Movies: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

When director Daniel Schmid grew up, his parents ran a hotel in the Alps, and this singular setting was to influence his film. Rather by coincidence, he came to Berlin in the early 1960s and became part of the new German wave. Schmid worked with, amo...

Romi, a prostitute, is anything but successful at her job: she is of far too gentle a nature for her clients. The more obstinately she is pushed to the streets by her pimp Franz, the closer she is to a complete breakdown. One day Romi is addressed by...

The film does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two-month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnap...

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 h...

Though he never actually worked in Hollywood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of 36, was influenced greatly by American studio films of the 1950s and the convention of melodrama (the link most often mentioned is Douglas Sirk)....

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...

A pseudo variety show about the Aufbau-Era, the time of the German 'economic miracle'. Brigitte Mira recounts her four husbands through song and joke, on a series of artificial sets....

A film portrait of the influential Bavarian actor, director, and screenwriter who publicly confessed his homosexuality, which chronologically covers all the important stages from Action-Theater to the director's early death, supplemented with anecdot...

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....

A famous poet who hasn't written a word in two years unconsciously plagiarizes the work of Stefan George, while dealing with several mistresses, his dim-witted brother, and a murder investigation....

The production of a film requires recording equipment and financial resources, if nothing else. Hellmuth Costard places these basic prerequisites at the centre of his film: using a Super 8 camera system he developed, he films himself as he tries to r...

A beautiful woman, Supergirl Francesca Farnese, appears out of nowhere on a Bavarian highway. She wears only an orange jumpsuit and wants to go to Washington. Playboy Charly first takes her to Lake Starnberg, where she meets best-selling author Evers...

Avant-garde adaptation of a Carlo Goldoni play. Well-to-do Venetians congregate in a coffeehouse and discuss their problems....

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 archival material. With openness and slight n...

After the war, almost by chance, Alfonso Sansone started to produce documentary films and moved from Palermo to Rome, the city of film....

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Ricky returns to Munich from Vietnam and is promptly hired as a contract killer....

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 s...

A documentary about German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, during the time of filming "Querelle," features an interview with Fassbinder only ten hours before his death....

A documentary about Fassbinder and the early years of the legendary Antiteater, the group he was a member/leader of. You can here see and hear some of the actors he was going to use in his movies for the next years. The movie shows rehearsals for his...