It was Rainer Werner Fassbinder who helped put New German Cinema on the international map in the 1970s. He was an artist who achieved that rare synthesis of radical subjectivity and wide audience appeal; he succeeded in reconciling his own artistic demands with an audience's desire to be entertained. In just 14 years he made 44 films, including television films comprising several parts. He also had an active career in the theatre. His death in 1982 marked the end of an important epoch in film history.Fassbinder hurled himself through life with a fury, confronting the materialism of the new Germany, and producing a body of work of astonishing variety. This book attempts to illuminate the complexities of the work, while at the same time as it reveals a man who tried to reconstruct the extended family of his childhood through his relationships with the actors and technicians who followed him from film to film. Christian Braad Thomsen, a friend of Fassbinder's and a film-maker himself, is especially perceptive about Fassbinder's working methods and the specific nature of his cinematic imagination.