Other notable films include the lesbian chamber drama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), Satan's Brew (1976), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), and Querelle (1982), all of which dealt with homoerotic themes.

[7] He was the only child of Liselotte Pempeit (1922–93), a translator, and Helmut Fassbinder, a doctor who worked from the couple's apartment in Sendlinger Straße,[8] near Munich's red light district.

In April 1968, now 23, he directed the production of his play Katzelmacher, which tells the story of a foreign worker from Greece who becomes the object of intense racial, sexual, and political hatred among a group of Bavarian "slackers".

This close-knit group of young actors included among them Fassbinder, Peer Raben, Harry Baer and Kurt Raab, who along with Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann became the most important members of his cinematic stock company.

Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, who started out making movies, Fassbinder's stage background was evident throughout his work.

By 1976, Fassbinder had gained international prominence, prizes at major film festivals, premieres and retrospectives in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, and a study of his work by Tony Rayns had been published.

[34] Fassbinder's second film, Katzelmacher (1969), (Bavarian pejorative slang term for a foreign worker from the Mediterranean), was received more positively, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim.

It features a group of rootless and bored young couples who spend much of their time in idle chatter, empty boasting, drinking, playing cards, intriguing or simply sitting around.

Katzelmacher was adapted from Fassbinder's first produced play – a short piece that was expanded from forty minutes to feature length, moving the action from a country village to Munich and delaying the appearance of Jorgos.

[41] The eponymous hit man of the title (actually a German, played by Karl Scheydt) is a cold-blooded contract killer, who returns from Vietnam to his native Munich, where he is hired by three renegade policemen to do away with a number of undesirables.

[42]The Niklashausen Journey was loosely based on the real-life of Hans Boehm, a shepherd who in 1476 claimed that the Virgin Mary called him to foment an uprising against the church and upper classes.

It was Fassbinder's first effort to create what he declared he aspired to: a cinematic statement of the human condition that would transcend national boundaries as the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini had done.

[59] Originally made for German television, Jail Bait was based on a play by Franz Xaver Kroetz, who violently disagreed with Fassbinder's adaptation, calling it pornographic.

It details the vicious response of family and community to a lonely aging white cleaning lady who marries a muscular, much younger black Moroccan immigrant worker.

Set in the closed, repressive Prussian society of the Bismarck era, the film paints a portrait of a woman's fate completely linked to an unbending and utterly unforgiving code of social behavior.

The plot follows the story of Effi Briest, a young woman who seeks to escape her stifling marriage to a much older man by entering into a brief affair with a charming soldier.

The film served as a showpiece for Fassbinder's muse and favorite actress Hanna Schygulla, whose detached acting style fitted the roles the director created for her.

Like a Bird on a Wire (Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht) is a forty-minute television production featuring Brigitte Mira, the main actress in Fear eats the Soul, singing cabaret songs and love ballads from the 1940s and 1950s.

I Only Want You to Love Me (Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt, 1976) tells the story of Peter, a construction worker in jail for manslaughter.

Based on a true account taken from For Life, a book of interviews edited by Klaus Antes and Christiane Erhardt, it was Fassbinder's personal reflections on childhood and adolescence.

[citation needed] In a time of professional crisis, Fassbinder made Satan's Brew (Satansbraten, 1976) a bleak amoral comedy that pays homage to Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty.

The film follows a twelve-year-old crippled girl, Angela, who, due to her parents' lack of affection, arranges an encounter between them with their respective lovers at the family country estate.

[69] Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst) is an omnibus film, a collective work of eight German filmmakers including Fassbinder, Alf Brustellin, Volker Schlöndorff, Bernhard Sinkel and Alexander Kluge, the main organizer behind the project.

It begins with Schleyer's wake, a segment filmed by Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlöndorff, and it ends with the tumultuous joint funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in Stuttgart.

In one sequence, Elvira wanders through the slaughterhouse where she worked as Erwin, recounting her history amid the meat-hooked corpses of cattle whose slit throats rain blood onto the floor.

[citation needed] Returning to his explorations of German history, Fassbinder finally realized his dream of adapting Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.

[79] The film is constructed as a big, tear-jerking Hollywood melodrama in its depiction of the unfulfilled love story between a German variety singer separated by the war from a Swiss Jewish composer.

Filmed with a morbid nostalgia for swastikas, showbiz glitz and as a cloak-and-dagger romance, the main theme of Lili Marleen is the question: is it morally justifiable to survive under National Socialism, as the naïve singer does by having a successful career?

A sports reporter becomes enthralled by the unbalanced actress and discovers that she is under the power of a villainous doctor who supplies her with the drugs she craves so long as she can pay the exorbitant fee.

"[93] The three most important women of Fassbinder's life, Irm Hermann, Ingrid Caven and Juliane Lorenz, his last partner, were not disturbed by his romantic and sexual involvement with men.