"I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be"
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Fassbinder isn’t modest here; he’s drafting a hostile takeover bid for the medium. The name-dropping is pointed: Shakespeare, Marx, Freud aren’t just “greats,” they’re paradigm-makers who rewired the terms of the debate. By aligning cinema with theatre, politics, and psychology, he stakes a claim that film isn’t entertainment on the side of real history, but a machine that can manufacture reality: how people speak, desire, organize, and lie to themselves.
The line works because it’s both grandiose and diagnostic. Fassbinder doesn’t say he wants to be “the best.” He wants to be irreversible. “Someone after whom nothing is as it used to be” frames influence as an event, almost a before-and-after split in cultural time. That’s the subtext of an artist who understood that postwar Germany was living in denial, laundering fascism into respectability through prosperity, sentimentality, and “normal life.” If society is a set of stories people tell to avoid guilt, then cinema can be the counter-story that makes avoidance impossible.
Context sharpens the audacity: New German Cinema was fighting for relevance against Hollywood gloss and domestic amnesia. Fassbinder’s films attacked the family, romance, and class mobility as soft-power systems that keep brutality polite. The ambition isn’t just aesthetic; it’s moral and political. He wants cinema to stop comforting people and start changing what they can no longer unsee.
The line works because it’s both grandiose and diagnostic. Fassbinder doesn’t say he wants to be “the best.” He wants to be irreversible. “Someone after whom nothing is as it used to be” frames influence as an event, almost a before-and-after split in cultural time. That’s the subtext of an artist who understood that postwar Germany was living in denial, laundering fascism into respectability through prosperity, sentimentality, and “normal life.” If society is a set of stories people tell to avoid guilt, then cinema can be the counter-story that makes avoidance impossible.
Context sharpens the audacity: New German Cinema was fighting for relevance against Hollywood gloss and domestic amnesia. Fassbinder’s films attacked the family, romance, and class mobility as soft-power systems that keep brutality polite. The ambition isn’t just aesthetic; it’s moral and political. He wants cinema to stop comforting people and start changing what they can no longer unsee.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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