Fear Eats the Soul - BFI Film Classics (discounted)

Fear Eats the Soul (BFI Film Classics) by Laura Cottingham / ISBN 9781839021794 / 100-page paperback, 5.25 x 7.5 inches, b/w images / discounted copies in like new condition

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In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1974) Emma (Brigitte Mira), a working-class widow and former member of the Nazi party, marries Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan migrant worker. Set in Munich during the 1970s, the film melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war Germany.

It is a film about the way conventional society detests anything and anybody unfamiliar - but also a film about the hopes and limits of love. Intricately directed, beautifully performed, and designed to show Munich life in all its shabby kitschiness, Fear Eats the Soul may be Fassbinder's finest film.

Laura Cottingham celebrates Fassbinder's achievement, placing Fear Eats the Soul in relation to his extraordinarily prolific career in theatre, film and television. Her analysis pulls back the thin curtain that separated his work from his tumultuous life. She also explores the director's debt to the lush Hollywood melodramas made by fellow German Douglas Sirk, especially All That Heaven Allows (1955). In a detailed scene-by-scene analysis, Cottingham shows how Fassbinder managed to combine beauty and tenderness with fierce political critique.

Laura Cottingham is an American art critic, curator and visual artist. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout Europe and in New York City, her best known videos being Not For Sale, 1998 and The Anita Pallenberg Story, 2000. She curated "NowHere," for the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark in 1996 and "Vraiment Feminisme et art," for Le Magasin in Grenoble, France in 1997. She lives in New York City.