Fassbinder: Life and Work of a Provocative Genius.

[Betty]

Barry read and liked this biography Fassbinder: Life and Work of a Provocative Genius /Christian Braad Thomsen /trans Martin Chalmers, so I checked out Thomsen's story of this renown film maker of New German Cinema about whom I knew little. Thomsen the biographer actually knew Rainer Werner Fassbinder well and writes everything interesting--childhood, adult experiences, other film makers and Hollywood--that influenced his film making. It all makes me want to search Netflix to see what of his is available. The title of the first chapter 'The Double Man' implies that he was a complicated human being, whose cinematographic characters reflected doubleness, personally and symbolically (mirrors, mannequins). One of his best-known films adapts Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story Of Franz Biberkopf.

Fassbinder had the ideal childhood, like Nabakov, to develop his personality: "there was no one to tell me: do this, do that, don't do it this way, but that way...", the biography says. His big, extended household of strangers and his parents' divorce also compounded a lack of parental supervision. His career re-established similar working conditions--a crowd of fellow workers. While that freedom meant he felt a certain lack of regard and love, his self-direction made him master of his destiny and nonconformist. Some viewers of his films might find them "pessimistic" but he saw choice as bringing fortune or misfortune. Thomsen explains Fassbinder's non-pessimistic attitude:

"What looks like fate is, despite everything, made by human beings. And what human beings have made, they can also alter even if Fassbinder presents his rebels as so imprisoned in what they want to change, that they are only able to repeat the misfortune."

If someone else wants to read Fassbinder's biography right now we can do that.