Personal Experience and the Media : Media Interplay in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Work for Theatre, Cinema and Television

The work of the West German artist Rainer Werner Fassbinder is as versatile as it is extensive. During the 16 years of his artistic career, Fassbinder produced more than 40 films and staged 29 plays half of which he had written himself. In doing so he not only drew on aesthetic traditions as diverse as the German folk play, the American gangster film, Hollywood melodrama, the Theatre of Cruelty and the French Nouvelle Vague, but also worked in three media simultaneously: theatre, cinema, and television. It has often been pointed out that this versatility appears to forestall any conceptualisation of Fassbinder's work from the vantage point of its production. The present work aims at exactly such a conceptualisation by exploring the interplay between his work for the different media.