Movie Quote by Rainer W. Fassbinder

"The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film"

Rainer W. Fassbinder

About this Quote

Fassbinder is basically confessing a double hunger: for seduction and sabotage. He wants the shameless pleasure machine of Hollywood - its sweep, its star power, its emotional clarity - and he wants to lace it with a critique that refuses to flatter the world as it is. The provocation is in the pairing. In postwar West Germany, "serious" cinema often meant austerity and penance, while Hollywood meant glamour, amnesia, and a kind of imported anesthesia. Fassbinder's dream is to steal the drug and change the dosage.

The word "union" does a lot of work. He's not calling for propaganda, or for films that lecture the audience into better politics. He's imagining a marriage where beauty is not the enemy of analysis, where the viewer can be carried along by melodrama and still feel the trapdoor open under their assumptions. That's classic Fassbinder: use genre, romance, family drama, even kitsch as a delivery system for discomfort. Let viewers recognize themselves in the fantasy, then show them the cost of that fantasy.

"Such a German film" signals a national problem, not just an artistic one. West Germany in the 60s and 70s was busy rebuilding prosperity while repressing history and policing conformity. Fassbinder is staking out a cinema that looks outward (to Hollywood craft) and inward (to German denial), insisting that political critique has to compete in the same arena as pleasure. If you can't make the status quo entertaining, it keeps winning by default.

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Rainer W. Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 - June 10, 1982) was a notable figure from Germany.

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