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Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors
A kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long-awaited first full-length a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period "in the spirit" of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman’s equivalent of what Baudelaire was to an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution.
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long-awaited first full-length a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period "in the spirit" of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman’s equivalent of what Baudelaire was to an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution.
200 pages, Paperback
First published April 19, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
January 15, 2023
Included in a list of quotations informing Ian Penman’s piece is this observation from Jean Genet, “The idea was dreamed rather than thought…” one that seems a fitting description of Penman’s melancholic, idiosyncratic study of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Part meditation, part biography, part film criticism, archivist, cultural critic and perennial outsider Penman’s restless, roving approach reflects Fassbinder’s own rampant unconventionality. Penman moves between thinking about Fassbinder as an individual and Fassbinder as both icon and iconoclast - queer, fiercely political, prolific, divisive, continually courting controversy with his obsessive ongoing critiques, his railing against the condition of post-WW2 Germany. Penman probes Fassbinder’s origins, his intricate network of influences from Doblin to Godard to Sirk to post-1968 gay politics. Alongside, inextricably intertwined with his consideration of Fassbinder, are Penman’s attempts to work out why Fassbinder has been so important in his own life. And at times it’s not clear if Penman is focused on writing about Fassbinder or attempting to recapture the spirit of an era and somehow come to terms with the losses of his own past.
Through Fassbinder too, Penman is able to delve into the relationship between cinema and ideology, beginning with the American movies flooding post-war Germany as part of a project designed to make occupation palatable; to counter any traces of National Socialism by promoting American values – however contradictory those might have been in the light of events like the bombing of Hiroshima. But Penman isn’t aiming for rigorous cultural or social history, his writing is more atmospheric and essayistic, at times not unlike Walter Benjamin's - another highly significant figure in Penman’s life. Instead Penman returns over and over again to themes of estrangement, mirroring, alienation and “dead-eyed” consumerism, as he sifts through fragments of the past, invoking the mood of the Cold War and a later Germany overshadowed by the Red Army Faction during the turbulent 70s, and out of all this the spectacular rise of New German Cinema.
Penman rejects linearity, laying out his ideas in a series of numbered paragraphs that interconnect through association and implication. Penman’s often cited as influencing writers and theorists from Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher to Brian Dillon and there is something of their work apparent in his style, the way he deploys aspects of memoir, philosophy and critical theory. Although his work’s often more opaque than theirs, free-flowing, even outwardly anarchic, as he spits out references to Derrida, Barthes and Nabokov to Genet and Otto Dix, yet strangely disciplined. I find this one impossible to fully represent. It's sometimes incisive and illuminating, sometimes bewildering and self-indulgent, but never less than fascinating or stimulating.
Thanks to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for an ARC
Rating: 3.5/4
Through Fassbinder too, Penman is able to delve into the relationship between cinema and ideology, beginning with the American movies flooding post-war Germany as part of a project designed to make occupation palatable; to counter any traces of National Socialism by promoting American values – however contradictory those might have been in the light of events like the bombing of Hiroshima. But Penman isn’t aiming for rigorous cultural or social history, his writing is more atmospheric and essayistic, at times not unlike Walter Benjamin's - another highly significant figure in Penman’s life. Instead Penman returns over and over again to themes of estrangement, mirroring, alienation and “dead-eyed” consumerism, as he sifts through fragments of the past, invoking the mood of the Cold War and a later Germany overshadowed by the Red Army Faction during the turbulent 70s, and out of all this the spectacular rise of New German Cinema.
Penman rejects linearity, laying out his ideas in a series of numbered paragraphs that interconnect through association and implication. Penman’s often cited as influencing writers and theorists from Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher to Brian Dillon and there is something of their work apparent in his style, the way he deploys aspects of memoir, philosophy and critical theory. Although his work’s often more opaque than theirs, free-flowing, even outwardly anarchic, as he spits out references to Derrida, Barthes and Nabokov to Genet and Otto Dix, yet strangely disciplined. I find this one impossible to fully represent. It's sometimes incisive and illuminating, sometimes bewildering and self-indulgent, but never less than fascinating or stimulating.
Thanks to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for an ARC
Rating: 3.5/4
September 24, 2023
Incoherent by design and more readable than it has any right to be. Personal and removed. Less an attempt to understand Fassbinder as man or artist than a scratching at the center of the Venn diagram where artist and critic meet. Suffering from the basic problem of all criticism: the films are right there for the watching, accessible to all. No exegesis necessary.
It’s hard to imagine this interesting anyone who doesn’t already love Fassbinder; has not already submerged themselves in that curious Fassbinder genre of “people torturing each other in rooms;” has not already grappled with the puzzle of his extraordinary productivity—this filmmaker who could write, shoot, edit another masterpiece in an improbable matter of weeks.
Where is Effi Briest? The single film to which Fassbinder gave the most time and effort and money. An outlier in so many ways. Only the title is quoted here, without comment: Fontane Effi Briest or, Many people who are aware of their own capabilities and needs just acquiese to the prevailing system in their thoughts and deeds, thereby confirming and reinforcing it. Where are the edges, is what I'm saying. Where is the Fassbinder out of sight?
In the end, there is one line of thought in this book that I expect to hold onto: “The recurring modernist idea or fantasy or project of waking everyone from the ahistorical dream inside which they slumber. Arise and awake, o sleepers! …this, from men who are often only but bleerily present themselves…” (101). But you see, “the problem with making art to wake people up: Your ideal reader/viewer is therefore by definition probably asleep, and not the least bit interested in your kind of wake-up-you-sleep-walkers art” (177-178).
It’s hard to imagine this interesting anyone who doesn’t already love Fassbinder; has not already submerged themselves in that curious Fassbinder genre of “people torturing each other in rooms;” has not already grappled with the puzzle of his extraordinary productivity—this filmmaker who could write, shoot, edit another masterpiece in an improbable matter of weeks.
Where is Effi Briest? The single film to which Fassbinder gave the most time and effort and money. An outlier in so many ways. Only the title is quoted here, without comment: Fontane Effi Briest or, Many people who are aware of their own capabilities and needs just acquiese to the prevailing system in their thoughts and deeds, thereby confirming and reinforcing it. Where are the edges, is what I'm saying. Where is the Fassbinder out of sight?
In the end, there is one line of thought in this book that I expect to hold onto: “The recurring modernist idea or fantasy or project of waking everyone from the ahistorical dream inside which they slumber. Arise and awake, o sleepers! …this, from men who are often only but bleerily present themselves…” (101). But you see, “the problem with making art to wake people up: Your ideal reader/viewer is therefore by definition probably asleep, and not the least bit interested in your kind of wake-up-you-sleep-walkers art” (177-178).
October 26, 2025
‘Difficult to canonize, difficult to mourn. Difficult to assimilate. He is the opposite of those modernist figures who leave behind a tiny nest of fragments, like the remains of an afternoon picnic: the cult of the little and the lost, the sliver and the fragment. He is the opposite of all that. He is an entire town, region, conurbation, country; die Fassbundesrepublik.’
The fragmented style might not work for a different reader, but it works perfectly for me — adore it, might even prefer it over unnecessarily ‘clinical’, long essays that adhere to a more conservative/formal structure. I found Penman’s work to be highly engaging and informative. Brilliantly crafted. Introspective, nostalgic without being overly self-indulgent. Or perhaps because I ‘enjoyed’ it enough, I didn’t even care about it being that way or alike. Dry, subtle, ironic humour — not overwhelming, and doesn’t dwell too long on a single subject/topic. Right book, right time, maybe. To clarify — I didn't even know who Fassbinder was before I read this. Might have stumbled on his name/work when browsing for interviews of Werner Herzog, but otherwise — can’t remember.
‘I have no desire to be some kind of amiable, reasonable, encyclopaedic curator of the archive—Whatever transpires, I want it to retain traces of the book I might (should?) have written at the time, just after his death—Completely unbalanced and self-indulgent. Dissolute, unconventional, ablaze. Utterly partial. Fuck the dialectic! Way out on a limb. Insane montage and drugs everywhere and melancholy city skies. We go round and round in the night, consumed by fire. In other words: everything I've left behind—For the longest time, not writing this book was itself a way of not coming to terms with various things. Procrastination rears its prickly and sluggish head.’
‘Fassbinder perhaps as my own equivalent of what Baudelaire was for Walter Benjamin. An urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed, before computers and global finance, before digital editing, and just before the arrival on the scene of the malign code of AIDS.’
‘Liking or following Fassbinder at the time was more like the serial purchase of cheap paperbacks by your favourite author or albums by your favourite band, than it was anything off-puttingly grand.’
‘Did I ever wonder: why are so many of the things I love either French or German—why does the UK feel so parochial and un-European? Why are we so time-stranded—conservative? Such a hidebound culture at the time; plenty of newspapers and small magazines and arts programmes but all of them so Oxbridgey and middle-brow. Absent a whole education in European culture, ancient and modern. I don't recall ever feeling particularly English or British or Anglo Saxon or Celtic or whatever; this may have been partly the punkish, puckish spirit of the times, and partly a result of my own wildly dispersed, non-settled, non-linear childhood, which had nothing like a home town or immediate circle or anything like a secure sense of nationality.’
‘Capital disapproves of every excess but excess wealth; it is based on the magic belief that capital is productive, when in fact it breeds anxiety and paranoia and disease and debt. You may gain the world but die an early and miserable death.’
'Cocaine allows you to construct vast mental or stylistic edifices without at any point registering any real emotion. Cocaine is architectural, manic: add this bit, now add this bit, and let's also add this other one… numberless additions, with no end in sight.'
‘Downers to sleep, uppers to work: a parody of capitalist programming. His drug use betrays no trace of the old fond dream of collective liberation, or even artificial paradise. Robot screws for the capitalist merry-go-round. He wakes himself up and puts himself to sleep with drugs of every kind. Cosseting and punishing himself. Sleep now is either agitated half-sleep or near-coma.’
‘You wake up decades later and perform what might be called a cost/benefit analysis; it does not have a reassuring outcome.’
‘Everything is questioned—except, naturally, the idea of the male genius who has special rights or privileges which he must seize at all costs, above all else, at this special moment in history.’
‘He's not performative, not a subtle gaslighter, not a carefully conniving narcissist and control freak. If he has monstrous flaws then, well, at least they're all upfront. There was no duplicity about what was on offer, positive or negative.’
'He is someone who is wildly passionate but also cynical, calculating, detached. A plotter in the calculus of dependency. An island tyrant in seas of collectivity. A true monster of selfishness, but then too, there was never any hope that he could exist for long without a whole galaxy of other people around him.'
‘Collective political action fades, and the sometimes utopianism of the counterculture is replaced by something darker, more claustrophobic. Mood: hard drugs, terror tactics, need-to-know secrecy, surveillance tapes, VHS porno, the ever-present threat of apparently random violence—The fringes of far right and far left locked in an unstable and combustible relationship, like a doomed Fassbinder couple. But who exactly is gaslighting who?’
Reminds me a lot of Tom McCarthy — Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays . Penman’s collection is mostly about films or filmmakers (but complemented and layered with numerous, brilliant quotes by other writers). Not a lot football content in this one (unlike McCarthy’s collection which has a dedicated section to Zidane), but Penman did write about Fassbinder being a football fan (FC Bayern Munich, unsurprising?) in an LRB article (available at the back/last few pages of this book). A bit off topic this, but can someone please do a Pedri (Barça) with a bit of Bad Bunny and some croquetas? Keeps being the futbolista, midfielder with one of the highest, if not the highest ‘score’ of countless matches even when without an assist or goal — what even is a Pedri. The audacity honestly. Goggle eyes celebration times infinity.
‘West Germany had been forbidden entry by FIFA to the 1950 tournament, and the 1954 final was the first time the German national anthem was aired at any global sporting event since the war (‘über alles’ still made a lot of people feel distinctly queasy). There was a feeling of a page being turned, despite a few minor controversies such as the disallowed Puskás goal, and rumours (never quite dispelled) that the German team received more-or-less unwitting chemical assistance. (They thought they'd all been popped with warm-up shots of vitamin C, which in reality was methamphetamine. Allegedly.) On a less ethically cloudy point, the Germans also benefited from the curious new boots they walked out in that day, whose miraculous screw-in studs meant they could better adapt to the atrocious, rain-sodden conditions. The boots were provided by an obscure German firm, only trading since 1949, called Adidas.
Reviewing The Marriage of Maria Braun in 1979 I couldn't consult Wikipedia for instant clarification on the provenance of the allegorical football game. I'm not sure it would have made much difference, finally. I still love Veronika Voss beyond reason, and still find Maria Braun an admirable but chilly work, a sumptuous technicolour fable of misalliance and fraud, public front and private loss, where Veronika Voss is a more bleakly personal meditation (in pin-sharp but melancholy monochrome), as vividly clammy—unreal as an interrupted dream. You think it's all over? You wish.’
In comparison to Penman, I do remember McCarthy’s humour/writing to be more analytical, intellectually intense, but ironically paired with an almost ‘deadpan’ delivery — slightly absurd but alluringly so – highly addictive text. In any case, reading McCarthy makes me want to re-read McCarthy, and also read his work of ‘fiction’ which I’ve not yet done.
'Afloat now in the digital aether, no point in pretending otherwise. No opposition between the realm of the spectacle and domestic intimacy. The spectacle lurks now inside us all. Inside and outside merged. On the one hand: image hunger, icon addiction. On the other: each image given microseconds of attention. Have we fatally outsourced our own ability to fantasize to the anonymous eye of digital technology?'
‘Perhaps, towards the end of this century, we will distinguish between two classes of men: those who were educated by the television, and those who were educated by books.’
— Ernst Jünger
'Fassbinder wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. No one else. He wanted to walk down a staircase wearing feathers and a gown. He died the same age as she did, the same way she did.’
— Daniel Schmid'
'Real human bodies are the opposite of capitalism though they are its material: they are not liquid, they wear out and decay.’
— Joanna Walsh'
'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.’
—Simone Weil'
'In Los Angeles, Brecht wrote— ‘Every day, I go to earn my bread / In the exchange where lies are marketed…’ The last lines are as follows: ‘Gold in their mountains, / Oil on their coast; / Dreaming in celluloid / Profits them most.’
May 12, 2023
Some parts I took pictures of on the train:
‘Adorno speaks somewhere of the colour of neurotic playfulness'. In many of Fassbinder's 1970s films we find the garish colour schemes of the new consumer society run riot. As if everyday life were itself drugged, or in search of a Hollywood technicolour redemption.’
‘The new post-war generation is encouraged to cultivate individual taste amongst the baubles of the emergent consumer landscape. Colour is no longer the sole preserve of the moneyed. Pop art has encouraged a rethink of what is considered stylish or in good taste. He depicts this peppy new world of personalized' interior décor as already shading into something bland and claustrophobic.’
‘It will seem to many that my diary, written just for me, is too artificial. But it's only natural for me to be artificial.- Fernando Pessoa’
‘Cocaine allows you to construct vast mental or stylistied edifice’s without at any point registering any real emotion. Cocaine is architectural, manic: add this bit, now add thisbit, and let's also add this other one... numberless additions, with no end in sight.’
‘Baudelaire's 1864 prose poem Le miroir deals with a man so ugly that he wants to shun all mirrors; but he reflects that the revolutionary principles of 1789 give him
an equal right to glory in his image. No place in society for the Ugly. Forever out of place, it is something that cannot be co-opted, appropriated, turned into a new consumer fetish.’
‘
‘Adorno speaks somewhere of the colour of neurotic playfulness'. In many of Fassbinder's 1970s films we find the garish colour schemes of the new consumer society run riot. As if everyday life were itself drugged, or in search of a Hollywood technicolour redemption.’
‘The new post-war generation is encouraged to cultivate individual taste amongst the baubles of the emergent consumer landscape. Colour is no longer the sole preserve of the moneyed. Pop art has encouraged a rethink of what is considered stylish or in good taste. He depicts this peppy new world of personalized' interior décor as already shading into something bland and claustrophobic.’
‘It will seem to many that my diary, written just for me, is too artificial. But it's only natural for me to be artificial.- Fernando Pessoa’
‘Cocaine allows you to construct vast mental or stylistied edifice’s without at any point registering any real emotion. Cocaine is architectural, manic: add this bit, now add thisbit, and let's also add this other one... numberless additions, with no end in sight.’
‘Baudelaire's 1864 prose poem Le miroir deals with a man so ugly that he wants to shun all mirrors; but he reflects that the revolutionary principles of 1789 give him
an equal right to glory in his image. No place in society for the Ugly. Forever out of place, it is something that cannot be co-opted, appropriated, turned into a new consumer fetish.’
‘
March 12, 2023
Penman here offers a memoir-in-pieces by way of an overview of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s life and prolific filmmaking career, combined with a sort of rough cultural history of 1970s Germany. The author sets out his stall with the first sentence of the book proper: ‘The first thing to proclaim is: the absolute impossibility of summing up Fassbinder.’ (Despite that, he does find a neat way of collectively describing Fassbinder’s thematically and aesthetically diverse output: ‘malign fairytales for jaded adults’.) Thousands of Mirrors is not supposed to be comprehensive – while a few of Fassbinder’s films are discussed in some detail, others have only a brief paragraph devoted to them, and Penman is most interested in personal aspects, in puzzling out why exactly Fassbinder became so significant in his own life. Mulling over the effect of the whole piece, I feel both Fassbinder and Penman remain somewhat obscure to me, but I don’t find that to be a problem. The book, deliberately a set of glimpsed fragments, is aptly titled.
I received an advance review copy of Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors from the publisher through NetGalley.
I received an advance review copy of Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors from the publisher through NetGalley.
December 19, 2023
I was really frustrated by this. The format alone — 450 brief notes, most of which may as well be tweets — is a turn-off, but it's written in a way that feels uber self-conscious of and self-absorbed in its own intellectualizing, obsessed with its own supposed novelty and “style” in a way that relegates any and all substance to the back burner (which is unfortunate for me because I love RWF, and because Penman makes some great points that he doesn't really explore or expand on in any meaningful way).
May 16, 2023
A wonderful book. I’ve been a fan of Ian Penman’s writing for many years and (unlike most) I first found him through his occasional writing on film (such as a piece in SCREEN) rather than his music criticism. He has a ‘crowded’, thick-descriptive, personal and unique style that I like. This new book has a collage-mosaic construction (written during pandemic lockdown) that Penman likens to the shattered shards of a glittery disco ball. It’s not really a critical study of Fassbinder’s fims, and it doesn’t pretend to be: it’s about a certain ‘fix’ on an image or myth of 1970s German culture as dreamed and mirrored in the punk and post-punk UK that Penman lived through, and in which he began his writing life. It’s full of superb aphorisms, turns-of-phrase, thought-and-word-conjunctions, reminding me at times of Raymond Durgnat. The cumulative effect of the hundreds of fragments is really impressive. Highly recommended.
July 15, 2023
“13.
What is it to attempt a biography or overview or memorial or accounting in this era of Wikipedia and Twitter and all the other just-a-click-away info blocs and image banks? Exegesis become a game of hop, skip and jump. Information a matter of rhizomes and rabbit holes and riverbank drifts.”
This book is nothing more than a list of scattered musings and quotes that orbit around the author’s fascination with Fassbinder. It’s amazing.
What is it to attempt a biography or overview or memorial or accounting in this era of Wikipedia and Twitter and all the other just-a-click-away info blocs and image banks? Exegesis become a game of hop, skip and jump. Information a matter of rhizomes and rabbit holes and riverbank drifts.”
This book is nothing more than a list of scattered musings and quotes that orbit around the author’s fascination with Fassbinder. It’s amazing.
May 21, 2023
was doubtful of the fragments but occasionally the form works wonders. Penman uses the fragments to seemingly jump from thought-to-thought without the constraint of the paragraph, opting instead to rely on the power of the sentence, or maybe more apt, the declaration. But this is a working constellation of thought, a multitudinous and occasionally schizo-affective web of association rather than disparate fragments standing on their own. Overall left with the feeling that I 1) didn't really learn anything new about Fassbinder but that's really not the point here 2) need to revisit a couple of his films
August 20, 2023
4.5 stars, rounded up for the many breadcrumb trails the author provides to other works in film, literature, painting, and lit theory.
September 28, 2023
First thing to say: this is not an exhaustive guide to Fassbinder’s films, although of course many of them are referred to along the way.
In its structure, with 450 numbered paragraphs of varying lengths, it reminds me of David Shields “Reality Hunger” and in his relentless digressions Penman is similar to the great Geoff Dyer. Like Dyer, Penman proves to be an entertaining and erudite raconteur. I’m eagerly awaiting his next book.
As for the subject matter, I would say it helps if you are already a fan of the great German director, but I don’t think it’s totally necessary, just let Ian be your guide through the maze of his incredible cinematic output - 44 films in 13 years, including some that have now become classics of post war European cinema.
Certainly this book has inspired and encouraged me to go online and check out even more of Fassbinder’s output.
The best book I’ve read about cinema since Dyer’s Zona (about Tarkovsky) and easily the best non fiction book I’ve read so far this year.
Another winner from the consistently excellent Fitzcarraldo Editions.
To accompany this essay I would also recommend listening to the authors recent appearance on the LRB podcast.
In its structure, with 450 numbered paragraphs of varying lengths, it reminds me of David Shields “Reality Hunger” and in his relentless digressions Penman is similar to the great Geoff Dyer. Like Dyer, Penman proves to be an entertaining and erudite raconteur. I’m eagerly awaiting his next book.
As for the subject matter, I would say it helps if you are already a fan of the great German director, but I don’t think it’s totally necessary, just let Ian be your guide through the maze of his incredible cinematic output - 44 films in 13 years, including some that have now become classics of post war European cinema.
Certainly this book has inspired and encouraged me to go online and check out even more of Fassbinder’s output.
The best book I’ve read about cinema since Dyer’s Zona (about Tarkovsky) and easily the best non fiction book I’ve read so far this year.
Another winner from the consistently excellent Fitzcarraldo Editions.
To accompany this essay I would also recommend listening to the authors recent appearance on the LRB podcast.
May 3, 2023
Here’s my review::
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/n...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/n...
