Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Known for: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed more than 40 films and television productions in 13 years before his death at 37, working at a pace that had no equivalent in European cinema. Drawing on Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodramas, Brechtian distanciation, and the experience of postwar German society, he produced works — Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) — of formal precision and emotional devastation. He died of a drug overdose in 1982.