In a Year with 13 Moons

Starring:In a Year With 13 Moons
Studio: Fantoma
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
In 1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Fox and His Friends, inspired by his relationship with working-class butcher Armin Meier. When Fassbinder dumped his longtime lover in 1978, the distraught Meier committed suicide, and Fassbinder fell into a deep depression. Whether driven by guilt or helplessness, the director drew from the experience for another film, the story of transsexual Elvira Weishaupt (Volker Spengler in a haunting performance). Elvira, formerly Erwin, is a working-class butcher who changed her sex for a lover who promptly left her. She now spends her days wandering the alienating industrial Frankfurt cityscape while reminiscing about her painful past. Coming after the lush, soft-focus beauty of the international hit The Marriage of Maria Braun, the bleak landscape of Frankfurt and Elvira's harsh, stylized flashbacks are almost shocking. The faint of heart should be warned of a gruesome slaughterhouse scene where cattle are killed and butchered--a display of cruelty that echoes the emotional brutality of Elvira's past. It's one of Fassbinder's most personal projects (in addition to writing and directing he serves as cinematographer, editor, and set designer), a strikingly stylized film and one of his most emotionally wrenching works. Meier may have inspired Elvira, but Fassbinder invests himself into the character, and his identification creates a powerful, painful portrait drenched in despair. --Sean Axmaker
Description
When the object of his affection off-handedly commented, "too bad you're not a girl", Erwin disappeared to Casablanca and returned as Elvira. Now, adrift and alone amid the maze of the Frankfurt streets, Elvira revisits the people and places of his past, desperately searching for the identity and love and she's never known.

Description

MARTHA
IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS

He has been called everything from a petty tyrant to the last great filmmaker of the 20th century. In little more than ten years, Rainer Werner Fassbinder created an amazing legacy of forty-three films. Before his death at the age of 37, Fassbinder had destroyed boundaries, redefined genres, and changed the course of German cinema. Fantoma is very proud to present this special 2-DVD set featuring two of his finest films.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent starting place.......2006-07-26

This set would probably be the best introduction to Fassbinder's films that you can find. 'Martha' represents the quintessential Fassbinder melodrama.. Margret Carstensen's desperate performance as a tortured wife is unforgettable.. 'In a Year with 13 Moons' is among the director's best works - it is a transitional film in his catalog it brings together the experimentation of his early years with the scope of his later hollywood-like (tongue in cheek hollywood) films..
This would be my choice for an affordable introduction to Fassbinder.

Fassbinder: the master.......2006-07-20

Granted I haven't seen the dvd, or the features (these films have been released seperately for a while though), I can easily say these are some of Fassbinder's masterworks.
Both are haunting, touching, and unflinching in that sense.
Fassbinder was a true master, and these films accentuate that.
In A Year With 13 Moons is a little odd as a film, but what film of Fassbinder's isn't? But Martha is definitely something else and well worth seeing (more so than 13 Moons at least).
Regardless, if the picture quality lives up to the quality of the films, this shouldn't be a set a fan of Fassbinder (or world cinema in general) should miss.

Average customer rating:

everything is great, but the price!
Brutal, honest, excellent
A bleak and crude vision of the multiple facets of love!
What no one seems to be mentioning is the humor
Fassbinder's Dark Masterpiece

In a Year with 13 Moons
Starring: Original Soundtrack
Manufacturer: Fantoma
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Similar Items:

Fox and His Friends
Martha
Beware of a Holy Whore
Satan's Brew
Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy (The Marriage of Maria Braun / Veronika Voss / Lola) - Criterion Collection

