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Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The Fassbinder retrospective, which is co-presented by MFA, the Rice Media Center and the Goethe-Institut Houston, presents 22 films from the best-known director of New German Cinema.

This list of films presented at the MFA includes the The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), a soap opera-like commentary of the ailing conditions of post-war Germany through an array of cinematic elements such as sexual politics, comedy, romance and satire; In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), a sentimental look at the last five days of transsexual Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt; and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), a story of love and power gained and lost.

Fassbinder himself has been noted as one of the most important and controversial filmmakers of the post-World War II generation, concentrating on Hollywood melodrama and avant-garde techniques.

The classic Fassbinder style was the upshot of his desire to reach a mass audience. His first films, such as Love is Colder Than Death (1969) and Beware of the Holy Whore (1971), failed to reach such an audience due to their austere and complex nature.

A search for a wide audience led the filmmaker to Hollywood melodrama through filmmaker Douglas Sirk. Using Sirk's films as a model, Fassbinder soon released The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), his first commercially successful film.

Enthusiasm for his work culminated in The Marriage of Maria Braun , which gave Fassbinder not only critical acclaim, but also popular acceptance.

Fassbinder continued to create popular films until his death in 1982. A drug addict, he died from a sleeping pill and cocaine-induced heart attack, with the script for his next film beside him.

Arthur Dong

Director Arthur Dong will present his latest documentary, Licensed to Kill, at the MFA on Oct. 10. After the screening, Dong will answer questions concerning his 80-minute film, which examines the minds of men whose hatred of homosexuals leads them to murder.

In the process of investigating over 200 such murders, Dong interviewed seven killers. They include a young man who claims as his defense self-protection from homosexual advances, an extreme religious man who kills because of his own self-loathed homosexuality, a victim of child abuse scared of losing his own manhood and a gangster punk looking for an easy target to boost his image.

Dong looks at the various societal elements through the eyes of the killers to understand if and how a society shapes such hatred.

Dong also takes advantage of many varied information sources, including news reports, courtroom scenes, evidence from police files, home and police videos of gay bashings and childhood photos of the killers. All these elements fuse into a harrowing mental and emotional journey through the film.

Licensed to Kill has won awards at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival.

Dong himself has won several film awards and fellowships, including an Emmy nomination.

At DiverseWorks, Dong and community leaders will lead a panel discussing the nature of hate-crimes in Houston Oct. 11. Call (713) 223-8346 for details.

Fritz Lang

The MFA closes its October film repertory with Fritz Lang's murder-mystery masterpiece, M . The film, inspired by the crimes of the real-life serial killer known as the "vampire of Dusseldorf," revolves around the disappearance of young Elsie Beckmann and the search for her killer.

Peter Lorre debuts in his role as child killer Hans Beckert in Lang's first sound film. His character, a schitzophrenic mixture of victim and victimizer, metaphorically illuminates the constant fight for self-control, which parallels the struggle between the criminal underworld and the police force.

Lang, another German filmmaker and director, had a reputation as a serious perfectionist, and several critics described this as unnecessary and sometimes distracting. Yet, criticism of Lang is highly varied, for his different periods of creativity produced works with styles and images which corresponded to his different studio experiences in Germany and the United States.

Despite this, however, conventional cinematic wisdom claims Lang as a film genius whose talents proliferated, leading to the production of over fifty films.

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the October 10, 1997 issue.