Fassbinder, Franz, Fox, Elvira, Erwin, Armin, and All the Others

Abstract

As October prepared its special issue on Fassbinder, In a Year of Thirteen Moons became its focus, with the film's script as its central document. representative in Germany responded to our request to publish the script with the following sentence: Es freut uns, dass Sie In a Year of Thirteen Moons publizieren wollen; als ein sehr persbnlicher Film ist dies geradezu ein Schliissel zu gesamten Werk. Because this is a very personal film, it is actually a key to entire oeuvre. I remembered similar phrases about this special subjective nature of Thirteen Moons from the reviews that had appeared when the film was released in New York. This babbling of the Doxa-Public Opinion, the mind of the majority, petit bourgeois Consensus, the Voice of Nature, the Violence of Prejudice- kept nagging at me: at his most personal, assumes total artistic control, Fassbinder's immediate response to the loss of his lover. Thus, Wilhelm Roth, in his annotated filmography of Fassbinder: Fassbinder worked on the film from July 28 to August 28, 1978, a few months after the suicide of his friend Armin Meier, who appeared with him in Germany in Autumn. Fassbinder not only wrote the script and directed, but was responsible for the sets and editing, and did the camerawork himself for the first time. Never before had he taken a film so fully into his own hands; hardly any other film is so much tied up with his life.