May 25, 2023
I mean this book is just vibes. I didn’t learn anything about fassbinder at all, he’s absent for most of it, I mean absent in the way of negative space in that Penman touches on people who were influential to fassbinder, in and around his orbit, or people/artists/thinkers that seem to remind Penman of some aspect of fassbinder. Again, nothing is explicitly linked so a lot of work is on the reader to piece together these shards. I kind of just wish Penman wrote a coherent book because the best fragments are the ones that are actually speaking about some aspect of a film (eg 151; 121;138). It’s clear that he knows film and has things to say about it and I’m disappointed I didn’t get the edification I feel like I could have. I can do the vibes bit myself. Reads like Lester Bangs on speed some of the time and a sort of embarrassingly sentimental nostalgic look back at the 70s at others. A lot of talk about dreams and vague musings on cinema and images in general. A good amount of just straight up calling fassbinder physically and spiritually ugly but that doesn’t seem to shake Penman’s absolute reverence for his supposed subject. Seems more like a book about Penman than anything else.
February 10, 2024
Lesin í ásnum á köldum janúarmorgnum en kláruð í horninu inni í stofu með leik City og Everton hummandi í vinstra eyranu og með sólina í augunum.
Essía í brotum, á stanslausu flakki fram og aftur í tíma, málandi líflega mynd af lífi Rainer Werner Fassbinder og tímunum sem hann lifði á, sem hann var mótaður af og sem hann mótaði. Allt séð í gegnum mjög svo persónuleg augu höfundarins Ian Penman sem skrifar í stuttum og hnitmiðuðum pælingum, tilvísunum og endurminningum.
Allt í allt mjög heillandi bók sem gaf mér mikla innsýn inn í ákveðna stemningu sem ég fæddist of seint til að upplifa sjálfur. Einn daginn mun ég líka horfa á fleiri myndir eftir Fassbinder, en ég hef í raun bara séð eina (Angst essen seele auf).
Essía í brotum, á stanslausu flakki fram og aftur í tíma, málandi líflega mynd af lífi Rainer Werner Fassbinder og tímunum sem hann lifði á, sem hann var mótaður af og sem hann mótaði. Allt séð í gegnum mjög svo persónuleg augu höfundarins Ian Penman sem skrifar í stuttum og hnitmiðuðum pælingum, tilvísunum og endurminningum.
Allt í allt mjög heillandi bók sem gaf mér mikla innsýn inn í ákveðna stemningu sem ég fæddist of seint til að upplifa sjálfur. Einn daginn mun ég líka horfa á fleiri myndir eftir Fassbinder, en ég hef í raun bara séð eina (Angst essen seele auf).
December 10, 2023
Author is annoying. Tries too hard to convince you he is cool because he took drugs in the 70’s and 80’s and apparently would’ve been a good painter if his life had gone differently. Bad way to write a “biography”. He didn’t finish it, just wrote 450 ideas, many of which have nothing to do with the subject, in an almost-random order. Only saving grace is scattered interesting tidbits. The book constantly references the better, more comprehensive RWF book that I’m kicking myself for not reading instead.
On an unrelated note, it kills me that we’ll never see the Jane Fonda-Fassbinder movie that was in the works when he died.
On an unrelated note, it kills me that we’ll never see the Jane Fonda-Fassbinder movie that was in the works when he died.
April 15, 2023
Read my review of "Fassbinder Thousand of Mirrors here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...
September 15, 2024
A fantastic film read, up there with Geoff Dyer’s Zona and Kier-La Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women, showing the writer’s intimate relationship with a particular film (Stalker for Dyer) a mood of film that goes beyond genre or director (Janisse), or in this case, a relationship with a director. Penman really focuses on what could be considered the difficult period of Fassbinder – his post 1976 films that got away from the Sirkian melodramas and into more abstract, austere satires, and then his period pieces for which he received the most late period acclaim, the BRD trilogy & the massive Berlin Alexanderplatz. Penman seems to focus on this period of Fassbinder primarily because that might have been when he first caught the RWF bug – and this was when these films were hitting theaters at the time.
Full confession, I am in the midst of my own Fassbinder obsessive stage, and what that feels like is you kinda need to see as many of his 40+ films as possible. It becomes a compulsion. As of right now, I have seen 25 of his films, and I have a list of the ones I’m missing (some are becoming hard to track down) as well as the films that influenced Fassbinder – my ex-Landlord and I are going deep – we’ve already knocked off Berlin Alexanderplatz, 8 Hours don’t make a Day (not even mentioned in Penman’s book), and World On a Wire – three titles that together equal about 24 hours of film watching.
My first introduction to Fassbinder was when I was a PA on movies in 2000 – another PA asked if I’d seen any and I hadn’t – I’d been to film school and worked in a video store but at that point I was really into Antonioni, Robert Altman, Val Lewton, and films from the late 60s and early 70s, but not Fassbinder. I think they had shown us Imitation of Life in film school and said that Fassbinder was deeply influenced by Sirk – I wasn’t into Sirk so I didn’t get anywhere with RWF at that time. The PA said that Fassbinder changed cinema for him – I pretty much scoffed at that claim. He’d had a class on him in college where they watched a bunch. I was intrigued, but not in a position to go deep.
I think I saw Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and tried to make it through Beware of a Holy Whore (which I appreciate much much more after seeing more of his films) – loved Ali and Petra Von Kant, but my real relationship with RWF began in 2016, when I went to see a 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver that was introduced by Scorsese and Schrader. Both said how Taxi Driver was influenced by Fassbinder, especially Merchant of Four Seasons. Scorsese went on to say during the early 70s, they all saw each Fassbinder when it came out, though after a point, Scorsese said Fassbinder was “over his head.” That immediately made me interested – what films could possibly be over Scorsese’s head? And I feel these are exactly the period of films Penman analyzes here in depth.
Now I’ve seen a lot of these, and I get what Scorsese was saying, but I also understand Penman’s fondness for them – my own favorites of this period are Lola and In a Year of 13 Moons. And when you really get into Fassbinder, it’s more than just watching a film – you see his coterie of actors – the same faces in different roles, his basic philosophy of life that is echoed in his scripts, the authors he choses to adapt and the films he references – and really how the films play off each other. I have not read the Fassbinder bio Love is Colder than Death which Penman alludes to (though the ex landlord has it now so I will be reading it soon) and it seems that this period from 1976-1982 (his death) was when RWF was really addicted to drugs and used them to sustain his superhuman working habits. He was literally in production for 13 years straight and if you do the math he made a film every 100 days during that time. This is not normal or healthy. It is legendary. No one else in the history of cinema – and there are some AMAZING artists out there who have made phenomenal, superhuman films. Fassbinder is one of these, and his blurring of his life and his work and the ultimate sacrifice of his life he made – he is more like a rockstar or a musician (Miles Davis comes to mind) than a filmmaker – what films could be, this intimate, extremely personal art form so expensive and dominated by commerce – he found a way to bend the economic system to his own goals and to make films that in some way are more like diary entries than stories.
That one is In a Year of 13 Moons. I kinda think of 13 Moons as I do Psycho for Hitchcock, Straw Dogs for Peckinpah, Persona for Bergman. Those three films are unlike any of the other films by those filmmakers but in a way encapsulate all of their obsessions and fixations in abstraction, and that abstraction reflects a truth hinted at in the dozens of other films they had made. 13 Moons is Fassbinder’s rumination on the suicide of one of his lovers, expressed in an abstract, complex, somewhat plotless story of a transsexual’s affection for a man who does not return her love. There are scenes of slaughterhouses amidst music by Suicide and Roxy Music. It’s been a while but I think Gottfried John dances (my ex landlord loves Gottfried John) – it’s a film of deep sadness, of the characters and their creator wrestling with immense, tragic questions of self, responsibility, and relationships. It feels like Fassbinder didn’t have a psychiatrist, he had his films.
