As artistic disappearing acts go, Rainer Werner Fassbinder¹s is among the most impressive the 20th century has to offer. In the 1970s, the period of his greatest productivity, the Bavarian auteur was considered by some the most important European filmmaker since Godard, an artist of astonishing productivity -- he made seven films in 1971 alone -- whose versatility and insight were without peer. The New York Times¹ Vincent Canby, one of Fassbinder¹s most ardent American champions, wrote of The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), "It¹s of that incredible sharpness that cuts through to the bone without giving immediately apparent pain."

And yet, 21 years after his death, Fassbinder has faded from view. Drop his name to most people under 40 and you'll get a blank stare, or a look of vague recognition, in return. Though a good number of his 41 features have been released on video, few have made the jump to DVD. Critics rarely mention his name, less out of ignorance than because there are so few filmmakers working today in a style that might reasonably be compared to his. Far From Heaven, which was at least as indebted to Fassbinder's reworking of Douglas Sirk as Sirk himself, might have done for Fassbinder what Pulp Fiction did for Godard, but Todd Haynes' '50s reenactment was so seamless, few investigated its origins.

Though generalizing about an artist with such a daunting body of work is a bit of a mug's game, it's fair to say that Fassbinder's cinema was universally Brechtian, distrustful of emotional involvement that might dull an audience's critical faculties. Like many of Fassbinder's films, Katzelmacher (1969), his second feature, employs boredom and confusion as deliberate strategies; the film returns frequently to a stagy shot of its young characters sitting along a wall, oppressed by their own aimlessness. By the time a Greek immigrant (played by Fassbinder himself) moves into their neighborhood, you've gotten a visceral taste of the anomie that erupts into racist violence. In Beware of a Holy Whore, shot in 1971 and already Fassbinder's 10th film, he repeats the strategy, with a bored-to-the-gills film crew milling purposelessly around a Spanish hotel lobby, downing endless Cuba Libres and quarreling drunkenly amongst themselves. Then, suddenly, comes a burst of violent plot twists, which serve less to provide action than to parody the need for it.

Opinions differ as to why, but it's clear that such films lose much of their power on television. It may be that they rely on the quiet insulation of a movie theater to lull their audience into a properly trance-like state, or simply that the temptation of the fast-forward button is too great. But the dwindling of repertory cinema may have much to do with the evaporation of Fassbinder's reputation. "His movies almost demand a movie theater," says the Philadelphia Film Festival's Ray Murray, who remembers programming Fassbinder at the Roxy and the TLA. "Slow-moving films have their own power, but it's really on the screen."

That power will be on display in Philadelphia over the next month, as a scaled-down version of Wellspring's touring Fassbinder retrospective comes to town. Spread over three venues and spanning a month, the retrospective brings three early Fassbinder features (Beware of a Holy Whore, Love is Colder Than Death and The American Soldier) to International House this weekend, along with Fassbinder's two earliest surviving short films, The City Tramp and A Little Chaos. Next week, three of Fassbinder's best-known works -- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Merchant of Four Seasons and The Marriage of Maria Braun -- arrive at the Ritz, and the Prince closes out the series with a trio of his most daring: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fox and His Friends and Chinese Roulette. (Wellspring has also begun to issue Fassbinder films on DVD, two at a time.)

Fassbinder himself was as controversial as his films. Though he was married twice, his homosexuality was an open secret and he was reputed to possess an almost hypnotic hold on his stock company of lovers and actors -- many of whom overlapped. Fassbinder once declared his great subject to be "the power of emotional manipulation," and he could be as cruel in his relationships as the characters in his films were; two of his lovers -- including El Hedi ben Salem, a poor Moroccan immigrant who was thrust into stardom as the lead in Ali -- committed suicide after Fassbinder spurned them.

Hanna Schygulla, perhaps the actress most closely identified with Fassbinder, recalls that side of Fassbinder, but another as well. Reflecting on their first meeting, when she was a young drama student and he three years her junior, she says, "There was this mix of being shy and rebellious -- extremely shy, but ready to reverse everything. You could feel some talent ready to explode." His "magnetism," she explains, came from the same two qualities: "It was always a mix of rising tenderness and fear."

In New York to kick off the retrospective, Schygulla now bears an uncanny resemblance to Debbie Harry, but in Fassbinder's films -- including, most famously, The Marriage of Maria Braun -- she was typically a forthright, self-possessed woman who used her sexuality as a tool for self-advancement. It was, similarly, Schygulla's own self-assurance that allowed her to come through her experience with Fassbinder without emotional scarring. "I'm a planet of my own, too," she says. "When I was 4 years old, I was hanging around on the street, and a neighbor came up and asked me, ŒWho do you belong to?' And I said, ŒTo me.'"

Schygulla, who shot 12 movies with Fassbinder between 1969 and 1972, not to mention acting in several of the plays he regularly staged, recalls the whirlwind pace of those days: "There wasn't so much thinking in it. The dynamic was of [working with] somebody who was really possessed, so driven, that he took everybody with him. It was being part of something, even if you wouldn't quite understand what it was all about."

Fassbinder thrust the history of fascism in the face of a country still avoiding its own past, his own beefy Bavarian presence the greatest rebuke to Aryan ideals. "My first impression of him was, ŒWhat a strange boy,'" Schygulla recalls. "Strange-looking, too, because he had that kind of Mongolic face among all these German faces." So, too, his films attacked a German industry intent on turning out bloodless pastoral romances. Ray Murray explains, "It's hard to appreciate today, but back then, that style of film, that rawness, the human conflict, the underbelly and all the sad souls of all these Germans -- not the blond mädches, but the riffraff of Germany, working-class people -- that was eye-opening. Before then, the stuff coming out of Germany was all these yodeling films from Bavaria."

It was in the realm of sexuality, though, that Fassbinder transgressed most freely. His films present a polymorphously perverse world where sexuality knows no boundaries; there are no gay or straight characters, only characters who are more or less adept at manipulating sex for their own ends. In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the fact that Margit Carstensen's Petra is recently divorced doesn't prevent her from falling for Schygulla's opportunistic nymphet, any more than it prevents Schygulla from going back to her husband after she's bled Carstensen dry. (When Petra's mother learns of their relationship, she exclaims, "My daughter loves a girl. How strange.") Kindred spirits like François Ozon, who directed a film version of Fassbinder's unproduced play, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, might draw inspiration from Fassbinder's equal-opportunity cynicism, but it doesn't play too well on today's gay film fest circuit. "Fox and His Friends was one of the earliest gay films," Murray says, "and when you think that it was a political, socioeconomic film rather than a coming-out or first-love [story], he was very ahead of his time. Even to this day, people don't like [his films], because he saw gay relationships as just as exploitative and domineering as straight relationships."

What made for compelling art didn't serve Fassbinder so well in his personal life, though. He died at 36 of a drug overdose, never able to alter the lifestyle of his younger days. "I think that's the tragedy of his life, that he had a hard time believing in love," Schygulla says. "He was too skeptical -- he thought love was some kind of mechanism of social suppression. But on the other hand, maybe it's the thing that he was most longing for, like everybody."

The films, of course, remain, although whether or not they will continue to be seen is an open question. "I think the world needs spirits that are capable to upset, to make us aware that if we go on the way we go on, we degenerate, or we end up far from that state of being that we all started with, when we were children, we were just so intensively in the present, and living, really involved and on fire and full of wonder," Schygulla says. "So whatever life and routine does to us after a while, this all needs to be reviewed, and maybe turned upside down from time to time."