“Fassbinder’s second film, which became not only his first claim to fame and author status, but also gave him [...] valuable operating capital for years to come.
On a film set in Spain, cast and crew are waiting for the director to arrive. Boredom makes them engage in abusive power games and sexual intrigues. When the director finally shows up on set, mayhem ensues.
The destructive downward spiral of a man who returns from the French Foreign Legion to his suffocating life back home. Hans Epp is a self-destructive man who lives a dissatisfied life.
Petra von Kant, a successful fashion designer, enjoys a fairly satisfactory sado-masochistic relationship with her female assistant Marlene. Things get more complicated when she falls in love with the beautiful young Karin.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder pays homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow meets a much younger Arab worker in a bar during a rainstorm.
“I find women more interesting. They don’t interest me just because they’re oppressed – it’s not that simple.
Factory worker Küsters, faced with the threat of redundancy, kills his boss and commits suicide. His widow finds herself deserted by her family and friends, until a wealthy communist couple decide to make political capital from her plight.
“Upon its release in Europe and the United States in 1975–76, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit, 1975) disappointed many European and American gay critics. In their reviews, these critics criticized the film from two dominant perspectives.
“It seems as if Fassbinder needed to purge his system after In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978), a traumatised remake of Louis Malle’s Le feu follet (1963), chronicling a transsexual depressive’s last days, and inspired by the suicide of Fassbinder’s lover Armin Meier.
In 1938, a German singer falls in love with a Jewish composer in Zurich, who helps Jews flee Nazi Germany. She wants to help but is forced back to Germany. Her song "Lili Marleen" becomes a hit with soldiers and the Nazi top.
Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer–prostitute, exults in her power as a tempter of men, but she wants more – money, property, and love.
“This sense of unrootedness and disorientation may stem largely from an aesthetic dissonance between Fassbinder and Genet [whose novel Querelle de Brest was adapted by Fassbinder], both in terms of agenda and the times in which they were working.