In collaboration with the Goethe Institut, Boston and the Department of German at Harvard, the HFA presents a tribute to the late, great enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A product of the experimental theater in postwar Germany, Fassbinder grafted his Brechtian penchants onto a rich, visual cinematic canvas that embraced aspects of the conventional Hollywood genre film (gangster movies, melodramas) and piercing social critique, creating a highly unique body of work that remains unrivaled in its political and emotional resonance. The retrospective features the films that established his name internationally as well as rarely screened work he produced for German television. It offers an opportunity to survey not only the range of the director’s prolific output—which included forty-four film and television productions from the late 1960s until his untimely death, in 1982, at age thirty-seven—but his multiple talents as a writer, actor and director. The series is prefaced by a new documentary that explores Fassbinder’s enduring legacy, twenty years after his death.