Rainer Werner Fassbinder born 31 May 1945 (d. 1982)Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a German film director, screenwriter and actor. A premier representative of the New German Cinema.
Famous for his frenetic pace in film-making, in a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years Fassbinder completed 35 feature length films; two television series shot on film; three short films; four video productions; twenty four stage plays and four radio plays directed; and 36 acting roles in his own and other’s films. He also worked as an actor (film and theatre), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theatre manager.
Fassbinder was distinguished for the strong provocative current underlying his work and the air of scandal surrounded his artistic choices and private life. His intense discipline and phenomenal creative energy when working were in violent contrast with a wild, self-destructive libertinism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, as well as its central figure. He had tortured relationships in his personal life with the people he drew around him in a surrogate family of actors and technicians. However, his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalised violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity. His films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society, and the individual, thwarts it. A prodigiously inventive artist, Fassbinder distilled the best elements of his sources — Brechtian theatrics, Artaud, Hollywood melodramas - especially 'women's pictures', classical narrative, and a gay sensibility into a complex body of work.
His most notable films include The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), Fox and his Friends (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and his final film, his extraordinary vision of Jean Genet's Querelle (1982) [pictured left].Fassbinder died at the age of 37 from an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. There is debate as to whether the overdose was accidental or not. His death is often considered to mark the end of New German Cinema.