Biography for
Rainer Werner Fassbinder More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

31 May 1945, Bad Wörishofen, Bavaria, Germany

Date of Death

10 June 1982, Munich, Bavaria, Germany (drug overdose)

Height

5' 9¼" (1.76 m)

Mini Biography

Above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. Openly homosexual, he married twice; one of his wives acted in his films and the other served as his editor. Accused variously by detractors of being anti-Communist, male chauvinist, anti-Semitic and even homophobic, he completed 44 projects between 1966 and 1982, the majority of which can be characterized as highly intelligent social melodramas. His prodigious output was matched by a wild, self-destructive libertarianism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema (as well as its central figure.) Known for his trademark leather jacket and grungy appearance, Fassbinder cruised the bar scene by night, looking for sex and drugs, yet he maintained a flawless work ethic by day. Actors and actresses recount disturbing stories of his brutality toward them, yet his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. Some find his cinema needlessly controversial and avant-garde; others accuse him of surrendering to the Hollywood ethos. It is best said that he drew forth strong emotional reactions from all he encountered, both in his personal and professional lives, and this provocative nature can be experienced posthumously through reviewing his artistic legacy.

Fassbinder was born into a bourgeois Bavarian family in 1946. His father was a doctor and his mother a translator. In order to have time for her work, his mother frequently sent him the movies, a practice that gave birth to his obsession with the medium. Later in life, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. At the age of 15, Fassbinder defiantly declared his homosexuality, soon after which he left school and took a job. He studied theater in the mid-sixties at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich and joined the Action Theater (aka, Anti-Theater) in 1967. Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema (e.g., Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders) who started out making movies, Fassbinder acquired an extensive stage background that is evident throughout his work. Additionally, he learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theater management. This versatility later surfaced in his films where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. [So boundless was his energy, in fact, that he appeared in 30 projects of other directors.] In his theater years, he also developed a reparatory company that included his mother, two of his wives and various male and female lovers. Coupled with his ability to serve in nearly any crew capacity, this gave him the ability to produce his films quickly and on extremely low budgets.

Success was not immediate for Fassbinder. His first feature length film, a gangster movie called Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (1969) was greeted by catcalls at the Berlin Film Festival. His next piece, Katzelmacher (1969), was a minor critical success, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. It featured Jorgos, an emigrant from Greece, who encounters violent xenophobic slackers in moving into an all-German neighborhood. This kind of social criticism, featuring alienated characters unable to escape the forces of oppression, is a constant throughout Fassbinder's diverse oeuvre. In subsequent years, he made such controversial films about human savagery such as Pioniere in Ingolstadt (1971) (TV) and Whity (1971) before scoring his first domestic commercial success with Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (1971). This moving portrait of a street vendor crushed by the betrayal and his own futility is considered a masterpiece, as is his first international success Angst essen Seele auf (1974) (Fear Eats the Soul). With a wider audience for his efforts, however, some critics contend that Fassbinder began to sell out with big budget projects such as Despair (1978), Lili Marleen (1981) and Lola (1981). In retrospect, however, it seems that the added fame simply enabled Fassbinder to explore various kinds of filmmaking, including such "private" works as In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978) and Die dritte Generation (1979), two films about individual experience and feelings. His greatest success came with Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) (The Marriage of Maria Braun), chronicling the rise and fall of a German woman in the wake of World War II. Other notable movies include Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972), Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975), Satansbraten (1976) and Querelle (1982), all focused on gay and lesbian themes and frequently with a strongly pornographic edge.

His death is a perfect picture of the man and his legend. On the night of June 10, 1982, Fassbinder took an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. When he was found, the unfinished script for a version of Rosa Luxemburg was lying next to him. So boundless was his drive and creativity that, throughout his downward spiral and even in the moment of his death, Fassbinder never ceased to be productive.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Cohn

Spouse

Ingrid Caven

(26 August 1970 - 27 September 1972) (divorced)

Trivia

Son of Lilo Pempeit.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 318-330. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) was his most successful movie

He made 41 movies in 13 years

Was a huge fan of Douglas Sirk. His movie Angst essen Seele auf (1974) is a remake of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955).

Whity (1971) was his least successful movie.

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1977

His death is often considered to mark the end of New German Cinema.

A school in Munich is named after him. Ironically, he left school without graduation at the age of 16 (18 July 2006).

A year before his death, listed these as his ten favorite films: The Damned (1969), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Lola Montès (1955), Flamingo Road (1949), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Dishonored (1931), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Johnny Guitar (1954), Kalina Krasnaya (1974).

Despite Fassbinder's international success and enduring legacy, not a single one of the director's 23 theatrical films was ever nominated for an Academy Award. Additionally, only one Fassbinder film ("Lili Marleen") was ever submitted by Germany to the Academy for a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Ultimately, the film was not nominated.

Personal Quotes

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

"Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It's a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other."

"I let the audience feel and think."

"I'm against caricatures, I'm against parodies;if you say that this scene has the effect of a parody, then I have to take your word for it, but then I'm ashamed of myself and I apologize."

"The American method of making films left the audience with emotions and nothing else; I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling."

"What I would like is to make Hollywood movies, that is, movies as wonderful and universal, but at the same time not as hypocritical, as Hollywood."

I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.

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