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

on the Alexanderplatz Criterion box

How did we talk about movies before we had polls.

We groped and stumbled.

I watched the Marriage of Maria Braun this week and really, really enjoyed it. There are an awful lot of European films like that that don't do anything for me, so I was really surprised. I also managed to correctly guess he was a Gemini just by watching this film. I love all the short twists and turns to it and you never know exactly what to expect. At first the baffling ending troubled me and I thought it ruined the whole rest of the movie until I rewound and watched it one more time and then I understood. A very complex film, I thought, and a masterpiece.

I watched Querelle a long, long time ago with a friend. I don't remember what I thought of it, really. But I remember it had that famous French woman in it...Moreau, that's it. I remember there being something kindof humorous about her in that.

berlin alexanderplatz coming out in nov.

(er, on dvd)

Read a collection of essays, interviews, etc recently, greatly titled "Anarchy of the Imagination". There is a short story, of sorts - more like a film of his on 20 pages that kinda did my head in for the rest of the day hurrah.

Okay, I thought Lola was embarrassingly and irritatingly boringly bad. I even watched the Blue Angel just before it (the film with Marlene Dietrich that Fassbinder was supposed to be doing a tribute to with 'Lola') and man, I just don't get it. If the name of the film is Lola, why not make Lola the main character? And while we're at it, let's get a better plot and choose a different actress altogether!

yr mad.

http://sctv.org/characters/lola/lola.gif

yes, Bobby Bittman wd've directed the SCTV remake of Fassbinder

With Ed Grimley as Franz Biberkopf.

WAY too much of his stuff out there right now.

tailor-made kitsch for anomic urban intellectuals. fuck it.

penetrating criticism there

really worth waking up the thread for

capsule review, john. i could get into it, but i don't know if it's worth it. the weird thing about rwf fanboys, like warhol fanboys i guess, of both sexes, is that them being utter shits on a personal level becomes in some way 'part of' the total work. with fassbinder, the work is almost justification for the life. people are mannequins so it's okay to push them around. i suppose there is the alibi that it's capitalism making us mean, somewhere, but is that really even present in, say, 'petra von kant'.

otherwise, stilted versions of sirk films... if that's your thing, go nuts, have a ball, whatever.

I've seen "...Maria Braun" and "Querelle" and loathed them both. i don't intend to see any of his other film's although, strangely, i did quite like Ozon's "water Drops on Burning Rocks".

if memory serves, 'lola' has some pep to it -- 'water drops', which probably is ozon's best film (not very high praise!) comes from the late 60s, and maybe that's when he was best. the films were short and kind of fresh. you get to the mid-70s and things like 'chinese roulette' and it's basically bad chabrol and you wonder what the fuck you're doing watching.

"film's"! ugh.

xpost - re Ozon, i haven't seen much, "5x2" was on ch4 last night but i couldn't summon up the energy to watch it.

me neither, but the ones i've seen:

Swimming Pool (2003) -- dire
8 femmes (2002) -- dire
Sous le sable (2000) -- okay central perf from rampling
Water Drops on Burning Rocks -- not bad
Sitcom (1998) -- awful awful awful "OMG BENEATH THE VENEER OF BOURGEOIS RESPECTABILITY..." yarn

Yesterday, I had the displeasure of spending two endless hours with In a Year of 13 Moons. Pretty much everything about it was substandard, but the acting in particular was shockingly bad.

"5x2" is really not worth the bother -- my local library stocks this for some reason! By coincidence I caught a screening of Cassavetes' "Faces" today, which does the whole marriage is blah with about, I dunno, 10 billion times more style, etc.

Only seen 3 or 4 of his but you should see "Fear eats the Soul", jed.

with fassbinder, the work is almost justification for the life. people are mannequins so it's okay to push them around.

none of the people in the fassbinder films i've seen (admittedly only about 5) seemed like mannequins. a lot of them are unpleasant, or do unpleasant things, but they're at least complicated unpleasant people. and of course not all of them are unpleasant, and also there's a huge amount of life and color in the movies that you seem to be denying. but anyway. to each his own and all that.

The Index of ILX Film Snobs

I shouldn't really talk That One Guy Who etc (I'm sure I knew who you were at some point but can't keep track of nu-handles), I was a Fassbinder fan when I was a teenager but haven't seen anything in years & years - I remember liking Herr R., Satan's Brew & 13 Moons precisely because they were dire empty difficult and in the case of the last one coked beyond reason = I liked them for personal reasons

I imagine what you're saying about the audience goes hand-in-hand with pretty much any arthouse director though no?

