RW Fassbinder: C/D, S/D, Y/DA-Y/DA

She could pull through.

the other place has better seats

Saw a trailer for World on a Wire the other night--it opens here shortly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URq7m3-SOtA&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active

Morbius had a couple of posts on it last year. There are some famous sci-fi films that I don't get as much out of as most people--2001, Solaris--but it looks like it could be excellent.

I think you will like this one, Phil.

It's kind of sci-fi, crime thriller, mad-as-a-TV-miniseries European art film rolled into one.

There are a handful of Fassbinders I love, and a handful I find boring, so I'm hoping for the best. The one thing that struck me immediately was that it had a great look.

World on a Wire is great, definitely one of my favourite fassbinder films actually.

He has so many films that of course he's got a few rubber donuts. I can't finish Berlin Alexanderplatz.

There's a restored R1 dvd of Despair out today!

ooh i want to see world on a wire. i took a fassbinder class in college that was pretty much total immersion -- a great/scary body of work to be immersed in!

It's like being up his ass.

Lord Sotosyn, when you finally get to the last episode / coda of Berline Alexanderplatz, you'll be happy

World On A Wire is one of the made-for-television films; it has almost zero budget, most of which they spent on tinfoil to wrap around the walls of the simulacron's control room. But very stylized and looks great. It's a little long, was originally a two episode series, and it's all talk no effects so sci-fi fans who are not Fassbinder fans might be advised to gauge expectations, but the basic concept is razor sharp and yes it definitely does anticipate all of the better ideas in the The Matrix by about three decades. I loved it. Wouldn't make my top 5 Fassbinder, maybe my top 15.

Saw Satan's Brew for the first time last week! Good lord. I thought Third Generation was slapstick, but that was highbrow compared to the pacing / density of this one where every line of dialogue seems to be trying to be playing it up for yuks. It was a little exhausting how hard it tries, actually, but it was still funny and Margit Christensen doing straight up comedy -- amazing!

xp yucko!

hmm haven't seen satan's brew, though i like funny fassbinder. one of my faves is beware of a holy whore. the ray charles sequence is amazing.

Board should add a Suggest Banish to TMI button over on the side.

So WOAW is getting a theatrical release in the US? Or is a region 1 dvd coming out? I can't wait, looks like total bait for me.

There's an Elvis hit that pops up on the soundtrack of WoaW, and I remember thinking that today it would cost more than the entire 1973 budget.

It's good, but very much him, more than much other s.f. with similar themes. His mother has a particularly thankless role, even for her.

Kamikaze 89 is one of my favorites. Fassbinder stars but didn't direct

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_6m7808n5Y

His mother has a particularly thankless role, even for her.
that one short film with fassbinder and his mom playing themselves (autumn in germany) is wild. weird relationship to say the least.

or rather germany in autumn

xp

Beware is one the very best ones. But it's funny for different reasons. Satan's Brew is like a sitcom, it almost feels like it should have a laugh track, very uncharacteristic.

I remember watching Beware at the Castro towards the end of a RWF festival. About 50 people, all spread out through the theatre, many people alone, including me (as my friend Anne who was working the booth told me as she sold me the ticket: 'Ha ha, one for Fassbinder, how many times have I heard that this week'). Everyone was mostly silent for about the first 40 minutes, and then some lines in the film started causing individual audience members to crack up and lose it, one at a time -- until, gradually, every line was causing different people to laugh, so the laughter was travelling in pockets across the theatre. It was bizarre. It was less like the lines were funny, and more like people were reaching their individual limits of how much they could take and being forced to vent.

yeah, that's sort of how i remember seeing it too. it didn't seem very funny at first but the cumulative effect just kicked the whole film into hilariousness. i can't really think of any other movie quite like it.

Milton Parker's description of WooW is otm.

Saw it during the 1997 marathon as mentioned above and then saw the great-looking rerelease last April. The main thing I remember right now is some nutty guy kept going on about how his mother was in the original version and he had been watching it his whole life on a VHS tape. During the final Q&A he kept arguing with Juliane Lorenz and Laurence Kardish, which went on way too long before security finally escorted him out. He said something about "You changed it! You changed the meaning, in the original it said something else!" To which Juliane Lorenz replied "The original was in German, you are speaking English, you speak German, why don't you speak German?" All of which was annoying at the time but I guess added yet another layer of reality thereby heightening the filmgoing experience.

I think over on the no-man's land of ILF I once tried to describe that point where you shift over from being horrified to laughing in a Fassbinder film and somebody, not a regular, gave me grief for it.

Here: Best FIlms About Filmmaking

maybe he wasn't giving me grief, I dunno

Statan's Brew is one of the few I hate! Wacky farce was not his forte.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is one that I love--I've made it all the way through three times the past 30 years.

