Das Kleine Chaos: 1966 Short Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder


Here’s a 1966 short crime film by a young and learning Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The great and too-soon-departed German filmmaker actually plays one of the three young criminals who decide to invade a woman’s home to terrorize and rob her. The film is relentlessly cool and begins at around the 3 minute mark to really show how deeply Fassbinder was mining the work of Jean Luc Godard. Those shots in the apartment with Fassbinder reading the novel out loud in front of a wall of pinned art prints is straight up Godard stuff. But it’s just fine to imitate other filmmakers as long as your real intention is to destroy them from the inside. Fassbinder was just that kind of filmmaker.

Here’s an article about Fassbinder on the Senses of Cinema site.

Film: Prénom Ernesto

Marvelous movie! Prénom Ernesto was made by Gabriel Dib and it stars Ernesto Salles as Ernesto and Debora Gaspar as Anna K.  It’s in Portuguese and I don’t understand more than several words of it but I don’t have to.  It’s a wonderful film that is inspired and heavily influenced by the work of Jean-Luc Godard.  The filming of traffic at the beginning of the film is a Godard signature, the gunshots on the soundtrack, the sudden on-screen titles and the quote from Godard that goes, ‘All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.’  That’s essentially what this film is about.  It’s shot with that casual sense of people interacting with objects that Godard perfected in the early sixties. Dib has made a very careful and productive study of Godard’s technique and uses it in a way that shows how fresh and modern it still is.