Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Subtitle: film as private and public art
By: Wallace Steadman Watson.
Series: Understanding modern European and Latin American literature
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Columbia, S.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 341
Subjects: Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 1946-  -- Criticism and interpretation
Other titles: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Description: Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder introduces scholars and students to the controversial and prolific but brief career of a filmmaker hailed as one of the New German Cinema's most talented exponents. Combining a chronological survey with a thematic exploration, Wallace Steadman Watson reviews the entirety of Fassbinder's artistic output, focusing specifically on fifteen of the filmmaker's thirty-eight feature-length works.

Watson's interpretations of these films, all of which he studied in Germany, scrutinize the financial constraints, material conditions, and script development involved in their production. In addition, Watson's analyses draw on a wide assortment of Fassbinder interviews - many of which are not available in English - and on theoretical and critical approaches employed in the Frankfurt School, gay and lesbian film theory, and studies of melodrama and camp.

. A comprehensive, balanced study, Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder also features an annotated bibliography, extensive notes, a filmography of Fassbinder's works, and a listing of films and television programs that examine Fassbinder and his achievements.
Notes: Filmography: p. 292-305.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 306-321) and index.
Table of contents: title: Fassbinder and his Germany; title: Starting out; title: mostly in the theater; title: Film apprenticeship as marathon race; title: Reconsidering the holy whore : reflection, reflexivity, and Sirkean melodrama; title: Outsiders and underdogs : male melodramas; title: "Women's pictures"; title: Art out of crisis : the emergence of "late" Fassbinder; title: Rewriting Nabokov : the Stoppard/Fassbinder despair; title: The "women's picture" as history; title: Desire and history : Berlin Alexanderplatz; title: New directions (perhaps) and conclusions.