“He had never lived as a normal person, wanting to live to 80. He lived twice as intensely as the rest of us. Work was all he had in life.” Michael Ballhaus, cinematographer.
Some moviemakers can rightly be called prodigies or geniuses, but only a few tear through their times like forces of nature.
One such filmmaker, for better and worse, was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the monumentally self-destructive and awe-inspiringly gifted actor-writer-director who died at age 36 in 1982, allegedly from cocaine and alcohol abuse, after a career that saw him make a staggering 43 features in a mere 14 years.
Fassbinder, now the subject of a special 38-film retrospective running through June, mounted jointly by The Film Center of the School of the Art Institute and Facets Multimedia, was the most important German filmmaker since World War II.
The only one of his generation whose talents can be plausibly compared with Orson Welles’, he created in his brief life a vast cinematic mosaic comparable in many ways to Honore de Balzac’s great 19th Century French novel cycle, the “Comedie Humaine.” From Fassbinder’s first film, 1969’s “Love Is Colder Than Death,” to his last, 1982’s “Querelle,” he kept deepening and extending that world, portraying all classes — upper (“Fox and His Friends”) lower (“Katzelmacher”) and middle (“The Merchant of Four Seasons”)–as well as outlaws (“The American Soldier”), poets (“Satan’s Brew”), factory owners (“Despair”), revolutionaries (“The Third Generation”) and white collar drones (“Why does Herr R. Run Amok?”).
Fassbinder’s 43 films offer one of the darkest movie portraits of Germany since the 1920s’ Weimar nightmare cinema of “M,” “Nosferatu” and “Pandora’s Box.” With supreme tenacity, he and his hard-core collaborators — actors and technicians with whom he worked repeatedly — built a picture of German life high and low.
Repeatedly portraying hopeless unrequited loves and people crushed or victimized by society and each other, they mesh into a view of life so bleak, their themes may be best summed up in the title of his one English language movie, “Despair.”
Sheer numbers make Fassbinder a phenomenon. Not only did he direct at the furious rate of three to four movies a year for his entire career, he wrote scenarios for others, 25 plays and even some influential film criticism, besides having an active career as theater director and movie and stage actor.
More surprisingly, a high percentage of Fassbinder’s immense output was of superb quality. He was an avant-garde, revolutionary director who gradually turned himself into a popular European art movie storyteller. He directed at least six masterpieces: “The Merchant of Four Seasons,” “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” “The Marriage of Maria Braun,” “In a Year of 13 Moons” “Lili Marleen” and “Lola.” . And one of his films, the 15-hour German television adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” stands alone as one of the great film achievements of the century.
He was also a self-destructive near-psychopath who ravaged his own body with drink, drugs and promiscuous sex, driving himself with almost perverse recklessness.
Fassbinder’s premature death, while he was working on “Querelle” (from the Jean Genet novel), was no shock to his associates. He was dissolute on a grand scale: gorging and abusing himself, swigging down bottles of vodka and Jim Beam on his film sets, hurling himself into dangerous gay waterfront bars in Germany and New York and driving both his long term male lovers to suicide. (He had female lovers as well, and he was living with one — his editor, Julianne Lorenz — at his death.) Fassbinder’s expensive cocaine habit is blamed by some for putting “Maria Braun” over budget.
Yet, in the end, those personal failings and excesses matter as little as Charlie Parker’s or Sam Peckinpah’s. What counts is his work, his art.
“He was an outsider by choice,” explained his most frequent star, Hanna Schygulla. “He extracted and distilled that sense of alienation and shaped it into something powerful.” Drawing from his many original scripts and from authors as disparate as Doblin, Genet, Henrik Ibsen and Clare Boothe Luce, Fassbinder created his own artificial region: a German terrain (Munich, Berlin and the countryside) whose main constant was betrayal and loss. There, the driving forces were greed and exploitation, the pleasures almost always illusory. Constantly, we are conscious of being in a stylized vision, a trap from which there is no escape.
Fassbinder used a maze of movie influences, mixing the realms of European art films (Luchino Visconti, Jean-Luc Godard) and Golden Age Hollywood (Douglas Sirk, Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh). Within that world, he was capable of compassion and sympathy, melancholy and rage, ecstatic abandon and a pessimism so profound, it sometimes hurts to watch it.
