The brute beauty of “Fox and His Friends” (Faustrecht der Freiheit), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s quietly savage 1975 x-ray of the exploitation of a simple man (Fassbinder) by wealthier, snobby friends after a windfall startles with its dense, concrete tapestry of trashy fairgrounds and garishly tasteless apartments and bolthole gay bars and swimming pools and horrifying exploitation.
(This original West German trailer contains nudity.)
Love is a transaction. And if capitalism doesn’t kill you, your lovers will. From the same restoration of the recently-issued Criterion Blu-ray, 1970s German life (and Fassbinder’s equal-opportunity sadism) hammers to dank existence again. 123m. (Ray Pride)
The image above is Harry Baer quoting Fassbinder in an interview on the Criterion Blu-ray of Fox. The restored “Fox And His Friends” plays September 30 and October 4 at Siskel.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
Iconoclasm By The Book: A Fassbinder Fascination The grand corpus left by German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the age of thirty-seven—over forty films and television projects, plus plays in a decade-and-a-half of cold fury—is the subject of Ian Penman’s short, sharp shock of "Fassbinder: Thousands Of Mirrors."
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