Tonight at 8 p.m., the Dryden will screen Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder than Death, R. W. Fassbinder, West Germany 1969, 88 min., 35mm, German w/subtitles).

Fassbinder himself plays small-time pimp, Franz, in this film that could seem more indebted to the nouvelle vague than to Douglas Sirk or Bertolt Brecht. While ostensibly a gangster film, Love Is Colder than Death really concerns a complex love triangle, between Franz, his prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (Hanna Schygulla), and Bruno (Ulli Lommel), the member of a crime syndicate that Franz refuses to join. While Fassbinder's film does have much in common with a French New Wave work such as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959), it shares little of the latter's carefree exuberance. Ultimately foregrounded here is a bleak precision and sense of alienation that would go on to characterize Fassbinder's work as a whole. Love Is Colder than Death was Fassbinder's first feature film, and the first installment in what he loosely conceived as a gangster trilogy, which the Dryden will screen in its entirety (see also Saturday, May 23, and Thursday, May 28).

[source: Dryden website, 2015-May-18]