Movie Quote by Rainer W. Fassbinder

Fassbinder is admitting to a kind of artistic possession, but he’s careful about what’s doing the haunting. It’s not Douglas Sirk the man, the name you cite to signal taste. It’s the technique: the lessons Sirk smuggled into glossy melodramas and that Fassbinder then re-exported into the harsh, modernist glare of New German Cinema.

The line turns influence into a craft ethic. “Tried to write about them” matters as much as “saw his films”: criticism here isn’t fandom, it’s apprenticeship. Writing forces you to articulate how Sirk makes feeling legible - through color, framing, décor, the choreography of glances - and, crucially, how he uses bourgeois surfaces to indict bourgeois life. Fassbinder’s subtext is that analysis changes you. You don’t merely borrow themes; you acquire a set of moves, a way of thinking in images.

There’s also a defensive modesty in “not Sirk himself.” Fassbinder knows the accusation: imitation, secondhand emotion, cinephile ventriloquism. He preempts it by separating author-worship from method. What “has been in everything I’ve done” is a structural insight: melodrama isn’t a guilty pleasure but a political technology, a way to stage oppression as intimacy - how capitalism and family, desire and discipline, end up sharing the same room.

Context sharpens the claim. In postwar Germany, looking to a German émigré who perfected his critique inside Hollywood’s dream factory is a pointed act: learn from exile, then turn the lesson back on the home that produced it.