Stuart Jeffries

The bad boy of German cinema who ‘wanted to be Marilyn Monroe’

Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 43 highly original films, and was planning another when he died – at the same age, and in the same way, as his idol

Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1980. [Getty Images]

Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is Fassbinder himself.’

‘Fassbinder wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. He wanted to walk down a staircase wearing feathers and a gown’

It was the meeting of opposites. She was Hollywood royalty, Henry’s daughter, sexy star of Barbarella and double Oscar winner, poised to release the first of her series of workout videos that would in the next 13 years sell 17 million copies. By contrast, Fassbinder probably didn’t even own a pair of leg-warmers. He was, as Ian Penman reports in this slender love letter to his oversized, cocaine-addled hero, ‘the unregenerate opposite of a certain micro-fascist 1980s gym/body culture: 60-80 cigs a day; big white steins of Bavarian beer; big plates of his favourite calorific German food’. Fassbinder was referred to in German tabloids as ‘RWF’, as if to shrink the legend of this mythic ogre into manageable proportions. He was routinely described, Penman tells us, as ‘a slob, a barbarian, a punk anarchist queer… a monster of sexual indulgence and shock horror left-wing quotes and bad drug rumours’. 

He died aged 37, having made 43 films, not just directing, but writing, producing, set-designing, editing, choosing music, photographing them – and starring in more than a few. Had he lived on he might have been more celebrated – outdoing on screen and in life even such monomaniac German director contemporaries as Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. But he didn’t and isn’t: hence the need for Penman’s lovely tribute.

‘I wish our council had been as quick to fill it in.’

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