Bully Tag

Fassbinder 1000's of Mirrors by Ian Penman. 200 pages, Semiotext(e). 2023. There are only two ways to start an essay on Rainer Werner Fassbinder: with sex or with death. All the things else is scenery. This one begins with death. On the 1982 Venice Film Festival, a pirated copy of Fassbinder’s death mask reportedly made the rounds of hotels and cafes, smuggled in a plastic bag like a kilo, like takeout. Juliane Lorenz, a movie editor moonlighting as Fassbinder’s wannabe widow, commissioned the mask after the director died at thirty-seven—prematurely, but still right on cue—that June. (Stroke...