He was a typical ’60s hybrid, carried to extremes. As the rebellious son of a doctor, affecting working class manners and extreme leftist politics, Fassbinder was essentially a role-player: violently rejecting establishment values while courting the government money with which he financed most of his projects.
But in the end, as in his life, nothing matters but his films. No other German director of his generation (a formidable group that includes Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Wolfgang Petersen, Margarethe von Trotta and Werner Schroeter) can match Fassbinder for ambition and achievement. The current series shows off all that dazzling range and versatility: with 17 newly struck 35 mm prints that include his most famous works (“The Marriage of Maria Braun,” “The Merchant of Four Seasons,” “Lola”), plus six local premieres of rarities like 1970’s “Rio das Mortes” and “Whity” and 1973’s “Martha.”
What could he have accomplished if he hadn’t self-destructed? We’ll never know. But the current Fassbinder tribute shows us exactly where his vision lies and what this quintessential German filmmaker saw in his native land and drew from his private hells.
THE BEST OF FASSBINDER
In Fassbinder’s uncommonly large filmography, some films rise above the rest. Here is a personal choice of his best.
“Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1973). Douglas Sirk’s 1955 “All That Heaven Allows” re-imagined for a 60ish charwoman (Brigitte Mira) and her young North African lover (El Hedi ben Salem). 9 p.m. May 16, Facets Multimedia; 4:30 p.m. May 25, Film Center.
“Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1979-80). Alfred Doblin’s ’30s novel of Berlin in chaos, seen through the eyes of outsider Franz Biberkopf (Gunther Lamprecht): one of the great movie literary adaptations. Shown in 8 parts, in 2 complete cycles: May 30 through June 5, Facets.
“The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant” (1972). Fassbinder’s elegant, cruel adaptation of his own play about failed love in a chic lesbian milieu. 6:30 p.m. May 23, Film Center.
“Despair” (1977). Based on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a cuckolded candy manufacturer (Dirk Bogarde), who seeks to murder his own double. 6:30 p.m. May 29; 8 p.m. June 29.
“Fox and His Friends” (1974). Actor Fassbinder as a small time gay carnival worker, who wins the lottery and is stripped of his fortune by his venal upper-class lover and his set. 6:30 p.m. May 22, Facets; 6:30 p.m., Sunday, Film Center.
“In a Year of 13 Moons” (1978). A wrenching look at the last days of a transsexual destroyed by unreturned love, with the screen’s most bizarre Jerry Lewis homage. 6:30 p.m. May 28, Facets; 6 p.m. June 21, Film Center.
“Lili Marleen” (1980). Visually, his most spectacular film: based on the ironic, partially true tale behind one of WWII’s most popular ballads. 4 p.m. May 11, Film Center; 8:45 p.m. May 28, Facets.
The BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy: “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1978), 4 p.m. Saturday, Film Center; 5:30 p.m. May 17, Facets. “Lola” (1981), 7:45 p.m., May 15, Film Center; 1 p.m. May 18. “Veronika Voss” (1981) 3:15 p.m. May 18, Facets; 6 p.m., Tuesday, May 20, Film Center. Post-war amorality and decay in ’50s Berlin. (“Maria Braun” was the biggest popular and critical hit of Fassbinder’s career.)
“The Merchant of Four Seasons” (1971). The torments of a short sidewalk fruit salesman with a tall, faithless wife. Another Sirkian melodrama. 7 p.m. May 16; 8 p.m. June 7.
“The Station Master’s Wife” (1977). An excruciating melodrama of small-town cuckoldry, sado-masochism and madness, based on Oskar Graf’s novel “Bolweiser.” 6:15 p.m., Sunday, Film Center; 8:45 p.m. May 22, Film Center.
Also recommended: “Beware of the Holy Whore,” “Martha,” “Effi Briest,” “Satan’s Brew,” “Germany in Autumn.”
Facets Multimedia is at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., 773-281-9075. The Film Center is at Columbus Drive at Jackson Boulevard, 312-443-3737.
