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Rating: 
Summary: Filmdom's Resident Ogre
Review: Fassbinder lived life, as the French say, ventre a terre -- with his belly to the ground. And what a belly it was. By the end, that enormous gut was the repository of more lusts and appetites than can be found in all the circles of Dante's hell. Fassbinder was, if not the 20th century's greatest filmmaker, certainly the 20th century's greatest film FIGURE. Unlike most directors, you can't whittle down his body of work to one or two masterpieces -- all his films must be seen, and a working knowledge of his corrupt and abrupt life is necessary.
Christian Thomsen's biography is no masterpiece, but it is the most complete Portrait of the Artist as a Young Monster yet written, and for that reason alone commands attention. Of course Thomsen can't explain how one man was able, in the course of 15 years, to write and direct 41 films, one of them 15 hours long. But who can? Such a driven personality can only be cautiously approached, never apprehended. Thomsen can't be blamed for what, after all, amounts to little more than a very understandable mystification. Much less forgivable is his slipshod commentary on the films themselves. Fox and His Friends, in particular, is given annoyingly short shrift. This movie, Fassbinder's most far-seeing and revolutionary, is sort of a gay Double Indemnity, with what I believe to be the cinema's first instance of an homme fatale -- it is a truly fascinating update of 40's film noirs, brilliant in its hyperrealistic and poker-faced depiction of Germany's gay underground. But Thomsen passes right over all this, preferring instead to attack the editing, which isn't "tight" enough for his tastes. This is very lazy criticism and not even close to being accurate. I fear Thomsen is influenced by some of Fassbinder's own disdainful comments on the film, even though the director was clearly indulging in a little Hitchcockian false modesty. The point is, Thomsen knew Fassbinder personally, and may still be a little too gobsmacked by his subject to write the unbiased and considered biography he deserves. Again -- quibbles. Here, for the first time, we learn just how fast Fassbinder could write a feature-length script ( four days ), what he needed to do it ( cocaine ), and which of his projects he held nearest and dearest to his grossly enlarged heart ( Effi Briest, Berlin Alexanderplatz ). Nor does Thomsen quail before the awesome task of explicating each and every one of Fassbinder's many films -- they're all here, every last one of them, even those not available in the U.S. The definitive biography is still to come, but in the interim, this is more than enough to tide over any but the most insatiable Fassbinder freaks.
Rating:
Summary: Filmdom's Resident Ogre
Review: Fassbinder lived life, as the French say, ventre a terre -- with his belly to the ground. And what a belly it was. By the end, that enormous gut was the repository of more lusts and appetites than can be found in all the circles of Dante's hell. Fassbinder was, if not the 20th century's greatest filmmaker, certainly the 20th century's greatest film FIGURE. Unlike most directors, you can't whittle down his body of work to one or two masterpieces -- all his films must be seen, and a working knowledge of his corrupt and abrupt life is necessary.
Christian Thomsen's biography is no masterpiece, but it is the most complete Portrait of the Artist as a Young Monster yet written, and for that reason alone commands attention. Of course Thomsen can't explain how one man was able, in the course of 15 years, to write and direct 41 films, one of them 15 hours long. But who can? Such a driven personality can only be cautiously approached, never apprehended. Thomsen can't be blamed for what, after all, amounts to little more than a very understandable mystification. Much less forgivable is his slipshod commentary on the films themselves. Fox and His Friends, in particular, is given annoyingly short shrift. This movie, Fassbinder's most far-seeing and revolutionary, is sort of a gay Double Indemnity, with what I believe to be the cinema's first instance of an homme fatale -- it is a truly fascinating update of 40's film noirs, brilliant in its hyperrealistic and poker-faced depiction of Germany's gay underground. But Thomsen passes right over all this, preferring instead to attack the editing, which isn't "tight" enough for his tastes. This is very lazy criticism and not even close to being accurate. I fear Thomsen is influenced by some of Fassbinder's own disdainful comments on the film, even though the director was clearly indulging in a little Hitchcockian false modesty. The point is, Thomsen knew Fassbinder personally, and may still be a little too gobsmacked by his subject to write the unbiased and considered biography he deserves. Again -- quibbles. Here, for the first time, we learn just how fast Fassbinder could write a feature-length script ( four days ), what he needed to do it ( cocaine ), and which of his projects he held nearest and dearest to his grossly enlarged heart ( Effi Briest, Berlin Alexanderplatz ). Nor does Thomsen quail before the awesome task of explicating each and every one of Fassbinder's many films -- they're all here, every last one of them, even those not available in the U.S. The definitive biography is still to come, but in the interim, this is more than enough to tide over any but the most insatiable Fassbinder freaks.
