Battle over RWF's legacy.

Katja Nicodemus's interview with Ingrid Caven in last week's issue of Die Zeit brought the long-simmering rivalry between Rainer Werner Fassbinder's two wives - Caven and Juliane Lorenz, head of the Fassbinder Foundation - to a big ugly public boil. Now, signandsight has translated that interview into English.

For starters, Caven calls Lorenz's marriage to RWF into question, but for cinephiles, her other accusations are far more serious. The full interview is a must-read, but in a statement s&s runs on the same page, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus sums up the most serious charges. When he attended MoMA's RWF retrospective, "I noticed that the Fassbinder Foundation had systematically erased Ingrid Caven, Peer Raben and others close to Fassbinder out of the story, or rather forced them out through court cases. It went so far that at a number of events Juliane Lorenz threatened not to allow films to be shown if these close friends of Fassbinder's were invited. I think this form of historical misrepresentation is outrageous."

Updated through 6/1.

The German papers have been following up, of course, and today's issue of Die Welt has the latest (Peter Zander has a longer piece as well): 25 actors, directors and producers, all of whom worked with RWF at some point, have issued a statement calling for Lorenz to resign and hand over all Foundation assets to the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin (which many will know as the Film Museum on Potsdamer Platz).

What's more, the "remastered" Berliner Alexanderplatz, heralded when it premiered at this year's Berlinale, well-reviewed when it appeared on DVD here in Germany and again briefly in New York theaters, and well on its way to a release on DVD in the US from none other than Criterion, has, so the statement reads, been "markedly brightened" in order to make it more palatable to consumers, despite the fact that RWF himself fought long and hard against the production company and the television network to keep his dark visual tones intact when it was broadcast in 1980. "To bastardize a primary work of Fassbinder's this way reveals an egomaniacal philistinism of unmatched brazenness," reads the statement.

The signatories: Caven, Werner Schroeter, Walter Bockmayer, Peter Kern, Udo Kier, Michael Fengler, Günther Kaufmann, Y Sa Lo, Isolde Barth, Rudolf-Waldemar Brem, Hans Hirschmüller, Ulli Lommel, Karl Scheydt, Elga Sorbas, Ursula Strätz, Peter Berling, Rolf Bührmann, Hanns Eckelkamp, Molly von Fürstenberg, Thea Eymesz, Ila von Hasperg, This Brunner, Frank Fellermeier (of the Werkstatt Raben), Gottfried Hüngsberg and Renate Leiffer.

Update, 6/1: Harry Baer, who worked with RWF in front of and behind the camera from 1969 to the bitter end, tells Der Tagesspiegel that, while he recognizes the Foundation's accomplishments, to allow Fassbinder's work to fall under the complete control of just one person would be to fly in the face of the "multi-faceted personality, his intellectual milieu and the complexity of his historical legacy."

Posted by dwhudson at May 31, 2007 7:56 AM