Lola" (1981) Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

For years, Angelas parents have tried to make her feel guilty for having driven them to seek comfort outside their marriage. Ironically there is some indication that their dalliances may have had a hand in the accident that caused her condition. In this unpleasant milieu, they begin playing a truth-telling game called "Chinese Roulette," which leads to even more distasteful revelations and recriminations..

From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1970, were influenced by the work of the Antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich. Collected here are five of those fascinating and confrontational works. Whether a self- conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling glimpse into the mind of a twentysomething man who was to become one of cinema’s most madly prolific artists.

''Veronika Voss'' joins ''The Marriage of Maria Braun'' and ''Lola'' to make up the director's trilogy about West Germany in the 50's. It is one of Fassbinder's last and best films he made before his sudden death in 1982.

This tale of intermingled love and hate is directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and is the 13th of the 33 films he made in his short life. It explores the universal dynamics present in close human relationships, even lesbian ones. Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer. Some time ago, she divorced the husband she no longer loved. Until recently, she has been in a fairly satisfactory S & M relationship with her assistant. When she develops an obsession with her fashion model, however, things become far more complicated.

Franz (Fassbinder) refuses to join a mob-type organization and insists on going it alone as a petty thief. His hooker girlfriend (Hanna Schygulla) and pal Bruno (Ulli Lommel), who mysteriously and erotically enters their lives, then hit the road, quietly offing anyone in their way while planning a bank robbery.

Three of RW Fassbinder's early works united together in a single release. Each reworking the gangster noir genre, a la the French New Wave, these three Fassbinder films are some of the most interesting and intriguing of the New German Cinema movement. The loose trilogy of Love is Colder Than Death, Gods Of the Plague and The American Soldier, each shot in black and white, represent an iconoclastic artist's journey though narrative and form.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's controversial, fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin's great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made forty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic, restored in 2006 and now available on DVD in this country for the first time, follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to "become an honest soul" amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.

A technical designer enjoys a comfortable life with his wife and child. He has the approval of his boss and is in good health except for smoking too much according to his doctor. His wife is visited by a girlfriend one Sunday afternoon. The man is bored watching television and grabs a chandelier and kills the conversing women and his child. In a chilling display of nonchalance, he contemplates his own death by hanging in this disturbing feature. This film was the fourth for director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Hailed as a defining moment in Fassbinder’s prolific career, “The Merchant Of Four Seasons” tells the story of Hans, a street fruit peddler and born-loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to drinking and violence. After recovering from a debilitating heart attack, his buisness finally starts to take off. However, the more he becomes a credit to his family, the more depressed he becomes. One sociable day, while toasting his friends and family, he decides to drink himself to death.

Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer – arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. Petra falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in. The rest of the film deals with the emotions of this affair and its aftermath. Fassbinder tells his story in a series of 5 or 6 long scenes with extended uses of a single camera shot and deep focus.