Product Details

• Actors: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake, Eva Mattes, Gisela Fackeldey
• Directors: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Writers: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Producers: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Fengler
• Format: Color, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: German
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Fox Lorber
• VHS Release Date: October 22, 2002
• Run Time: 124 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00006IUMI
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #461,919 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted his own play for this modern twist on The Women, the great all-female Hollywood classic of sex and social conventions in high society. Margit Carstensen is successful dress designer Petra, Irm Hermann her silent, obedient secretary/servant/Girl Friday Marlene (whom she alternately abuses and ignores), and Hanna Schygulla the callow, shallow young Karin, a seemingly naive blond beauty Petra treats as part protegée, part pet, until the calculating kitten turns on Petra. Michael Ballhaus's prowling camera finds Marlene silently hovering on the borders of Petra's dramas, looking on through doors and windows like an adoring lover from afar. Bouncing between catty melodrama and naked emotional need, it's a quintessentially Fassbinder portrait of doomed love, jealousy, and social taboos. The DVD features commentary by Fassbinder scholar Jane Shattuc, the early 1966 Fassbinder short films The City Tramp and The Little Chaos, the bonus documentary Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and filmographies. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent DVD also incl. both Fassbinder short films, January 7, 2003

By 

J. Clark (metro New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (DVD)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), one of Fassbinder's masterpieces, explores the tortured connections between desire and power. Not only is the DVD of exceptional quality, it includes both of Fassbinder's fascinating short films ("The City Tramp" and "The Little Chaos") plus a revealing documentary.

Although Bitter Tears remains one of Fassbinder's most controversial films - in part for its severely limited depiction of women's lives - it is also one of his most powerful. Fortunately, the range of lesbian-themed films in the past thirty years has presented women's experiences in considerably more diversity and fullness, so perhaps now we can better evaluate the film's considerable merits.

Fassbinder's casts are always uniformly strong, but this one is extraordinary, especially Margit Carstensen in the title role (she won several awards), Hanna Schygulla (with whom Fassbinder made 20 pictures) as her new lover Karin Thimm, and Irm Herrman as Petra's mysterious assistant Marlene who, without uttering one word, at times dominates with her sheer presence.

The film is astonishing for its interweaving of raw emotion with stunning and meticulous design. Fassbinder and director of photography Michael Ballhaus (who shot about half of the director's films, and now does all of Scorsese's pictures) wrest every bit of visual interest from the single claustrophobic set (we never leave this one apartment). The endlessly inventive deep focus compositions provide a series of emotionally penetrating, and technically virtuosic, comments on the action - ironic, allusive, symbolic, and visually gorgeous. The only picture which approaches this level of achievement - in making limited physical space utterly compelling as cinema - is Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles (1948), but he had all of two sets!

Fassbinder also makes acerbic use of every carefully placed object in the lavish apartment. Most notable is a gigantic blowup of Poussin's painting "Midas and Bacchus," which reminds us that Petra - like Midas, whose life was blasted by the "golden touch" - should be careful what she wishes for. The nude Bacchus stands in the center of the mural - and not infrequently Fassbinder's compositions - with the body of, well, a Greek god, a larger-than-life male in a film peopled entirely with women. Some critics argue that this overbearing backdrop represents the patriarchal system which underlies, and perhaps even dooms, the relationship of Petra and Karin. Fassbinder includes many other witty, even playful, elements throughout the film, both to give it greater resonance, and to keep it from descending into bathos. For instance, dramatic form has rarely been so drolly encapsulated as when Petra changes into a new wig - "symbolically" indicating her emotional state - in each of the film's five scenes (each unfolds in continuous time).

Although it would be unfair to reveal the ending, a tentatively optimistic reading may be possible: For one character it revolves around a newfound self-respect, for another because she has, for the first time, genuinely reached out to someone else. The film is so rich, on so many levels, that you may find yourself seeing it differently on each viewing. Few works so creatively, and powerfully, manage to subvert our desire for cathartic drama while simultaneously fulfilling it.

FASSBINDER'S SHORT FILMS ARE ALSO INCLUDED on this DVD. Both were made in 1966, when he was 19. "The City Tramp," about a homeless man who finds a gun, is a work of extraordinary, stark visual design and intriguing commentative sound (street noise juxtaposed with classical music juxtaposed with silence). It boasts excellent performances, with Fassbinder raising it far above the level of a "vanity piece" for financial backer cum star Christoph Roser. It also introduces several of the filmmaker's recurring themes, including alienation, the role of the outsider, exploitation, and violence, while its sporadic playfulness highlights another vital, and fun, aspect of his work. "The Little Chaos" is about three friends who use their knowledge of American crime movies (and Godard's 1964 film Band of Outsiders) to rob a woman. Although not as visually striking or emotionally rich as "City Tramp," it features first-rate performances and has a refreshing exuberance. The DVD also includes "Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977," an engrossing half-hour documentary.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lesbo-a-Go-Go, Fassbinder Style!, June 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Boy, oh, boy! The crankiest lesbians you'd ever want to see just talking and fighting, talking and drinking, talking and dancing to the Platters! I can't think of a better way to spend two hours. This one's amazing. Perhaps the ultimate Fassbinder: excruciating for many, sheer heaven for a lucky few. When brittle but oh-so-vulnerable Petra, wearing her bizarre Wagneresque 'gown' with the glittery pretzel-shaped decolletage, puts "In My Room" on the phonograph and starts bitching to gorgeous, scheming Karin about her first marriage, it'll send you into the stratosphere. Kinky, trashily hilarious, profound and political -- what more could you possibly want in a movie?

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fassbinder's take on a Mankiewicz classic, All About Eve, February 21, 2004

By 

Beverly Campbell (chicago, illinois USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (DVD)

Considerable journalism and scholarship has been devoted to Fassbinder's admiration for works of Danish-born film director Douglas Sirk. However Fassbinder did, in fact, loosely borrow from many melodramatic texts, Mildred Pierce for The Marriage of Maria Braun, Sunset Blvd. for Veronica Voss, both in the BRD Trilogy, and in the case of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, from Joseph's Mankiewicz's All About Eve.

In the audio commentary, popular arts critic Jane Shattuc makes reference to Fassbinder's theatrical renderings in the film, Petra's couture costumes, tightly framed background shots of the Poussin painting in Petra's apartment, and use of lighting, all of which provide the viewers with every bit of intimacy as a performance on stage.

Obviously his own background and training in theater was one source of inspiration for the film. But certainly another was his fascination with Hollywood melodrama, and specifically in this instance, Joseph Mankiewicz's characteriztion of Broadway legend Margo Channing and her idol Eve Harrington in All About Eve.

While same class consciousness dyanamics are evident in both films, so are elements of lesbianism and bi-sexuality. Only in the case of Fassbinder the class differences between Petra, her appentice, and the Hanna Schgulla character become stark and more exaggerated. As for sexual oreintation, what's implied in All About Eve is more evident in Petra von Kant and worthy of a enough consideration to do a doctorial dissertation on the subject.

i love this film because it provides the most vivid and detailed characterizations of female intentions, wants, and desires of any other film in the Fassbinder canon, including the female characters in the BRD Trilogy or Berlin Alexanderplatz.