Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Katzelmacher

Katzelmacher

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s second feature depicts the intolerance of a circle of financially and sexually frustrated friends when an immigrant laborer (Fassbinder) moves to their Munich neighborhood. This scalpel-sharp theatrical experiment, based on one of the director’s successful early stage plays, is both a personal expression of alienation on the part of the filmmaker and a comment on the persistence of xenophobic scapegoating in German society.

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Film Info

  • Germany
  • 1969
  • 89 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • German

Available In

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder

Early Fassbinder

DVD Box Set

5 Discs

$48.96

Katzelmacher
Cast
Hanna Schygulla
Marie
Lilith Ungerer
Helga
Elga Sorbas
Rosy
Doris Mattes
Gunda
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Jorgos
Rudolf Waldemar Brem
Paul
Hans Hirschmüller
Erich
Harry Baer
Franz
Peter Moland
Peter
Hannes Gromball
Klaus
Irm Hermann
Elisabeth
Katrin Schaake
Woman with a convertible
Credits
Director
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography
Dietrich Lohmann
Editor
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (as Franz Walsch)
Music
Peer Raben

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Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder
Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder

From the beginning, it was clear that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was destined to shake up German cinema.

By Michael Koresky

Essays — Aug 26, 2013

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Writer, Actor, Director

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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.

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