If you ever want to feel like you have been wasting your life, look to the short but spectacularly productive life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Within fifteen years – the span of his professional career –Fassbinder cranked out 40, count ‘em 40, feature films. That’s roughly 3 movies a year. But that’s not all. He acted in 36 movies, some his own, some directed by others. He also wrote and directed 24 stage plays, did two TV series and a handful of radio plays. The man was motivated. Of course, he also died of a drug overdose at the age of 37 and his personal life was so notoriously self destructive that it was the subject of at least one documentary. Make of that what you will.
Fassbinder’s sheer talent was obvious, however, in his first films. Das kleine Chaos (A Little Chaos) was made when he was a mere 21 years old, in 1966, and it is about a trio of smartly-dressed roughs who after failing to get money through selling fake magazine subscriptions turn to a more direct method of revenue enhancement. Like a lot of works by young artists, Fassbinder wears his influences on his sleeve with this film, namely Jean-Luc Godard. The main character, played by Fassbinder, is the sort of movie-obsessed thug who could have stepped off the screen of a half dozen Godard movies, particularly Breathless. The dynamic between the trio recalls that of A Band Apart. But the film that Fassbinder really had in mind was Godard’s 1962 film My Life to Live, about a woman who leaves her husband and child to become a prostitute. Fassbinder directly references the movie at a couple of points. The shot of Fassbinder reading from a book, Henry de Montherlant’s The Girls, is clearly taken from a similar scene in My Life. He even dresses up his characters like those in Godard’s movie. That coat with the fur collar worn by the robbery victim is straight out of My Life to Live. Fassbinder later admitted that A Little Chaos is “a little like Godard.†You can watch the movie above. Find more free films in our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..
via Cinephilia and Beyond
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.Â
A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
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A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema
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