WHY RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER IS SECRET MOVIE CLUB'S DIRECTOR OF 2021 by Craig Hammill

When we picked Akira Kurosawa as our inaugural director with an eye to screen as many of his great movies as possible in 2019, we thought we had a plan.

Each year, we’d pick a new amazing director and devote that year to as thorough a deep dive and celebration of their work as possible.

2020 started with grand ambitions: Stanley Kubrick would be our 2020 director. Posters were made. Dates were set. Then Covid hit. Thankfully, we’re nearing completion of Kubrick’s body of work since theaters have re-opened and you, dear audience, have been coming back to the theaters.

Interestingly, when we began programming the movies of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder this past month, it was only because we love his movies so much and found we could get them on 35mm.

Then, organically, through the side door, the way many great ideas come, we realized HERE was our director for 2021.

Fassbinder was born in Germany in 1945 right at the tail end of World War II. His life and cinematic work, in many ways, would be a cinematic wrestling with fascism, human hypocrisy, and German identity after possibly the darkest chapter in its history.

Fassbinder would also become synonymous with the greatest explosion of creative output of any post-war director EVER in any part of the world. In his short life of 37 years (he died young as he predicted he would of a cocaine and barbituate overdose), Fassbinder somehow managed to write and direct (and sometimes star in, shoot, edit) 40+ feature films, two long television mini-series, and 24 plus plays.

But while quantity is, on some true level, impressive, what’s truly stunning is the sustained quality of the work of this output. While there are a number of misfires, the majority of Fassbinder’s cinematic work is restlessly exciting, thematically rigorous, dramatically devastating, and piercingly insightful.

Fassbinder almost certainly was brilliant BECAUSE of his contradictions as well as despite them. He was a terror to his cast, crew, loved ones, subject to frequent screaming outbursts, temper tantrums, threats. An openly bisexual man in a time that was still not completely comfortable with unapologetic LGBTQ artists, Fassbinder was also one of the most disciplined, hard working, rigorously tough (on himself, his work, his collaborators) filmmakers who ever lived.

Though someone who always seemed to have a personal life in constant roil and turmoil married to intentionally self-aware destructive appetites for drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, ruinous romantic affairs, Fassbinder was also one of the most clear-eyed, intelligent, intellectual, prescient filmmakers who ever lived.

Just look at how he recognizes that abusive relationships are tied to and informed by the abusiveness of society as a whole in movies like The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and Fox and His Friends. And then note how he goes that extra step to point out that victimized characters have to, rightly or wrongly, take ownership of their situation and remove themselves from such abuse. No one else will do it for them.

It’s not a message many of us want to hear. Yet it’s a message most of us NEED to hear.

Or look at how Fassbinder could make a hilarious if brutal behind the scenes filmmaking comedy with Beware of a Holy Whore whose most brutal takedown is reserved for Fassbinder himself who is shown in the movie to be little more than a talented spoiled brat who does deserve to be taken down a peg or two.

As Fassbinder gained confidence and experience, his ambition grew as well and we find his middle and later period movies like The Marriage of Maria Braun, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Lola, Veronika Voss, explicitly linking post-war West Germany’s embrace of business, the free market, capitalism to a kind of emphatic refusal to deal with its recent fascist past. And how, when we, as a society or an individual, don’t reckon with the skeletons and demons of the past, find that the fascism hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just been internalized in destructive ways.

This ability to synthesize the cinematic, the political, the societal, the personal in a bracingly confrontational and questioning way reaches its height with Fassbinder’s 14.5 hour miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz adapted from the famous novel of the 1920’s which shows how fascism rose in Weimar Germany through people who felt hopeless, left behind, ignored by elite society. This mini-series also ends with a final 2 hours that are two of the most transgressive hours of television you will see next to David Lynch’s Episode 8 of Twin Peaks The Return.

Fassbinder may also have been one of the most sophisticated political thinkers of any moviemaker. In this programmer’s humble opinion, even the movies of some of cinema’s most celebrated political moviemakers pale in comparison to Fassbinder’s nuanced, shoot in all directions, understanding of the failings/flaws of ALL political systems. Maybe only Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi’s classic Salvatore Giulianno comes as close to disturbing, all encompassing political insight as Fassbinder’s work.

There’s a famous story actor Karlheinz Bohm (Peeping Tom, Fox and His Friends, Martha, etc) tells when acting in Fassbinder’s wonderful satire of all political ideologies Mother Kusters Goes To Heaven. At some point in the movie, Bohm approached Fassbinder and said “Rainer, you make fun of the capitalists, you make fun of the communists. You make fun of the left. You make fun of the right. You even make fun of the center and the independents. Where exactly do you stand?”

“I shoot,” Fassbinder replied. “In all directions.”

And this gets to the very nub of Fassbinder’s genius. By sparing no one, Fassbinder, paradoxically, turned out to be the fairest of all moviemakers. By being willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of every person, tribe, way of thinking, Fassbinder paradoxically created movies of tremendous humanism, acceptance, and depth.

This may be no where more apparent then in this programmer’s personal favorite Fassbinder movie In A Year of 13 Moons which Fassbinder wrote, directed, produced, shot, edited immediately after the suicide of his lover Armen Meir. It tells the story of the last few days in the life of transgender woman Elvira who is horribly mistreated and ignored by her lover for whom she transitioned. There are very few works that radiate with a kind of genius, open wound pain, humanity, love, despair, questioning as 13 Moons. Anchored by one of the great performances by Volker Spengler as Erwin/Elvira, Fassbinder somehow makes a movie of tremendous almost unbearable brutality (including an extended scene in a slaughterhouse-Armen had been a butcher before he dated Fassbinder). Societal brutality. Interpersonal brutality. The brutality of fate. The brutality of intentional and unintentional cruelty. Yet at its center is a kind of unbearable grace, humanity, and love. Erwin/Elvira is a truly good person. A person possessed of the best of what it is to be human.

Fassbinder was that rarest of humans-a total mess who was, at the very same time, a superhumanly disciplined, determined, and productive human being. A terror who was acutely self-aware that he was a terror. An angry artist who, nevertheless, somehow wanted to shock audiences into a questioning and awareness about assumptions.

If ever we needed a model for these crazy times where we all have to just scrap, produce, will ourselves through to higher ground and results, there is no better model, no better filmmaker than Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

He MADE movies because he had to. He was possessed of that inner demon/angel to create. And he had the will, discipline, introspection, honesty to put himself through the ringer to make the works great.

May we all be as hard on ourselves as Fassbinder was on himself and the world around him.

And as loving.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.