And in Fassbinder’s oeuvre it came chronologically between Despair (Penman and I agree that it is an interesting film, but one of his least successful – though apparently Fassbinder was very proud of it) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (which is arguably his most acclaimed – I prefer Lola – Maria Braun has a fantastic first half but it loses me in the second half, though the ending is a wow), two period pieces removed from himself, he could hide behind the set dressing – whereas 13 Moon is nothing but Fassbinder – extremely intimate, maybe even his most personal film. It is something else.
Penman claimed to have seen Veronika Voss 4 times when it was first in theaters – my ex landlord and I just watched it – and respected what it is – it is nothing if not fascinating, but it’s a slog (certain films my wife calls “work”), and if you haven’t seen a bunch of Fassbinders beforehand, I’m sure it would be lost upon you, unless you are a film geek who is super into Sunset Boulevard. RWF was a video store clerk before there were video stores – his films refer to his influences and riff on them, all through his sensibility – an obsessed bisexual workaholic coming to terms with both his upbringing and Germany after World War 2. Women in Fassbinder’s films are usually prostitutes of some sort – after WW2 Germany was in a bad state and women did what they had to do to get by. I’m sure there were accusations of misogyny but men don’t have it much better – they are dolts motivated by base instincts which tend to destroy them – everyone confuses need with love and love becomes this abstract otherness which sends his characters into dangerous tailspins. You could potentially argue that Fox and His Friends is another extremely personal film but it’s not as abstract as 13 Moons – Fox is a melodrama. Veronika Voss is as much about Fassbinder’s films as it is a story – he is in it – he drops himself in Voss and the end of Berlin Alexanderplatz like Hitchcock cameos, but in both films he is watching – Alexanderplatz he watches inhumane depravity (in that series dreamlike epilogue – I agree with Penman that for its immense length Alexanderplatz is not the masterpiece you think it could be. My ex landlord kept saying he’d read the novel 20 years ago and it is much different than the novel. I got annoyed that RWF kept repeating what could be seen as the moment that defines Franz Biberkopf – when he beats one of his prostitutes to death with his bare hands. It’s a brutal scene, and in case you missed it RWF puts it in like 6 episodes, the exact same scene – no different angles or takes. There’s a stretch that is pretty tough going, but the epilogue, where RWF creates his dream of the novel, is something else – it makes it worth the 13 hours you need to get through to get there. Biberkopf and Döblin’s novel haunted him – his main character in his 3rd film Gods of the Plague gives his name as “Franz Biberkopf”) and in Voss he is watching one of Veronika Voss’s old movies with her where she is an addict while in real life she is an addict being manipulated because of her addiction, living on the fumes of her past glories.
It is a haunted film – stark black and white with sets painted to the exact shade of skin tones so that characters seem to blend into the background. And at this stage in his life, RWF was in the throes of his addictions – drugs to sleep, drugs to wake up, drugs to keep producing films. I’ve watched some docs on RWF and wanted to see his working methods – at this point, he didn’t storyboard or shotlist, and they said he didn’t even like to location scout. So basically RWF would show up every day and make it up as he went along. Really experienced directors I’ve seen do this (Jarmusch, Cronenberg) but in a way this is the exact opposite of what pre-viz CG effects are – in those cases (which is largely taking over filmmaking), the effects are so complicated they begin as animated storyboards months in advance which can be agreed upon by studio execs so that the director’s role on set is to essentially place the actors within a predetermined frame – I’m not saying that isn’t difficult, and RWF wasn’t dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars and computer effects etc, but he was literally guided by intuition while he was making these movies. So think that he was in production for 10 months straight on Alexanderplatz – every day waking up and starting from scratch and literally “winging it.” I can’t imagine –
So on Veronika Voss he’s literally running on fumes, and the film itself is kinda about that – a character manipulated by her addictions and clinging on to past glories, empty mansions where furniture is covered by sheets – it’s this ghostly movie that’s fixated on death. The gentle old folks (Holocaust survivors) who kill themselves, the sportswriter’s sometime girlfriend killed in a car accident – the writer being swept up in this world of the actor (who in one memorable scene can’t remember her lines, blowing take after take until finally having a meltdown on set) which brings with it death. This is made by someone who doesn’t have anything left – and yes, it’s interesting to think about, to discuss, but watching it is slow going. This does feel like a last film – and if it had been his last film – Fassbinder had a sheath of unfinished projects he wanted to still make – there would have been a poetic irony to it, a neatness that emulates his films. But then he made Querelle, which, in its own way, works even better as a final statement in that it isn’t a perfect summation or a meditation on film, celebrity, drugs, memory, and death as Veronika Voss is. It to me represents a new phase in Fassbinder’s fixations – a totally artificial landscape (I thought of Fellini Satyricon or Casanova and pointing towards the boat scenes in Poor Things) where he is in control of every element of the film. No weather to get in the way, no real locations, the whole thing is him. And it’s a fantasia – a gay porno film without any pornography. Decadent, nihilistic – it’s imperfect statement fits Fassbinder even better – his purely intuitive approach would be ill-served by something actually appropriate. Life, especially his life, wasn’t like that.
Penman also holds high regard for his confessional in Germany in Autumn, which I have not seen. Fassbinder plays himself and interacts with his mother. I mean, as art and life become one and the same, why not just erase the line? But – as Penman aptly puts in his title – as close as Fassbinder gets, it is not real, it is always a reflection of the real, and that reflection shines the light of truth.
Full confession, I am in the midst of my own Fassbinder obsessive stage, and what that feels like is you kinda need to see as many of his 40+ films as possible. It becomes a compulsion. As of right now, I have seen 25 of his films, and I have a list of the ones I’m missing (some are becoming hard to track down) as well as the films that influenced Fassbinder – my ex-Landlord and I are going deep – we’ve already knocked off Berlin Alexanderplatz, 8 Hours don’t make a Day (not even mentioned in Penman’s book), and World On a Wire – three titles that together equal about 24 hours of film watching.
My first introduction to Fassbinder was when I was a PA on movies in 2000 – another PA asked if I’d seen any and I hadn’t – I’d been to film school and worked in a video store but at that point I was really into Antonioni, Robert Altman, Val Lewton, and films from the late 60s and early 70s, but not Fassbinder. I think they had shown us Imitation of Life in film school and said that Fassbinder was deeply influenced by Sirk – I wasn’t into Sirk so I didn’t get anywhere with RWF at that time. The PA said that Fassbinder changed cinema for him – I pretty much scoffed at that claim. He’d had a class on him in college where they watched a bunch. I was intrigued, but not in a position to go deep.
I think I saw Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and tried to make it through Beware of a Holy Whore (which I appreciate much much more after seeing more of his films) – loved Ali and Petra Von Kant, but my real relationship with RWF began in 2016, when I went to see a 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver that was introduced by Scorsese and Schrader. Both said how Taxi Driver was influenced by Fassbinder, especially Merchant of Four Seasons. Scorsese went on to say during the early 70s, they all saw each Fassbinder when it came out, though after a point, Scorsese said Fassbinder was “over his head.” That immediately made me interested – what films could possibly be over Scorsese’s head? And I feel these are exactly the period of films Penman analyzes here in depth.
