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You are here: Home Film Festivals Previews Rainer Werner Fassbinder - The Romantic Anarchist Enjoys A Retrospective (Pt. 1)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder - The Romantic Anarchist Enjoys A Retrospective (Pt. 1)

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Parent Category: Film Festivals
Category: Previews
Published on Wednesday, 14 May 2014 13:49
Written by Jack Angstreich

From May 16th through June 1st, 2014, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running the first part of a major retrospective of the late great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982), including all of his theatrical features as well as many of his television films, along with several films influenced by the director. The second half of the series will begin in November 2014. 

In Fassbinder’s striking first feature from 1969, Love is Colder than Death, thew director plays a thuggish pimp who teams up with a handsome, more polished gangster played by Ulli Lommel. This film is representative of his eclectic early phase, which often registered the influence of Hollywood genres like the crime and film noir.
 
With The Merchant of Four Seasons, released in 1971 and screening as a DCP “restoration” in this series, Fassbinder found his true métier as a director of melodramas influenced by those of the magisterial Douglas Sirk, but Love is Colder than Death has many compelling elements, not the least of which is the presence of Hanna Schygulla, memorably playing the pimp’s girlfriend. The black-and-white cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann is another distinctive component and this comes through in the 35-millimeter print from Janus Films which nonetheless sports some wear. 
 
Love is Colder than Death is paired with Jean Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet’s short film from 1968, the even more avant-garde The Comedienne, The Bridegroom and the Pimp, which stars Fassbinder, in a characteristically brilliant performance, as another pimp who here tries to break up the impending marriage of an actress and her African-American bridegroom. (Straub, a giant or world cinema, is one of the dedicatees of Love is Colder than Death, along with Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and two characters from a Damiano Damiani Western.) Aesthetically, this work is even more impressive than the promising Fassbinder feature that it is paired with and there is some gorgeous, black-and-white photography to be seen in the rather worn 35-millimeter print being screened. 
 
Love is Colder than Death and The Comedienne, The Bridegroom and the Pimp are showing three times:
  • Friday, May 16th
  • Saturday, May 17th
  • Monday, May 19th
 The remarkable Beware of a Holy Whore — a study of the paranoid, hothouse atmosphere surrounding a film-set in Spain and inspired by the shooting of the director’s bizarre, widescreen color Western, Whity — is the reflexive, seductive capstone to (and possibly the summit of) the avant-garde, initial period of Fassbinder’s oeuvre. Starring the extraordinary Lou Castel in a gripping performance as the despotic, capricious director of the film-within-the-film, Beware of a Holy Whore boasts an outstanding cast, including Fassbinder himself, Eddie Constantine, Hanna Schygulla, Ulli Lommel, Margarethe von Trotta, Marquard Bohm, Magdalena Montezuma, Kurt Raab, Ingrid Caven, Katrin Schaake, among others.
 
Shot in color by Michael Ballhaus, the film features several beautiful, bravura, complexly choreographed, long mobile takes, reflecting a more virtuosic command of the medium than one encounters in Fassbinder’s earliest works, where the director often relied upon a quasi-primitive style characterized by long, static shots. 
 
Beware of a Holy Whore screens twice, on Saturday, May 24th and on Monday, May 26th, in a reasonably attractive 35-millimeter print, diminished by some wear and dirt visible especially at the heads and tails of reels; it is preceded by a short film, Cuba Libre, by the celebrated director, Alberto Serra, an hommage to Fassbinder’s feature, named after the cocktail consumed in the film.
 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Romantic Anarchist (Pt. 1)
May 16th - June 1st, 2014

Film Society of Lincoln Center 

 

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