Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (31 May 1945 — 10 June 1982) was a German film director, screenwriter, and actor. Considered one of the most important figures in the New German Cinema, Fassbinder was prolific; in a professional career less than fifteen years, he completed forty feature-length films, two television film series, three short films, four video productions, twenty-four stage plays, and four radio plays.
He had tortured, personal relationships with the actors and technicians around him who formed a surrogate family. However, his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social outsiders and his hatred of institutionalized violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity.
Fassbinder died in June 1982 at the age of 37 from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates. His death has often been cited as the event that ended the New German Cinema movement.
| Known For | Directing |
|---|---|
| Most Rating | 1.0695 |
| Birthday | 1945-05-31 |
| Place of Birth | Bad Wörishofen, Germany |
| Also Known As | Rainer W. Fassbinder, R. W. Fassbinder, Franz Walsch, 雷纳·沃纳·法斯班德 , |
1974
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
7.74/452
Emmi Kurowski, a cleaning lady, is lonely in her old age. Her husband died years ago, and her grown children offer little companionship. One night she...
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Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
1976
Shadow of Angels
4.444/9
Beautiful, detached, laconic, consumptive Lily Brest is a streetwalker with few clients. She loves her idle boyfriend, Raoul, who gambles away what li...
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Shadow of Angels
1982
Veronika Voss
7.221/154
In Munich 1955, German film star Veronika Voss becomes a drug addict at the mercy of corrupt Dr. Marianne Katz, who keeps her supplied with morphine....
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Veronika Voss
1970
Gods of the Plague
5.65/30
After his release from prison, ex-convict Franz Walsch finds his way back into the Munich criminal underworld. His attentions focus upon two women, Jo...
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Gods of the Plague
1978
Life Stories: A Conversation with RW Fassbinder
0/0
An interview with RWF in the kitchen in a house he had rented close to Paris at that time. Four years before his untimely death, the interview shows a...
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Life Stories: A Conversation with RW Fassbinder
1969
Al Capone im deutschen Wald
8.75/2
A young man who is constantly searching for relics from World War II and idolizes Hitler and Al Capone founds a criminal organization with friends and...
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Al Capone im deutschen Wald
2008
Counter Shot: Departure of the Filmmakers
6.7/3
Documentary about filmmakers of the New German Cinema who were members of the legendary Filmverlag für Autoren (Film Publishing House for Authors). Am...
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Counter Shot: Departure of the Filmmakers
1969
Katzelmacher
6.445/55
A group of young slackers spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos moves in,...
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Katzelmacher
1982
The Wizard of Babylon
4.5/4
A documentary about German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, during the time of filming "Querelle," features an interview with Fassbinder only ten ho...
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The Wizard of Babylon
1980
Douglas Sirk: Über Stars
10/1
Douglas speaks about some of the stars he has directed, like Asta Nielsen, Lili Dagover, Zarah Leander, George Sanders, Signe Hasso, Barbara Stanwyck,...
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Douglas Sirk: Über Stars
1971
Beware of a Holy Whore
6.205/61
Film director Jeff and his lead actor are taking their time getting to set. In their absence, the crew lack a purposeful way to spend their time waiti...
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Beware of a Holy Whore
1982
Kamikaze '89
5.34/25
In a futuristic, totalitarian society wherein the government controls all facets of the media, a homicide detective investigates a string of bombings...
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Kamikaze '89
1970
Love Is Colder Than Death
6.198/58
Small-time pimp Franz is torn between his mistress and Bruno, the gangster sent after him by a shady crime syndicate he has refused to join.
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Love Is Colder Than Death
1984
The Last Trip to Harrisburg
8/2
A soldier and a beautiful blonde on a train to Harrisburg.
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The Last Trip to Harrisburg
1975
Fox and His Friends
7.2/151
Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. He enters an abusive r...
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Fox and His Friends
1978
Germany in Autumn
6.31/29
Nine fictitious documentaries and films reflect the mood of late 1970s Germany, particularly the two-month period in 1977 when a businessman was kidna...
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Germany in Autumn
1972
The Merchant of Four Seasons
6.7/81
Hans is a street fruit peddler and born loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to turn to drinking and violence. After r...
