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For an update on the transfer of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz to DVD, click here.

Can anyone comment on the quality of New Yorker's Stationmaster's Wife? I love the bitterly funny Fassbinder like Chinese Roulette and Martha, so this sounds like a great place to go next. But then again, it's New Yorker...

I wasn't that interested in The Stationmaster's Wife, but I think that is because I've only seen the incomplete American version, which I think is the one New Yorker released. It's the version they released on VHS at least.

sevenarts wrote:Can anyone comment on the quality of New Yorker's Stationmaster's Wife?

Beaver. I am waiting for a release of the TV version, too.

ahhh ok. the Beaver review made it look (barely) acceptable, but if it's not even the full version of the film that's a definite skip. oh well.

i've only seen ali, and i cannot reasonably express my love of it. despite my lack of exposure to the rest of his catalogue, a local record store has a dvd set of year of 13 moons and another film (maria i think may be the title) for a nominal amount of 22 dollars. worth a blind purchase?

additionally, i raven to see more of wenders early films but am unable to come across anything in the video stores. anyone know the availability of his films on dvd (particularly kings of the road and alice?)

brownbunny wrote:i've only seen ali, and i cannot reasonably express my love of it. despite my lack of exposure to the rest of his catalogue, a local record store has a dvd set of year of 13 moons and another film (maria i think may be the title) for a nominal amount of 22 dollars. worth a blind purchase?

DEFINITELY. The other film packaged with 13 Moons is Martha, and they're both among my favorites of the Fassbinders I've seen so far. They're both incredibly compelling, beautifully shot, and emotionally draining. I wasn't as blown away by Fear Eats the Soul as you were (it was my first Fassbinder as well), but 13 Moons certainly did the trick: it remains one of the most devastating, memorable films I've ever seen. The DVD quality is very good on all the Fantoma and Wellspring Fassbinders, too.

i don't know if you watched the documentary accompanying the ali disc, but it indicated that that particular film was a shift in filmmaking for fassbinder, and that his films prior to that had been drastically different, in a narrative way. is any of this available?

brownbunny, didn't you read this thread from page one?

in regards to that question, michael, i'm an insufferably lazy, feckless individual and i neglected to. i will do that now, however, as i presume it will contain or allude to the information i seek.

For people who are discovering Fassbinder and wanting to learn more about this amazing director and his films, this is the best thread to explore starting with the first page. Lots of info here and also the The BRD Trilogy and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul threads.

Just watched The Third Generation tonight, what a marvelous film. The Godard influence is incredibly pronounced, most notably in the soundtrack -- it's an incredibly dense collage of voices and noise to rival even JLG's most cluttered soundtracks. And the media plays a big role in this aural insanity. There's almost always a TV or radio on in the background, sometimes two, accompanied by music, voices reading from books, conversations, animal noises, anything else that can be thrown in to add to the cluttered, tense atmosphere. Fassbinder has perfectly captured a paranoid, cynical world where business executives plot terrorist threats in order to pump up business, and inept revolutionaries are only too glad to be manipulated in order to get some excitement.

As with all Fassbinder, this film is incredibly unsettling, mixing real brutality and ugliness with silliness and high camp. The terrorists are presented as entirely middle class, basically aspiring to the same lifestyle and desires that they were supposedly fighting against. It's also seemingly a fairly radical feminist statement, a critique of the ways in which leftist paradigms too easily fall back into the exact same man/woman dynamics that exist in the larger society.

And the visuals! Those sweeping camera movements that wind around the cell's cramped apartments, the campy posturing and costumes of Volker Spengler, the carnival ending... Just an amazingly beautiful film to look at, it really swept me up for its bizarre, hilarious, uneasy ride.

Can anyone recommend the best book or two about Fassbinder? I'd especially like something with extensive film-by-film sections, to read after I watch each of his films.

I've read the Laurence Kardish book (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Anarchy of the Imagination, and the Thomas Elsaesser book, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject, and of the three, the Elsaesser book is by far my favorite. It's comprehensive, it has annotations on all his films contained within larger chapters of historical and personal context during the making of the films, so it functions as both film analysis and historical biography.

I have more than ten books on Fassbinder and I agree with acquarello. Fassbinder's Germany is the one I reach out to the most every time I go through the Fassbinder phase once or twice every year.

So they shot, edited and completed Berlin Alexanderplatz in six months? A film over fifteen hours long? I cannot wait to see this film, really...

It's quite an amazing piece of work. It puts an entire novel onto the screen -- what Stroheim wanted to do with Greed and wasn't quite able to.

I finally caught up with Katzelmacher. I always put it off because the idea of a "stage-bound" early Fassbinder film based on a play about idle youth didn't sound like a good prospect to me. I was wrong.

I never thought I could be excited gain by static shots of lost souls sitting around staring into space. If Fassbinder hadn't taken up cinema, he could have been the greatest album cover photographer ever.

And the sound of the bisexual gigolo ripping down his zipper before fucking his girlfriend from behind in the second scene strikes me as Fassbinder's cinematic clarion call.

I'm not sure what's going on, but all of the Wellspring Fassbinder DVDs have just become very scarce. Many online retailers list the titles as "out of stock," while some go so far as to say certain titles have been discontinued.

This site, which is usually pretty reliable, does not indicate any of them as out of print, so the discs may just be between printings. However, since the Weinsteins now own what used to be Wellspring, any nutty theory is plausible.

sevenarts wrote:Just watched The Third Generation tonight, what a marvelous film.

I just saw this the other day myself. I think it's already moved into my top three favorite Fassbinder's, maybe second only to In a Year with 13 Moons. However, it was the first Fassbinder I've seen in a long time. I've been thinking about revisiting some of my favorites. Especially Querelle, which was my first Fassbinder.

(Very) interesting article from Times Literary Supplement on Fassbinder's relatively neglected poetry, plays and theatre work:

[quote]The new edition of Fassbinder's dramatic works has been given the more provisional title Theaterstücke (“Theatre Playsâ€

and a really awesome caricature of him on the cover that is now taped to the side of my desktop computer.

I just watched QUERELLE for the first time since, oh, 1990 or so, and it's killing me... Who is the voice-over narrator? It sounds like the guy who did the trailers for The Exorcist or The Ninth Configuration or something. The voice is in my head and it's driving me batty.

More thoughts on QUERELLE later, but will someone please answer this for me?

Fascinating description in TLS of that early play. It sounds like a critique of Schindler's List avant la lettre.

I'm about to supplement my Nietzsche study with some Schopenhauer and was wondering if anyone had any comments on Fassbinder's use of Schopenhauer in In A Year with 13 Moons and whatever other movies. I don't know anything about Doblin but I coincidentally bought Berlin with World as Will and Rep. and the back cover says Doblin was very influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche so I'm assuming RWF might emphasize whatever overtones the book has. Any comments? Also, does anyone know of any studies that have been done on this side of Fassbinder's work?