Texas Theatre hosts month-long tribute to gay filmmaker

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the most prolific filmmakers in history — he wrote and/or directed more than 20 features and documentaries, tons of TV movies and a mammoth miniseries, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and acted in a score of others. He was also openly gay — and very outre at that — in his life and films; at a time when gay cinema was consider underground, he was one of the most acclaimed international directors of his generation. He died, in 1982, of a drug overdose; he was only 37.
Oak Cliff’s Texas Theatre will spend the month of July looking back on Fassbender — first with a new documentary about his life, Fassbinder: To Love without Demands (showing July 7), followed by weekly screenings of three of his films: His uber-gay, full-frontal story of social climbing Fox and His Friends (1975); his most critically-lauded film, The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), starring his muse, Hanna Schygulla; and a restored of Kamikaze ’89, in which he starred (his last film appearance) for director Wolf Gremm.
Each screening is on Wednesday and starts at 7 p.m.