Noticias

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s whirlwind career of 40-plus movies made within just over a dozen years kicked off with Love Is Colder Than Death. It ended, all too soon, with a sendoff that may as well have been called Death Is Hotter Than Love. Even if it hadn’t wound up being Fassbinder’s final cinematic will and testament, Querelle, an uber-horny but otherwise unorthodox adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest, would still feel like a film precariously perched between rowdy, profane life and that liminal, insatiable zone that always follows la petite mort.

But because the timeline spanning the film’s completion to its release was bisected by Fassbinder’s death from a drug overdose, it’s nearly impossible to avoid overlaying the gorgeously wrecked glamour of his entire career onto the film, draping the virtue of his carnal vices over a package that’s already prodigiously overstuffed.

Vicky Krieps leads the cast of Corsage, a co-production between Austria, Luxembourg, Germany and France. Elisabeth de Wittelsbach, the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary who reigned for over 44 years as the spouse of Emperor Franz Joseph I, isn’t simply a major European personality from the second half of the 19th century. Owing to her beauty and rebellious spirit, "Sissi" has continually fuelled all manner of fantasies in popular culture. The murdered sovereign was glorified in film in the 1950s via Ernst Marischka’s trilogy, which revealed Romy Schneider to the world. A number of TV films ensued, which swiftly sank into oblivion, such as Xaver Schwarzenberger’s mini-series Sisi. Then, in 2012, on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the sovereign’s birth, Kurt Mündl’s documentary Sisi… und ich erzähle euch die Wahrheit offered up a new and far less sanitised portrayal of Elisabeth of Austria,...

As a follow-up to the sensual gay coming-of-age story “Call Me by Your Name,” Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” — a bloody and relatively cold reimagining of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror movie, about a ballet school operated by a coven of witches — couldn’t be more different, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less personal. In fact, as the director told Variety, “I don’t know what I can do to be more connected to my roots as a filmmaker than going back to that film.”

What does the original “Suspiria” mean to you?

I saw the original movie when I was almost 14, but I had seen the poster when I was 11. Those two experiences marked me in my imagery very, very strongly, and I started to nurture a sense of obsession for the realm of this film.

Your version is equally inspired by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Why is that?...

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Ja from Mnpp here. This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second-to-last film, the glorious Veronika Voss. The film is the final piece in his "Brd Trilogy" (Brd stands for "Bundesrepublik Deutschland," the official name of West Germany and of the united contemporary Germany"), which includes The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola. It was released at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear. Anyone a fan? It's basically his methadone-drenched take on Sunset Boulevard, and one of the most beautiful of Fassbinder's films (which is saying a lot) - the blackest-black-and-whitest-white cinematography by frequent collaborator Xaver Schwarzenberger is a dazzling thing. . . The film's star Rosel Zech, seen up top dialing a phone and smoking like nobody's business - she spends a lot of the movie doing both, and she does them magnificently - just passed away last September, we briefly memorialized her at Mnpp.