RWF/TLS.

Leo A Lensing seems to hang with a different crowd here in Germany than I do: "Even if Fassbinder's homeland has been slow to recognize his high standing in film history, the rest of the world has not," he writes in the Times Literary Supplement. If Lensing means - and I don't think he does - that it's only in Germany that RWF was, during his lifetime, as reviled by conservatives as he as revered by the left, he might have a point. Regardless, his review of three newish books is an important reminder to cinephiles of the work that engaged RWF's feverish energies before he devoted them to his films.

The books:

• Referring to the essay Fassbinder wrote on Alfred Döblin for Die Zeit in 1980, the piece Justin Vicari explored so rewardingly for the Film Journal a year ago, Lensing reminds us that RWF was a voracious reader. "Im Land des Apfelbaums (In the Land of the Apple Tree), an elegantly edited collection of unpublished texts from the rich archival trove of Fassbinder's literary juvenilia, demonstrates that the young reader also became a precocious writer."

• "The new edition of Fassbinder's dramatic works has been given the more provisional title Theaterstücke (Theatre Plays), presumably in anticipation of further unpublished plays and fragments surfacing from the archives."

• "Even if one divides Fassbinder's writing for the theatre neatly into obvious categories - the unpublished early problem plays, the radical experiments at the limits of linguistic performability, the aggressive adaptations of classical and traditional plays, and the late operatic melodramas - it is not easy to make sense of the breakneck evolution of his theatrical and dramaturgical ideas or of his place in the literature of West Germany.... Thanks to David Barnett's new study, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, the first book devoted exclusively to the full range of what he calls Fassbinder's 'theatrical activities,' we now have the framework for a more dispassionate investigation into just how much more complex and interesting this part of his career actually was."

Posted by dwhudson at April 19, 2007 11:37 AM