Rainer fassbinder biography of rory
He also worked as an actor, author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theater manager. Underlying Fassbinder's work was a desire to provoke and disturb. His phenomenal creative energy, when working, coexisted 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. We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.
His career lasted less than two decades, but he was extremely prolific; between andhe completed over 40 feature films, 24 plays, two television serials, three short films, and four video productions, winning five of the most prestigious prizes for feature film in Germany, including the Golden Bear and multiple German Film Awards.
His premature death is often considered the end of the New German Cinema timeframe. The aftermath of World War II deeply marked his childhood and the lives of his family. He was one year old when he was returned to his parents in Munich. As a result, a number of her relatives came to live with them in Munich. Fassbinder's parents were cultured members of the bourgeoisie.
His father concentrated on his careerwhich he saw as a means to inspire his passion for writing poetry. His mother largely ignored him as well, spending the majority of her time with her husband working on his career. InLiselotte Pempeit and Helmut Fassbinder divorced. Helmut moved to Cologne while Liselotte raised her son as a single parent in Munich.
When she was working, she often sent her son to the cinema to pass time. Later in life, Fassbinder claimed that he saw at least one film a day, sometimes as many as four per day. During this period, Pempeit was often away from her son for long periods while she recuperated from tuberculosis. As he was often left alone, he became used to the independence and later became a juvenile delinquent.
He clashed with his mother's younger lover Siegfried, who lived with them when Fassbinder was around eight or nine years old. He had a similar difficult relationship with the much older journalist Wolff Eder c. As a teen, Fassbinder was sent to rainer fassbinder biography of rory school. His time there was marred by his repeated escape attempts, and he eventually left school before any final examinations.
At the age of 15, he moved to Cologne with his father. To earn money, he worked small jobs ; he also helped his father, who rented apartments to migrant workers. During this time, Fassbinder began to immerse himself in his father's world of culture, writing poems, short plays, and stories. Inaged 18, Fassbinder returned to Munich with plans to attend night school with the idea to eventually study drama.
Following his mother's advice, he took acting lessons and from to attended the Fridl-Leonhard Studio for actors in Munich. He also entered several 8 mm films including This Night now considered lost[ 16 ] but he was turned down for admission, as were Werner Schroeter and Rosa von Praunheim who would also have careers as film directors. He returned to Munich where he continued with his writing.
Shot in black and whitethey were financed by Fassbinder's lover, Christoph Roser, an aspiring actor from a wealthy family, in exchange for leading roles. In the latter, his mother — under the name of Lilo Pempeit — played the first of many parts in her son's films. At age 22, Fassbinder joined the now defunct Munich Action-Theater in ; there, he was active as actor, director and scriptwriter.
After two months he became the theatre's leader. In Aprilnow 23, he directed the production of his play Katzelmacherwhich tells the story of a foreign worker from Greece who becomes the object of intense racialsexualand political hatred among a group of Bavarian "slackers". A few weeks later, in Maythe Action-Theater was disbanded after its theater was wrecked by one of its founders.
This close-knit group of young actors included among them Fassbinder, Peer RabenHarry Baer and Kurt Raabwho along with Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann became the most important members of his cinematic stock company. In the space of 18 months he directed 12 plays. Of these 12 plays, four were written by Fassbinder; he rewrote five others.
The style of his stage directing closely resembled that of his early films, a mixture of choreographed movement and static poses, taking its cues from musicals, cabaret, films and the student protest movement. After he made his earliest feature films at age 24 inFassbinder centered the efforts of his career as film director, but maintained an intermittent foothold in the theater until his rainer fassbinder biography of rory. He worked in various productions throughout Germany and made a number of radio plays in the early s.
In at age 29, Fassbinder took directorial control over the Theater am Turm TAT of Frankfurt; when this project ended in failure and controversy, Fassbinder became less interested in theater. Fassbinder used his theatrical work as a springboard for making films; and many of the Anti-Theater actors and crew worked with him throughout his entire career for instance, he made 20 films each with actresses Hanna Schygulla and Irm Herrmann.
