Movies: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

In Thomas Ostermeier's stage version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film, Maria marries German soldier Hermann Braun during World War II. The couple spend over a decade apart due to forces largely beyond Maria's control. To survive in postwar Germany,...

Wives of rich men 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 themselves do not pursue careers; they dep...

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....

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...

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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)....

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...

A husband and wife lie to each other about their weekend travel plans, only to both show up at the family's country house with their lovers....

A biochemistry professor finds an old manuscript with the structure and formula of an immortality drug....

After a worker kills a superior and commits suicide, each of his family members attempts to forge a path forward in life....

A hitchhiker unsettles the ideologically colored lifestyle of a young architect and in doing so loses her own ideological distance from the maxim of prosperity....

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

Documentary about filmmakers of the New German Cinema who were members of the legendary Filmverlag für Autoren (Film Publishing House for Authors). Among them are Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders....

Hans is a street fruit peddler and born loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to turn to drinking and violence. After recovering from a debilitating heart attack, his business finally begins to take off. However, the mo...

A German serial killer preys on boys and young men during the so-called years of crisis between the wars. Based on the true story of Fritz Haarmann, aka the Butcher of Hanover and the Vampire of Hanover....

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 soldier and a beautiful blonde on a train to Harrisburg....

A documentary about the life and work of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder....

An intriguing Hans Christian Andersen-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 ...

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...