Fassbinder

Started by pookiethecat, June 05, 2003, 10:49:24 PM

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Quote from: wilder on October 25, 2014, 07:19:34 PM


Part II of the retrospective, November 7th - 26th at Film Society Lincoln Center

I'm currently living in Berlin, and the possibility of one day watching Fassbinder without subtitles is one of my biggest incentives for learning German.

wilder

Janus' trailer for Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (1972)

The astonishingly prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) directed over 40 movies in 15 years. Yet one of his most sprawling works has remained unreleased in the U.S. until now: the epic 1972 EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY. Commissioned to make a working-class family drama for public television, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, upending expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical— perspective. Over the course of five episodes, the project tracks the everyday triumphs and travails of the young toolmaker Jochen (Gottfried John) and many of the people populating his world, including the woman he loves (Hanna Schygulla), his eccentric nuclear family, and his fellow workers, with whom he bands together to improve conditions on the factory oor. Rarely screened since its popular but controversial initial broadcast, EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY rates as a true discovery, one of Fassbinder's earliest and most tender experiments with the genre of melodrama.

Opening at Film Forum in NY on March 14th with a nationwide theatrical tour to follow.

Currently available on blu-ray from Arrow in the UK, Criterion forthcoming

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Everyone in NYC should run to see this, it's incredible. Acerbic as always with Fassbinder, but also very humane and funny. Spends hours building up the characters, then at one points sets them all loose in a crazy choreography in one of the best party sequences I've ever seen.