Of all the filmmakers who created a new international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, the young German writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) was unquestionably the most prolific and the most gifted. This bold book of writings by and about Fassbinder includes contributions by film historians and critics, plus an illustrated filmography and recollections by Fassbinder's colleagues and friends. 67 photos.

A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the first of its kind to engage with this important figure. Twenty-eight essays by an international group of scholars consider this controversial director's contribution to German cinema, German history, gender studies, and auteurship. A fresh collection of original research providing diverse perspectives on Fassbinder’s work in films, television, poetry, and underground theatre. Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains the preeminent filmmaker of the New German Cinema whose brief but prolific body of work spans from the latter half of the 1960s to the artist’s death in 1982. Interrogates Fassbinder’s influence on the seminal ideas of his time: auteurship, identity, race, queer studies, and the cataclysmic events of German twentieth century history Contributions from internationally diverse scholars specializing in film, culture, and German studies. Includes coverage of his key films including: Gods of the Plague (1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Martha (1973) (TV), World on a Wire (1973), Effi Briest (1974), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975), Fear of Fear (1975), Chinese Roulette (1976), In a Year With 13 Moons (1978), Despair (1978), The Third Generation (1979), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) (TV), and Querelle (1982).

This book is an attempt to trace and illuminate, through interviews with colleagues, friends, and contemporaries, different perspectives about Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Watson's draws on a wide assortment of Fassbinder interviews--many of which are not available in English--and on theoretical and critical approaches employed in the Frankfurt School, performance and reception theories, gay and lesbian film theory, and studies of melodrama and camp. Watson also incorporates his own interviews with Fassbinder's mother and with the woman who served as Fassbinder's film editor and companion during the final four years of his life. A comprehensive, balanced study, 'Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder' also features an annotated bibliography, extensive notes, a filmography of Fassbinder's works, and a listing of films and television programs that examine Fassbinder and his achievements."--Back cover.

Fassbinder's version of modern post-civilized terror was, like much else about his work, ahead of its time. --San Francisco Chronicle

Publisher description

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the most innovative practitioner of New German Cinema. He worked at breakneck speed and in fourteen years made forty-four films, including Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). Fassbinder ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity, and his films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society defeats that desire. In Fassbinder, Christian Thomsen, a close friend of the director, illuminates Fassbinder's body of work while revealing his insider views of a man who, despite a furious temper, manic working habits, and rampant drug addiction, supported an extended family- including his mother, a string of male lovers, lovelorn women, and even a pair of frustrated wives-with his intoxicating and prolific imagination. This book, like Fassbinder's often-used image of the mirror, brilliantly reflects the sexual, political, and overwhelmingly human contradictions inherent in the life of this intensely creative man and the remarkable films he directed. Christian Braad Thomsen is a Danish filmmaker and scholar.