From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder (World on a Wire, Berlin Alexanderplatz) refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1971, were influenced by the work of the antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich. Collected here are five of those fascinating and confrontational works; whether a self-conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling glimpse into the mind of a twentysomething man who would become one ofcinema's most madly prolific artists.Films Include:Love Is Colder Than DeathFor his debut, Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic, unorthodox crime drama about a love triangle involving the small-time pimp Franz (Fassbinder), his gangster friend Bruno (Ulli Lommel), and Franz's prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (future Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla). With its minimalist tableaux and catalog of New Wave and Hollywood references, this is a stylishly nihilistic cinematic statement of intent.KatzelmacherFassbinder's second film dramatizes the intolerance of a circle of financially and sexually frustrated friends when an immigrant laborer (Fassbinder) moves to their Munich neighborhood. This scalpel-sharp, theatrical experiment (based on one of the director's successful early stage plays) is both a personal expression of alienation on the part of the filmmaker and a comment on the persistence of xenophobic scapegoating in German society.Gods Of The Plague