Now I’ve seen a lot of these, and I get what Scorsese was saying, but I also understand Penman’s fondness for them – my own favorites of this period are Lola and In a Year of 13 Moons. And when you really get into Fassbinder, it’s more than just watching a film – you see his coterie of actors – the same faces in different roles, his basic philosophy of life that is echoed in his scripts, the authors he choses to adapt and the films he references – and really how the films play off each other. I have not read the Fassbinder bio Love is Colder than Death which Penman alludes to (though the ex landlord has it now so I will be reading it soon) and it seems that this period from 1976-1982 (his death) was when RWF was really addicted to drugs and used them to sustain his superhuman working habits. He was literally in production for 13 years straight and if you do the math he made a film every 100 days during that time. This is not normal or healthy. It is legendary. No one else in the history of cinema – and there are some AMAZING artists out there who have made phenomenal, superhuman films. Fassbinder is one of these, and his blurring of his life and his work and the ultimate sacrifice of his life he made – he is more like a rockstar or a musician (Miles Davis comes to mind) than a filmmaker – what films could be, this intimate, extremely personal art form so expensive and dominated by commerce – he found a way to bend the economic system to his own goals and to make films that in some way are more like diary entries than stories.
That one is In a Year of 13 Moons. I kinda think of 13 Moons as I do Psycho for Hitchcock, Straw Dogs for Peckinpah, Persona for Bergman. Those three films are unlike any of the other films by those filmmakers but in a way encapsulate all of their obsessions and fixations in abstraction, and that abstraction reflects a truth hinted at in the dozens of other films they had made. 13 Moons is Fassbinder’s rumination on the suicide of one of his lovers, expressed in an abstract, complex, somewhat plotless story of a transsexual’s affection for a man who does not return her love. There are scenes of slaughterhouses amidst music by Suicide and Roxy Music. It’s been a while but I think Gottfried John dances (my ex landlord loves Gottfried John) – it’s a film of deep sadness, of the characters and their creator wrestling with immense, tragic questions of self, responsibility, and relationships. It feels like Fassbinder didn’t have a psychiatrist, he had his films.
And in Fassbinder’s oeuvre it came chronologically between Despair (Penman and I agree that it is an interesting film, but one of his least successful – though apparently Fassbinder was very proud of it) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (which is arguably his most acclaimed – I prefer Lola – Maria Braun has a fantastic first half but it loses me in the second half, though the ending is a wow), two period pieces removed from himself, he could hide behind the set dressing – whereas 13 Moon is nothing but Fassbinder – extremely intimate, maybe even his most personal film. It is something else.
Penman claimed to have seen Veronika Voss 4 times when it was first in theaters – my ex landlord and I just watched it – and respected what it is – it is nothing if not fascinating, but it’s a slog (certain films my wife calls “work”), and if you haven’t seen a bunch of Fassbinders beforehand, I’m sure it would be lost upon you, unless you are a film geek who is super into Sunset Boulevard. RWF was a video store clerk before there were video stores – his films refer to his influences and riff on them, all through his sensibility – an obsessed bisexual workaholic coming to terms with both his upbringing and Germany after World War 2. Women in Fassbinder’s films are usually prostitutes of some sort – after WW2 Germany was in a bad state and women did what they had to do to get by. I’m sure there were accusations of misogyny but men don’t have it much better – they are dolts motivated by base instincts which tend to destroy them – everyone confuses need with love and love becomes this abstract otherness which sends his characters into dangerous tailspins. You could potentially argue that Fox and His Friends is another extremely personal film but it’s not as abstract as 13 Moons – Fox is a melodrama. Veronika Voss is as much about Fassbinder’s films as it is a story – he is in it – he drops himself in Voss and the end of Berlin Alexanderplatz like Hitchcock cameos, but in both films he is watching – Alexanderplatz he watches inhumane depravity (in that series dreamlike epilogue – I agree with Penman that for its immense length Alexanderplatz is not the masterpiece you think it could be. My ex landlord kept saying he’d read the novel 20 years ago and it is much different than the novel. I got annoyed that RWF kept repeating what could be seen as the moment that defines Franz Biberkopf – when he beats one of his prostitutes to death with his bare hands. It’s a brutal scene, and in case you missed it RWF puts it in like 6 episodes, the exact same scene – no different angles or takes. There’s a stretch that is pretty tough going, but the epilogue, where RWF creates his dream of the novel, is something else – it makes it worth the 13 hours you need to get through to get there. Biberkopf and Döblin’s novel haunted him – his main character in his 3rd film Gods of the Plague gives his name as “Franz Biberkopf”) and in Voss he is watching one of Veronika Voss’s old movies with her where she is an addict while in real life she is an addict being manipulated because of her addiction, living on the fumes of her past glories.
It is a haunted film – stark black and white with sets painted to the exact shade of skin tones so that characters seem to blend into the background. And at this stage in his life, RWF was in the throes of his addictions – drugs to sleep, drugs to wake up, drugs to keep producing films. I’ve watched some docs on RWF and wanted to see his working methods – at this point, he didn’t storyboard or shotlist, and they said he didn’t even like to location scout. So basically RWF would show up every day and make it up as he went along. Really experienced directors I’ve seen do this (Jarmusch, Cronenberg) but in a way this is the exact opposite of what pre-viz CG effects are – in those cases (which is largely taking over filmmaking), the effects are so complicated they begin as animated storyboards months in advance which can be agreed upon by studio execs so that the director’s role on set is to essentially place the actors within a predetermined frame – I’m not saying that isn’t difficult, and RWF wasn’t dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars and computer effects etc, but he was literally guided by intuition while he was making these movies. So think that he was in production for 10 months straight on Alexanderplatz – every day waking up and starting from scratch and literally “winging it.” I can’t imagine –
So on Veronika Voss he’s literally running on fumes, and the film itself is kinda about that – a character manipulated by her addictions and clinging on to past glories, empty mansions where furniture is covered by sheets – it’s this ghostly movie that’s fixated on death. The gentle old folks (Holocaust survivors) who kill themselves, the sportswriter’s sometime girlfriend killed in a car accident – the writer being swept up in this world of the actor (who in one memorable scene can’t remember her lines, blowing take after take until finally having a meltdown on set) which brings with it death. This is made by someone who doesn’t have anything left – and yes, it’s interesting to think about, to discuss, but watching it is slow going. This does feel like a last film – and if it had been his last film – Fassbinder had a sheath of unfinished projects he wanted to still make – there would have been a poetic irony to it, a neatness that emulates his films. But then he made Querelle, which, in its own way, works even better as a final statement in that it isn’t a perfect summation or a meditation on film, celebrity, drugs, memory, and death as Veronika Voss is. It to me represents a new phase in Fassbinder’s fixations – a totally artificial landscape (I thought of Fellini Satyricon or Casanova and pointing towards the boat scenes in Poor Things) where he is in control of every element of the film. No weather to get in the way, no real locations, the whole thing is him. And it’s a fantasia – a gay porno film without any pornography. Decadent, nihilistic – it’s imperfect statement fits Fassbinder even better – his purely intuitive approach would be ill-served by something actually appropriate. Life, especially his life, wasn’t like that.
Penman also holds high regard for his confessional in Germany in Autumn, which I have not seen. Fassbinder plays himself and interacts with his mother. I mean, as art and life become one and the same, why not just erase the line? But – as Penman aptly puts in his title – as close as Fassbinder gets, it is not real, it is always a reflection of the real, and that reflection shines the light of truth.
