Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Not many film directors can claim to have been as productive as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, nor to have produced so many film masterpieces. Born in a Bavarian small town in 1945, Fassbinder's childhood was marked by the deprivations of post-World War II Germany. After a turbulent adolescence, he found a calling in theatre, studying at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich from 1964 to 1966. At the same time, he started to experiment with film, completing a series of 8mm shorts. He developed his artistic vision along multiple paths, writing, performing, and directing for the Munich Action Theater (later known as the Munich Anti Theater), and fulfilling similar roles in his films. Starting with 1969's Love Is Colder Than Death, Fassbinder quickly became an established figure of the New German Cinema, joining other iconoclastic directors such as Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. His topics and style were always innovative and controversial, ranging from the meaning of violence in 1971's The American Soldier, to homosexuality and class structure in Fox and his Friends (1974), to the history of postwar Germany in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), to the epic thirteen-hour summation of his world view in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). At the same time, Fassbinder built up a quasi-mythical image for himself in the media, a man without compromise in either his personal or creative life. Sadly, his productive career was cut short at the age of thirty-seven: shortly after completing his last film, Querelle (1982) from Jean Genet's novel, Fassbinder died of drug-induced heart failure.
