Part of Trilogies, Part 2 and The BRD Trilogy
See also: Melodrama and Politics: A Rainer Werner Fassbinder Seminar (Wed, Mar 20 | 6:30-7:45pm)
Once-beloved Third Reich–era starlet Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. Struggling for survival and haunted by past glories, the forgotten star encounters sportswriter Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) in a rain-swept park and intrigues him with her mysterious beauty. As their unlikely relationship develops, Krohn comes to discover the dark secrets behind the faded actress’ demise. Based on the true story of a World War II UFA star, VERONIKA VOSS is wicked satire disguised as 1950s melodrama.
“Does indeed offer a point of climax and summation: namely, to the meteoric career of its director. Significantly, it is one of the most successful of Fassbinder’s many appropriations of canonical Hollywood genres, a project — his desire to create a Hollywood in Germany — that was among the director’s most astute and intelligent achievements… Perhaps Fassbinder’s most damning judgement of Germany during and following Nazism. It is a worthy summation of an extraordinary trilogy of films.” —Adam Bingham, Senses of Cinema “If MARIA BRAUN made its heroine into a symbol of Germany pulling itself together after the end of the war, and LOLA was about the conflict between corruption and duty, VERONIKA VOSS seems to be about Germany's lingering fascination with the images of the 1930s, with the carefully cultivated aesthetic of decadence, domination, perversion, and sinister sexuality… There are times during the movie when we can almost see everyday, ordinary postwar Germany picking its way distastefully through the smelly rubble of pre-war decadence.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1982) “The showing tonight [Sep 24, 1982] at Lincoln Center of the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder's VERONIKA VOSS, the opening attraction of the 20th New York Film Festival, sets such a high standard that the rest of the entries may be hard put to meet it… VERONIKA VOSS, which has been photographed in knife-sharp black and white, doesn't work in ordinary ways. Unlike MARIA BRAUN and LOLA, it doesn't have any easily apparent social and political targets. It works entirely through the myths of movies.” —Vincent Canby, New York Times (Sep 24, 1982)
