Movies: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Though he never actually worked in Hollywood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of 36, was influenced greatly by Amercian studio films of the 1950s and the convention of melodrama (the link most often mentioned is Douglas Sirk)....

BBC documentary about the rise of the New German Cinema and several of its most important figures....

A documentary about the life and work of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder....

What is the future of cinema? In 1982, in Cannes, Wim Wenders invited many movie makers to answer this question. 26 years later, the question remains, but Wenders is now on the other side of the camera....

Avant-garde adaptation of a Carlo Goldoni play. Well-to-do Venetians congregate in a coffee house and discuss their problems....

An intriguing Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice over narration. Sudden Wealth is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry ...

When director Daniel Schmid grew up, his parents ran a hotel in the Alps, and this singular setting was to influence his film. Rather by coincidence he came to Berlin in the early 1960s and became part of the new German wave. Schmid worked with, amon...

A pseudo variety show about the Aufbau-Era, the time of the German 'economic miracle'. Brigitte Mira recounts her four husbands through song and joke, on an series of artificial sets....

Berta, a naive young maid, searches for love when the army engineers come to town to build a bridge....

The 50-year-old haulier Kluth is left by his wife and falls in love with 15-year-old Anita, the daughter of the owners of his favorite pub. Anita's parents tolerate the relationship because Kluth supports them financially. But when Anita is expecting...

After the war, almost by chance, Alfonso Sansone starts to produce documentary films and moves from Palermo to Rome, the city of film....

A documentary that focuses on the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun"....

A tramp finds a gun lying in the street....

Nightclub singer La Paloma succumbs to the persistent courting of a chubby rich admirer and marries him. Before the marriage, she was thought to be dying, but soon she is well. She believes her husband's love has cured her, but her efforts to love hi...

A young man named Jürgen joins the military. As much as he tries to make a heroic career as a soldier in a rearmed West Germany, he fails utterly and ends up in a bizarre sanatorium....

An African-American GI retires from the US Army in West Berlin to live with his (white) girlfriend, who already has a baby with another black man. After an argument with her family, she deserts him as well. Despite finding a job and a new place to li...

About the making of "Der amerikanische Soldat/The American Soldier" in 1970....

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Beautiful, detached, laconic, consumptive Lily Brest is a streetwalker with few clients. She loves her idle boyfriend Raoul who gambles away what little she earns. The town's power broker, called the rich Jew, discovers she is a good listener, so she...

Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Bla...