Fassbinder: His was a meteoric life

Visionary, punk, monster, genius, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was born in a Bavarian town in 1945, three weeks after the Nazi surrender. Thirty-seven years later -- surrounded by notes for his next movie and pickled in cocaine, booze and nicotine -- the untamed soul of the New German Cinema died, leaving behind 41 feature films. Is it any wonder that his longtime muse Hanna Schygulla later wondered: “Did he die so young because he was in such a rush, or did he rush because he was destined to die young?”

Schygulla didn’t answer her question; perhaps she knew better than to try.

Fassbinder was an enigma. He made movies that decry oppression but was famously cruel to those who worked for him, and while openly gay nonetheless married (and divorced) actress Ingrid Caven. There’s plenty of gossip where he’s concerned, but this is one instance where the work is actually more interesting than the larger-than-life personality behind it. You can get a sense of just how much more interesting in the abbreviated retrospective (15 features, two shorts) that opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and runs through April 26. The first essential Los Angeles film event of the year, the series affords an opportunity to see his work as it was meant to be seen -- bigger than life, and often as anguished and beautiful.

Rediscovering dead directors is part of the movie lover’s covenant, but with Fassbinder it’s also a pleasure. There are all sorts of reasons to give him our love. He was among the first to rehabilitate Douglas Sirk’s reputation, and without him there might not be either Todd Haynes or Pedro Almodovar, both of whom owe him a profound debt. He brought melodrama out of the closet, where it had lingered as a disreputable genre, good for three-hankie sob sisters and their weak brothers, and turned it into an instrument of social criticism. He made movies about recognizably human gay characters and gave his women actors as juicy roles as his men. And, in film after film, he poked into German history like a finger in a wound; he never stopped poking.

Rejected by the German Film and Television Academy when he was 20, Fassbinder had his revenge when, just three years later, he directed his first movie, a black-and-white drama with a characteristically overheated title, “Love Is Colder Than Death.” (It screens tonight.) Influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol, among others, the story involves a hood (played by the director-writer in tight jeans and leather jacket) who lives off his prostitute girlfriend (Schygulla) and falls for a fellow gangster, an Alain Delon look-a-like with cruel cheekbones (Ulli Lommel). Fast-paced, cheaply made and totally in control, the film is a relative trifle in the context of Fassbinder’s overall oeuvre but it’s also pretty splendid on its own modest terms and shows how much of his filmmaking talent was there from the start.

Raised during West Germany’s “economic miracle,” Fassbinder flourished amid the country’s post-1968 tumult of protest movements, politically motivated assassinations and kidnappings, a ban on radicals in public service jobs, and the emergence of radical terrorist groups. In 1967, he joined an influential experimental theater group, some of whose members formed the basis for what would become, essentially, his personal movie colony. In most of his films, he worked with the same core group of technicians and actors, some of whom, like the brilliant Kurt Raab (star of the blistering “Satan’s Brew,” screening April 25), performed double duty on the crew. Fassbinder’s establishment of a Hollywood-like production base remains one of his greatest innovations, not only in terms of its uniqueness vis-a-vis the larger German film scene but also because of its extraordinary success.

A voracious consumer of movies, Fassbinder openly embraced Hollywood -- but on his own terms. “What I would like,” he once famously declared, “is to make Hollywood movies, that is, movies as wonderful and universal, but at the same time not as hypocritical.”

Over the years, he dipped in out of many familiar genres, directing gangster flicks, historical epics, crypto-noirs and social melodramas influenced not only by the likes of Godard, Warhol and Sirk but by such wide-ranging forefathers as Bertolt Brecht and Howard Hawks. Although the films shift in look and in emphasis, there are thematic threads that hold them together, including sexual and social identity, amnesia and historical memory, authoritarianism and an ever-present undercurrent of fascism.

