seventy-five years old, Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have been this year, and the thought of what could have been the German Film, would be Cooper, since thirty-eight years dead, has many voted again and again melancholic. No one was more radical and more uncomfortable (and entertaining) than he, no one suffered in this country as he is, nobody stood up to him, his history and the German soul has discontinued such as he. If we look today at his movies, then with a historic view. Not because they were not aged well, the opposite is the case. But because they show Germany in a state from which we are arrived, where we find ourselves today.
Verena Lueken
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
Cooper has provoked, especially after his death, a veritable flood of publications, studies, analyses, his own writings came out of his theatre pieces, scripts, exhibition catalogues, and again and again, picture-books, about individual films, and his series “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, the Actresses were in his films on his oeuvre. Hardly any other German Director of such has been posthumously honored researched as he is. And the Fassbinder Foundation and its President Juliane Lorenz have provided an exemplary digital work edition (and continue to do), which makes almost every one of his forty-four movies available, and in contemporary 4K quality.
so What is left for another book? Still a picture book, this time with Film Stills? There is in Fassbinder’s films to discover something that has been overlooked by all the authors that have caved in on him and his work? A curtsy in front of another Large, the not recognized, a pain that is not recognized, an anger, a love, a drug, which has not been investigated in the past decades? Sure has not been overlooked that he was sexy, a “film stallion, surrounded by all these smart, talented women,” as John Waters points out in his over-the-top birthday greeting. Have noticed other. But Waters also stresses that you can’t cry in his films, but often laugh, and not always sadistic, as in “Martha”, but often simply for the joy of the wisdom of its women, a picture of incidence, an evil dialogue, an Exaggeration to Kitsch.
