Fassbinder’s First Finale

Love Is Colder Than Death is the name of a new Rainer Werner Fassbinder screening series beginning this weekend at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive. It’s also the title of the first of the forty-four movies made by the peversely prolific German auteur. Naturally, the 1969 film kicks off the series; it plays Friday, October 4. A psychosexually complex love triangle and a violent crime drama, it’s is an ambitious debut, a spin on American noir traditions revealing that, from the very beginning, Fassbinder was preoccupied with the end. The fatalistic Love Is Colder Than Death is also a remarkably stylistically assured film. Watch this supremely cool, consummately directed scene from the film.