A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder

A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a groundbreaking collection. The first to engage fully with this important figure, whose untimely death in 1982 is said to have marked the end of New German cinema. Twenty–eight chapters consider this controversial director′s contribution to German cinema, German history, gender and queer studies, and auteurship. Riding a wave of renewed interest in Fassbinder as a result of the increasing availability of his work, this collection puts the enigmatic director, actor, and character in context and considers the reach of his influence on a new generation of film makers.

These contributions by an international group of scholars provide a range of multiple perspectives through which  Fassbinder emerges as an even more engagingly complex and more brilliant auteur than ever before.

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction 1
Brigitte Peucker

Part I Life and Work 15

1 The Other Planet Fassbinder 17
Juliane Lorenz

2 R. W. Fassbinder: Prodigal Son, Not Reconciled? 45
Thomas Elsaesser

3 Rainer "Maria" Fassbinder: Cinema between Literature and Life 53
Leo A. Lensing

4 Five Fassbinder Scenes 67
Wayne Koestenbaum

Part II Genre; Influence; Aesthetics 77

5 Imitation, Seriality, Cinema: Early Fassbinder and Godard 79
Laura McMahon

6 Exposed Bodies; Evacuated Identities 101
Claire Kaiser

7 Redressing the Inaccessible through the Re Inscribed Body: In a Year with 13 Moons and Almodóvar s Bad Education 118
Victor Fan

8 Nudity and the Question: Chinese Roulette 142
Eugenie Brinkema

9 Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority 159
Brian Price

10 Fassbinder′s Work : Style, Sirk, and Queer Labor 181
John David Rhodes

11 A Nagging Physical Discomfort: Fassbinder and Martha 204
Joe McElhaney

12 Beyond the Woman′s Film: Reflecting Difference in the Fassbinder Melodrama 226
Nadine Schwakopf

13 Through the Looking Glass: Fassbinder′s World on a Wire 245
Brad Prager

Part III Other Texts; Other Media 267

14 Violently Oscillating: Science, Repetition, and Affective Transmutation in Fassbinder′s Berlin Alexanderplatz 269
Elena del Rio

15 In Despair : Performance, Citation, Identity 290
Brigitte Peucker

16 Declined Invitations: Repetition in Fassbinder′s Queer "Monomusical" 313
Caryl Flinn

17 Fassbinder′s France: Genet′s Miseen Scène in Fassbinder′s Films 333
Olga Solovieva

18 Un–framing the Image: Theatricality and the Art World of Bitter Tears 352
Brigitte Peucker

19 A Novel Film: Fassbinder′s Fontane Effi Briest 372
Elke Siegel

20 Swearing and Forswearing Fidelity in Fassbinder′s Berlin Alexanderplatz 398
Paul Coates

Part IV History; Ideology; Politics 421

21 "There Are Many Ways to Fight a Battle": Young Fassbinder and the Myths of 1968 423
Eric Rentschler

22 A Generation Later and Still Unrepresentable?: Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction 441
Frances Guerin

23 Two Kinds of Excess: Fassbinder and Veit Harlan 461
Laura J. Heins

24 Jolie Laide: Fassbinder, Anti Semitism, and the Jewish Image 485
Rosalind Galt

25 Impossible, Impolitic: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Fassbinder′s Asynchronous Bodies 502
Elena Gorfinkel

26 "So Much Tenderness": Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Günther Kaufmann, and the Ambivalences of Interracial Desire 516
Tobias Nagl and Janelle Blankenship

27 Rainer, Rosa, and Werner: New Gay Film as Counter–Public 542
Randall Halle

28 Fassbinder′s Fox and His Friends and Gay Politics in the 1970s 564
Ronald Gregg

29 Querelle′s Finality 579
Roy Grundmann

Selected Bibliography 604

Index 623

Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and a Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. Peucker is the author of many essays on questions of representation in film and literature. Earlier books include Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (1987), Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (1995), and The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (2007).

"This account includes interesting points of view that compliment and supplement one another as they shed light on a complex film practice and its practitioner." (NeoPopRealism Journal, 2011)