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The Merchant of Four Seasons
2014
Alfonso Sansone: Producer by Chance
0/0
After the war, almost by chance, Alfonso Sansone started to produce documentary films and moved from Palermo to Rome, the city of film.
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Alfonso Sansone: Producer by Chance
1981
Cinémania: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
6/2
A documentary about the director Fassbinder but edited as if it were a film of the master himself, with some sequences of his own movies.
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Cinémania: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1992
I Don’t Just Want You to Love Me
6.455/11
A documentary about the life and work of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
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I Don’t Just Want You to Love Me
1966
The City Tramp
6.115/26
A tramp finds a gun lying in the street.
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The City Tramp
1973
Tenderness of the Wolves
5.663/46
A German serial killer preys on boys and young men during the so-called years of crisis between the wars. Based on the true story of Fritz Haarmann, a...
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Tenderness of the Wolves
1968
The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp
4.5/14
Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their tr...
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The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp
1966
The Little Chaos
6.371/31
Theo, Marite, and Franz cannot make any money selling magazines door to door, so they try a little robbery.
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The Little Chaos
1976
The American Soldier
6.292/24
Ricky returns to Munich from Vietnam and is promptly hired as a contract killer.
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The American Soldier
1976
The Culture Industry Needs Something Like Me
0/0
An attempt at a psychological profile of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who answers the author's questions about his artistic and personal development in a...
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The Culture Industry Needs Something Like Me
1972
Bremen Freedom
6.167/6
A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery i...
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Bremen Freedom
1982
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Last Works
6.25/4
This portrait, drawn by Wolf Gremm, shows Rainer Werner Fassbinder both as an actor— taking the leading role in the film "Kamikaze 1989", also directe...
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Last Works
1979
Bourbon Street Blues
6.125/8
An adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "The Lady Larkspur Lotion" created by Douglas Sirk with the assistance of his film students and Rainer Werner Fas...
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Bourbon Street Blues
1970
Baal
5.7/19
An exploration of the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.
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Baal
1971
The Ancestress
9/1
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The Ancestress
2002
Fassbinder in Hollywood
6.111/9
Though he never actually worked in Hollywood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of 36, was influenced greatly by American studio f...
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Fassbinder in Hollywood
1971
Fassbinder Produces: Film No. 8
7/1
About the making of "Der amerikanische Soldat/The American Soldier" in 1970.
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Fassbinder Produces: Film No. 8
1978
Little Godard
10/1
The production of a film requires recording equipment and financial resources, if nothing else. Hellmuth Costard places these basic prerequisites at t...
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Little Godard
1970
The Niklashausen Journey
5.778/9
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 ha...
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The Niklashausen Journey
1974
1 Berlin-Harlem
3/4
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...
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1 Berlin-Harlem
1968
Mit Eichenlaub und Feigenblatt
8.5/2
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...
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Mit Eichenlaub und Feigenblatt
1971
Mathias Kneißl
6.5/2
Inspired by the real-life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX century. Mathias stole from the...
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Mathias Kneißl
1971
Supergirl
4.4/10
A beautiful woman, Supergirl Francesca Farnese, appears out of nowhere on a Bavarian highway. She wears only an orange jumpsuit and wants to go to Was...
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Supergirl
1971
The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach
6.5/19
In an attempt to escape 19th-century poverty, eight farmers and day laborers attack a prince's money transport in the Hessian Hinterland.
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The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach
1975
Die Wohngenossin
5.5/2
A hitchhiker unsettles the ideologically colored lifestyle of a young architect and in doing so loses her own ideological distance from the maxim of p...
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Die Wohngenossin
1971
Whity
5.348/23
"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American Southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive yo...
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Whity
1971
Haytabo
6.8/5
A biochemistry professor finds an old manuscript with the structure and formula of an immortality drug.
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Haytabo
2015
Fassbinder: Love Without Demands
6.4/7
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was probably Germany’s most significant post-war director. His swift and dramatic demise at the early age of 37 in 1982 left...
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Fassbinder: Love Without Demands
2015
Fassbinder
6.2/9
A film portrait of the influential Bavarian actor, director, and screenwriter who publicly confessed his homosexuality, which chronologically covers a...
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Fassbinder
2008
Back to Room 666
5.5/2
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,...
