change his style so completely, but even more impressive is how he so immediately showcased an equal mastery in this new vein, and succeeded so completely also in merging his themes and new visual style with that of the older director’s. (In such an extremely short and compressed time period as well.) The Merchant of Four Seasons is an emotionally searing and visually powerful experience (great Sirkian use of colors), and just blew me away. (I’ve got to say something about the commentary for this film, also in the Arrow set, where the two scholars are keen to try to repair what apparently has been the historical tendency of critics, including Thomsen, to view the Irm Hermann character negatively – whose performance here I found really exceptional –, but in so doing they dump so hard and contemptuously instead on the male titular character, one of them venting his irritation at the hunched over Hans as his paranoid depression gets more intense, to the point of almost telling him to “man up”, that they inadvertently start coming across themselves like the non-empathic, repressive and aggressive products of the sick society the whole of Fassbinder’s work denounces!).

I was a little lukewarm on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as it started, with its very stage-bound quality (and perhaps feeling I was seeing something a little predictable unfold as I had read up on the film before). It struck me like an agonizing Bergman chamber drama, very much like Cries and Whispers in the same year for example, but Ballhaus’ cinematography is completely captivating and the film just ramps up so much by the celebrated fourth act that it’s an extremely exhilarating and awe-inspiring experience to watch the dramatic, insane catharsis.

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Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day. I’ve just finished this 8-hour made-for-television series so I can do a proper write-up. To matt’s point earlier, this is definitely something you could watch with your family or with a romantic partner you’re getting to know! It’s radically different in spirit with what comes before (even though we sense some of the same concerns at play), its optimism a marked contrast, and I gather as well to the rest of what follows in the oeuvre. The Criterion backcover describes the series as one of the director’s “experiments with the possibilities of melodrama”, but that doesn’t seem at all right to me. It’s really comedy drama, the tone very different from the previous two films, almost flirting with your typical 70s sit-com(dram) at times (Eight Is Enough?). Except that it’s grounded in the lives and problems of an extended working class family, and there’s as much emphasis on what occurs in the factory as in the private sphere (family, love), and there’s a politically progressive, quasi-socialist interrogation (and building political consciousness on the workers’ part) of the social-structural conditions that create some of the difficulties in their lives. (No wonder some head guy at the television network cancelled the series after five episodes.) (Reminds me also of how Godard’s more politically-motivated films during this period and thereafter started to acknowledge and focus on the centrality of work in his characters’ lives – Tout va bien also in a factory and in this same year perhaps being the most obvious example).

So there’s a grounded realism, but at the same time Fassbinder allows himself to get quite light – perhaps never more so than in the second episode, for example, where the eccentric but resourceful Grandma and the boyfriend she’s just picked up in the park and decided will be her partner go searching for an affordable apartment then get involved in a crazy scheme to start an illegal kindergarten to help fill a social need in that neighborhood. There’s a lot of emphasis on the slight kookiness of the characters here, but since it’s grounded in that overall realism it turns out sweet without ever being silly or shallow.

The optimism that contrasts with the director’s usual work comes out of the way every episode is about solving some kind of problem(s), whether at the factory or their personal lives, and the characters collaborating and helping each other to come up with solutions, that usually end up working. By the end of the series as we head into a potentially major confrontation occurring between the workers and the managers of the factory, things work out perhaps a little more neatly than they would in actual life, but it never comes across as facile or unrealistic either. In a similar way, even though Kurt Raab is again the Darth Vader of the piece playing an über-authoritarian father, a further nasty development from the brother-in-law he also played in The Merchant of Four Seasons (and making miserable the life of the same cute little girl who played in that film), on the whole, even with all the idiosyncrasies and conflicts, there’s more function than dysfunction in the extended family, we don’t get the usual feeling of the director viewing the institution itself as inherently or unredeemingly repressive, and love is not colder than death.

I’ll also mention there’s usually a remote quality to Hanna Schygulla’s performances before this (which gets satirized in Beware of a Holy Whore), but it’s refreshing to see that absent here and something completely different from her.

The characters are very well drawn and endearing, and the whole thing just has a lot of charm and entertainment value. Within the first minutes of the first episode you’re acclimated very quickly and easily into this universe and immediately hooked – it’s amazing how Fassbinder was able, as he did also in The Merchant of Four Seasons, to have the whole world and story set up within minutes of the film starting. Also amazing, of course, that he had so many story ideas to fill out all of these films and television episodes in such a compacted time, and that the quality of the filmmaking (at this point at any rate) never lets up. This was shot on 16 mm, but I couldn’t tell, the quality of the elements and the transfer are that good.

A must-see in my view, and highly recommended if some of you haven’t seen this and start feeling you’re getting mired in the more depressing material during this project.

senseabove wrote: Sun Sep 12, 2021 3:10 am Should we go ahead and get a ruling on whether Fassbinder's acting credits in other directors' work will qualify?

I considered allowing them because it does stretch the idea of what an auteur is (especially as he appears so often in his own films), but given the problems of participation and availability of films, restricting the project to its pre-existing parameters seemed best.

Rayon Vert wrote:Germany in Autumn is on the RWF Volume 2 DVD set by Artificial Eye, although I see it's fetching a hefty price now. I see it's also on a 2018 French Carlotta blu-ray set (also volume 2) but I imagine the subtitles are in French only.

It’s also available from Edition Filmmuseum (or was), as it’s primarily a Kluge project. Lili Marleen was released by Madman on DVD a long time ago - likely OOP now. Wildwechsel is great, but won’t be released. That and Bremen Freiheit are my favourite of the unavailable films. The latter will be way at the bottom of the restoration pile I expect, because of the way it was produced (for TV, with outlandish use of primitive video effects.) It has been screened on film for decades, however, so it’s not out of the question.

Thanks for taking this on, Matt. A list project I can actually get excited about.

Word to the wise: Berlin Alexanderplatz might be a lot to process, but it’s not missable. I’d recommend you get plenty of shorter Fassbinders under your belt before tackling it, though.

domino harvey wrote:The one illustrated above (Faustrecht der Freiheit) and Die Niklashauser Fart were my favorites, though I didn’t think they were amazing or anything. This just isn’t my guy!

If I was trying to guess which films you’d liked, that second one would probably have been guess number forty.