August 1, 2024
Pretentious. The blurb on the back of the book claims this book to be part essay. Hardly, if anything, these are the reflective undeveloped ramblings of a middle-class punk of a bygone era. I didn’t care. This book doesn’t go anywhere because Penman’s, like so many other self-involved-brits, post-modern worldview involves casting the self externally beyond the social world as a means to brandish critique that is just hot-headed clap-trap with poetic cadence. I should have stopped reading when he began throwing the catch-all phrase of every middle-class, larping leftist within the imperial core: professional-managerial class. When Penman talks about Fassbinder, it seems worth it again, more so because I think Penman misinterprets the theme of alienation, that sense Fassbinder shows so well, as something Fassbinder feels to be universal. But if it is, why would Fassbinder do social commentary in the first place? Why is there always such contradistinction between his characters? If only critics could stay in their lane. Uhg
August 16, 2023
This book reminds me of Future Days by David Stubbs. Penman was a music journalist for the NME just before Stubbs began writing for Melody Maker. They share a Germanophilia that seems quite particular to alternative music scenes of late-70s and 80s Britain. Penman’s confession on page 106—that as a teenager he found an image of Ulrike Meinhof sexually arousing—is perhaps the height of this Germanophilia. Still, it’s a good little reflection for anyone interested in Fassbinder’s work and legacy. I like its montage structuring, which is well-suited to the subject. Any attempt at a stricter form would surely have cramped Penman’s desire; that is, to wax lyrical about one of his favourite artists and to write shamelessly in tangents.
November 30, 2023
While it doesn't exactly build into the great and final critical study of Fassbinder that I wanted it to be, that might be the point. A shotgun blast blending biography, criticism, and memoir. The amazing thing about Fassbinder's films is how singular and precise they are despite the insanely quick production timeline behind them. This book is explicitly written by mimicking that process, but in my opinion fails to capture that magic. It very much feels like it was produced in a couple of months, whereas Fassbinder's films do not. But I suppose matching Fassbinder's magic is a tall order.
More importantly, the book filled me with excitement on Fassbinder and his films while contextualizing them. And I guess that's all we really want at the end of the day!
More importantly, the book filled me with excitement on Fassbinder and his films while contextualizing them. And I guess that's all we really want at the end of the day!
July 30, 2024
A book about Fassbinder told in fragments, reflections of the author's relationship to the artist and the short arc of time that delimited RWF's productive flurry of films. I'm not usually a fan of non-fiction that puts the author on center stage but it's at least half the point here and Penman does a good job of making the era as universal as it was personally defining to him.
I generally like Fassbinder's less chaotic work more than his full-bore nightmares and I appreciate Penman's effort to place the director's work in the context of modern German history, thought, and art.
I generally like Fassbinder's less chaotic work more than his full-bore nightmares and I appreciate Penman's effort to place the director's work in the context of modern German history, thought, and art.
May 20, 2024
Don't think it landed quite the way I was hoping it would, but it's frequently good and never not interesting. The only real term I can think of that might describe it is an anti-biography. Take that to mean what you will.
May 22, 2024
This strange little frustrating book is filled with basic banalities, pedantic name dropping, redundant ramblings, and self indulgent anecdotes, it’s really everything I dislike about cultural criticism and any writing about art in general. The author even goes on to tell us about what he’s been watching on Netflix lately. The fact that the publisher is comparing this sort of writing with the work of Cioran and Barthes is insulting and laughable. Avoid this book, watch Fassbinder films instead.
February 19, 2024
“145.
Today, all his petty tyranny and sexual serfdom and emotional blackmail and out-front substance abuse wouldn’t be tolerated, right? Of course not. (Or, at least, not in the same way.) Even back then, everyone involved doubtless knew it wasn’t ‘OK.’ But – I mean, look at the results! Rainer is so productive, he has such discipline! Which is true enough. He writes, shoots, casts and completes all his films with scarcely credible economy. In Hollywood, all that cocaine mania and ego indulgence and extensive use of close personal friends would result in films that took years to complete, with studio-destroying budget overruns. And they would still be deeply disappointing, if they were ever finished at all.
146.
He's not performative, not a subtle gaslighter, not a carefully conniving narcissist and control freak. If he has monstrous flaws then, well, at least they’re all upfront. There was no duplicity about what was on offer, positive or negative. If you didn’t like the setup why then just leave and go find another director to give you all these roles. He was the one holding purse strings and casting reins. Private life and working life became one and the same. Decisions made in camera. I suppose in 2022 we really should condemn such behaviour – but what would that achieve? I suppose it might make us all feel better about ourselves for a minute or two.”
Today, all his petty tyranny and sexual serfdom and emotional blackmail and out-front substance abuse wouldn’t be tolerated, right? Of course not. (Or, at least, not in the same way.) Even back then, everyone involved doubtless knew it wasn’t ‘OK.’ But – I mean, look at the results! Rainer is so productive, he has such discipline! Which is true enough. He writes, shoots, casts and completes all his films with scarcely credible economy. In Hollywood, all that cocaine mania and ego indulgence and extensive use of close personal friends would result in films that took years to complete, with studio-destroying budget overruns. And they would still be deeply disappointing, if they were ever finished at all.
146.
He's not performative, not a subtle gaslighter, not a carefully conniving narcissist and control freak. If he has monstrous flaws then, well, at least they’re all upfront. There was no duplicity about what was on offer, positive or negative. If you didn’t like the setup why then just leave and go find another director to give you all these roles. He was the one holding purse strings and casting reins. Private life and working life became one and the same. Decisions made in camera. I suppose in 2022 we really should condemn such behaviour – but what would that achieve? I suppose it might make us all feel better about ourselves for a minute or two.”
February 3, 2024
i loooooooved it. was not expecting there to be so many passages about genet, but was so delighted to see it. i haven't seen that many fassbinder movies, so there's some of it that definitely went over my head, but it'll be fantastic to re-read in a few years i bet. i don't know if it was me or the book, but i did feel a pretty sharp loss of momentum in maybe the third quarter or so where the meditations on the Self feel a little more distracted than the rest of the book, but again, that could've been Me being distracted. i read most of this while i was in nyc last and found myself laughing or almost moved to tears on the subway, which was so unexpected but so great.
February 1, 2024
I have never seen a Fassbinder film. I read the this book because I am interested in how art is created. I don’t doubt that many readers will begin but not finish this book. And I believe also that no one who finishes this slim read will be left feeling ambiguous about it.
I finished the book with great appreciation of the writing and approach. As others have said, this is not a conventional biography or critique of Fassbinder. It’s more like an impressionistic piece of performance writing about a filmmaker who either defies cliche or defines it.
I finished the book with great appreciation of the writing and approach. As others have said, this is not a conventional biography or critique of Fassbinder. It’s more like an impressionistic piece of performance writing about a filmmaker who either defies cliche or defines it.
Read
October 22, 2023Penman mentions a few times, instances of travelling down rabbit holes of research and becoming enamoured by any and all information you stumble across; this is what the book resembles structurally, for me. partnering him on these forays can feel particularly enlightening and i found great pleasure in the questioning tone that capped the text. hits a familiar note for me in enjoying the passion-backed writing, no matter the subject. excited to dip into other penman works
May 25, 2023
most film books seem to stumble into explaining shots and transferring a visual language to words but rwf has too many films to rely on such a boring path. the spitfire bullets ranging from sentences to several paragraphs that combine biography are a superb way to go into this director. if you want to understand the visual, watch the movies.
April 2, 2024
A fascinatingly fragmentary history, approaching a seemingly undefinable figure and saying, alright, let’s give it our best shot, pulling in so much seemingly unrelated cultural contexts in it’s almost bullet-point structure, but making it all feel like it is saying something focused and whole, whatever that may be.
December 1, 2025
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82) was a West German filmmaker who, in his short life, wrote and directed 38 feature films, several shorts and TV shows, including what many consider his masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and even produced films for other filmmakers. A one-man film studio, he created a new movie every 100 days. But his unhealthy lifestyle ended his life early when he died of a cocaine overdose at age 37.
