Love Is Colder Than Death: The Life And Times Of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by Robert Katz, Peter Berling

VERY GOOD softcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601878 This colossal biography seems to have written with an accurate blend of sadness, desperation, outrage, amazement, blood and tears. Four months after the painful departure of Fassbinder, -L'enfant terrible of the German Cinema, the loyal expositor and protagonist of a lacerated nation for different demons, who always tried to show the dark side of his personages; from Berlin Alexanderplatz to Mria Braun, from Lolita to Petra von Kant, from Ali to Mama Kuster, all his characters are loaded of the original sin, disturbed and anguished for the weight of the conscious, a merciless world that is far to understand and so many times even distinguish between the Germany of Schiller and Beethoven respect the Nazi Germany. A very complete motives exposition a long the febrile existence of this disturbed genius, who lived faster tan the speed of life, deputing thirty six films in just only seventeen years of artistic activity. Go for this biography, a painful gaze inside the life and times of this monumental creator.We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)

Genres: Film, Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Media Tie In

245 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There can't be many other books on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and for anyone interested in him and his work then I'd highly recommend this. I've seen most of his later films and a couple of his early ones, but didn't know much about the man himself other than the fact he died at 37 and had something of a drugs problem. A really absorbing read, and the fact that Robert Katz knew Fassbinder, makes this more than just some biographer throwing together pieces of information. The interviews were of particular interest to me, because he rarely ever gave them. A brilliant film-maker of which we won't see the likes of again. His output over quite a short career was just insane.

[Justin Decloux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trashy, filled with purple prose, and an endlessly readable document of a horrifying man that made great cinematic art. This paints a portrait of Fassbinder as one hell of a piece of shit.

[Clove · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick and easy and mostly unobjectionable read; free from excessive sensationalism. RWF probably would have objected to the slightly dismissive treatments of the RAF/Baader-Meinhof events and the slightly moralistic take on substance use (well, and probably more things than that...) But, a nice amount of background and substance for a light little bio, and not badly written. 3.5

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

hit the fucking spot. salacious, juicy, down in the muck stuff. just what i wanted. a new role model.

[George Huxley · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite German film director. What a fucking amazing man. What a fucking tragic loss. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the director, and often times screenwriter, editor, cinematographer, and actor, in over 40 films in just over 10 years. Each one a goddam masterpiece, even the one's I have yet to see. Fassbinder is synonymous with genius, with intuitive, inspiring, and sincere works of art. I love this man to death, and it is a terrible shame that he had to die when he did. R.I.P. RWF

[Chris Molnar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend doing what I'm doing right now: watching every Fassbinder movie chronologically from the beginning. It'll take a good chunk of your life, but it's a better use of your time than watching Stranger Things. The first two shorts and two features are very impressive, and will carry you through some of the filmed theater and mixed-bag experiments until you get to the unbelievable one-two punch of Merchant of Four Seasons and Petra Von Kant, which is more or less the point of no return. Seeing his restless and relentlessly productive practice evolve, and growing up alongside his endearing, legendary troupe, helps to situate the films. On the one hand, there's an inspiring, "let's put on a show" aspect that makes you want to go out and create things with your friends. On the other, you realize just how unique he was, in his ability to singlehandedly create an industry of high quality, never predictable films using only the basic resources of West German state money, credit cards, and his buddies, until the real producers caught on and he could finally get suitcases of cash to spend on blow.

Which brings us to all the sex, drugs, mind games and wild tales, which are numerous and inextricable from the movies. Not sure why this book gets aspersions cast on it, or is fairly difficult to find. It's an appropriately salacious, quick read with many of the unbelievable but true stories about the man you'll hear in various documentaries or articles, but here all together, many of them as quotes or written excerpts from the man himself or his closest associates. There's no reason to doubt the veracity except to the self-deprecating extent that Katz reminds us of the unknowability of certain deatils. It's as much of an anaylsis of the films as you'd want - there's no way to actually get into all of them short of a college curriculum or multi-volume critical history. In the end you're better off just watching them; a major undertaking all by itself.

So, start watching the movies, then read the book. While I read it, I got from Nora Helmer up through Fear of Fear (that's eight movies, all of which he made between 1973-1975). That includes two stone-cold all time greats (Ali: Fear Eats The Soul and Fox And His Friends), an utterly bonkers TV special (Like A Bird On A Wire), an adaptation of A Doll's House (Nora Helmer), a hugely influential, hit literary adaptation (Effi Briest), a top-shelf made-for-TV melodrama (Fear of Fear), a topical tragicomedy that could be remade today and lose no relevance (Mother Küsters Goes To Heaven), and a very strong movie on love and power that would be anybody else's masterpiece but for him is just totally lost in the shuffle (Martha). Not to mention that he still has two more 1975 movies for me to watch (Satan's Brew and the definitively titled I Only Want You To Love Me), and that I'd already watched his first 1973 movie, a classic multi-part sci-fi TV serial (World On A Wire). Once you read about all the hijinks he was getting up to while being so productive, you'll feel exhausted too. It's amazing he even got to 37 before dying. I also watched a few of the documentaries - I recommend End of the Commune? and Fassbinder's Women for source material, and Love Without Demands as an overview.

