#filmprogramming

Fassbinder Screening Intro_07.20.24

Hello everyone and welcome to Whammy! Before we get into Fassbinder, a little housekeeping.

My name is Ian and I am a volunteer for TAPE Los Angeles - we are a nonprofit dedicated to Teaching, Archiving, Preserving, and Exhibiting analog media.

Along with collectively programming film and video titles, as is the case with tonight’s screening, we offer low-cost to FREE digital transfers for VHS tapes and other common formats.

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And now... Who was Rainer Werner Fassbinder?

A German, Gemini, Bisexual, Libertine, Terrorist, Tyrant. A Genius.

My very first Fassbinder was his last, Querelle, which you’ve just watched the trailer for. Herr Fassbinder was 37 years old, the age I am now. He had already made over 40 feature films, one motion picture every hundred days for the past 13 years. He died in June, most likely from a tragic combination of poor health, a drug overdose, and suicidal ideation. In February he had won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival with Veronika Voss, he hoped Querelle would take the Golden Palm at Cannes, and planned for his next picture to take the Golden Lion at Venice -- a “hat trick” that would culminate in an Oscar and the cover of TIME magazine.

“Grow ugly and work. Then, and only then, let them come. I want to be ugly on the cover of Time-- it’ll happen and I’m glad about it and I admit it--when ugliness has finally

reclaimed all beauty. That is luxury.”

He was planning a biopic about Rosa Luxembourg, which would eventually be made by Margarethe von Trotta. He wanted to do a remake of Joan Crawford’s Possessed. He had a slate of films ready to go.

Tracing Rainer’s influences during childhood can be just as dizzying a task to get a hold on as is his filmography. He had been named for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a child he wrote a theater piece about flowers falling in love. He went to a Rudolf Steiner school, brought up by anthroposophists, he watched hundreds of movies, many American ones, he had murderous fantasies toward his mother and was often surrounded by pimps and sex workers. He and Udo Kier would later become a pimp-prostitute pair (i’ll let you guess which was which). Rainer seduced where he could not strong-arm. He inserted himself into scenes and gathered collaborators around him the way Andy Warhol was doing at the Factory, in service of one unifying vision--his own. All of this despite Rainer’s crippling shyness, even around Warhol himself, who Rainer referred to as Andreas. He had a way of making people his though, getting them to change their allegiances. His Action Theater group’s headquarters was bombed out by a member of the Baader/Meinhof gang, but not for any political reason, it was personal. The man’s wife had left him to go live with Rainer and another one of the director’s revolving cast of actor-come-lovers. He renamed most of his male friends, often giving them women’s names. For Rainer, the women in his life were all surrogates for different parts of himself. His pictures abound with female characters, and he told his own stories through them. He loved women, and men, sometimes simultaneously, though he made statements such as Love is Colder Than Death. Much was made of the suicides of Rainer’s former lovers, the bouts of violence, his cool, promiscuous indifference, the long periods of melancholy. “The feeling was mutual. They said that I exploited them and I said that they exploited me...I reproached them for having made me do so much, simply because I was the only one ready to do it.” Rainer’s relationship to his growing cast of friends, lovers and film surrogates became monarchical, some would say even tyrannical, but others remember him gently, the boy who would not come down from the altar. The boy who would quote Thomas Mann’s “I am often weary to death of portraying humanity without participating in what is human.” Rainer made a choice early on, that his work, his stories, were the most important thing to him. It cost him everything, and those around him plenty, but for their efforts we have Lola, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Effie Briest, Martha, and World on a Wire.

Without further ado, here is Fassbinder’s 1966 short A Little Chaos, followed by the 1982’s A Man Like Eva, with Eva Mattes playing EVA, aka RWFassbinder.