Confession time. I only made it through 50% of this book. It started really well. I found the combination of personal narrative and film criticism worked well. It would have made a great essay. But, I found that ir didn't work in long form.

It is a portrait of a time, the disillusionment of the seventies, the tawdry glamour of the eighties and the cultural artefacts that these times created. This book might have been more interesting if I had lived through these, but I was only a child in the 1970s and a young teen in the eighties. As you would expect, it is well-written. I would recommend it to anybody interested in film and the times covered by the book. However, it wasn't for me

I’m a huge fan of Fassbinder and Ian Penman’s book skilfully and quirkily analyses his life and work in a refreshing and unconventional style. Not a straightforward biography, more a personal exploration of one person’s love for a unique filmmaker.

Penman here offers a memoir-in-pieces by way of an overview of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s life and prolific filmmaking career, combined with a sort of rough cultural history of 1970s Germany. The author sets out his stall with the first sentence of the book proper: ‘The first thing to proclaim is: the absolute impossibility of summing up Fassbinder.’ (Despite that, he does find a neat way of collectively describing Fassbinder’s thematically and aesthetically diverse output: ‘malign fairytales for jaded adults’.) 'Thousands of Mirrors' is not supposed to be comprehensive – while a few of Fassbinder’s films are discussed in some detail, others have only a brief paragraph devoted to them, and Penman is most interested in personal aspects, in puzzling out why exactly Fassbinder became so significant in his own life. Mulling over the effect of the whole piece, I feel both Fassbinder and Penman remain somewhat obscure to me, but I don’t find that to be a problem. The book, deliberately a set of glimpsed fragments, is aptly titled.

A really interesting overview of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s life and work from legendary critic Ian Penman. This is not exactly a biography - in fact, it’s just as much a piece-by-piece memoir about how Fassbinder’s work came to mean something special to Penman himself. I’m not a Fassbinder aficionado but this did make me want to see a lot more of his films - as well as read and watch so much of the other media mentioned. A great read!

Strangely, despite the thousands of references to Fassbinder in Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, we learn little about the fêted director, his movies, or his life. Penman weaves a bit of Fassbinder into his otherwise all-consuming memoir, a network of themes, relationships and fandom, only a few bits extrapolated from the titular auteur. Penman dispenses with Fassbinder’s oeuvre through comparisons, one film being like another or updating this with a shadow to that. It’s an orgy of namechecks, many sections are simply lists of moves, TV shows, punk groups, and other directors, and the titles of Fassbinder’s 44 projects repeated. The movies, their affecting power, economy, and purposes, and their explorations of what love can be and what it can do to us, remain dark experiences in Penman’s memory or scattered on YouTube.

Why write a book at all if it is nominally about an artist without need for their art, their screen a yearning void? And perhaps that is the elusive point of this episodic account of a tantalisingly edgy Fassbinder. Penman’s Fassbinder believed that people choose madness as he himself chose intensity. Penman amplifies the live-fast-die-young Fassbinder, the voracious cigarette-guzzling auteur, his physiognomy a clock of deterioration, the frame rate accelerating the decay. But, you are safe with Penman. He avoids excess. He capitulates, and too soon, the reader is back swaddled in the Netflix present, nostalgic for one-night art house stands and movies remembered as unrepeatable experiences.

I guess plenty of books will tell you about Fassbinder’s life and achievements—chatgpt it. We don’t need any more information. So, for example, of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, possibly Fassbinder’s most highly regarded work, Penman avoids analysis. It is ’a notable exception to the general rule’, a movie with a scene in a hospital, a film with ordinary characters tainted by innocence, and ‘unquestionably a masterpiece.’ To flesh out Fear Eats the Soul for those who have not seen it, the narrative plays out in luminous 70s Fugicolour. It concerns a mixed-race couple from different generations. They first encounter one another in a gloomy bar, where they dance slowly to the jukebox. It’s love without glamour, although there is plenty of fab period décor and the woman has a lovely wardrobe of geometric fabrics. Soon the relationship is oppressed by neighbourhood bitterness, fuelled by aggressive racist and ageist attitudes—however, the initial spite yields to a self-interested acceptance. But, the man remains a curiosity, an unknown object. He is desired, discounted, and ultimately pathologised—roles habitually reserved for women, projected onto an exotic male body. Without providing the details of such scenarios, Penman can refrain from engaging with the criticism of Fassbinder’s noted portrayals of women and rumours of his off-screen grooming, gaslighting, and abuse. Former lovers El Hedi Ben Salem (the Ali of Fear Eats the Soul) and Armin Meier committed suicide, Irm Hermann claimed she tried to kill herself three times, and Hanna Schygulla said she felt like Fassbinder’s puppet. In Penman’s fetishisation of the Fassbinder myth, we don’t learn about any of it. Fassbinder associated women with passion and men with commerce. And, for all their power, his female characters remained mired in patriarchal representations as victims. A female lead, Veronica Voss, sums it up, ‘You don’t understand me when an actress plays a woman who wants to please a man, she tries to be all the women in the world rolled into one.’