Rating: 
Summary: Thomsen's book is insightful.......
Review: If you are curious about Fassbinder's film - this book offers a fine outline - with comments about Fassbinder's life interspersed - by someone who knew him and talked to him on several occasions. You can sense that Fassbinder had a great impact on Christian Braad Thomsen - his biography is done in a loving fashion.
Rating:
Summary: Filmmaker... rebel... provocative genius!
Review: The book's subtitle, alluding to Fassbinder as a provocative genius, says it all really... Here we have a filmmaker that lived his life like a rock star whilst simultaneously creating film after film at a rate that would make industrious British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom hang his head in shame. Fassbinder famously made a record number of forty-four films in fourteen years, ranging from the good, to the great, to the groundbreaking, before burning out at his writing desk. Thomsen's biography here, manages to both present the facts in a clear-cut and informative way, whilst simultaneously invoking the chaotic, bizarre and often contradictory lifestyle that the filmmaker chose to live, with the later passages bringing to life in evocative detail Fassbinder low-life-Shakespearian demise; slumped at his desk (with various pill boxes and alcoholic beverage containers littered around his body), whilst the manuscript for his next masterpiece lay on the floor beside him... the last few pages still in the typewriter.
From almost the first paragraph on we get a strong idea of the complexities of Fassbinder's life, with the true story behind the filmmaker often reading like a synopsis for one of his own manuscripts. The details of his life are rich with the kind of emotional ups and downs own would associate with social melodrama at it's most cloying, with Fassbinder, an over-weight bi-sexual who married often - though still found the time to pimp German actor and sometime collaborator Udo Kier around the leather bars that would become part of the lifestyle for his night-time altar ego - being as far from the mould of the usual auteur as you could possibly get. From this, we begin to get a clearer idea of the emotional resonance that the filmmaker's work had on a personal, self-referential level. His most iconic trait as a filmmaker was to take the template of Douglas Sirk and create a German melodrama with more traditional Hollywood ideals, all the while, playing off its conventions with an almost post-modern approach to the contrast between the real and the cinematic.
His most famous attempts at such a style came with films like The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. By the time he'd reached the mid-nineteen-seventies he'd started to experiment with the visual aspects of his films, as well as establishing a more socially aware attitude. These more 'left-field' pictures included the downbeat social-satires In a Year of 13 Moons, Chinese Roulette and of course the more-controversial parable, The Third Generation. By the later stages of his career Fassbiner had begun to elevate the visual design of his films even further, creating bold and often hauntingly surreal works like Despair (from the novel by Nabokov) Lola (a remake of the Blue Angel) and Querelle (from the novel by Genet). He was also working with some fairly established actors and garnering impressive notices from the foreign press. Thomsen's handling of these varying stylistic periods and ideological movements are bold and well written, whilst the use of testimony from those who knew the rebellious filmmaker well, actually gives us a sense of what Fassbinder was like as a human being.
Here, the stories about the conception and production of the films is chronicled well, with sidelines into the various personal traumas connected with Fassbinder's life (for example, his frequent bouts of depression, his crisis of identity and sexuality, his strange relationship with his wife and lovers... and the fact that the star of Fear Eats the Soul went out into the night following the break up of his relationship with the director and stabbed two innocents to death). Some of the lengthy chapters, on occasion, fall into cliché or generics, but this *could* be down to the translation... but anyway, who needs over the top prose when the character of the book is already through the roof? This book is a great introduction to the films and history of one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century, so, if you are interested in cinema, the German New Wave or just filmmaking in general, then this is one of the best books around. Right up there with John Baxter's biography of Stanley Kubrick, and Stig Bjorkman's interviews with Woody Allen.
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