Contemporary Literary Criticism | Fassbinder, Rainer Werner - Jonathan Rosenbaum

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

[Fassbinder] has been devoted to social reform and the perpetuation (through updating) of the dominant codes of narrative cinema. Far from being "radical" or "subversive", as has often been claimed, his cinema is liberal in the best and most hallowed sense of the word…. In Faustrecht der Freiheit [Fox]—working with narrative elements traceable back to [Erich von] Stroheim and von Sternberg as well as Sirk—he is relating a fable of class exploitation within a homosexual milieu that is rather obvious and predictable in overall design, but clever and nuanced in many of its individual details. The cultural snobbery of Eugen, his parents and his friends is underlined far past the point of necessity or plausibility (leading to a howler when his mother describes seeing the "Firebird Suite" at the opera), and some of the eventual cruelties of the clan similarly seem too clearly designed to ram home a thesis. But on the other hand, the actual...

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