Fassbinder developed his rapid working methods early. Because he knew his actors and technicians so well, Fassbinder was able to complete as many as four or five films per year on extremely low budgets. This allowed him to compete successfully for the government grants needed to continue making films. Additionally, he learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theater management.
This versatility surfaced in his films too where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. He also appeared in 30 projects of other directors. ByFassbinder had gained international prominence, prizes at major film festivals, premieres and retrospectives in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, and a study of his work by Tony Rayns had been published.
All these factors helped make him a familiar name among cinephiles and campus audiences throughout the world. He lived in Munich when not traveling, rented a house in Paris with ex-wife Ingrid Caven. His films were a fixture in art houses of the time after he became internationally known with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Inhe was a member of the jury at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival.
Starting at the age of 21, Fassbinder made forty-four films and television dramas in 15 years, along with directing 15 plays for the theatre. These films were largely written or adapted for the screen by Fassbinder. He was also art director on most of the early films, editor or co-editor on many of them often credited as Franz Walsh, though the spelling variesand he acted in 19 of his own films as well as for other directors.
He wrote and directed four radio plays and wrote song lyrics. In addition, he wrote 33 screenplays and collaborated with other screenwriters on 13 more. On top of this, he occasionally performed many other roles such as cinematographer and producer on a small number of them. Working with a regular ensemble of actors and technicians, he was able to complete films ahead of schedule and often under budget and thus compete successfully for government subsidies.
He worked fast, typically omitting rehearsals and going with the first take. Fassbinder's first ten films — were said to be an extension of his work in the theater, shot usually with a static camera and with deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue. In throughhis films brought him international attention, with films modeled, to ironic effect, on the melodramas Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood in the s.
In these films, Fassbinder explored how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientationpolitics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday fascism of family life and friendship. The final films, from around until his death, were more varied, with international actors sometimes used and the stock company disbanded, although the casts of some films were still filled with Fassbinder regulars.
But I hope in the end it will be a house. Working simultaneously in theater and film, Fassbinder created his own style from a fusion of the two artforms. His ten early films are characterized by a self-conscious and assertive formalism. Although praised by rainer fassbinder biographies of rory critics, they proved too demanding and inaccessible for a mass audience.
Fassbinder plays the lead role of Franz, a small-time pimp who is torn between his mistress Joanna, a sex worker played by Hanna Schygulla, and his friend Bruno, a gangster sent after Franz by the syndicate that he has refused to join. Joanna informs the police of a bank robbery the two men have planned. Bruno is killed in the shootout, but Franz and Joanna escape.
Love Is Colder Than Death is a low key film with muted tone, long sequences, non-naturalistic acting and little dialogue. The film, however, already displays the themes that were to remain present through the director's subsequent work: loneliness, the longing for companionship and love, and the fear and reality of betrayal. Fassbinder's second film, KatzelmacherBavarian pejorative slang term for a foreign worker from the Mediterraneanwas received more positively, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim.
It features a group of rootless and bored young couples who spend much of their time in idle chatter, empty boasting, drinking, playing cards, intriguing or simply sitting around. The arrival of Jorgos, a guest worker from Greece, leads to a growing curiosity on the part of the women and the antagonism among the men living in a suburban block of apartments in Munich.
Katzelmacher was adapted from Fassbinder's first produced play — a short piece that was expanded from forty minutes to feature length, moving the action from a country village to Munich and delaying the appearance of Jorgos. The character of Franz from Fassbinder's first film, but now played by Harry Baer is released from prison, but falls back with the wrong crowd.
He teams up with his best friend, a black Bavarian criminal who killed his brother, to raid a supermarket. Both men are betrayed by Franz's jilted lover Joanna who tips off the police. Franz is killed, and the film ends at his laconic funeral. Similar in plot and characters to both Love is Colder than Death and The American SoldierGods of the Plague ' s theme of homoerotic love would reappear repeatedly in the director's films.
