Love is Colder Than Death

Schygulla and Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Love is Colder Than Death, from 1969, is an assured first feature that suffers from some self-conscious artiness. The gangster plot is not deeply felt. Rather, it is more of a regurgitation of tropes from comic strips, JP Melville, Godard, and, especially, Warhol. Fassbinder's stock company, already in place thanks to his work in the theater, loll indolently while plotting half-assed stratagems; a Fassbinder motif repeated in Beware the Holy Whore and The Third Generation.

Dietrich Lohmann's gorgeous high-contrast, black and white cinematography engages the viewer. Characters shot against white backgrounds highlight the postmodern debt Fassbinder owed to his artistic forbears and anticipated the work of Robert Longo; who eventually married Fassbinder collaborator, Barbara Sukowa. When Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder ride off into the sunset at this film's end, one can't help feeling love and exhilaration for the duo. They stand at the outset of an extraordinary career together.