Movies: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Bla...

Though he never actually worked in Hollywood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of 36, was influenced greatly by Amercian studio films of the 1950s and the convention of melodrama (the link most often mentioned is Douglas Sirk)....

A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She def...

A film portrait of the influential Bavarian actor, director and screenwriter who publicly confessed his homosexuality....

Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the anger of her father, whose inces...

Nightclub singer La Paloma succumbs to the persistent courting of a chubby rich admirer and marries him. Before the marriage, she was thought to be dying, but soon she is well. She believes her husband's love has cured her, but her efforts to love hi...

Inspired by the real life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX Century. Mathias stole from the riches to give to the poor, becoming a hero for the rural people, and a popular social rebel. He was...

Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Str...

A tramp finds a gun lying in the street....

Douglas speaks about some of the stars he has directed like Asta Nielsen, Lili Dagover, Zarah Leander, George Sanders, Signe Hasso, Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Wyman and many others....

A pseudo variety show about the Aufbau-Era, the time of the German 'economic miracle'. Brigitte Mira recounts her four husbands through song and joke, on an series of artificial sets....

Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight nai...

Avant-garde adaptation of a Carlo Goldoni play. Well-to-do Venetians congregate in a coffee house and discuss their problems....

Documentary about the making of the 1980 German television series....

Berta, a naive young maid, searches for love when the army engineers come to town to build a bridge....

An African-American GI retires from the US Army in West Berlin to live with his (white) girlfriend, who already has a baby with another black man. After an argument with her family, she deserts him as well. Despite finding a job and a new place to li...

Documentary about the shooting of BOURBON STREET BLUES....

After the war, almost by chance, Alfonso Sansone starts to produce documentary films and moves from Palermo to Rome, the city of film....

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What is the future of cinema? In 1982, in Cannes, Wim Wenders invited many movie makers to answer this question. 26 years later, the question remains, but Wenders is now on the other side of the camera....