All that, and the legendary Erroll McDonald (mentioned in my previous review, of Bernhard's My Prizes) gets a shout-out in the acknowledgements. Great book on a continually fascinating and inspiring figure.

[Jack Herbert Christal Gattanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

And, of course, what would've been the film after his (unintentional?) Swan song, Querelle, was to be titled: "I'm the Happiness of This World." Funny ha-ha. Or as Harry, a close friend, said right after RW Fassbinder's death: "F*cking cocaine!"

(P. 39 on the 1969 film Love is Colder Than Death): "Here, in his first complete Screenplay, written from the clash of experience around him, we have the beginning of a pattern he would never abandon: filling his life with followers in order to make movies, then making movies to fill his life with followers; finally, the distinction would disappear."

I had had this on my radar for a lot of years, actually probably since I read (at least in most part, maybe I didn't quite finish it but got through most anyway) the Fassbinder interview book "Anarchy of the Imagination," and I finally got spurred to read this after recently watching the Criterion of Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (which doesn't get a lot written about here despite being his first very long work except that it stirred controversy, as the filmmakers work did often, on the left as well as the right).

What you get with this biography is something that is in at least some part an oral history of Fassbinder - there are a plethora of interviews with his closest collaborators, his two ex wives (I didn't even know he had one!) - and it's written by a former screenwriter of one of the films he acted in but didn't direct, Kamikaze 89. And the results are quite good as reportage and immediate recounting, with a little spotty writing here and there. This isn't to say it isn't riveting reading, and I devoured it in about three or four sittings. The life and work of this man was equally miraculous and despicable, heroic and villainous, the work of an impassioned, innovative, bold, vicious genius who made people around him both so miserable and at times so elated. It's something to be so loved and reviled, and then loved again, by many of the same people.

I don't think it paints a totally unglamorous or unfair portrait of the man, on the contrary there were a few times when I wondered if Katz would go back to anything even remotely painting the man in a positive light. But then I don't need to like someone to be absorbed into a story, and in this case one of the filmmakers who redefined what cinema could be in the 1970s. But I'd be lying too if I said sometimes Katz's writing wasn't a bit precious. One example is when he's writing on around p 29 about the time period RWF found himself in when first getting into making films:

"History was getting gang-banged and pregnant with the issues of 1968."

Uh... huh. Now, this isn't a big problem throughout the book, but it is there in some parts when Katz tries to get a little more clever or his reach exceeds his descriptive grasp. Luckily, again, he is working from so many oral stories from people that he can go many pages just letting some like his producer partners like Michael Fengler (what, not a word on Herr R? Oh, well), or Peter Cahtel and Harry Baer. (Strangely, Udo Kier must've turned down being interviewed, a shame as he has a couple of very... interesting passages here in the man's life, from being a hooked for Rainer's pimp to an episode involving cooking onions that I leave you to discover).

Frankly, sometimes subject matter and the subject at hand can overcome any (minor) misgivings with writing style. Where else will I get to read the German wildman actor Kurt Raab, who stared in many of his films, this dismissive line when they were done with the final collaboration on The Stationmasters wife? - "His career as an actor was jeopardized, too, by Rainer's refusal to cast him in any upcoming project, telling him frankly, 'I have no more ideas for your face.'"

A small way though this kind of cruel (but funny) dismissal is how the man worked with people, and it's captivating just how dependent he was to have such a group of people who wanted to be in his films and, yes, please him by being these performers... but he also could drive them away and be so ruthless. An even more devastating portrait comes in the section about the female producer and sometimes actress on 13 Moons and Third Generation, Isolde Barth, and how she was so enamored with him and even sort of in a zelig fashion started to behave and act like him... which made how quickly he turned around to push her out so crippling and heartbreaking.

It's a story that isn't entirely unique, of course, as history is filled with tremendously gifted artists who could be (or were) monsters in personal and professional capacities. What makes this stand out somewhat more than others to me is not just the awesome amount of work (quantity *and* quality as is pointed out at least once, if not by the author then a critical work or two he quotes, that's another part of this, too), but how much he was his works and how no matter the evidence there people still wanted to work with and be around and love him. Even that idea of *love* was challenged by Fassbinder, to the point where (I didn't know this) he turned down 1984 because it didn't feature the kind of love he could believe in at all.

On one level it keeps one reading on a sort of film history level, which I'm just totally into, of the development of one project into another and the evolution of a career. On another level is a story of excess and the contradictions that make people inherently compelling to me, that a man so deeply shy really, how he could turn "like a little boy" as described many times here in certain situations, could also be incredibly gregarious and a mean SOB to so many, not to mention how he treated and cheated and made the women and men around him so on edge and worse off (and oh Salem, what a story and a half there!) On yet another level is a relationship story, or several relationships, but the stand out for me is with Julianne Lorenz who seemed to love him the most despite what he could throw in her way.

