Crappy Fassbinder Biography

Fassbinder: The Life And Work Of A Provocative Genius, by Christian Braad Thomsen. Amazon promotes this as the revealing biography of this highly productive and radical director.  No.  About 40 of this book's 358 pages offer a superficial overview of the manic, profligate life of New German Cinema's greatest director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  The other 300+ pages are dry critical studies (heavily laced with dry psychological analyses) of Fassbinder's 40 feature films, 24 plays, two television serials, three short films, and four video productions.

Fassbinder died at age 37, and completed his remarkable body of work, as well as acting in a dozen films, in a whirlwind between 1967 and his death in 1982.  A homosexual-heavy bisexual, he also had numerous volatile marriages, affairs and work relationships, as well as heavy drug and alcohol use.

I was hoping this *biography* would get down into the Fassbinder gutter and wallow the reader in his filthy, grimy, often violent sexual relationships with many of his film's leading men, such as the Moroccan El Hedi ben Salem, Armin Meier, Kurt Raab, and the negro Günther Kaufmann. Meier and ben Salem both committed suicide.  But only pages 18-20 deal with this, and give only the most broad outline of Fassbinder's debauched love life.  I should have stopped reading right then and there, but I kept turning another 30 pages or so, then started skimming through the overly-academic analyses of the films, television shows and stage plays. 

Fassbinder's peers included Herzog and Wenders, and I always thought Fassbinder's films were better.  Had he been able to continuing working the last forty years, one can only imagine what other gems he would have added to the great The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, Effi Briest, Chinese Roulette, The Marriage Of Maria Braun, Lola, Veronika Voss and the television series Berlin Alexanderplast.

Fassbinder had his own film language, somnolent pacing, flat, detached dialogue, set designs rich in symbolism, post-war German melodrama and social criticism. Fassbinder was one of the best at presenting losers on the big screen.  Unlike in Hollywood melodramas, Fassbinder's troubled characters, beat down by both circumstance and their own failings, didn't secure happy endings, but learned how to survive their morally bankrupt surroundings and themselves, or make peace with death.  When one contemplates Fassbinder's own untidy personal life, one can't help believe that he was able to sympathize and identify with his film's characters, and that is why they feel so authentic.

If this *biography* had offered more of the personal Fassbinder and less of the theoretical-critical, the reader would probably have an even deeper understanding and appreciation of his films.