29 Quotes by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.

People often criticize my films for being pessimistic; there are certainly many reasons for being pessimistic but I don’t see my films that way. They’re founded in the belief that revolution doesn’t belong on the cinema screen but outside in the world. Never mind if a film ends pessimistically but exposes certain mechanisms clearly enough to show people how they work and the ultimate effect is not pessimistic. My goal is to reveal such mechanisms in a way that makes people realize the necessity of changing their own reality.

I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.

As long as movies are depressing, life isn’t.

I’d like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

People are terrible. They can bear anything. Anything! People are hard and brutal. And everyone is disposable. Everyone! That’s the lesson.

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That’s my dream, to make such a German film.

Since I’m not a second Marx or Freud who can offer people alternatives, I have to let them keep their own wrong feelings. And I don’t believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable-they should be taken absolutely seriously.