When asked in 1974, halfway through his too-brief career, whether he thought films ought to be critical rather than affirmative, Rainer Werner Fassbinder replied that ‘the best thing’ he could imagine ‘would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as the Hollywood film and a criticism of the status quo. That’s my dream, to create such a German film – beautiful and extravagant and fantastic, and nevertheless go against the grain.’ Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is in large part a book about dreams, and about interrupting them. Fassbinder belonged to a generation of left-wing artists, musicians and filmmakers whose aim was to shake their audience out of a slumber. You could, borrowing a term from Trotskyism, call these artists ‘entryists’. Though rooted in the avant-garde, they weren’t content with creating works for unshockable cognoscenti. They believed that if they could smuggle their ideas into the mainstream, the result would be an ‘explosion in the heart of the commodity’, as the late Mark Stewart put it, a disruption of the unthinking common sense of an affluent capitalist society. The sleepwalking masses would be jolted into an awareness of the true poverty of their lives, and into the political action necessary to change it.
