A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they ...
Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends) was one of the many films in the short, but prolific, career of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder plays Franz Biberkopf, a financially poor gay man who performs in a traveling circus as Fox the Talking Head. One day, he lucks into winning half a million marks in a lottery. This ...
This tale of intermingled love and hate is directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and is the 13th of the 33 films he made in his short life. It explores the universal dynamics present in close human relationships, even lesbian ones. Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer. Some time ago, she divorced the husband she no longer loved ...
American Soldier (originally Der Amerikanische Soldat) was the third of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "gangster trilogy." The film stars Karl Scheid as a German/American Vietnam veteran who takes a job as a hired assassin on behalf of the Munich crime lords. Scheid works both sides of the fence when three policemen engage him to knock off some ...
German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder both directed and photographed The Third Generation (Die Dritte Generation). Displaying a sense of humor that can most kindly be described as perverse, Fassbinder follows the exploits of a group of well-heeled German terrorists. Without truly taking sides, the director demonstrates how the terrorists are ...
In his 36-year life, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made some 40 films. He is perhaps best known to American audiences for his 1978 period drama, The Marriage of Maria Braun. A theme he examined repeatedly in his films was the unreasonable meanness of people, which he shows in a stark, relentless fashion. This early film, Whity, is set in the ...
This Rainer Werner Fassbinder drama centers around the lonely quest for love of Elvira Weishaupt, a man who became a woman to please his/her man. Just prior to that, Elivira had been jilted by her previous live-in partner, a man. She does the operation to win the heart of another, Anton. Unfortunately, the sex-change operation does not change the ...
The film that elevated German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder from domestic approbation to international acclaim, The Marriage of Maria Braun stars the director's on-and-off favorite actress Hanna Schygulla in the title role. During the allied siege of Germany in the last year of the war, Maria's new husband (Klaus Löwitsch) is shipped off to ...
Martha is a wealthy and totally self-involved woman -- so much so that on a trip during which her father dies, she does indeed cry, but only because she lost her purse. She marries a stranger who claims not to be at all attracted to her, and their wedding is only the beginning of a battle between them to determine who will get the upper hand over ...
German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs the made-for-TV melodrama Pioneers in Ingolstadt, based on the play by Marieluise Fleisser. The film opens as a parade of soldiers are marching through a town square singing patriotic songs. Alma (Irm Hermann) and Berta (Hanna Schygulla) are watching them and musing about their ideas on men and ...
This film by wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his 10th, is one of the rare films about filmmaking which was said by the critics to have succeeded both technically and as drama. In it, a German film crew sits in their Italian hotel, waiting for the arrival of their director (Lou Castel), their star (Eddie Constantine) and more money. While they ...
Gods of the Plague (Gotter der Pest) is one of several German films directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder under his pseudonym of Franz Walsch. That's Fassbinder, however, playing the small role of a buyer of pornography. The main story involves a pair of two-bit hoods who spend most of the film one-upping each other with a brace of scheming females ...
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder uses a 15th century legend as an allegory to the political situation in late-'60s Germany in The Niklashausen Journey. Combining medieval and contemporary imagery, the story follows Hans Boehm (Michael König), a shepherd who believes the Virgin Mary wants him to start a proletarian revolution. Fassbinder appears ...
Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs this bleak morality tale about a young Bavarian bricklayer who longs for love. Raised in a rigid, remote household and married to an emotionally distant woman, everyone in his life seems indifferent to his suffering. His life takes a further unfortunate turn when, while blind drunk, he accidentally kills a ...
A technical designer enjoys a comfortable life with his wife and child. He has the approval of his boss and is in good health except for smoking too much according to his doctor. His wife is visited by a girlfriend one Sunday afternoon. The man is bored watching television and grabs a chandelier and kills the conversing women and his child. In a ...
An independent criminal's work is admired by organized crime. He is tortured after he refuses the invitation to join the gang but later relents and becomes a member. He continues to be a pimp and a murderer in this disturbing film that appeared at the Berlin Film Festival in 1969. This feature garnered international recognition for writer/director ...
Mother Kusters (Brigette Kira) is the wife of a factory worker who goes beserk one day, killing himself and the boss' son. Mother finds herself a media celebrity, which only serves to make herself and her late husband look like idiots. Later, Mother is "adopted" by a Communist couple who wish to exploit her husband's "act of defiance" for their ...
Aimlessness and misplaced ambition take two friends in unexpected directions in this made-for-TV drama directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Michel (Michael Konig) and Gunther (Gunther Kauffmann) are two friends who feel trapped in Germany and are trying to decide what to do with their lives; Gunther has recently gotten out of the Army and is ...
Jorgos (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a Greek immigrant in Germany who encounters the intolerance of the locals against foreign workers. Open hostility turns to violence when he is beaten up by the authoritarian thugs after dating a German woman. Male and female nudity along with hetero and homosexual sex scenes are shown in this searing indictment ...
Originally Die Sehnsucht de Veronika Voss, this Rainer Werner Fassbinder spin on Sunset Boulevard stars Rosel Zech as film actress Veronika Voss. Once the toast of Germany, Veronika had allegedly been an intimate of Joseph Gobbels. But the Third Reich is dead...and Veronika may as well be. Playing to an increasingly diminishing fan following, ...
A housewife's slow descent into suicidal depression is chronicled in great detail in this movie by experimental film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
Rainer Werner Fassbinder not only directed Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf), but also scripted the film, designed the sets, and produced. Brigitte Mira heads the cast as a lonely German cleaning woman, who enters into an affair with equally lonely--and much, much younger--Moroccan mechanic El Hedi Ben Salem. They marry, despite the ...
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's sweeping 16-hour-long drama Berlin Alexanderplatz is an adaptation of the novel by Alfred Doblin. Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) is released from prison as the film opens; he had been jailed for four years after killing his girlfriend Ida. Franz becomes involved with Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar) and promises to no ...
Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of Four Seasons) is about the deterioration of a man's soul. Fruit vendor Hans (Hans Hirschmüller) cannot please his family. His mother harps on his failures. His wife is openly discontent. He must peddle produce to his beloved ex-girlfriend, and he is mocked by his customers for being shorter and ...
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