Cauê Neves

Drawing from the influence of the German and French avant-gardes, as well as the late American avant-garde, this project aims to investigate the formal perversion of these currents in the cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, also taking Hollywood melodrama into account as the core of the filmmaker’s anarchic creative process. The proposal consists of a formal analysis of Fassbinder’s work through a selection of two of his works: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, 1972) and My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin: An Epilogue (Mein Traum vom Traum des Franz Biberkopf von Alfred Döblin: Ein Epilog, 1980). Preliminarily, we will highlight the Fassbinderian combination between theatrical forms: Brecht’s epic theatre, the violent experimentalism of The Living Theatre, and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. In cinema, we will explore the arrangement of the old Hollywood melodrama with the Camp and kitsch aesthetics of New York’s avant-garde cinema.