What Would Fassbinder Do?

Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced no grand masterwork. While several of his fellow travelers in the New German Cinema movement—namely Volker Schlöndorff, Alexander Kluge, and Werner Herzog—were sustaining an impressive output of one or two films per year throughout the 1970s, none could match the truly frenetic pace of Fassbinder, who was writing, directing, and sometimes acting in as many as four movies per year. This steady stream of stylistically varied, “minor” works makes his oeuvre particularly difficult to decipher, though some have tried (monographic studies such as Ronald Hayman’s Fassbinder: Film Maker and Robert Katz’s Love is Colder than Death are notable efforts to condense and canonize). His eschewal of pretension carried over into his media persona: the image of the overweight, loose-lipped, drug-deranged auteur was a staple of the German tabloids throughout his short, tragically circumscribed career.