Rainer Werner Fassbinder became during his brief life one of the most dynamic and controversial figures in the modern cinema. Before his death in 1982, he completed over 40 film and television productions and created numerous works for the stage and radio. He performed as an actor in over a dozen other films and was one of the central artists in the New German cinema movement of the 1970s. Despite the fact that his career lasted for less than two decades, he was a torrential force whose self-destructive behavior was capable of producing an energetic degree of inventiveness and creativity. He continually led his life on the edge of a great abyss and became the poet laureate of angst, perversity, and a powerfully genuine emotionalism.
Fassbinder was born in 1945, though he would later change his birth date to 1946. His parents divorced when he was six and Fassbinder spent his childhood being moved back and forth between his aloof father and his seemingly disinterested mother. While his mother spent time in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, his father lived in Munich and was a doctor whose patients mostly were prostitutes and their clients. Except for the sporadic company of his father's patients and a few friendly relatives, Fassbinder grew up primarily alone and once boasted, "I'm my own father." If he was his own father, then the movies were his mother as he spent hours each week in darkened theaters watching American films. He was especially intrigued by gangster pictures and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. By his late teens, after displaying an indifference to school and leading a brief career as a street hustler, Fassbinder became convinced that he had to make films.
He attended drama school intermittently in Munich and, by 1967, was acting with a small group called the Action Theater. Fassbinder systematically took control of the group through the combined forces of hard work, an overmastering ego, and sexual liaisons with theater members. By the time the police had closed the theater during the May 1968 uprisings, Fassbinder had already formed the core of the Anti-Teater which he would use on stage and in film.
Improvisations and guerrilla theater tactics formed the basis for the Anti-Teater and, in 1969, Fassbinder directed the group in his first four feature films. Each film was made within a matter of a few weeks and represented a mix of experimental stylization, psycho-drama, and autobiographical details. These earliest films ranged wildly from the extremely studied and classical design of Effi Briest (West Germany 1974) to the excessive Gotterdammerung mentality of The American Soldier (West Germany 1970); yet the common ground among all the films was a focus on redefining the structure of narrative film making. Each film also exposed, directly and indirectly, glimpses into Fassbinder1s psychology.
Effi Briest is a close adaptation of Theodor Fontaine's 19th century novel which was, in turn, a variation on Madame Bovary. When developing some of his previous adaptations of novels to film, Fassbinder simply neglected to read the novel. In producing Effi Briest, he deviated from this practice, actually reading the book, and quoting directly from it throughout the film. The narrative of Effi Briest attracted him as it provided a compelling delineation of Fassbinder's own overwhelming need for love, his inability to achieve it, and the underlying sadomasochistic pursuit of power that can so easily dominate the emotions.
Brutality as a substitute for love is part of the subtext of the early gangster trilogy including Love is Colder Than Death (West Germany 1969), The Gods of the Plague (West Germany 1969), and The American Soldier. In these films, he created a Teutonic underworld of smoke and shadows in which preposterously laconic hoods kill and are killed amid the bathrooms, bars, and supermarket aisles of modern Germany. Sex is reduced to a ritualistic game of power and the characters behave with the somnambulistic motions of "B" movie automatons.
Indirectly, the films in the gangster trilogy express Fassbinder's own ambivalence concerning his sexuality and his artistic methodology. Fassbinder had an enormous and even, perhaps, desperate need to be loved, yet he would eventually reject virtually every lover he had, and psychologically drove two to suicide. Likewise, despite the fact that his method of work relied heavily upon the contributions of his cast and crew, he would periodically "punish" them in films like Satan's Brew (West Germany 1976), one in which many of the film's characters are caustic caricatures of the cast members. Fassbinder even parodied part of himself in the form of the film's half-demented poet.
The ambivalent characteristics and attitudes that surfaced in Fassbinder's personal life also permeated his political perceptions of modern Germany as well as his directing practices. He viewed Germany as still being a proto-fascist state and his political beliefs were ostensibly committed to the collective ideal as formulated by the original Anti-Teater group. However, the Anti-Teater group was never a collective in its actual method of operation: Fassbinder ruled as a "Fuhrer" figure, a manifest contradiction between his actions and beliefs which he recognized and lampooned in Satan's Brew. Similarly, he was extremely ambivalent about the radical terrorist movements of the 1970s, although some of the original members of the Baader-Meinhof gang were his acquaintances.
In his production of The Third Generation (West Germany 1979), Fassbinder set forth the conclusion that terrorism and the modern security state fed upon and needed each other in order to exist. He viewed his contemporaries as a lost generation doomed to "act in danger but without perspective." Likewise, he suspected the state of using terrorism as a pretext in order to justify its own repressive policies. With the vitriolic satire of The Third Generation, Fassbinder attacked the growing nihilism of power politics.
Despite his outpouring of bitter commentary on the modern state, a combination of decadence and nihilism were becoming increasingly obvious in Fassbinder's own life. His omnivorous sexuality was proving increasingly destructive to his friends and lovers; his consumption of drugs and alcohol was reaching life-threatening proportions; and he was rapidly gaining weight from compulsive eating. The recurring line in Berlin Alexanderplatz (West Germany 1980), "There is a reaper and his name is death," became a virtual leitmotif for Fassbinder. He had always lived on the edge, but increasingly he seemed to have been dancing on his grave.
In many respects, In a Year of Thirteen Moons (West Germany 1979) was Fassbinder's most personal film. Written, photographed, edited, and directed by him and starring only his closest associates, including his ex-wife, mother, and several ex-lovers, the film was Fassbinder's curious act of contrition for the suicide of his most recent male lover. The film's highly experimental structure and conflicting blend of pathos and black comedy reflected Fassbinder's own confusion over his contradictory emotional drives. In a way, Fassbinder was both a seducer and a spurned lover, a man who was ruthlessly incapable of accepting the emotional needs which he compulsively sought to fulfill. The title of his first film, Love is Colder Than Death, would prove to be prophetic of his real role throughout his career.
His sudden death in 1982 did not come as a real surprise to those who knew him. Fassbinder's overindulgence in virtually everything consumed him and he died, ironically, while in bed. His battered felt hat still on his head and a clinched cigarette in his hand, watching an old American film on the television set. His final epitaph surfaced inadvertently in the documentary film The Wizard of Babylon (West Germany 1982), the filming of which had ended earlier that day. One of the policemen who were originally called to the death scene later commented to reporters, "Even Fassbinder's just a man." His own mortality which he had tested and challenged during the final years and finally won out.
To some critics, Fassbinder's death practically marked the end of narrative film making in the New German cinema. Fassbinder's demise did mark the closing of a unique and extra-ordinarily vital chapter in the modern cinema. He remains an audacious and combative figure and his work retains the power to shock and offend. Yet, his stylistic control and diversity are virtually unequalled in the cinema and his boldness of vision and purpose railed against the increasing banality of the modern screen.
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