FIRST COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE IN THE UNITED STATES OF THE FILMS OF RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER
All Forty-Three Film and Television Works, Many in New 35mm
Prints, Including Several N.Y. Premieres and the Complete Screening of the
Fifteen-Hour Epic Berlin Alexanderplatz
Gala Opening Night with
Tributes and Performances by Actresses, Actors, and Crew from Fassbinder's
Films
Series to Tour Thirteen North American Cities through March 1998
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
January 23March 20,
1997
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the genius of the New German Cinema, made
forty-three remarkable film and television works between 1966 and his death
in 1982 at age thirty-seven. The full depth and scope of this astonishing
career‹unparalleled in postwar world cinema‹will be on display
for the first time in the United States beginning January 23, 1997, when
The Museum of Modern Art presents Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a
complete retrospective of the director's work.
Using a potent mix of
impassioned melodrama and biting satire, working independently with a
loyal, likeminded cast and crew, and wedding intense personal and political
issues, Fassbinder produced an entirely original oeuvre that remains as
imaginative and incisive today as when he was alive. Practically hurled in
the face of bourgeois culture, these films include acknowledged treasures
such as The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Lola (1981),
Fox and His Friends (1974), Veronika Voss (1981), Effi
Briest (1972/74), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972),
Katzelmacher (1969), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul (1973), and Lili Marleen (1980).
"Prolific and ever able to astonish, Fassbinder emerged as one of the
major artists of the late twentieth century," says Glenn D. Lowry,
Director, The Museum of Modern Art."We are pleased and honored to have
worked with the Fassbinder Foundation in Berlin to present a complete
retrospective of this superb filmmaker."
The series will feature
nineteen new 35mm subtitled prints, many of them with new or rewritten
subtitles and with color restored to the quality of the original 16mm
prints. It will also feature the world theatrical premiere of World on a
Wire (1973), the U.S. premieres of the television films
Bolwieser (1976/77) and Women in New York (1977), and the New
York premieres of several other films, including the Western Whity
(1970).
Rare versions of Fassbinder classics will also grace the
program, such as the original English language versions of Despair
(1977) and Lili Marleen (1980); an unusual print of Mother
Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) that includes both the "tougher"
German and the "softer" American endings; and the only extant English
subtitled copy of Jail Bait (1972), from the Museum's own
archive.
"Prodigiously talented and productive, Fassbinder was an
astonishing filmmaker whose acute psychological insight, empathy, and sense
of space, rhythm, and dramaturgy constantly refreshes the viewer's notion
of cinema," says Laurence Kardish, Curator and Coordinator of Film
Exhibitions, Department of Film and Video, who co-organized the series with
Juliane Lorenz, Director, Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin. "He was a social
cartographer, illuminating the ways society influenced and circumscribed
choice, and an ironic chronicler of German culture. There has been no one
like him in contemporary film."
Through March 1998, films from the
Museum's complete retrospective will screen at thirteen venues in North
America. This tour, organized by Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural
Center in collaboration with the Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin, and in
cooperation with The Museum of Modern Art, will visit Los Angeles, Atlanta,
Chicago, Toronto, Washington, and San Francisco, among other cities. In
addition, the Sundance Film Festival will present several Fassbinder films
in a special sidebar in mid-January and the Walter Reade Theater in New
York will present approximately fourteen films from May through early
June.
The prolific director, who often wrote and acted in his own films,
was introduced to New York audiences in the fall of 1971 by the New York
Film Festival and The New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who spoke
of the young brash German as the most original talent since Jean-Luc
Godard. The city's appetite for Fassbinder, and the filmmaker's appetite
for New York, was whetted. Fassbinder returned annually for the next six
Festival screenings and grew so enamored of New York that he considered
moving here.
"Rainer always had a very strong connection to New York,"
says Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder's film editor and companion for the last
six years of his life. "This series is the fulfillment of a filmmaker's
career. Even if he is not alive, for someone who felt the strong support of
New York City and whose success here opened the way for German directors to
show their work in America, this is the fulfillment of a dream."
On
Thursday, January 23, the opening night event, A Celebration of Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, features an evening of live performances and
tributes by many of Fassbinder's closest collaborators, including actresses
Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus,
and the world premiere of the 1977 documentary Rainer Werner
Fassbinder.
Another highlight of the series is the complete
screening of Fassbinder's fifteen-hour masterpiece, the television film
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979/80), which will take place from March 2
to 9. Adapted from Alfred Döblin's seminal novel of the same name, it
encompasses the range of human experience—critic Andrew Sarris called it
"a Mount Everest of modern cinema"—and is a remarkable portrait of Germany
between the wars. This will be the work's first public screening in New
York since 1983, the year after the director's death.
With the notable
exception of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder's television
productions, which number some fourteen works, are almost unknown in this
country. As well as the world premiere of the science-fiction film World
on a Wire, the program will present new prints of Recruits in
Ingolstadt (1970/71), The Niklashausen Journey (1970), and
Fear of Fear (1975), among other films. The majority of Fassbinder's
television work will screen at the end of the series, from March 9 to 20.
Some of these films will be projected on video, without English
subtitles.
From February 1 to 21, The Museum of Modern Art will screen
an adjunct series, Fassbinder's Favorites: From the Archives, a wide
variety of works from world cinema that, by his own admission, particularly
enchanted Fassbinder. These films, chosen from the Museum's own collection,
include Pier Paolo Pasolini's Accatone (1961), Douglas Sirk's The
First Legion (1951), and the rare 1929 Weimar social drama, Mutter
Krausens fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krausens Goes to Heaven), as well
as films by Raoul Walsh, Jean Genet, Luis Buñuel, Jean Vigo, and
others.
In conjunction with the series, The Museum of Modern Art will
publish an authoritative 120–page catalogue edited by Laurence Kardish, in
collaboration with Juliane Lorenz. This lavishly illustrated book combines
essays by Kardish, Fassbinder scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Wolfram
Schütte, and critic Georgia Brown with selections from Fassbinder's
own writings; personal recollections by Lorenz, Harry Baer, Jeanne Moreau,
Wim Wenders, Hanna Schygulla, and Volker Schlondörff; and an annotated
filmography. Lorenz's own book, Chaos as Usual: Conversations about
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, will also be published in January 1997, by
Applause Books. A comprehensive set of interviews with Fassbinder's closest
collaborators and friends, it constitutes a living history of the
director's life and working habits.
Besides his work in film, Fassbinder
was active throughout his career in the theater, acting in and directing
numerous productions and writing fourteen plays. From January to April,
several of these works will be produced at different venues in the city,
including The Theatre-Studio, the Jewish Repertory Theater, the Work House
Theater, and The Patricia Brooks Theater Lab/Circle in the Square Downtown.
(For more information, please contact these organizations
directly.)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a collaboration between
The Museum of Modern Art and the Fassbinder Foundation, and is presented
with the assistance of Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural Center. The
program is presented with the support of New Yorker Films, New York;
Leisure Time Features, New York; InterNationes, Bonn; and Lufthansa,
Germany.
More information about the Fassbinder retrospective, including a complete schedule of screenings, is available elswhere on this site.
212.708.9752.
