Focus Features

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a phenomenon.

In just 14 years - from Love is Colder Than Death to Querelle (whose artificial world is suffused with the orange glow of a setting sun) - Fassbinder made 44 films – including mini-series such as the epic 13-part Berlin Alexanderplatz – as well as works for radio and the theatre.

“Live Fast, Die Young” seems to have been his credo given that he died at the early age of 37. “Shoot Fast” pretty much summed up his approach to filmmaking – he shot his films very quickly, they were cheap to produce, and the films themselves were filled with a restless energy and tension.

What would he have done with the new, versatile digital technology! With his cinematic imagination, his sense of camera movement and color, he would have created a new language of filmmaking in the 21st century.

In his book about Fassbinder, his friend and filmmaker Christian Braad Thomsen talks about Fassbinder's death:

“When Fassbinder died at the age of 37, he had produced a body of work for which other people would need at least 3 lives. It's no surprise if under these conditions a heart gives up.

In the last months of his life Fassbinder had got into a bizarre state. He had discovered what an incredible effect could be achieved by combining cocaine with sleeping pills. It's understandable that his heart responded in confusion when it was hit by contradictory impulses: the command of the cocaine to work faster and the instruction of the sleeping pills to go at things calmly. In the end, it had to give up because it was hit more than any human heart can cope with.

Only 8 hours before his death Fassbinder had been interviewed for a documentary about the making of his final film, Querelle. This last interview is among the most notable moments of film history. Fassbinder sits, powerful and brooding, in his black leather armchair, eyes hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses, and he speaks with considerable effort with many pauses, as if he first has to fetch the words from a place where he no longer is. He finds it difficult to express himself, but what he finally says is brilliantly clear. With a seemingly absurd self-confidence, he says that instead of going to Hollywood, he wants to create a kind of German Hollywood and make a cinema "that is as wonderful and as generally comprehensible as Hollywood but, at the same time, not so false."

Fassbinder in Fox and His Friends

When a journalist once asked him why he dreamed of working in Hollywood, he replied that he would like to make a film with James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. In whatever celestial situation Fassbinder may now find himself, it's not impossible that he finished that film long ago - and that he was able to persuade the two of them to play Bakunin and Rosa Luxemburg to the music of Kraftwerk.

Instead of hiding his light under a bushel, he preferred to let it burn at both ends. He once said to a journalist that he would like to be to cinema what Shakespeare was to theatre, Marx to politics and Freud to psychology - someone after whom nothing was as before. Some will see in such a statement a touch of childish megalomania or one of those delusions of omnipotence that often appear in the wake of a cocaine high. But neither of these explanations excludes the possibility that Fassbinder perhaps reached the goal he set for himself. Admittedly, he never grew as old as Shakespeare, Marx or Freud, but he did manage 6 months more than Mozart. And if film negatives should prove as durable as sheets of music, then Fasbinder's films will live as long and continue to enrich and provoke those who believe that film is not only a holy whore, but also an art form - and in Fassbinder's hands, the most complete of all.”

Extract from Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius by Christian Braad Thomsen, translated by Martin Chalmers (Faber & Faber, 1999).

Essential Viewing: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul [Buy] (a remix of Douglas Sirks's All That Heaven Allows), Fox and his Friends [Buy] (with a chilling central performance from Fassbinder himself), The Marriage of Maria Braun [Buy] (Fassbinder's dissection of Germany's post-war economic miracle, which made a star of Hanna Schygulla), Berlin Alexanderplatz [Buy], Lola [Buy]  (with its provocative “happy ending”), and the death-obsessed Querelle [Buy].

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a phenomenon.

In just 14 years - from Love is Colder Than Death to Querelle (whose artificial world is suffused with the orange glow of a setting sun) - Fassbinder made 44 films – including mini-series such as the epic 13-part Berlin Alexanderplatz – as well as works for radio and the theatre.

“Live Fast, Die Young” seems to have been his credo given that he died at the early age of 37. “Shoot Fast” pretty much summed up his approach to filmmaking – he shot his films very quickly, they were cheap to produce, and the films themselves were filled with a restless energy and tension.

What would he have done with the new, versatile digital technology! With his cinematic imagination, his sense of camera movement and color, he would have created a new language of filmmaking in the 21st century.

In his book about Fassbinder, his friend and filmmaker Christian Braad Thomsen talks about Fassbinder's death:

“When Fassbinder died at the age of 37, he had produced a body of work for which other people would need at least 3 lives. It's no surprise if under these conditions a heart gives up.

In the last months of his life Fassbinder had got into a bizarre state. He had discovered what an incredible effect could be achieved by combining cocaine with sleeping pills. It's understandable that his heart responded in confusion when it was hit by contradictory impulses: the command of the cocaine to work faster and the instruction of the sleeping pills to go at things calmly. In the end, it had to give up because it was hit more than any human heart can cope with.

Only 8 hours before his death Fassbinder had been interviewed for a documentary about the making of his final film, Querelle. This last interview is among the most notable moments of film history. Fassbinder sits, powerful and brooding, in his black leather armchair, eyes hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses, and he speaks with considerable effort with many pauses, as if he first has to fetch the words from a place where he no longer is. He finds it difficult to express himself, but what he finally says is brilliantly clear. With a seemingly absurd self-confidence, he says that instead of going to Hollywood, he wants to create a kind of German Hollywood and make a cinema "that is as wonderful and as generally comprehensible as Hollywood but, at the same time, not so false."

Fassbinder in Fox and His Friends

When a journalist once asked him why he dreamed of working in Hollywood, he replied that he would like to make a film with James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. In whatever celestial situation Fassbinder may now find himself, it's not impossible that he finished that film long ago - and that he was able to persuade the two of them to play Bakunin and Rosa Luxemburg to the music of Kraftwerk.

Instead of hiding his light under a bushel, he preferred to let it burn at both ends. He once said to a journalist that he would like to be to cinema what Shakespeare was to theatre, Marx to politics and Freud to psychology - someone after whom nothing was as before. Some will see in such a statement a touch of childish megalomania or one of those delusions of omnipotence that often appear in the wake of a cocaine high. But neither of these explanations excludes the possibility that Fassbinder perhaps reached the goal he set for himself. Admittedly, he never grew as old as Shakespeare, Marx or Freud, but he did manage 6 months more than Mozart. And if film negatives should prove as durable as sheets of music, then Fasbinder's films will live as long and continue to enrich and provoke those who believe that film is not only a holy whore, but also an art form - and in Fassbinder's hands, the most complete of all.”

Extract from Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius by Christian Braad Thomsen, translated by Martin Chalmers (Faber & Faber, 1999).

Essential Viewing: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul [Buy] (a remix of Douglas Sirks's All That Heaven Allows), Fox and his Friends [Buy] (with a chilling central performance from Fassbinder himself), The Marriage of Maria Braun [Buy] (Fassbinder's dissection of Germany's post-war economic miracle, which made a star of Hanna Schygulla), Berlin Alexanderplatz [Buy], Lola [Buy]  (with its provocative “happy ending”), and the death-obsessed Querelle [Buy].