Love is Colder than Death
(Liebe ist kälter als der Tod)

Screening on Film

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
With Ulli Lommel, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake.
West Germany, 1969, 35mm, black & white, 88 min.
German with English subtitles.

In the director’s first feature film, a small-time pimp (Fassbinder) in love with a prostitute (his recurring leading lady Schygulla) resists the efforts of a Berlin crime syndicate to recruit him and opts for a more independent life of crime. This experimental, mannerist take on the American gangster film reflects the director’s awareness of the existential crime studies of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville as it examines the social order through the lens of society’s underbelly. “What is important to me is that those who see this film call into question their most deeply private feelings,” he mused. “That is more political, or more politically aggressive, I find, than showing the police as the prime oppressor.”