saw The Third Generation last night. I've been saving up the 10 or so I haven't seen yet for special occasions like the good wine, but then when I get to something as amazing as that one, it makes me want to make a run on the video store, take two days off from work and batten down

the scene where Eddie Constantine as the corrupt CEO chides the police chief for not having a sense of humor, and the police chief responds by saying 'I had a dream last night... that Capitalism invented Terrorism to force the State to protect it better... isn't that funny?' and they break out into hysterical laughter

and the opening credit sequence with the flashing credits & Peer Raben's kosmische score is one of the most psychedelic things I've seen in months, where the hell are the complete Peer Raben soundtracks? a CD with all the atmospheric pieces in these Fassbinder films would go head to head with all my favorite Cluster & Conrad Schnitzler albums, why can't it be real

http://images.kino.de/flbilder/max02/mbiz02/mbiz19/z0219513/m135.jpg

http://images.kino.de/newspics/655/6655_1/m80.jpg

yeah wish i could find a single jpg of udo's shock wig in this film

leaving work early to stop by home & record the music of the opening sequence into pro tools before returning the dvd

Berlin Alexanderplatz is in my house right now, it is due back in 4 or 5 days. Probably not gonna happen. There's always summer I guess.

http://www.artecapital.net/uploads/39_1.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9jGFSY3wnw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TBuCNvVPI4

http://www.sendspace.com/file/cckwug

Third Generation was awesome agree. Wouldn't say no to a listen to every bit of soundtrack Raben composed from around '76-'79 (Fassbinder's or otherwise, Ottinger 'Ticket of No Return' had some great stuff in it).

The sound design (?) was marvelous -- e.g. all that muffled sound coming off the TV, and so on.

Chinese Roulette was no good tho'.

Elementary school children's Q&A w/ RWF:

http://orpheusfx.blogspot.com/2009/03/fassbinders-q.html

What do you think is needed for a perfect Sunday morning?

Caviar, champagne, the Eight Symphony of Mahler, 'radio activity' by Kraftwerk, the Sunday Bild paper, a book so exciting you don't want it to end, a friend, a good friend, and the possibility of unplugging the phone.

thanks fo rthe link. classic stuff, although I find it hard to believe that elementary school kids designed this Q&A

World on a Wire restored and playing NYC MoMA week after next.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/movies/04wire.html

G. Kenny on WoaW:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/04/out-in-the-real-world-in-real-time-fassbinders-welt-am-draht-world-on-wire.html

The film is simultaneously constantly piss-taking and deadly earnest, a labyrinthian riot of scenes seen solely via reflective surfaces, set in an only vaguely futuristic world where characters do their expository walk-and-talks around a small indoor swimming pool whilst a Marlene Dietrich impersonator swoons about. the film, the riches of which include an extended scene that pays snarky homage to both 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, sometimes resembles a mind-meld of Kubrick and Alfred Jarry, Fassbinder and lensers Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz running the show on screen with wildly anarchic creativity while the characters in it are in near-constant torment over who's running their show. Characters in zombie makeup out of Carnival of Souls pop in and out of the film's two (at least at first) depicted "worlds," one ostensibly "upper" and the other "lower," and while one realm is not ever depicted as more materially desirable than the other, those who "know" that they are "simulations" become desperate to transfer to the upper world, because then they will have the assurance of being "real." That individuals in the upper world are discovering that they themselves might lack "realness," well, you can imagine the problems this can create.

Got the two boxsets over Xmas/New Year (Praise be to FOPP/ Twenty quid a popp). Took me until now to see "Love Is Colder Than Death", which I'd always assumed must be a load of old tosh, but is great, it looks beautiful and Ulli Lommel is very handsome, the scene on the train between him and the girl is hilarious, "Are you thinking about sex?" "No, the revolution". Only in the 60s eh? Also I now love "Gods of the Plague", I'd seen it before but hadn't appreciated it much, general consensus is that "The American Soldier" is the best of his 'gangster' films but I think this is, this time round it's Harry Baer who is handsome, I love the ludicrous last lines RWF gives characters as they lay a-dying, love the soundtrack to this film too. One word of warning don't watch "Fear of Fear" if you're feeling ill, as I was on Saturday night, the wobbly screen bit will make you vomit, as I did on Saturday night...

... and by the way, this might belong on the football thread but:

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's favourite footballers of all time:

1. Helmut Haller
2. Paul Breitner
3. Garrincha
4. Gerd Müller
5. Gento
6. Didi
7. Harald Konopka
8. Peter Grosser
9. Vava
10. Ferenc Puszkas

... I admit I had no idea who Peter Grosser was and only vaguely knew the name, Harald Konopka. Overall seems to be a marked fondness for podgy, slightly unhealthy looking, individuals with various substance abuse problems ... wonder why? (Maradona was surely made for RWF!)

Yeah he would've stalked Maradona.

never really understood the appeal of this guy. he seems like an endurance test. which I can appreciate fro ma campy John Waters-esque POV but it's not like I actually want to sit through any of it

Although both no doubt share a love for melodrama I doubt John Waters would enjoy any Fassbinder (they use that aspect very differently).

There is an appeal to Fassbinder but it isn't wide (much of it rooted in German history).

Some of his films have really knocked me out and others were just impenetrable.
Really like Love Is Colder Than Death fwiw.

um Waters LOVES Fassbinder

http://www.fassbinderfoundation.de/node.php/en/newyork

he's on the fucking Board of Directors!

haha! Ah well, doesn't scan.

Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven tomorrow. Thoughts?