The Rakish BAAL the Resurrected: A Tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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He has been called a romantic anarchist, an enfant terrible, radically subjective, self-destructive, driven by a restless productivity, the creative engine, the heart of New German Cinema: the writer, actor, and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) is considered one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers since the Second World War.

Our exhibition The Rakish BAAL the Resurrected: A Tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is inspired above all by Volker Schlöndorff’s 1969 film Baal, with Fassbinder playing the main part, which Brecht’s heirs banned from being shown publicly for 44 years. ‘What Brecht’s heirs did not see at the time, and nor did we, was how much of Fassbinder was actually in Brecht’s Baal’, wrote Volker Schlöndorff in his autobiography Licht, Schatten und Bewegung. Mein Leben und meine Filme.

Rainer Fetting, the most important protagonist of those artists who in the late 1970s and early 80s received international recognition under the label ‘Neue Wilde’ – painters who expressed fundamental themes such as sexuality and individual mood, but also the cityscape of divided Berlin and its nightlife, today almost mythical, in colour-intensive and sensual paintings – has created a brilliant body of 15 works especially for this exhibition. Young artists like Neal Fox from Britain and Giuseppe Gonella from Italy have engaged in their own and very original way with Fassbinder/Baal, and the Estonian painter Ivar Kaasik unites Rainer Werner Fassbinder with Arthur Rimbaud on a canvas. Volker Schlöndorff, who had found in Fassbinder an ideal actor to play Baal, enriches the exhibition with 17 stills and studio shots from his film, which is now, after decades, finally accessible again.

Our exhibition The Rakish BAAL the Resurrected – A Tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder does not just coincide with this year’s Theatertreffen of Berliner Festspiele  with its Focus Fassbinder, but also with the comprehensive show Fassbinder – NOW from 6 May to 23 August at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau, organised by the Deutsches Filminstitut / Deutsches Filmmuseum in cooperation with the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation.