Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is an actor, director and screenwriter. Rainer Fassbinder made over 40 films in his short turbulent life. He is among the most important figures in New German Cinema.

Rainer Fassbinder was May 31, 1945 in the small Bavarian town of Bad Wörishofen,Germany three weeks after the Americans entered the town and the unconditional surrender of Germany in World War II.

A part of cultured bourgeois family, he had an unconventional childhood about which he would later talk about in interviews. At three months old, he was left with a paternal uncle and aunt in the country, since his parents feared he would not survive the winter with them. When was a year old he was returned to his parents in Munich.

His father, Helmut Fassbinder, a doctor near Munich’s red light district, saw his career as the means to indulge his passion for writing poetry. He had two sons from a previous marriage, did not take much interest in Rainer, and neither did his mother Liselotte, who was busy helping her husband in his medical practice. His parents divorced in 1951 and at the age of six, he was left to be raised alone with his mother.

To provide for them, she rented out rooms and found employment as a translator, but tuberculosis kept her away for long periods while she recuperated. Rainer was looked after by his mother's tenants and friends, but he became more independent and uncontrollable. He spent time in the streets, sometimes playing with other boys, sometimes just watching the world around him.

He clashed with his mother's younger lover Siggi, who lived with them when Rainer was eight and the later with the much older journalist Wolff Eder, who became his stepfather in 1959. His mother, working as an English- German translator, could not concentrate with her son around her and often gave him money to go to the movies and occupy his time. As an adult, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. "The cinema was the family life I never had at home."

In compliance with his mother's wishes, he altered the date of his birthday to 1946 in order to enhance his status as a cinematic prodigy. Several years before his death his real age was revealed when getting his passport.

Leaving school before taking his final exams, Fassbinder immersed himself in film as his did when he was younger, but unlike then, this time it was about making them. He made his first short films at age 20, persuading an older lover to finance and act in them.

His career only lasted 15 years, but during that time he did 40 feature length films; two television film series; three short films; four video productions; twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays; and 36 acting roles in his own and others’ films. In addition to directing, he was as an actor, author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theater manager.

In 1967, Fassbinder joined a radical theater troupe in Munich. He directed and acted in productions with Peer Raben, Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann, who became regulars in Fassbinder productions. The next year, Fassbinder directed “Katzelmacher,” his first play.

His most prolific years as a director, writer and actor in film, theater, television and radio began in 1969. He averaged releasing one film every hundred days.

Underlying his work was a strong provocative current. His pictures demonstrated a deep sensitivity to social outsiders and a hatred of institutionalized violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity.

A major theme of his work focuses on the individual’s tragic longing for love. Among his popular films are “Love Is Colder Than Death” (1969), “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1973) and “I Only Want You to Love Me” (1976). Often considered his best work, “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) was a 15-hour television drama.

Several his films deal with homosexuality, a taboo subject for major directors of the time. “Querelle” (1982) and “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (1971) focus on gays and lesbians as societal outsiders.

That's not to say that there wasn't controversy about his work and career, and had attacks from all sides from the groups he offended.

His television series Eight Hours Do Not Make a Day was cut from eight to five episodes after pressure from conservatives. He was sued over his adaptation of Franz Xaver Kroetz play Jail Bait, alleging that it was obscene. Lesbians and feminists accused him of misogyny when he presented women as complicit in their own oppression in the film 'Women‘s Picture'.

His movie The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has been cited by some feminist and gay critics as both homophobic and sexist. And many gays complained of misrepresentation in his movie Fox and his Friends.

Conservatives attacked him for his association with the radical left. Marxists said he had sold out in his depictions of left-intellectual manipulations in Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven and of a late-blooming terrorist in The Third Generation.

The most heated criticism came for his play Garbage, the City, and Death, whose scheduled performance at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt was canceled in 1975 amid charges of anti-semitism. The play was not performed until 1985, after Fassbinder's death. In the midst of the controversy over the play, he resigned from his directorship of the theater company, citing that he and the play had been misinterpreted.

While an incredible talent, working with Fassbinder was not easy. Coupled to his phenomenal creative energy was a wild, very self-destructive person that earned him a reputation as "the enfant terrible" of the New German Cinema. He had dysfunctional relationships with his actors and technicians with whom he who formed a surrogate family.

It was not just limited to his creative work. Drug and alcohol addiction, violent relationships with lovers, both male and female frequent public appearances in the New York City leather scene, were fodder for the tabloids and gossip columns.

Fassbinder did little to discourage the personal attacks on himself and his work. He seemed to provoke them by his aggressively non-conformist lifestyle, symbolized in his black leather jacket, battered hat, dark glasses and perennial scowl.

While he was entangled in multiple relationships with women, he more often was with men. He mixed his personal and professional life having family, friends and lovers appear in his films.

Early in his career, he had a lasting, but fractured relationship with Irm Hermann, a former secretary whom he forced to become an actress. Casting her in unglamorous roles most notably as the unfaithful wife in The Merchant of Four Seasons and the silent abused assistant in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. She idolized him, but he tormented and tortured her for over a decade. In 1977, she became involved with another man and became pregnant by him. Fassbinder proposed to her and offered to adopt the child; she turned him down.

His main romantic interest during his early period as a film director was Günther Kaufmann, a black Bavarian who was a married father of two. Kaufmann was not a trained actor when Fassbinder fell madly in love with him in 1970, and put him in his films. Fassbinder tried to buy his love with movie roles and expensive gifts, with Kaufmann destroying four Lamborghinis in a year. Kaufman appeared in fourteen of his films.

Although he claimed to be opposed to matrimony as an institution, the same year he met Kaufman he married Ingrid Caven, a regular actress in his films. Their wedding reception was recycled in the film he was making at that time, The American Soldier. Their two year marriage fell apart but their mutual admiration survived. "Ours was a love story in spite of the marriage," Ingrid explained in an interview, adding about her former husband's sexuality: "Rainer was a homosexual who also needed a woman. It’s that simple and that complex."

The three most important women of Fassbinder’s life, Irm Hermann, Ingrid Caven and Juliane Lorenz, his last partner, had no problems with his homosexuality.

In 1971, Fassbinder fell in love with El Hedi ben Salem, a Berber from Morocco. Their turbulent relationship ended violently in 1974. Salem, hanged himself in jail in 1982. Fassbinder, who barely outlived his former lover, dedicated his last film, Querelle, to Salem.

Armin Meier, a former butcher was Fassbinder's lover from 1974 to 1978. He also appeared in several films. After Fassbinder broke up with him, Meier committed suicide on Fassbinder’s birthday. He was found dead in their apartment only days later. Devastated by Armin’s suicide, Fassbinder made In a Year with Thirteen Moons to exorcise his pain.

In the last four years of his life, Fassbinder's companion was Juliane Lorenz, the editor of many of his films. They were about to marry on several occasions but never legally did. According to Lorenz, he was no longer sleeping with men; and while they were still living together, they were drifting apart the last year before his death.

Fassbinder died, June 10, 1982, from heart failure resulting from an overdose of sleeping pills and cocaine. His death marked the end of New German Cinema.

“I’d like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theater, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.”