Like a Bird on a Wire

Hans is a street fruit peddler and born-loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to turn to drinking and violence. After recovering from a debilitating heart attack, his business finally begins to take off. However the more he becomes a credit to his family, the more depressed he becomes.

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.

Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. While he wants to climb up the social ladder, it isn't without turmoil, and being torn between his old working class roots, and the shiny new facade of middle class consciousness.

"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive young wife Katherine, and two sons by a previous marriage; the homosexual Frank, and the retarded Davy. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning, until various of the family members ask him to kill some of the others.

Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.

The lackluster and plodding Bolweiser has the (mis)fortune to be married to the town's siren; his trusting nature leads him into serious trouble when she beds nearly every available guy.

Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the anger of her father, whose incestuous sexual attentions to her have grown unbearable.

The story of the young man Peter, who grew up during the economic miracle, bereft of parental care and love. Learning early on that interpersonal relationships are based on the principles of exchange or purchase, he abides by these rules and gives generous presents to his family and his wife Erika. But when he is unable to keep up this life-style, his story takes a horrendous turn ...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder visits for two weeks the "Theater der Welt" festival 1981 in Cologne. 30 companies showed in over 100 performances their own visions of a new theater. Framed by Fassbinder's reading of one of the famous essays on theater: Antonin Artaud's "The Theater and its double". The audience is left to wonder how much of Artaud's radical and beautiful vision is realized in contemporary theater.

After having her second child, a German housewife suffers from post-partum depression before inexplicably falling into a continually misdiagnosed mental state, befuddling her relatives.