Description: New edition of two classic plays by controversial German filmmaker RW Fassbinder, includes the classic all-women drama, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and the sci-fi satire, Blood on the Neck of the Cat.
Brief description:
Openly bi-sexual and deliberately subversive, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was post-war Germany's greatest filmmaker. An auteur whose 41 films ranged across genres and styles, his critique of society included Nazism, post-war Germany's economic transformation and social and sexual constraints and hypocrisy.
He began in theatre after being rejected for film school and made a name for himself as a controversial writer-director challenging social norms. He started to make films on a shoestring budget drawing together a group of stage actors and technicians and with his incredible energy and drive, produced ten films in two years. Fassbinder was inspired by French New Wave Cinema and Hollywood films, especially those by Douglas Sirk, to explore homoerotic themes in line with his queer vision of people constrained by society and tradition. He died at 37 and leaves a legacy of provocative, deeply personal films which continue to have relevance in an age when liberal values are under attack and the right is on the rise again.
Fassbinder was the subject of a major retrospective at BFI Southbank in 2017.