CHICAGO's TRAP DOOR THEATRE opened its 2006-07 season with a production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The play, written in 1971, and made into a film the next year with Fassbinder as director, tells a story...

(Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through March 20) The little that most American moviegoers know about the prolific gay German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder isn't pretty. By reputation the director was dictatorial, self-indulgent, mean-spirited, racist, overly dependent on chemical substances,...

Forget the end of Labor Day weekend, Fashion Week, or the return of corduroy, tweed, and the TV network’s fall schedule: When the bright lights are festooned across the outdoor patio at Tavern on the Green this Friday night for the opening of the 45th...

At no point during his career has Fassbinder renounced the autobiographical element in his films. His self-criticism does not affect the material but rather the manner of its presentation. The central experience—one might go so far as to call it the trauma that motivates his productivity—is emotional exploitation. His films are fictionalised, dramatised, occasionally didactic versions of what it means to live within power structures and dependencies that are all but completely internalised, an...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a man who knows how to hate. More to the point—but very much connected with it—Fassbinder's films may have extended the language and method of film more than those of any young film-maker of his generation. (p. 2) Melodramatic elements abound in Fassbinder's films. Why should Ali be stricken with the "immigrant's disease" at the end of Fear Eats the Soul just as Emmy so movingly forgives and accepts him? Why does Wildwechsel Ȃ...

[Fassbinder's characters] start at a point of freedom from external constraints far beyond any [Sirk's] characters could have imagined, but they are every bit as miserable. They almost always have more than enough money to do whatever they want or to travel wherever they please; they often have jobs that they quite enjoy; they live in a society that does not care about their political convictions, religious beliefs or sexual orientations. Even so, they are no more free than the title character...