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It is hard to imagine Fassbinder, contrast, very far from the pavements of a modern city, whether it be Munich, Berlin or New York, his favorite place. Though he dresses in dirty jeans and a leather jacket, and looks like a Hell's Angel, Fassbinder is rigidly disciplined. Since he finished his first film in 1969, he has turned out, on average, one full-length movie every three months. "I want to build a house with my films," he says. "Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in the end there will be a house."
Fassbinder is a homosexual, and some of his films, like Petra von Kant and Fox and His Friends, have homosexual themes. Even in those, however, his concern is not really homosexuality, but power, its uses and abuses. His movies assert that in any relationship, personal or political, there will be the oppressor and the oppressed. But the worst tyrant of all is love. Says he: "Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression."
The story of Petra von Kant is the enslavement of love. Petra, a dynamic dress designer played by the wonderful Margit Carstensen, dominates all around her until she falls in love with a younger woman (Hanna Schygulla). Her young lover soon rules her, and poor Petra is literally sent to her sickbed. Only when she falls out of love is her fever broken. Critics have speculated that the trusting, innocent title character of Fox and His Friends is Fassbinder's portrait of himself, particularly since Fassbinder, who is also a talented actor, played the part. His friends, however, know that the dominating-dominated Petra von Kant comes closest to autobiography. "I once asked Fassbinder why he works so hard," says Hopf. " 'To escape the loneliness,' he answered."
Dirk Bogarde is the star of Pass-binder's newest, yet unreleased film Despair, an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Though he has worked on more than 30 pictures, he says flatly that working with Fassbinder was "the most enjoyable experience I've ever had in the movies." Director and star understood one another instinctively. "Rainer and Tom Stoppard, the scriptwriter, came down to my house in the south of France to talk about the film," says Bogarde. "After four minutes we knew that we would get along, and I said that I didn't see any need to talk about it further. He then took a pile of motor magazines and went out to sit on the terrace."
Wenders, shy and bespectacled, lives in a house in the suburbs with Lisa Kreuzer, one of the leads of The American Friend. There he has surrounded himself with Americana—a jukebox, gadgets of all kinds and, bizarre as it may seem for a Münchner, a collection of Coors beer cans. Kluge, a practicing lawyer, is an intellectual from an older German tradition, and ideas cascade from his mouth, almost drowning those who are not used to swimming in such icy waters. He abjures possessions and sleeps only an hour or so at a time, waking constantly to continue his work. Only Schlöndorff and Von Trotta, who live in a pleasant walk-up in one of Munich's oldest quarters, maintain what might be regarded as a normal life.