On RWF – Anthony Quinn in The Guardian:

‘Penman deals with the early output in a blizzard of impressionistic strokes that may put off the uninitiated viewer for ever: “Boredom is the crucial factor here… anhedonia, existential wilting, mute withdrawal. Sudden bursts into hysterical violence.” And fans may also reconsider their allegiance to the work. I never much cared for his gangster film Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), but I did think it a brilliant title (it was also used by Robert Katz for his 1986 biography).
Not Penman, though, or not any more. “Love Is Colder Than Death. It’s a tart, snappy, memorable line, but – really? All love, categorically? He is an expert on poisons, but has no interest in cures.” That is such a good diagnosis of the Fassbinder ethos. He is just as persuasive about Despair (1978), the prestige Nabokov adaptation about a chocolate factory owner who fakes his own suicide (ineptly). I last saw the film at a BFI retrospective in the company of an eminent film critic friend; we both left the cinema with a vaporous “?” floating over our heads. It did that to people. Dirk Bogarde, its star, was aghast on seeing it, so too Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay. Penman skewers it: “The film displays at best a kind of interior decorator neurasthenia, a Fabergé egg melancholia, without the taint of anything like madness. It is modish glassware.”’

(…)

‘In June 1982, Fassbinder was found dead in a Munich apartment, a victim of his appetites – 60 to 80 cigarettes a day, a diet of Bavarian sausages and cabbage (ugh), plus a suicidal dosage of heroin and cocaine. He was 37. He had talked about his decision to live a short but “intense” life and meant it. Penman wonders: “But what if you find yourself still alive, in late middle age?” This immediately prompted thoughts of Orson Welles. Bloated, blighted, babyish of face, he too started out as a wonder boy, before his talent went into steep decline. Fassbinder, however, had already made more than 40 films and was furiously at work on his next. He had had a tantalising conversation with Jane Fonda about her taking the title role in a film about Rosa Luxemburg. But life outpaced him.’

Read the article here.

A friend alerted me to this article, RWF as a victim of his appetites is a very accurate description.

‘Fear eat the soul’ is an excellent movie. Pauline Kael never got Fassbinder, her own words, but that’s a understandable, he was just a tad too German for her.

I hope another Fassbinder retrospective will come soon to New York. This decade can use a bit of Fassbinder, and it will be interesting to look back on the Bonn Republic.