Hail a Holy Hellraiser

Long before it became the home for battling chefs and bitchy housewives, Bravo was cable’s cultural bastion for opera, dance, classical music, theater performances and foreign films.

I should know. At the time, I held the now antiquated title of Secretary to the Manager of Bravo’s Program Acquisition Department. Between answering phones (voice mail wasn’t even a twinkle in Ma Bell’s eye) and pounding out letters on an IBM Selectric typewriter (clickey-clack, clickety-clack), I was exposed to all this high-falutin’ fare. The opera, ballet and symphonic stuff left me cold, but it was here that I discovered the exotica of global cinema. For a kid brought up on Disney’s animated saccharine and Cinemascope’s bloated epics, it was a reel smorgasbord. From the French New Wave to the Italian Neo-Realists and the Chinese Fifth Generation, I could feast on a broad array of movies that were way more compelling, insightful and thought-provoking than anything ground out by the Hollywood film factory.

Also unlike the studios, where movie titles are dictated as much by the storyline as the marketing department, foreign filmmakers have the same mastery with a moniker as they do over the medium. Some of my fave titles include Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (aka Dick Tracy on Mars), Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Lina Wertmuller’s Everything Ready, Nothing Works and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God.

There’s one foreign writer/director/actor who belongs in the Film Title Hall of Fame and that’s Herzog’s compatriot, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Completing an astonishing forty feature films in less than fifteen years (not to mention two television film series, three short films and twenty-four stage plays), Fassbinder was a bundle of creative energy and a self-destructive libertine who died from an overdose of sleeping pills and cocaine at the age of thirty-seven. Never one to shy away from controversy, he made front page news in his native Germany as much for his tortured personal relationships with both men and women as the provocative political content of his works, pissing off feminists, gays, conservatives, Marxists and Jews.

It’s no wonder he became known as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema and that his film titles reflect both the turbulence of his work and, ultimately, his life:

Love is Colder Than Death

Gods of the Plague

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?

Beware of a Holy Whore

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven

Whether Fassbinder ultimately joined Mother Kusters or is hanging in hell with a holy whore, his films and film titles can best be summed up in his own words: “I let the audience feel and think.”