Notable Filmmakers

Rainer Warner Fassbinder

Rainer Warner Fassbinder – Actor, playwright, theater director, then filmmaker; 40 films in 14 years (1969-1983). Driven and demanding, he died at 36 of drugs/alcohol.

• Concerned with “outsiders” (criminal, poor, gay, foreign) yearning for love and acceptance in a world obsessed with status, material wealth, and bourgeois respectability. Protags generally homely and inarticulate. Concerned with “politics of sex–relationships as power struggles.
• concerned with cinema of the underdog–exploited and oppressed, BUT always with great formal beauty grounded in expressive use of color, lighting, and decor. Lighting always expressive (so unnatural) to create unusual shadows
• often worked in domestic melodrama (women’s pictures):
  • Marriage of Maria Braun (1979),
  • Lili Marlene, Lola, Veronica Voss (1981-2)

Began shooting low-budget features using stock company of actors and technicians.

• Improv scenarios concerning untreated malaise beneath the affluent surface of contemporary West German society.

1968 – Love is Colder than Death – his thematic credo, Fassbinder a Marxist and militant homosexual. Generally, explore themes of politics and sex: Concerned with “politics of sex—Love relationships as power struggles with dominant and dominated lover.

• Love was an affliction— “the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.”
• often worked in domestic melodrama (women’s pictures): Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lili Marlene, Lola, Veronica Voss (1981-2)
• Humanist Marxist who chose melodrama– heightened realism. (admired Douglas Sirk)

“I don’t find melodrama unrealistic; everyone has the desire to dramatize the things that go on around him…everyone has a mass of small anxieties that he tries to get around in order to avoid questioning himself; melodrama comes up hard against them…The only reality that matters is in the viewers head.”…from this perspective, bourgeois culture despises melodrama because it has developed much more repressive (sophistication of classical music, art, literature) forms of communication whose aim is to conceal process and function, and therefore to keep the bourgeoisie unaware of itself as a class in relationship to other classes.

• Rejected conventional film realism: “It’s a collision between film and the subconscious that creates a new realism.  If my films are right, then a new realism comes about in the head, which changes the social reality.”
• Influenced by Godard; melodramas stripped of theatrics and sentimentality but garish color; fades to white as transition–to keep audience awake not to begin to dream…I didn’t want to have predetermined characters made for the audience, rather, the audience should continue to do the work.”

BUT always with great formal beauty grounded in expressive use of color, lighting, and decor. His philosophy is his lighting and camera angles, like Sirk, lighting always as unnatural as possible–shadows where there shouldn’t be any make feelings plausible which one would rather have left unacknowledged.  No shadows, i.e., places to hide.

1975: Fox and His Friends–Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man who wins the natl. lottery and is befriended by corrupt bourgeois gay man who spend all of his money and abandons him, after which he takes an overdose of tranquilizers and dies on the floor of an ultramodern Frankfurt subway station.

1978: Despair

1979: The Marriage of Maria Braun

1979: In a Yr. of Thirteen Moons

1981/2: Lili Marlene, Lola, Veronica Voss

1982: death of drug overdose

Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders – newest director and most “America-obsessed”

• critic for cinema journal then experimental shorts before

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971) –film of psych disintegration in which a soccer goalie goes quietly mad from the fragmentation and discontinuity of his existence.  Thru Ozu-like cam placement and a variety of subj shots, Wenders attempts to induce in the viewer a state of anxiety similar to that experienced by the goalie.

Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976) –of characters experiencing psych and geographical dislocation induced by living in the modern world

Paris, Texas (1984)

WATCH: opening of Paris, Texas (1984)

Paris, Texas opening – CC

Wings of Desire (1987) about angels watching over people of Berlin

Together, these filmmakers were attempting to deconstruct bourgeois ideology through deconstructing its cinematic language–every subject is exposed for socioeconomic underpinnings. As a result, this movement was more popular in other countries than Germany, and so ended. However, it was essentially for the 70s and 80s what the New Wave was for the 1960s, a questioning of received values, an intoxicating burst of energy, a love affair with the cinema, and a love/hate relationship with Hollywood.