Rosel Zech, who from some angles reminds us of Marlene Dietrich or Delphine Seyrig, plays Veronika Voss, a fading German movie star whose story is a European take on Sunset Boulevard. The film uses black and white photography to create effects of light, shadow, and pure luminosity that work brilliantly such as the opening scene in the tramway car, or the interior of the Dr. Katz's clinic. The scene where Veronika sings Memories Are Made Of This in a low husky voice that recalls Dietrich at her w...
john/Lola / Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Part of his loose BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy - portraits of women in German society after the war - this late Fassbinder is based on the same story behind Sternberg's Blue Angel. Lola is a nightclub singer and prostitute, personal whore of larger-than-life property developer Schukert, at a red-light establishment favoured by the mayor and his cronies. Into this cosy, corrupt world comes a new Building Commissioner, Von Bohm – a meticulous character that the others cannot draw into...
Lili Marleen/ / Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Story of a song. And what song! In fact, the creation of Hans Leip and Norbert Schultze is the only character, a spell who creates existences, loves, tragedies with a sarcastic indifference. It is an obsessive music, soul of a ambiguous time of dreams and ideas intoxication, with old words and cruels ambitions.
Certainly, it is a Fassbinder's lesson about values and lies, about rules of war and feelings, about small victims and sacrifice.
Hanna Schygulla is gorgeous in a character's skin diffe...
精力超人的法斯宾德还在79-80年完成了他另一套辉煌的巨作：14集，15个半小时，耗资高达1300万马克的电视连续剧《柏林亚历山大广场》。三部曲表现的是50年代的德国历史社会现实，这套剧集则是展现20年代末经济危机时期德国现实的宏大历史画卷；三部曲展现的是女性视角和女性立场，而《广场》展现的则是法斯宾德自己的视角和立场。“《柏林亚历山大广场》是法斯宾德”表现“人、他自己的感情和思想、他的愿望与沮丧的一部最全面、叙事上最富于变化的大纲”。两项宏大的影像工程取得了无以伦比的辉煌成功，法斯宾德也在来自德国各界的欢呼声...
This director thinks terrorism is a stupid joke. The third generation of terror here is a bunch of bored citizens who are dumb enough not to wonder who is giving out the money that pays for their guns. It's a quite scary and funny way to look at contemporary society and some of its extremely radical enemies. Some viewers might find it disturbing instead of hilarious.
Fassbinder have have drilled the nail into the coffin of art film, forever establishing it as a genre in which only 1 person out of a thousand will actually like, enjoy, or want to study. One of those people happened to be my narrative avant-garde film proffessor. while this story of a man who switched genders...."just because" is deatheningly depressing and bloatedly long, there are redeeming qualities. This is appears to be a crystal clear message of struggle and love letter to the suffering o...
This is a melancholic semi-documentary about the West Germany's traumatic autumn called as "Deutschland Herbst". The prominent businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer who was a member of the board of directors in Daimler Benz and leader in several employer and industry associations was kidnapped and killed by extreme-left RAF. He was formerly SS worked as an important deputy and adviser to Bernhard Adolf, one of the German economic leaders. Schleyer's uncompromising position towards workers made him a...
Dirk Bogarde plays Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré businessman who owns a chocolate factory in Berlin between the wars. The film opens with Hermann discussing the right-wing newspaper magnate Alfred Hugenburg, with one of his employees. The backdrop of the film, the rise of the Nazis, is not intrinsic to the development of the plot, which is focussed on the internal development, or collapse, of Hermann Hermann. Hermann is determined to be a survivor, his psychological collapse is meant to ...
I recently managed to get a VHS copy of this rarity. It unfortunately has no subtitles, but I am very familiar with the play ("The Women," 1936), so it was a real pleasure to watch.
Unlike Fassbinder's other made-for-television films like FEAR OF FEAR or I ONLY WANT YOU TO LOVE ME, both of which could have been released theatrically as feature films, FRAUEN IN NEW YORK only really works as a television product. It is "filmed theater" in the extreme – the sets are very stagey, and slightly unre...
Televising the work of an avant-garde, openly homosexual director says as much about a West Germany still struggling with its postwar identity in the 1970s as it does about Fassbinder's stature. Railroad stationmaster & petty Nazi Party official Bolwieser (Raab) seems to have it made in his small town between the wars: a secure, respectable job, a position of authority & the most desirable woman in town as his wife. Both he & his wife Hanni (Trissenaar) discover that her beauty & his position ar...
I wasn't sure what I would get with Chinese Roulette, a little-known film from RW Fassbinder featuring one of the stars of the Nouvelle vague, Anna Karina, but I wasn't expecting this. I'm reminded somewhat of what a friend of mine says of Michael Haneke's movies (while I don't entirely agree, I can see his point): "Nothing happens - nothing happens - nothing happens - nothing happens - *something* happens- nothing happens, end of movie". While things do happen in Chinese Roulette- a film about ...
It seemed as though the film crew was inebriated during the entire filming. When a drunk sobers up he finds that what seemed like masterful writing is actually junk! I kept hoping it would improve but it stayed at an unfortunate one rating.
So this is a warning that this film is terrible and without any saving grace. I admire Fassbinder as a director and he has made some fine films but for some reason he lost it on this one.
It is supposed to be a comedy but I found no humor in it, black or ot...
for German TV, this demonstration of the adage that You Can't Buy Love is shot in a quasi-documentary style that evokes the British lumpenprole aesthetic of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. But Fassbinder is no social-worker/muckraker; this tale of a guy who just wants a little tenderness has the lockstep tragedic structure of Racine or Aeschylus. As in most of Fassbinder's best work, like FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, the impulse toward melodrama is naked and unashamed. The score, by Peer Raben, exceeds his mo...
Really, the plot is nothing different than your average movie on the Lifetime cable network: a woman suffers from [I]post-partem[/I] depression while no one around her seems to care much; eventually, she becomes addicted to Valium and alcohol. But what a difference a genius can make, and Fassbinder is clearly a genius. And his lead actress, Margit Carstensen, gives an absolutely brilliant performance. It's a small and subtle picture (made for television, actually), and I wonder if anyone else wo...
屈丝特婆婆已经步入老年，孤寂而沮丧的心很渴望关怀与温情，但从自己软弱的儿子及媳妇那里，什么也得不到，女儿也忙于应付自己的事业和爱情，丝毫不顾及老人的内心需要。
偶然的机会，屈丝特婆婆得到了两个富有的中年人的友谊。在一家报社做发行主管的提曼先生和提曼夫人号称自己是共产主义者，并对屈丝特婆婆保证说会运用他们的报纸为她的丈夫恢复名誉。
出于感激，屈丝特婆婆毫不犹豫地加入了这个政治派系，积极配合他们的宣传活动。但不久，屈丝特婆婆发现，自己其实是被利用的宣传工具而已。愤怒之下，屈丝特婆婆又毅然和...