Music critic Ian Penman had been meaning to write a book on the filmmaker for years but put it off because procrastination. Then, in the spirit of Fassbinder’s insane productivity, he gave himself a deadline of 3-4 months - the timeframe Fassbinder would turn around a completed film - to finally write it. And the end result is this: Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.
I’d like to say this was a good book but it really wasn’t. Maybe if it wasn’t so rushed, it’d be better. I’d say the same about Fassbinder’s films - of which I’ve only seen three: The Marriage of Maria Braun, Querelle, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant - that they might’ve been better if he hadn’t blitzed through them at such a feverish pace.
As a result, Querelle and Bitter Tears are both horrendously boring to sit through. Fassbinder supposedly wrote the script for Bitter Tears during one long haul flight while Querelle was his last film, made at his peak drug use - maybe if he’d taken more time with the script, maybe if he’d taken better care of his health, both films wouldn’t be such hard, dull work?
Penman’s writing style is my biggest bugbear. Like his Erik Satie book (which was published after this but I read it before the Fassbinder book), he’s written it in this numbered paragraph way that makes for a fucking awful stop/start rhythm to the book. It means he can go off on any number of tangents - many of which are banal and pointless; “Aren’t all masks death masks?” reads one idiotic numbered paragraph oh shut up! - but mainly gives it a staccato quality that resists ever building up to a smooth flow.
It just makes me angry because Penman can write well - in short bursts. His best book is It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, which is comprised of short, focused essays on notable musical figures. And he writes it without this silly numbered paragraph style too, so he doesn’t need this ugly crutch. Ironically, almost taunting me, the book closes out with three appendices, the final one of which is a short article on Fassbinder’s love of football that Penman wrote for the London Review of Books in 2014 which is great - it’s actually what I wanted the whole book to be composed of! - but that’s the only time I saw what I’d hoped the entire book would’ve been. And then it was over.
He simply can’t write long-form books - this and the Satie book are evidence of this. Perhaps that’s because he’s spent decades writing short pieces and he never developed the skills for writing a full-length book. The numbered paragraphs and stream of consciousness-style put me in mind of a messy first draft, except instead of rewriting it all into something resembling a real book, he submitted - and got accepted for publication, foolish, foolish publishers - the messy first draft.
I think I know why Penman chose this approach. He includes a quote from Nabokov’s The Eye at the end: “For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases.” You could interpret that in different ways. He’s saying that in death, Fassbinder’s influence has spread to numerous filmmakers, who in turn will die and influence others, ad infinitum.
Or he’s saying that there isn’t really a person there, just other people, creative influences, etc. that were a version of him but not him in totality. It possibly explains why this is such an uninformative supposed-biography - Penman doesn’t think there is a Fassbinder, in the summing up, to write about. Even though I, and others who might pick up this book, want to learn a bit about Fassbinder at the very least, and instead we learn very little about him, which is very unsatisfying.
Worse, there’s random sloppy details thrown in that aren’t true - Fritz Lang didn’t direct Caligari (p.124) and Penman includes quotes from people who say factually inaccurate things, like Daniel Schmid on p.94 who says Fassbinder and Marilyn Monroe died at the same age. No - she died at 36 and he died at 37.
The overall impression of all of this is one of annoyance and wasted effort, on the part of the writer and the reader. Maybe Penman was trying something different stylistically but he didn’t pull it off successfully - Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is a boring waste of time. You won’t learn anything much about the filmmaker and it won’t be much fun slogging through either - you’re better off spending a few minutes on Wikipedia looking up Fassbinder instead (which I gather is how Penman researches most of his work).
I’m not a huge fan of Fassbinder’s - Maria Braun wasn’t bad but the only other two movies of his I’ve seen were godawful - and, in a Penman-esque observation, I’ve only enjoyed one of Penman’s books - Curving Track - and disliked the other two. The same track record then for both creators! The reflecting phantoms’ population increases still more…
Music critic Ian Penman had been meaning to write a book on the filmmaker for years but put it off because procrastination. Then, in the spirit of Fassbinder’s insane productivity, he gave himself a deadline of 3-4 months - the timeframe Fassbinder would turn around a completed film - to finally write it. And the end result is this: Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.
I’d like to say this was a good book but it really wasn’t. Maybe if it wasn’t so rushed, it’d be better. I’d say the same about Fassbinder’s films - of which I’ve only seen three: The Marriage of Maria Braun, Querelle, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant - that they might’ve been better if he hadn’t blitzed through them at such a feverish pace.
As a result, Querelle and Bitter Tears are both horrendously boring to sit through. Fassbinder supposedly wrote the script for Bitter Tears during one long haul flight while Querelle was his last film, made at his peak drug use - maybe if he’d taken more time with the script, maybe if he’d taken better care of his health, both films wouldn’t be such hard, dull work?
Penman’s writing style is my biggest bugbear. Like his Erik Satie book (which was published after this but I read it before the Fassbinder book), he’s written it in this numbered paragraph way that makes for a fucking awful stop/start rhythm to the book. It means he can go off on any number of tangents - many of which are banal and pointless; “Aren’t all masks death masks?” reads one idiotic numbered paragraph oh shut up! - but mainly gives it a staccato quality that resists ever building up to a smooth flow.
It just makes me angry because Penman can write well - in short bursts. His best book is It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, which is comprised of short, focused essays on notable musical figures. And he writes it without this silly numbered paragraph style too, so he doesn’t need this ugly crutch. Ironically, almost taunting me, the book closes out with three appendices, the final one of which is a short article on Fassbinder’s love of football that Penman wrote for the London Review of Books in 2014 which is great - it’s actually what I wanted the whole book to be composed of! - but that’s the only time I saw what I’d hoped the entire book would’ve been. And then it was over.
He simply can’t write long-form books - this and the Satie book are evidence of this. Perhaps that’s because he’s spent decades writing short pieces and he never developed the skills for writing a full-length book. The numbered paragraphs and stream of consciousness-style put me in mind of a messy first draft, except instead of rewriting it all into something resembling a real book, he submitted - and got accepted for publication, foolish, foolish publishers - the messy first draft.
I think I know why Penman chose this approach. He includes a quote from Nabokov’s The Eye at the end: “For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases.” You could interpret that in different ways. He’s saying that in death, Fassbinder’s influence has spread to numerous filmmakers, who in turn will die and influence others, ad infinitum.
Or he’s saying that there isn’t really a person there, just other people, creative influences, etc. that were a version of him but not him in totality. It possibly explains why this is such an uninformative supposed-biography - Penman doesn’t think there is a Fassbinder, in the summing up, to write about. Even though I, and others who might pick up this book, want to learn a bit about Fassbinder at the very least, and instead we learn very little about him, which is very unsatisfying.
Worse, there’s random sloppy details thrown in that aren’t true - Fritz Lang didn’t direct Caligari (p.124) and Penman includes quotes from people who say factually inaccurate things, like Daniel Schmid on p.94 who says Fassbinder and Marilyn Monroe died at the same age. No - she died at 36 and he died at 37.
The overall impression of all of this is one of annoyance and wasted effort, on the part of the writer and the reader. Maybe Penman was trying something different stylistically but he didn’t pull it off successfully - Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is a boring waste of time. You won’t learn anything much about the filmmaker and it won’t be much fun slogging through either - you’re better off spending a few minutes on Wikipedia looking up Fassbinder instead (which I gather is how Penman researches most of his work).
I’m not a huge fan of Fassbinder’s - Maria Braun wasn’t bad but the only other two movies of his I’ve seen were godawful - and, in a Penman-esque observation, I’ve only enjoyed one of Penman’s books - Curving Track - and disliked the other two. The same track record then for both creators! The reflecting phantoms’ population increases still more…
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