“Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings.” —R.W. Fassbinder

Probably the most talented and certainly the most prolific director to come out of the New German Cinema movement, Rainer Werner Fassbinder changed the face of cinema forever. Unapologetically transgressive, thoroughly queer, and often fatalistic, the precocious German auteur made over 40 films in a period of only 14 years: starting with his first feature, the gangster flick Love is Colder than Death—made when he was only 24!—and ending with his final film, the cult adaptation of Jean Genet’s queer classic Querelle. Inspired to create a “German Hollywood,” Fassbinder adopted established genres like the thriller or melodrama as a stage from which to explore Germany’s history and enact social critique. His extraordinary productivity, coupled with ill health and addiction issues, likely led to his untimely death at only 37, after which his self-destructive persona and troubled personal life have threatened to overshadow his extraordinary body of work, even as it informed it.

Lola and Veronika Voss, the two films in our spotlight, both explore women’s experiences of life in West Germany after the war through the messy ramifications of romantic love. Part of a series of films known as The BRD Trilogy (after the “Bundesrepublik Deutschland”), they examine the complex legacy of Germany’s problematic past and rapid post-war recovery from a distinctly female perspective, cohering around the lives of three extraordinary women: Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola. Transactional romantic arrangements, and queer or unconventional couplings are common themes in many of Fassbinder’s films. What he would term the ’’exploitability of feelings" is a recurring point in his work, which critiques the imbalance of power, and ultimately highlights how individuals are never free to exist outside of history.