Although Germany’s past casts a shadow over all of his work, he only directed one film wholly set during Nazi Germany, “Lili Marleen” (made in 1980, it shows April 19). Shot in English with a multinational cast, the emotionally and stylistically florid melodrama opens in 1938 Zurich with Schygulla, as a cabaret singer named Willie, in the midst of a hot affair with her pianist, Robert Mendelssohn (an incongruously blond Giancarlo Giannini). Unbeknownst to Willie, Robert is helping his haute bourgeois father, David (Mel Ferrer), smuggle Jews out of Germany. Worried that Willie will somehow compromise Robert and his mission, David arranges to have the singer’s Swiss visa revoked, a move that sends her back to a Germany that is fast coming under the spell of National Socialism.

A metaphoric hall of mirrors -- the characters are often filmed behind window panes or framed within a looking glass -- “Lili Marleen” was one of Fassbinder’s most sumptuous productions. But as is always the case with the director’s work, the visual style remains firmly in the service of the film’s meaning, in this case the problematic question of German wartime identity. After her tinny recording of the film’s title song becomes a hit with the troops (and with Hitler), Willie is rapidly transformed into a Reich star. Her obdurate naivete -- she luxuriates in the Fuhrer’s largesse but insists that being an artist makes her politically neutral -- is at once a comment on the role of art, the moral obligations of the artist and the complicity of average citizens in state terror.

“Lili Marleen” did poorly in Germany, where it was criticized as being old hat, but to these eyes it feels vital and topical. The film’s aggressively impolite politics -- the Mendelssohns may be on the side of right but they are nearly as ruthless as the German officers -- and analysis of oppression are a breath of fresh air, particularly in a time of radically de-politicized moviemaking. The film’s vigor and urgency are common enough in the best politically conscious art. But because Fassbinder used melodrama to explore the contradictions between the surface of things and the perceived reality, it’s a great deal more enjoyable than those dry academic exercises that take on similar issues. He said his subject was “the exploitability of feelings” (by governments and individuals); so was his means of expression.

When he died two years later, a martyr to his excesses, Fassbinder had burned through one of the great careers in talking pictures. There’s the material legacy -- the 43 films (including two shorts), the 14 plays, the radio work and numerous performances in his and other directors’ films -- but something else lingers too. More than one irritated German critic has noted that some Americans believe that when Fassbinder died he took New German Cinema with him; given how few German films make it into this country now, it’s hard to know. Closer to home, what makes his death seem particularly tragic all these years later isn’t just the unmade Fassbinder movies we will never see (blast him) but that his passing came at the same moment our once-thriving native cinephile culture was gasping its last breath.

For moviegoers who came of age after Fassbinder, it may be difficult to grasp how important he was, but in the years before American indie film waylaid foreign-language film distribution and before video made subtitles a drag, he was ubiquitous. From the late 1970s up until his death, he was a fixture in the biggest festivals, the grandest museums, repertory houses and on that onetime breeding ground for future filmgoers, college campuses. In 1977, the first Fassbinder retrospective traveled the country (there were 22 features by then); in 1979, his melodrama “The Marriage of Maria Braun” opened in a New York City theater, where it played for a full year. By any standard, it was an incredible run. Now, with this retrospective, you can get a taste of just how incredible a run its filmmaker had as well.

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Fassbinder fest

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Tickets can be purchased by calling toll-free (877) 522-6225. For further information, call (323) 857-6010.

When: “The Merchant of Four Seasons,” “Love Is Colder Than Death” and the short films “The City Tramp” and “The Little Chaos,” tonight; “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” and “Chinese Roulette,” Saturday; “Katzelmacher” and “The American Soldier,” April 11; “Veronica Voss” and “Beware of a Holy Whore,” April 12; “Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven,” April 18; “Lili Marleen” and “The Stationmaster’s Wife,” April 19; “Effi Briest,” April 24; “Fear of Fear” and “Satan’s Brew,” April 25; “Imitation of Life” (directed by Douglas Sirk) and “Lola,” April 26. All screenings begin at 7:30 p.m.

Price: $8; $6 for museum and AFI members, seniors 62 and older, and students with valid ID