Love Is Colder Than Death

For his feature debut, Rainer Werner Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic, unorthodox crime drama about a love triangle involving the small-time pimp Franz (Fassbinder), his prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (future Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla), and his gangster friend Bruno (Ulli Lommel). With its minimalist tableaux and catalog of New Wave and Hollywood references, this is a stylishly nihilistic cinematic statement of intent.

Germany
1969
89 minutes
Black & White
1.78:1
German

Available In

Collector's Set

Early Fassbinder

DVD Box Set

5 Discs

$55.96

Cast & Credits

Cast

Ulli Lommel: Bruno
Hanna Schygulla: Joanna
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Franz
Hans Hirschmüller: Peter
Katrin Schaake: Woman on the train
Peter Berling: Shoemaker
Irm Hermann: Saleslady
Les Olvides: Georges
Peter Moland: Lead syndicate interrogater
Yaak Karsunke: Police commissioner
Hannes Gromball: Joanna’s client

Credits

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Art direction: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Art direction: Ulli Lommel
Editor: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (as Franz Walsch)
Music: Peer Raben
Music: Holger Münzer

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Writer, Actor, Director

Rainer Werner Fassbinder made an astonishing forty-four movies—theatrical features, television movies and miniseries, and shorts among them—in a career that spanned a mere sixteen years, ending with his death at thirty-seven in 1982. He is perhaps remembered best for his intense and exquisitely shabby social melodramas (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)—heavily influenced by Hollywood films, especially the female-driven tearjerkers of Douglas Sirk, and featuring misfit characters that often reflected his own fluid sexuality and self-destructive tendencies. But his body of work runs the gamut from epic period pieces (Berlin Alexanderplatz, the BRD Trilogy) to dystopic science fiction (World on a Wire) as well. One particular fascination of Fassbinder’s was the way the ghosts of the past, specifically those of World War II, haunted contemporary German life—an interest that wedded him to many of the other artists of the New German Cinema movement, which began in the late 1960s.