Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the most prominent and most prolific of the filmmakers of the New German Cinema, a revival of the once-vital German film industry after the first version had been destroyed by World War II. His films addressed social issues in a way that helped open the cinema to new examinations of homosexuality, feminism, and similar concerns. From his earliest works, Fassbinder's writing and directing were intensely personal statements, and a sense of desperate loneliness, clearly derived from his childhood, infuses much of his work. Films were made in Germany after World War II, but they were films associated with American companies or British companies and were primarily programmers, imitations of American melodramas, horror pictures, or British mysteries. A serious German cinema simply did not exist in any degree that could capture the attention of the world market. In the 1960s, young filmmakers felt the need for a change and issued the Oberhausen Manifesto, generally regarded as the beginning of the New German Cinema, though of the 26 signatories only one, Alexander Kluge, would later achieve world prominence. In 1965, a body was set up to help subsidize new films by young directors, and a breakthrough occurred in 1966, when a film produced by Alexander Kluge received eight awards at the Venice Biennale and several other films by young filmmakers achieved prominence as well. Opposition from the established film community, however, brough
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an director Douglas Sirk, who had a long Hollywood career, was one such influence, and his film Imitation of Life (1959) was a particular favorite of Fassbinder's. Fassbinder has noted that the characters live in prisons, separated from real life, and that in all their lives "nothing is natural. Never. Not in the whole film. And yet each tries desperately to make their thoughts and their desires their own" (Wiegand 35). Fassbinder has acknowledged the importance of Sirk in interviews: "Actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done" (T÷teberg and Lensing 12). Fassbinder also made clear why he found Sirk so important to his work: "Fassbinder said that previously he'd believed it was necessary to keep his distance from Hollywood-style storytelling if he wanted to work seriously. Sirk had emancipated him from the fear of being vulgar" (Hayman 99).
The Hollywood film was a major influence on Fassbinder, although he reshaped it to his own purposes even as he sought to recreate it on a German basis. His first film already has evidence of a stylistic gesture towards the aesthetic demands of commercial filmmaking in the approach taken toward the material:
Like Godard,
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Approximate Word count = 2443
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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