And in the end, it mildly surprises me that he wasn't on drugs for even longer or earlier (that it started in 76/77 and before that he was just.... fast), and it saddens me he could never fully get the help he needed; of all things *BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ* (his 15 hour epic he took a year to film) got him out of addiction... briefly. What a volcano of a man. I mean that as a compliment. Mostly.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

[Tama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feels good to open up easy reading, and be engaged immediately.

Unfortunately La Coquille is no more.

I did revere Fassbinder before the first pages of this book. All I knew was based on several films (including one documentary focussed on his work at a certain and early period of time—you get to see him after a family creative troupe). What I knew of him was that he could make a damn good audio-visual story, with entertaining and interesting philosophies.

Most recently I watched some earlier features. The independent, micro budget starting point. Now I see his character a little clearer. Albeit in English, and and sometimes through a third hand perspective. Algood. He was an individual. I want to be him... Having a creative troupe is the dream.

Quite the lovely profile of Fassbinder. I would’ve gone gay for him, based off ‘Katzelmacher’ at least.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid look at the man, the myth, the asshole.

[Bea De · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw"Berlin Aleksanderpla⁵tz";Fassbinder's wellknown t.v.-series and of course"Die ehe von Maria Brown"but only in reading this book-not even a year after the genius died it got published in tobe-continued episodes in Humo-a very popular weeklymagazine in Belgium which also published in the same format"the unbearable lightness of being" by Milan Kundera and "the journals of Adrian Mole" etc..-Reading this book awakened in me a lifelong fascination for the man himself-aside and especcially in relation to his art.He was very driven.At a certain point he made 2 movies in the same studio simultaniously.That's what made him take all that coke and peppills too.He needed to get his
so important work done;even knowing the risks.Even back then the specter of AIDS must have been looming heavely at his horizon.Fassbinder was tempestuous at times and even a bit of an asshole.Especcially towards some of the women in his life who never stood a chance with him romantically.Even his muze;the gorgeous,talented actress Hanna Schygulla seems to have been in love with him at a certain point ;tearfully banging on his door while he was sequestered with one of his lovers.Still;being a genius and an artist the man had the right to his occasional tantrum 1nd his erfectionist demands.Look at the oeuvre he left us!Reading this gave me the impression of a very lonely human being.Too succesfull for his friends from the antitheater group which made him pzrt of the system they hated."Love is colder than death"Did any of his lovers actually love him for himself?Or was it the fame and the money?He could never be sure.They came and went.His work was his life and eventually killed him.4Stars.

[Hogfather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love Is Colder Than Death is a very self-conscious effort to write a mythologizing biography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Robert Katz, an American screenwriter who worked on the last film Fassbinder acted in but did not direct. Katz has a strong ability to suggest how it might have felt to be around Fassbinder, and his book provides a helpful introduction to the filmmaker's wild life, but it stops there. Katz has little interest in the kind of minute details that (I think) make a biography come to life, a trait that shows itself by his lack of interest in most written sources. He doesn't attempt to explore the relationship between Fassbinder and his art with much depth and relies primarily on recollections by Fassbinder's peers for his account. In my opinion, a Fassbinder biography ought to be at least twice as long as Love Is Colder Than Death to go beyond the entertaining but surface-level approach Katz takes to the great filmmaker's life.

[Peyton]

Pretty “fun” read, reminded me a lot of the two Lou Reed biographies, RWF was kind of the Lou Reed of cinema (if Lou died after The Bells), a similarly sinister personality who recked havoc and chaos and blew up friendships and relationships due to his bruised ego, but seemingly expressed self-awareness of it in his own work, which alienated and angered half the people who watched it. Would love to see a more comprehensive 700 page plus biography one day, this is pretty straightforwardly told through the voices of the cultish “Fassbinder people”, which makes it less about the movies and more about the man. But that’s plenty enough. I can imagine picking this up in the 80s, not even having access to 70% of his movies and being pretty enthralled by it.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much is made of the difficulty that accompanies trying to separate an artist from their work, of how to accept the creations outside the politics. But it's not really politics that make Fassbinder a monster in retrospect. It's how cruelly he treated so many actors, women and gay men especially. Katz's account barely scratches the surface -- major players like Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen are rarely quoted -- yet he shares enough from best friend Harry Baer, late entry Juliane Lorenz, and early whipping girl Irm Herman to make you cringe. Fascinating like a car wreck.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quick and highly readable stomp through the wild life and times of the great German director. To the author's credit, there is less of the gossip and the scandal (which Fassbinder was certainly capable of attracting) and more of an examination of just how it was that this young creator was able to maintain such a prodigious rate of output under challenging circumstances. If you enjoy the movies, the book provides excellent background as to the how, why and when of the works themselves.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun, zippy bio that focuses on the who, what, where, and when rather than the why. If you find Fassbinder's films fascinating, this book is for you.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't know the person it was about and was not interested.

I like the title of the book, but to be honest at the end of the book, I just thought the film director was a bit of a twat.