Saw a DVD of World On A Wire (less than a tenner?) a few weeks ago and was gonna revive to ask - excellent, I shall get this ASAP.

I've only seen the "Maria Braun", "Lola", "Veronika Voss" trilogy. My favorite of the three was "Lola" since it was the funniest. "Maria Braun" was also pretty good. "Veronika Voss" was a little too weird. I've got "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" at home now.

Its the 11th best film ever made!

Title of Ali works better in German, where it is more like "Fear Eats Up The Soul" (as in "Fear Consumes the Soul") but in grammatically incorrect German, because he is an immigrant, so it would be "Fear Eat Up Soul"

I just realized he doesn't actually have a film called "White Lily" as Laurie Anderson led me to believe for the past 30 years.

didn't even realize Despair was coming out until I walked into work today and saw it on the shelf. Been dying to see it since I actually ran into my doppleganger while reading the book a couple of years ago.

Margit Christensen doing straight up comedy

"Satan's Brew"? Straight up comedy?

unearthed 1973 sci-fi TV mini-series from RWF sounds awes

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2011-08/63915802.jpg

It's getting a Criterion release later this year, too.

A few of my friends saw it and loved it. I need to check it out.

I've seen it and it's awesome, it's kind of like the matrix, lol.

It's well worth seeing. Not awesome, except for his casting his mom as another clueless ninny.

World On A Wire playing at LACMA this weekend.

World on a Wire - Not awesome but really good.

Also caught a screening of 'Bitter Tears...' a few weeks ago, that was awesome for the soundtrack choices alone.

I am going to see WOAW. Really good is good enough, plus I am LACMA member now.

Also not sure if this is still happening, but at one point Albert Serra was talking about making a Fassbinder Biopic in which he played RW. Sounded like it could be...interesting!:
http://www.viennale.at/cgi-bin/page.pl?id=3922;lang=en

great essay over at lareviewofbooks.org about world on a wire by someone who worked on it. would love to see this movie!

So World On A Wire was good. Far too long, probably, but compelling. There was tension in the audience between folks who were laughing at the camp and people who wanted to take it more seriously - one older cinephile shouted down a bunch of yukking hipsters with "this isn't a fucking comedy!!!"

Beautiful use of Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" which has me now listening to that track all morning.

"All the exteriors were shot in Paris because they were the most modern buildings in those days,"

Ah this explains a lot. I was trying to figure out which german city it could be!

The restoration was very nice, some fuzziness which I guess is as a result of 16mm being blown up to 35?

Fear of Fear tonight.

Getting to see W.o.a.W. this weekend.

Restored print of Despair making the rounds. Never really comes up as essential Fassbinder but why the hell not.

Anyone like Alexander Kluge? Saw a film by him at the Tate yesterday (the screening was plaged by issues with subtitles and gaps due changes of reels, i think?)

Anyhow,The Female Patriot will be hard to beat as a new discovery this year. All about the repression/cultural amnesia that sets in post-war Germany (shown to coincide with the Richter exhibition that ended yesterday). This is an issue that Fassbinder tackled in Third Generation.

Complex in the way it was put together. It is centred around a German history teacher's attempts to compile material so that she can teach more accurate, or 'better'/less repressed history classes as oposed to what is prescribed in the curriculum. But 'centred' in the loosest way possible. It often spends periods qhere it goes into pure Montage (her compilation of materials and what she finds) as per Chris Marker, then it will have short dramatic scenes (a parent complains to the teacher about how she is warping his son's mind; teachers debating her 'wrong' methods). The commentary to this montage has this fairly tight script, but it is narrated by a (I kid you not) knee (that's the body part) that ws hacked off a soldier in 1944. The knee goes into all sorts of essay like matter, a very striking bit on the brothers Grimm and their compilation of fairy tales (on a section about 'wishing' = as in a people's wish for impossible victories in bloody wars), so the narrative can then switch from an interview to an enthusiast of those fairy tales. He comes across rather creepily about them.

Anyway this film also has a documentary like session where the history teacher (who is actually an actress, btw) goes to a German Party conference and haggles delegates to change educational policy, to much bemusement. Kluge can go from shooting grainy B&W as in the party conference section to actual gorgeous elegiac shots of, say, trees hit by breeze and the winter snow, so there is a style here, too.

I didn't mind the somewhat trying screening because its quite dense and would need a couple of viewings to get a handle on it. I think the NFT need to pull their finger out and screen a season of his films.

saw it years ago in a film class where we also watched 'yesterday girl' and 'brutality in stone' (the latter is kind of a german complement to 'night and fog' iirc)