The Mumpsimus

For a long time, I let the Blu-ray discs of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 mini-series Eight Hours Don't Make a Day ( Acht Stunden sind kein Tag ) sit on the shelf. Watching them would mean I had very little left of Fassbinder's extensive body of work to see for the first time — mostly just a couple of TV films that have rarely, if ever, made it to home video anywhere. Everything else, I've seen at least once. It's been a quest and an obsession for more than a decade. Certainly, there are many pieces of Fassbinder's oeuvre that I will re-explore throughout my life, but the pleasure of first discovery has come close to an end. So the discs sat there, frequently glanced at, the case opened, the booklet read and re-read, but no more. And now here we are in the midst of the new corona virus, isolating at home. What better time to watch 495 minutes of Fassbinder? And so I did, and it was glorious. Eight Hours is unique among Fassbinder's work in being truly c...

I've written a lot about Rainer Werner Fassbinder here at The Mumpsimus, and a few years ago created a video essay about his early films when Criterion released five of them as part of their (apparently discontinued) Eclipse series of bare-bones releases. I keep meaning to write more about RWF, to create new video essays (on Fassbinder and the recently deceased cinematographer Michael Ballhaus ; on queer Fassbinder), and I will eventually, but for now I simply want to point out that U.S. viewers, at least, now have access to a big selection of Fassbinder films via TCM's new streaming site, Filmstruck , which replaced Hulu as the home to Criterion's streaming service. I'm giving Filmstruck a test ride, and so of course have delved into the Fassbinder titles. (And I'm not alone in that: here's a good new piece from Brandon Soderbergh on them .) There's quite a lot that hasn't been available in the U.S. for a while, most notably Querelle , which is...

Yesterday was the 70th birthday of my favorite filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder . He wasn't around to see it, having died at age 37, but I celebrated for him by watching Querelle again. (I was tempted to do a Berlin Alexanderplatz marathon today, but I do actually have to get some work done...) I've written various things about Fassbinder over the years, so here's a roundup and then some 70th birthday thoughts: In commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Fassbinder's death, I wrote "30 Years After Fassbinder: Where to Begin" , which attempts to offer some entry points into his vast, sometimes bewildering oeuvre. (And proposed that I'd be writing a series of posts about Fassbinder. I didn't get around to it at the time, alas...) The most extensive work I've done on Fassbinder was for Press Play : the text essay "Early Fassbinder: A Romantic Anarchist from the First" and accompanying video essay "First Fassbinder" . ...

I attended a screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1980 film Lili Marleen at the Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist series at Lincoln Center last weekend, and it was an extraordinary experience. This is one of Fassbinder's weirdest and in some ways most problematic films, a movie for which he had a relatively giant budget and got lots of publicity, but which has since become among the most hard-to-find Fassbinder films (which is really saying something!). Despite a lot of searching, I didn't come upon a reasonably-priced copy of it until I recently discovered an Australian DVD (seemingly out of print now) that was a library discard. The story of Lili Marleen is relatively simple, and is very loosely based on the wartime experiences of Lale Andersen , whose performance of the title song was immensely popular, and whose book Der Himmel hat viele Farben is credited in the film. A mildly talented Berlin cabaret singer named Willie (Hannah Schygulla) falls in love with a...

RogerEbert.com has just published a good overview of the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Godfrey Cheshire, "Regarding R.W. Fassbinder: Letter to a Young Cinephile" , inspired by the major, two-part Fassbinder retrospective at Lincoln Center in New York, currently underway and then continuing in the fall. If you're in traveling distance of New York City and you have any interest in film, you should try to go to some of these. (Also, the Mizoguchi series at the Museum of the Moving Image . I can't get to the city until both festivals are over, and so my jealousy of you will be intense, though at least I may get to see some of the Mizoguchis at Harvard Film Archive's similar series .) I've written about Fassbinder here before , and created a video essay last summer for Press Play about Fassbinder's earliest films. He is simply, completely, unquestionably my favorite filmmaker, the one whose work most deeply and consistently fascinates me, challeng...

First Fassbinder from Matthew Cheney on Vimeo Over at Press Play, I have a video essay and accompanying text essay on the first films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder [dead link: see video above, text below], the best of which were recently released in the US by Criterion as part of the Eclipse series . EARLY FASSBINDER: A ROMANTIC ANARCHIST FROM THE FIRST by Matthew Cheney The German actor and filmmaker Frank Ripploh interviewed Rainer Werner Fassbinder in March 1982, only a few months before Fassbinder's death at age 37. Ripploh's last question was: "How do you describe yourself?" "I'm a romantic anarchist," Fassbinder said. And so he had been from the beginning. It can be difficult to know what to make of Fassbinder, how to enter his extraordinary body of work, how to assess and appreciate his achievement. Romantic anarchists don't sum up well. First, there is the simple problem of scale. Though his career was relatively short, ...

On June 10, 1982, thirty years ago today, Rainer Werner Fassbinder died. He was among the most remarkable filmmakers of all time, a director whose work I've wrestled with and adored for a while. His extraordinarily rich, diverse, and vast oeuvre has become the single body of film work that most fascinates me, though I still haven't been able to see it all (few people have). I've written a bit about Fassbinder, and specifically his astounding TV movie World on a Wire , previously , but I've resisted writing about him more, partly out of a sense of humility in the face of his accomplishments and partly because I still feel, even after years of watching his movies, very much a beginner as a Fassbinder viewer. Fear Eats the Soul (1974) But even with the acclaim Fassbinder has received and the esteem in which he is held by many cinephiles, his films seem to have trouble staying available to viewers — though roughly 75% of them have been released on DVD at one ...

Consumer-citizens of the United States, rejoice! Criterion has announced that they will be releasing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's wonderful science fiction epic World on a Wire in February. Diligent and obsessive readers of this here blog may remember that I swooned over World on a Wire both here and at Strange Horizons back in September, and I remain as swoonful toward it as before. The DVD/Blu-ray will include a 50-minute documentary about the film by Juliane Lorenz, one of Fassbinder's most frequent collaborators and the head of the Fassbinder Foundation . Lorenz has created documentaries for some of the other DVD releases of Fassbinder's films in the U.S. and elsewhere, and I've enjoyed all of the ones I've seen, so am looking forward to this one quite a bit. And in equally magnificent — indeed, perhaps even more  magnificent — news, Criterion will also be releasing Louis Malle's final film, Vanya on 42nd Street . It's one of my favorites, a ...

My latest column is up at Strange Horizons , and this time it's about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic science fiction film World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) . If you want to see World on a Wire  (and you should!), it's available on home video in the U.K. and Europe , and in the U.S. can be seen via Hulu if you subscribe to Hulu Plus  (you can get a free trial subscription for a week, or if you have .edu email address, for a month). Rumor has it that Criterion will be releasing the film on DVD and Blu-ray in the U.S. at the end of this year or the beginning of next [ update:  the rumors were true ]. It's also still touring various U.S. cities -- at the end of this week, it will be at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA. I'm a Fassbinder nut, so will passionately defend even his films that only lunatics defend, but you don't have to be as obsessed with Fassbinder as I to see get pleasure from  World on a Wire.  (Although if "efficient" pl...