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 anticommunist, male chauvinist, antiSemitic and even antigay, 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 libertinage that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema , 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.
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 was his most successful movie
He made 41 movies in 13 years
Was a huge fan of Douglas Sirk.
Whity was his least successful movie.
Member of the Official Competition jury at the 27th 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: La caduta degli dei (Gtterdmmerung) , The Naked and the Dead , Lola Monts , Flamingo Road , Sal o le 120 giornate di Sodoma , Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , Dishonored , The Night of the Hunter , Johnny Guitar , Kalina krasnaya .
Despite Fassbinders international success and enduring legacy, not a single one of the directors 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.
Ex-brother-in-law of Trudeliese Schmidt.
Close friends with Udo Kier.
He is buried in the graveyard of the Church of St Georg, Bogenhausen, Munich. The interior of the church is used in a key scene in Michelangelo Antonioni s Professione: reporter .
Made 8 movies in just one year - 1970.
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.
I let the audience feel and think.
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.
In order to understand the present, what has and will become of a,country, one has to understand its whole history or to have assimilated,it.
Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.