Run Amok? It was co-directed by Michael Fengler the friend who had been his cameraman on the short film The Little Chaos in Only the outlines of the scenes were sketched by Fassbinder. Fengler and the cast then improvised the dialogue. Fassbinder asserted that this was really Fengler's work rather than his. Nevertheless, the two were jointly given a directorial award for the project in the German Film prize competition, and Why Does Herr R.
Why Does Herr R. The pressures of middle-class life take a toll on him. A visit by a woman neighbor occasions the incident that gives the film its title. Irritated by the incessant chat between his wife and her friend while he tries to watch TV, Herr Raab kills the neighbor with a blow to the head with a candle stick and then kills both his wife and their son.
Herr Raab is later found hanged in an office restroom. The main theme of the gangster film The American Soldier Der Amerikanische Soldat is that violence is an expression of frustrated love. A sudden frenzied outburst of repressed passion, the revelation of desire and a need for love that has been thwarted and comes too late is central here.
Eventually he ends up killing the girlfriend of one of the policemen with his friend Franz Walsh Fassbinder. The film closes with the music of the song "So much tenderness", written by Fassbinder and sung by Gunther Kaufmann. It pays homage to the Hollywood gangster genre, and also alludes to Southern Gothic race narratives. This avant-garde film, commissioned by the WDR television network, was shot in May and it was broadcast in October the same year.
Despite a temporary success, Boehm's followers were eventually massacred and he was burned at the stake. Fassbinder did not clarify the time frame of the action, mixing medieval elements including some costumes, settings, speech and music with those from other time periods, like the Russian Revolution, the Rococo period, postwar Germany and the Third World.
The Niklashausen Journeyinfluenced by Jean-Luc Godard 's Weekend and Glauber Rocha 's Antonio das Mortesconsists of only about a dozen or so scenes, most of which are either theatrical tableaux where there is no movement of the characters and the camera darts from speaker to speaker or are shots where characters pace back and forth while giving revolutionary speeches about Marxist struggles and debates on economic theories.
Set inWhity centers on the title character, a mulatto who works as the obsequious servant in the mansion of a dysfunctional family in the American South. He is the illegitimate son of the family patriarch and the black cook. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning until several of the family members ask him to kill some of the others.
He eventually kills them all and runs away to the desert with a prostitute from the local bar. After his "antitheater" had come to an end, Fassbinder founded his own production company Tango-Film. Not unlike Andy Warhol's "factory" method of production, Fassbinder usually worked with a fixed team of actors, cinematographers, musicians, and stage designers.
His very personal movies combined folk play elements with elements from melodramatic movies and gangster films. One of his biggest popular successes was "Fontane Effi Briest" —74a black-and-white adaptation of the novel by Theodor Fontane. In OctoberFassbinder directed a minute episode for the omnibus film "Deutschland im Herbst" "Germany in Autumn"which distinguished itself by its brutal honesty.
Having worked for television before, e. Despite having produced "Berlin Alexanderplatz" for television, Fassbinder had no regard for conventional TV series dramaturgy, small screen visuals or the viewing patterns of the general TV audience. His last movie, the homosexual romance "Querelle"was based on a novel by Jean Genet. Aside from starring in his own movies and those of his "group", Fassbinder has also worked with other directors.
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Rainer fassbinder biography of rory
He lived briefly with his father in Cologne and then pursued acting at the Fridl Leonhard Studio in Munich in There, he met Hanna Schygulla, who became his muse and frequent collaborator. Fassbinder's passion for theater led him to write plays and join Munich's "Action Theater" in Fassbinder's first feature films, "Love Is Colder Than Death" and "Katzelmacher"were produced with the "Antiteater" ensemble.
His early work exhibited influences from Godard, Brecht, and Straub. In the early s, seeking to broaden his audience, Fassbinder ventured into melodramas, inspired by the works of Douglas Sirk.