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Rainer Werner Fassbinder, at the age of 16, filled out a questionnaire required of schoolchildren that asked them about their plans for the future. He replied that his goal was to become a filmmaker, and make such a large amount of films that his life itself would become a film. With all of the well-publicized sexploits, drug use, and provocative press statements (that would give Von Trier a run for his money) it seems he accomplished his teenage goal insofar as he was always on the screens of the media and his films saturated the movie houses. He was born in 1945 in Germany, three weeks after the Third Reich surrendered to the Allied Forces. Over the course of his 14-year career, 1968-1982, he made over 40 films across every conceivable medium dealing with the lingering specter of Nazism and the exploitation of emotions within Germany of the 1970s.
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