Comic Melancholia: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Easily the most prolific and notorious member of the New German Cinema movement of the late 60s and 70s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the central figure of his generation of directors, although his death by cocaine overdose in 1982 has obscured his legacy in favor of contemporaries like Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. He lived fast and filmed fast, making his movies at breakneck speed like an avant-garde Roger Corman, all notable for a frank social realism and shocking (especially at the time) emphasis on gay and racial themes. But he also found seemingly unlikely inspiration in the florid Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk (himself a German expatriate), who gave him a narrative language to make his bitter outlook palatable to a wider audience. Oak Street’s retrospective gathers eight films covering the last decade of his career, including the controversial lesbian drama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and his ÒAdenauer TrilogyÓ of The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss, three progressively crueler metaphors for recent German political history. Oak Street, 309 Oak St. S.E., (612) 331-3134, http://www.oakstreetcinema.org