Includes an incredible scene of Hanna Schygulla having a conversation with a friend while chomping on a massive bratwurst.

Although his flawed characters occasionally behave appallingly, it would be wrong to describe Fassbinder as pitiless – the overly melodramatic Petra von Kant is a sympathetic character despite her theatrics, while the wife-beating protagonist of The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) is such a wretched victim that he never loses the audience’s empathy. Fassbinder’s epic 1920s-set TV series, running for 15 hours across 13 episodes and an epilogue, is an adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s novel, following the post-prison life of Franz Biberkopf, a gangster jailed for murdering his girlfriend.

Made when Fassbinder was just 24, Love Is Colder than Death was his first feature and the first of three gangster films he made within a year, followed by Gods of the Plague and The American Soldier (both 1970).

It’s one of Fassbinder’s very best movies, and remains a fierce, relevant dissection of intolerance and xenophobia. The plot, rife with doppelgangers and infused with noir elements, anticipates the later work of David Lynch.

articles As writer and director, Fassbinder never strains for meaning, simply allowing the disarmingly simple material do all the heavy lifting. While being President of the Jury, I would love to express my disappointment in not having been able to convince my colleagues to place R.W. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple’s relationship, one partner destroys the other.”. The arrival of Jorgos, a guest … Top Ranking. Is it ever truly possible for a man to transcend his god-given status in the world? She decides to let love into her heart, but once carried over the threshold, the full-bore romance turns into something quite different.
When the parents discover one another’s transgressions, their reaction – embarrassment, forced laughter and phony politeness in pretending nothing is amiss – recalls Luis Buñuel. Mai 1945 in Bad Wörishofen, Bayern; † 10. Deliberately setting out to hurt and humiliate her adulterous parents, young Angela (Andrea Schober) engineers a nasty parlour game that provides the film with an utterly compelling final 20 minutes, one of Fassbinder’s best sequences. Ahead of a full retrospective of the director’s work at London’s BFI Southbank, we count down 10 of his greatest movies. Used and abused by everyone and anyone, Elivra wanders to old haunts and attempts to pin-point the moment where it all went wrong. The title character – an innocent, not-very-smart working-class gay guy who wins the lottery and is adopted into a group of wealthy, hypocritical homosexual men – may have money, but he certainly doesn’t have friends.

This love story – and despite the considerable human unkindness on show, this is definitely a love story – is a great starting point for newcomers to Fassbinder’s work. This is a tale of love and exploitation and is perhaps the go-to film when looking for examples of Fassbinder’s apocalyptically bleak worldview. Nothing prepares us for the extraordinary two-hour epilogue, in which Franz encounters most of the characters, dead or alive, who have appeared throughout the action, in a haunting and fetish-infused dream sequence. An exciting, provocative filmmaker had arrived. All rights reserved.

Watch Love Is Colder than Death online on BFI Player, Watch The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant online on BFI Player, Watch Fear Eats the Soul online on BFI Player, Watch Fox and His Friends online on BFI Player, Watch Chinese Roulette online on BFI Player.

It’s long, claustrophobic and intense – one of those movies where paying close attention for the first hour pays off in the devastating closing stretches.
In a beautiful piece of film criticism, David Thomson wrote that the film has “no equal in its simultaneous delight in ‘style’ while pouring acid over the image”. In an interview he explained: “Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again.