Overall, the book’s style of rambling reminiscences cut short makes sense as a generous and restricted take on the Fassbinder, who challenged taboos, stereotypes, and bourgeois attitudes. Penman ponders, as in a discontinuous late-night inebriated conversation where he struggles to exactly recall any salient facts, lurching from one amazing awesome clip you’ve gotta see to another, where his Luddite fumbling with Youtube subtitles is so absorbing that he forgets what he wanted to say about the unseen gem on the screen (Ian, you just need to select closed-caption and then go to settings to get the English translation. Or, as Jack [Adam Driver] instructs us in White Noise [Noah Baumbach 2022], if you are serious about your subject, learn German).

Fassbinder’s stance in works such as Fear, and more so in earlier works, was detached and non-judgemental. His characters, particularly lovers, are strangers, enthusiastic but never intimate in a conventional way. These lovers test one another to see how far they will go and how much they are prepared to pay. Fassbinder sees love as transactional, and similarly, Penman expresses his devotion in quantities; that’s why there are so many lists. And, to consolidate his stance, the whole thing is subdivided into 450 discrete numbered sections. It is an economy of means, in keeping with his subject’s approach. Fassbinder reused sets, props, locations, and actors. The expedience gave his movies, such as Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), and Voss (1982), a Brechtian sense of artifice, paradoxically heightening the realism of his intimate company of artistes, performing with committed tenor.

The Fassbinder Penman doesn’t commit to is the miscreant, misogynist, chauvinist, antisemite, anti-gay, and anti-communist. In the book, the great director’s contradictions remain in suspension. A self-destructive monster whose monstrousness is strangely uninteresting as the long-essay stutters its enthusiasm for a complex subject and turns out to be a chronological survey, ending with Fassbinder’s final film, the erotic Querelle (1982). Studio bound and stylised as if Fassbinder was breathing technicolour and animation into the drawings of Tom of Finland. The pent-up narratives of the iconic artist’s characters are finally and gloriously able to play out. In fact, the story derives from Jean Genet. Penman mentions Genet 32 times but never tells the reader anything of how Genet squeezed poetry from a heroic, uncompromising life. Penman situates his words in between one thing and another, eulogising those blown out on excess, asking us to imagine early-Garbo morphed into late-Chet Baker. People lost to deregulation and on a downward spiral into the darkness of cigs, alcohol and substances. For Penman, this free indulgence is an enticing masculinity. But for this reader, it is misogynistic, not emancipation but fear of freedom perceived or represented in the movies as a female condition – those who experience it are mad. Fassbinder’s enlightened madness and freely administered self-abuse is a retort to the pathologised woman—medicated to be normalised.

Included in a list of quotations informing Ian Penman’s piece is this observation from Jean Genet, “The idea was dreamed rather than thought…” one that seems a fitting description of Penman’s melancholic, idiosyncratic study of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Part meditation, part biography, part film criticism, archivist, cultural critic and perennial outsider Penman’s restless, roving approach reflects Fassbinder’s own rampant unconventionality. Penman moves between thinking about Fassbinder as an individual and Fassbinder as both icon and iconoclast - queer, fiercely political, prolific, divisive, continually courting controversy with his obsessive ongoing critiques, his railing against the condition of post-WW2 Germany. Penman probes Fassbinder’s origins, his intricate network of influences from Doblin to Godard to Sirk to post-1968 gay politics. Alongside, inextricably intertwined with his consideration of Fassbinder, are Penman’s attempts to work out why Fassbinder has been so important in his own life. And at times it’s not clear if Penman writing about the film-maker or trying to recapture the spirit of a time and somehow come to terms with the losses of his own past.

Through Fassbinder too, Penman is able to delve into the relationship between cinema and ideology, beginning with the American movies flooding post-war Germany as part of a project designed to make occupation palatable; to counter any traces of National Socialism by promoting American values – however contradictory those might have been in the light of events like the bombing of Hiroshima. But Penman isn’t aiming for rigorous cultural or social history, his writing is more atmospheric and essayistic, at times not unlike Walter Benjamin's - another highly significant figure in Penman’s life. Instead Penman returns over and over again to themes of estrangement, mirroring, alienation and “dead-eyed” consumerism, as he sifts through fragments of the past, invoking the mood of the Cold War and a later Germany overshadowed by the Red Army Faction during the turbulent 70s, and out of all this the spectacular rise of New German Cinema.

Penman rejects linearity, laying out his ideas in a series of numbered paragraphs that interconnect through association and implication. Penman’s often cited as influencing writers and theorists from Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher to Brian Dillon and there is something of their work apparent in his style, the way he deploys aspects of memoir, philosophy and critical theory. Although his work’s often more opaque than theirs, free-flowing, even outwardly anarchic, as he spits out references to Derrida, Barthes and Nabokov to Genet and Otto Dix, yet strangely disciplined. I find this one impossible to fully represent. It's sometimes incisive and illuminating, sometimes bewildering and self-indulgent, but never less than fascinating or stimulating.

Penman on Fassbinder is an intriguing match and as it turns out a really worthwhile one. This is a long meditation, divided into 450 short sections, on what Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his films and art meant, and still mean, to Penman. It's also much more - a celebration and to a certain extent an attempt at a rehabilitation of a figure he describes as "an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed". This indicates how well the book captures a vanished, predigital world in all its complexity. Fassbinder only died in 1982 but it seems much longer ago. This is an excellent book if you're interested in Fassbinder, (German) culture in the 1960s and 1970s, or just really powerful writing.