Yesterday was the 70th birthday of my favorite filmmaker,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He wasn't around to see it, having died at age 37, but I celebrated for him by watching
Querelle again. (I was tempted to do a
Berlin Alexanderplatz marathon today, but I do actually have to get some work done...)
I've written various things about Fassbinder over the years, so here's a roundup and then some 70th birthday thoughts:
Fassbinder isn't around anymore to make some wishes on his birthday, so I'll make a few in his stead...
Of course, my primary wish is for everybody on Earth to recognize and celebrate Fassbinder's genius. But I can be more specific:
My greatest wish is for a release of
Eight Hours Don't Make a Day. As far as I can tell, it's never been released on home video anywhere, and has hardly ever been shown since its premiere on German television in the early '70s.
Criterion is doing a good job of putting together excellent home video versions of many of the films. With luck, they'll solve whatever rights problems led them to put their wonderful
BRD Trilogy set out of print, and will continue releasing extra-features-rich versions of the major films, as they recently have with
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and
The Merchant of Four Seasons. I hope, given that they've been able to stream them on Hulu,
Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, and
Mother Küsters are in line for similar treatment. I'd love to see a "Queer Fassbinder" set:
Fox, In a Year of 13 Moons, and
Querelle together, preferably with good commentaries and essays to help viewers work through the wonderful challenges those films offer.
Finally, we need someone to write a good, comprehensive biography. There are a few good Fassbinder books out there (my favorites of Thomas Elsaesser's
Fassbinder's Germany and Wallace Steadman Watson's
Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder, along with Juliane Lorenz's collection
Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder), but there's no good biography that I'm aware of. (Robert Katz's 1989 biography is an atrocity and shall not be spoken of.) Telling the story of Fassbinder's life day by day would be a tremendous, perhaps impossible, challenge, but the attempt would be worthwhile because it's so difficult to get a sense of how those days fit together — he would work on a film while also working on stage plays and radio plays, writing new scripts, getting financing for upcoming works, traveling to festivals — it's dizzying just to think about.
Fassbinder continues to offer riches to us even now. I wish, of course, that he'd made it to the age of an elder statesman (I'd trade significant portions of my anatomy to see what he would have done with digital cameras), but he lived so fast, so productively, and so brilliantly that though he died young, we're still working through his oeuvre in a way we aren't with even great filmmakers who lived to ripe old age. So happy birthday, RWF. We're celebrating even in your absence.
Finding the perfect book for the beloved animation fan in your life can be a big challenge, but these gift-book ideas will inform and inspire anyone who loves animation and drawing.
Sean Phillips has been working in comics for over 3 decades, creating beautifully rendered art on such titles as The Invisibles, 2000 AD, Judge Dredd, and Hellblazer. He was part of the British Invasion of Comics in the late 80′s/early 90′s along with cohorts Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, and Neil Gaiman. His ability to create striking cover illustrations, and draw fully formed characters in a classic, cinematic style has led to a long accomplished career as an artist. He is completing his latest collaboration with “partner in crime” writer Ed Brubaker on the supernatural thriller Fatale for Image Comics. August will see the premiere of their next series together, The Fade-Out, a noir tale set in 1940′s Hollywood. This also begins a 5 year deal with Image Comics for both Sean Phillips, and Ed Brubaker to produce comics exclusively for the publisher, which is a rare occurrence in the industry. This obviously shows the extreme confidence that both creator’s work, and craftsmanship inspires to land such a contract.
Sean Phillips has contributed cover and interior art for various Criterion Collection DVDs, including On the Waterfront, and 12 Angry Men.
He’s also been nominated for 3 Eisner Awards, and has won once with Ed Brubaker for best new series Criminal.
You can keep up with all of the latest Sean Phillips news, and art on his website.
For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com - Andy Yates
Over at Press Play, I have
a video essay and accompanying text essay on the first films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the best of which were recently released in the US by Criterion
as part of the Eclipse series.
It's a great shame that most of Fassbinder's films are not easily available on DVD in the US anymore. Criterion has done great work bringing some of them to us, though they've also had some go out of print. Many are available for streaming at
Hulu Plus, thankfully. I'm holding out a bit of optimistic hope for a companion Eclipse set:
Late Fassbinder, which could include
Lili Marleen and
Querelle. Or maybe for a release of
Eight Hours Are Not a Day. Or ... well, a boy can dream...
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My old DVD of
Paris, Texas had been loaned out to friends and acquaintances many times, because it's the sort of movie I just want to make people sit down and watch. DVDs are sensitive things, though, and somewhere along the line this one got scratched, making it skip and stall during one of the most important scenes at the end. Sometime this summer, I decided to replace it, and went searching for a cheap copy on Amazon. When I saw
a Criterion edition would be coming out, I gave up on the idea of getting a cheap replacement for my wounded disc and instead pre-ordered the new one. There are a few films that, if you're going to own them and watch them a few times a year (as I've done with
Paris, Texas ever since first getting it on a $5
videotape during a sale at a local video store), you should get them on the best edition possible. And the fact that it's now
on Blu-Ray is nearly enough to make me run out and get a Blu-Ray player.
I ordered the disc so long ago, I nearly forgot I'd done so and almost ended up replacing the other edition. But the new one arrived yesterday, and I quickly watched all the extras on the second disc and a few favorite scenes in the film itself. Because it had been about a year since I'd last watched the movie, the final half hour seemed even richer in its emotional effect than ever.
The colors on the new disc seemed more vivid than ever, though I haven't compared it to the previous disc and my memory of the film is strongly affected by having watched it many times on a washed-out VHS. The greens, reds, and blues are particularly sharp now, almost overwhelmingly so. The film has always been, even at its most desaturated, a powerful visual experience, but with the fine-tuning of every element by Criterion, it now verges at times on being an assault on the senses. In a good way.
Part of me, though, misses some of the old flaws. I really love the 23-minute collection of outtakes and extended scenes that was on the old DVD and is also on the Criterion edition -- love it not only because all of the scenes are interesting, a few of them are stunningly beautiful, and together they add up t