sunstruck (Free subscription) | 20/09/2008
Rachel Seiffert and Bernhard Schlink (see my previous post) aren’t the only ones to embed their sentiments of post-WW2 Germany in my mind. Long before I read Seiffert and Schlink, I remember seeing an outstanding film on the same subject by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder called The Marriage of Maria Braun . The Marriage of Maria Braun centres on a woman in Germany in the final years of WW2...
GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 06/09/2008
Marco Kreuzpaintner (Trade, Krabat) aims to start shooting a film based on the life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder early next year. He's currently writing a screenplay with Harry Baer, who worked with Fassbinder both in front of and behind...
Reverse Shot - (Free subscription) | 18/07/2008
The only film, and film experience, to which I can compare The Human Condition is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-and-a-half-hour TV movie adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz . At first the correspondences between the two films, except for those of epic length, seem to be wanting . . . and yet strangely, surprisingly, both projects share a haunted fascination with national and historical...
Critic After Dark (Free subscription) | 05/07/2008
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf ( Ali: Fear Eats the Soul , 1974) is as direct as a white man's contemptuous glare, as mysterious as a black man's serene gaze. Fassbinder uses color, stylized theater acting and camera movement to point up the extreme isolation felt (and developing bond shared) by two lovers--Emmi (Brigitte Mira), an elderly cleaning lady, and 'Ali' (El Hedi ben Salem),...
Critic After Dark (Free subscription) | 05/07/2008
Martha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973) (Link good for one week--after which it'll be replaced by the full text, with, hopefully, corrections, additions, revisions) Excerpt: Noel Vera Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Martha" (1973), based loosely on Cornell Woolrich's short story "For the Rest of Her Life," is ostensibly a television movie, but the themes, visual look and complexity of this supposedly minor...
Hell on Frisco Bay (Free subscription) | 07/06/2008
Two museums on opposite sides of Third Street between Mission and Howard have posted more information about their summer schedules. On the East side of the street at SFMOMA , on Thursdays and Saturdays: Throughout June, all fourteen episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz play. It may have been "made for television" but this 15-hour magnum opus first revealed itself at the 1980...
Tiny Mix Tapes (Free subscription) | 28/04/2008
Naughty cabarets. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. My surname. Germany has given us so much over the years, and most certainly one of those greatest contributions is Krautrock. And while most of those things will likely NOT be coming your way soon (because they are either immobile, dead, or penniless), take heart! music fans, because the legendary 1970s Krautrock innovators Faust are conducting a mini-tour!...
SpoutBlog (Free subscription) | 31/03/2008
The above montage of scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, set to two songs by Nina Simone, was posted on Vinyl is Heavy by Stephen Boone. I’ll let him explain: The idea is that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is two films. The first is about two lovers dealing with the terrible, [...]
Phawker (Free subscription) | 13/03/2008
VALLEY OF THE WOLVES IRAQ (2006, directed by Serder Akar, 122 minutes, Turkey) DESPAIR (1978, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 119 minutes, Germany) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The Turkish action film Valley of the Wolves Iraq has a certain whiff of the 1980’s, which is only fitting considering the decade was a prime era for stereotypical Arab [...]
notcoming.com | Recent Updates (Free subscription) | 05/03/2008
The first part (cheerfully titled “The Punishment Begins”) of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-hour made-for-TV magnum opus covers more emotional ground than most feature films do in their entire running time: it takes its protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, from a state of crippling depression following his release from a four-year prison sentence to a state of manic glee, back on top of the tiny section...
DVD Times (Free subscription) | 13/01/2008
DVD Video Review: Noel Megahey reviews Artificial Eye's second 4-DVD set of Fassbinder films, which includes Veronica Voss, In A Year Of Thirteen Moons, The Third Generation and Germany In Autumn.
DVD Times (Free subscription) | 10/01/2008
DVD Video Review: Noel Megahey reviews the first of two 4-DVD Fassbinder sets from Artificial Eye, the first containing Lola, Martha, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok, and the documentary I Don't Just Want You To Love Me.
The New York Review of Books (Free subscription) | 29/12/2007
By Ian Buruma Berlin Alexanderplatz directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz Catalog of the exhibition edited by Klaus Biesenbach Alfred Döblin's great novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, is pretty much untranslatable. Much of it is written in the working-class argot of pre-war Berlin. A translator can ignore this, of course, and use plain English, but then...
The Irish Times (Free subscription) | 21/12/2007
RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER COMMEMORATIVE EDITION, VOLS 1 AND 2 *****BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ *****
Variety.com (Free subscription) | 17/12/2007
Film News: Fassbinder, Herzog films to be screened -- The Berlin Film Festival will devote a seven-pic showcase to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and other German directors of the turbulent 1970s in a Rebellion of the Filmmakers sidebar.
