today~ may 31st, 2010 is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 65th Birthday!
Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 – June 10, 1982) was a German movie director, screenwriter and actor. He is considered one of the most important representatives of the New German Cinema.
He maintained a frenetic pace in film-making. In a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years, Fassbinder completed 40 feature length films; two television film series; three short films; four video productions; twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays; and 36 acting roles in his own and others’ films. He also worked as an actor (film and theater), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theater manager.
Underlying Fassbinder's work was a strong provocative current. His phenomenal creative energy when working were in violent contrast with a wild, self-destructive libertinism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, as well as being its central figure. He had tortured personal relationships with the actors and technicians around him who formed a surrogate family. However, his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social outsiders and his hatred of institutionalized violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity.
Fassbinder died at the age of 37 from heart failure resulting from a lethal interaction between sleeping pills and cocaine. His death is often considered to mark the end of the New German Cinema.
Scandals and controversies ensured that in Germany itself Fassbinder was permanently in the news, making calculatedly provocative remarks in interviews. His work often received mixed reviews from the national critics, many of whom only began to take him seriously after the foreign press had hailed him as a major director.
There were frequent exposés of his lifestyle in the press, and attacks from all sides from the groups his films offended. His television series Eight Hours Do Not Make a Day was cut from eight to five episodes after pressure from conservatives The playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz sued over Fassbinder's adaptation of his play Jail Bait, alleging that it was obscene. Lesbians and feminists accused Fassbinder of misogyny (in presenting women as complicit in their own oppression) in his 'Women‘s Picture'.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has been cited by some feminist and gay critics as both homophobic and sexist.
Gays complained of misrepresentation in Fox and his Friends. Conservatives attacked him for his association with the radical left. Marxists said he had sold out his political principles in his depictions of left-intellectual manipulations in Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven and of a late-blooming terrorist in The Third Generation. Berlin Alexanderplatz was moved to a late night television slot amid widespread complaints that it was unsuitable for children. The most heated criticism came for his play Garbage, the City, and Death, whose scheduled performance at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt was cancelled early in 1975 amid charges of anti-semitism. Though published at the time, and quickly withdrawn, the play was not performed until 1985, after Fassbinder's death. In the turmoil, Fassbinder resigned from his directorship of that prestigious theater complex, complaining that the play had been misinterpreted.
Fassbinder did little to discourage the personalized nature of the attacks on himself and his work. He seemed to provoke them by his aggressively non-conformist lifestyle, symbolized in his black leather jacket, battered hat, dark glasses and perennial scowl.
By the time he made his last film, Querelle (1982), Fassbinder was using heavy doses of drugs and alcohol to sustain his unrelenting work schedule. On the night of June 9–10, 1982, Wolf Gremm, director of the film Kamikaze 1989 (1982), which starred Fassbinder, was staying in his apartment. Early that evening, Fassbinder retired to his bedroom. He was working on notes for a future film: Rosa L, based on the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German revolutionary socialist, with Jane Fonda in the title role. Fassbinder was watching television, video and reading in between when shortly after one o'clock in the morning he received a phone call from his friend and assistant Harry Baer. At 3:30 a.m, when Juliane Lorenz arrived home, she heard the noise of television in Fassbinder’s room, but she could not hear him snoring. Though not allowed to enter the room uninvited, she went in, and she found him lying on the bed, dead, a cigarette still between his lips. A thin ribbon of blood trickled from one nostril. It was ten days after his thirty-seventh birthday.
The cause of death was reported as heart failure resulting from a lethal interaction between sleeping pills and cocaine. The notes for Rosa Luxemburg were found next to his body.
(this portrait painted on pages of fasbinder's screen plays by antebellian artist~ Rinaldo Hopf)
No comments:
Post a Comment