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Back to Room 666
1981
Polnischer Sommer
7/1
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Polnischer Sommer
1981
Lili Marleen
6.449/88
The story of a German singer named Willie, who while working in Switzerland, falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert, whose family is helpin...
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Lili Marleen
2005
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977
5.286/7
Rainer Werner Fassbinder reflects on the various stages of his career, discusses how his motives behind filmmaking evolved up his film Despair.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977
1985
Room 666
6.6/57
During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders asked a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera,...
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Room 666
1975
Auf dem Trümmerfeld der Träume
0/0
Documenatry about the films of Douglas Sirk.
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Auf dem Trümmerfeld der Träume
1987
Filmarbeit mit Douglas Sirk
0/0
Documentary about the shooting of BOURBON STREET BLUES.
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Filmarbeit mit Douglas Sirk
1979
The Marriage of Maria Braun
7.364/298
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to nav...
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The Marriage of Maria Braun
1976
Signs of Vigorous Life: The New German Cinema
0/0
BBC documentary about the rise of the New German Cinema and several of its most important figures.
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Signs of Vigorous Life: The New German Cinema
1980
Notes on the Making of 'Berlin Alexanderplatz'
6.4/5
Documentary about the making of the 1980 German television series.
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Notes on the Making of 'Berlin Alexanderplatz'
2012
Once Upon a Time… The Marriage of Maria Braun
0/0
A documentary that focuses on the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun".
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Once Upon a Time… The Marriage of Maria Braun
1969
Frei bis zum nächsten Mal
9/1
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Frei bis zum nächsten Mal
1969
Tonys Freunde
10/1
Based on the French play Copain, Clopant. The plot revolves around the gangster Mallard, who wants to blackmail the rising singing star Tony. Tony and...
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Tonys Freunde
2011
My Name Is Not Ali
6.333/5
Travelling between Germany, France, and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interv...
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My Name Is Not Ali
1971
Rio das Mortes
5.25/16
Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's gi...
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Rio das Mortes
2007
Atlètic Club Banyoles
0/0
The filmmaker Albert Serra and producer Àngel Martin present their last work on the web dedicated to the club Atlètic Club Banyoles and authentic foot...
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Atlètic Club Banyoles
1974
Effi Briest
6.602/49
When 17-year-old Effi Briest marries the elderly Baron von Instetten, she moves to a small, isolated Baltic town and a house that she fears is haunted...
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Effi Briest
1970
End of the Commune?
8/1
A documentary about Fassbinder and the early years of the legendary Antiteater, the group he was a member/leader of. You can here see and hear some of...
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End of the Commune?
2020
Wim Wenders, Desperado
7.7/3
"Wings Of Desire" and "Buena Vista Social Club", "Paris, Texas" and "The State Of Things": Wim Wenders is considered one of the pioneers of New German...
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Wim Wenders, Desperado
2010
Daniel Schmid: Le Chat Qui Pense
5.8/5
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,...
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Daniel Schmid: Le Chat Qui Pense
2019
Photographer "Eise"
0/0
A portion of the Emmy award-winning documentary on the great Life Magazine photojournalist, Alfred Eisenstaedt (Eise). He photographed for over 50 yea...
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Photographer "Eise"
2024
Sukowa - Playful Like A Child
0/0
“Acting is something anyone can do,” says Barbara Sukowa. “It’s completely intuitive and instinctual, much like a child dressing up.” Those who have w...
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Sukowa - Playful Like A Child
2002
Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Der Theatermensch
0/0
What tends to be forgotten behind Fassbinder's immense cinematic oeuvre is that he wrote and directed plays with almost equal intensity and success di...
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Der Theatermensch
2000
Fassbinder's Women
5.333/9
An essay film in which filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim interviews "the willing victims of Rainer Werner Fassbinder."
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Fassbinder's Women
1977
Adolf and Marlene
7/3
When Hitler watches Marlene Dietrich in a movie, he falls in love with her. He persuades her to come back to Germany to be with him, but upon her arri...
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Adolf and Marlene
2015
A German Youth
7.14/25
At the end of the 1960s the post-war generation began to revolt against their parents. This was a generation disillusioned by anti-communist capitalis...
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