The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Once declaring half-facetiously that he wanted to be to film “what Shakespeare was to the theater, Marx to politics, and Freud to psychology,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the premiere filmmaker of the New German Cinema, famous for his prodigious, inventive output over his short career. Making over 30 features in a dozen years, as well as creating works for TV and theater, Fassbinder became renowned for his potent combination of Hollywood genre gestures and overt stylization with an acutely sensitive, critical assessment of German society.Fassbinder also espoused the use of the overwrought conventions of melodrama to reach visceral truths and disrupt bourgeois propriety.

Born in 1945 in Bad Wörishofen, Fassbinder lived with his mother in Munich. He spent his youth at the movies and became a fan of Hollywood, particularly German émigré Douglas Sirk’s glossy 1950s melodramas. After high school, Fassbinder applied to the Berlin Film School — and was rejected. Undaunted, he began making shorts and formed his own company, the Anti-Theater, in 1968. Applying the theater ethos of working collaboratively with a stock company of actors and technicians, Fassbinder and the Anti-Theater began making feature films in 1969. Fassbinder’s nascent interest in examining the lives of ordinary people in realistic settings, however, also emerged in his neorealist comedy drama about a middle-class man who inexplicably kills his family, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970). After an unsatisfactory film adaptation of play Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971), Fassbinder, he formed his own production company, Tango Film, and made The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), a bleak story of a working man’s loveless marriage and alcoholic death, which was a critically hailed success in Germany. He followed it with the overtly theatrical The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). Later, though set among working-class teens, Jail Bait (1972) similarly revealed the dangerous effects of romantic illusions and social mores.

After two TV dramas about stifled wives, Martha (1973) and an adaptation of A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer (1973), Fassbinder adapted Theodor Fontane’s 19th-century novel Effi Briest for the screen in 1974. Critically hailed as another artistic triumph, Effi Briest has come to be considered one of his best films. 1974 became an even more crucial year in the Fassbinder’s career with the release of Fear Eats the Soul. Remaking Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), Fassbinder transformed the central couple into a frumpy older German woman and a young sexy Arab to explore the complex role social enmity plays in sustaining the relationship. Winner of the critics’ prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Fear Eats the Soul earned Fassbinder his first taste of international attention as one of Germany’s new generation of intriguing directors. His next film, Fox and His Friends (1975), brought more approbation. Starring the director himself as lower-class lottery winner Fox, Fox and His Friends compassionately and intelligently exposed how the assumedly outsider homosexual subculture was just as subject to middle-class aspirations and cruelty.

Polishing his style and creating even more structurally complex narratives as the 1970s went on, Fassbinder used his increasingly mobile camera work to create a multi-layered study of the emotional distance between the members of a profoundly dysfunctional upper-class family in Chinese Roulette (1976).Followed by Despair (1978), the (relatively) big-budget, English-language adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel was scripted by Tom Stoppard and starred Dirk Bogarde. Despite Despair’s credentials, though, Fassbinder’s return to a more explicitly German psychological environment in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) produced his greatest international success.

Though less accessible than Maria Braun, In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) continued to burnish Fassbinder’s critical standing. Made shortly after the death of his longtime companion Armin Meier, In a Year of 13 Moons unflinchingly explored the loneliness of an abandoned transsexual, rendering her fractured identity through a collage of sounds and mirrored, divided spaces. Returning to his explorations of German history in the early ‘80s, Fassbinder finally realized his dream of adapting Alfred Doblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1980. A monumental TV series running more than 13 hours, with a two-hour coda released in the U.S. as a 15-hour feature, it became his crowning achievement. Fassbinder then took on the Nazi period itself with Lili Marleen (1981), a melodrama about a cabaret singer in World War II Germany. Completing the postwar triptych begun with Maria Braun, Fassbinder’s Lola (1981) put a different spin on an ambitious woman’s upward climb, while the prize-winning Veronika Voss (1982) reimagined Sunset Boulevard (1950) in detailing a faded, Nazi-connected movie star’s descent into drug addiction in the 1950s. He went back to more personal work with his derided Jean Genet adaptation Querelle (1982), but, after years of drug-fuelled productivity, Fassbinder died from an overdose that summer. Rather than fade away, however, retrospectives of his work in subsequent years have continued to bolster Fassbinder’s critical stature.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:89436~T1)