ASIN: B0001A79DK
Release Date: 2004-04-13

Amazon.com

In 1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Fox and His Friends, inspired by his relationship with working-class butcher Armin Meier. When Fassbinder dumped his longtime lover in 1978, the distraught Meier committed suicide, and Fassbinder fell into a deep depression. Whether driven by guilt or helplessness, the director drew from the experience for another film, the story of transsexual Elvira Weishaupt (Volker Spengler in a haunting performance). Elvira, formerly Erwin, is a working-class butcher who changed her sex for a lover who promptly left her. She now spends her days wandering the alienating industrial Frankfurt cityscape while reminiscing about her painful past. Coming after the lush, soft-focus beauty of the international hit The Marriage of Maria Braun, the bleak landscape of Frankfurt and Elvira's harsh, stylized flashbacks are almost shocking. The faint of heart should be warned of a gruesome slaughterhouse scene where cattle are killed and butchered--a display of cruelty that echoes the emotional brutality of Elvira's past. It's one of Fassbinder's most personal projects (in addition to writing and directing he serves as cinematographer, editor, and set designer), a strikingly stylized film and one of his most emotionally wrenching works. Meier may have inspired Elvira, but Fassbinder invests himself into the character, and his identification creates a powerful, painful portrait drenched in despair. --Sean Axmaker

Description

When the object of his affection off-handedly commented, "too bad you're not a girl", Erwin disappeared to Casablanca and returned as Elvira. Now, adrift and alone amid the maze of the Frankfurt streets, Elvira revisits the people and places of his past, desperately searching for the identity and love and she's never known.

Customer Reviews:

everything is great, but the price!.......2007-05-07

a great movie, but little bit expensive.....

after i brought it, i found that i could buy it in my city with half of the price.....regret!

Brutal, honest, excellent.......2007-02-07

The movie should have been called "Despair" had Fassbinder himself not made the film with that title just before "In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden" (1978) which was very personal for the writer/director who had to come to terms with his lover's suicide. This drama follows the last few days in the life of Elvira - Erwin Weisshaupt. Several years back, Ervin underwent the sex change operation in hopes to win love of the man he loved. It did not help him to make Anton love him and it did not make him happier. It may sound beautiful, "I'll do anything for love, I'll be anything you want me to be" but by trying to be someone else, a person simply loses his/her own identity, becomes lonely and desperate and has no way out.

The movie is the most touching, moving, powerful and devastating Fassbinder ever made - it is impossibly difficult to watch at times but it does not make it a bad movie. The acting is fantastic by everyone; the directing is tight and Fassbinder is always in control taking movie from its melodramatic roots to the heights of pure tragedy, never been over-sentimental and even providing some humor. The choice of music with the references to "Death in Venice" (eternal and never fulfilled longing) and to Fellini's "Amarcord" (looking back at one's life trying to find the roots in the childhood, to understand how and why the things happened the way they did) makes the film even more compelling.

Warning: there is a scene in the slaughterhouse which is almost unbearable to watch. It is the very important scene but be prepared for it. It does not spare any details of the job done and in its emotional impact is as horrifying as "Les Yeux sans visage" ("The Blood of the Beasts" (1949), the short documentary by Georges Franju.

A bleak and crude vision of the multiple facets of love! .......2006-03-14

Just only a very few filmmakers in cinema ' s story have had the supreme virtue of treat th human being with such load of affection, respect and indulgency no matter the circumstances of religious, social, racial or psychological orders we talk.

Fassbinder literally embraced and loved the human being, and he dared to present many unsaid realities of universal repercussions. This awful and penetrating movie deals around a sex change of a man who tries to please his male lover, and then to be abandoned and deal with this stigma against the world.

An awful and incisive film which demands all your possible attention. It is not an easy going picture which anticipated itself by far to many actual issues.

What no one seems to be mentioning is the humor.......2006-02-16

Yes this film is full of hard-to-watch scenes like the slaughterhouse sequence, but what has not been mentioned is the wit and humor of the piece. Beginning with the openning scene in which a bunch of hustlers beat up the heroine because she is not a gay man, Fassbinder pulls a series of reversals and twists on what is expected. There are also amusing visual incongruities such as Elvira and Zora in their full femme outfits visiting slaughterhouses and convents.

The strong emotional impact of this film cannot be separated from Fassbinder's usual humor, which puts the character's pain into a larger perspective.

Fassbinder's Dark Masterpiece.......2005-01-07

This film is a masterpiece because of the way it challenges viewers: it refuses to be mere escapist entertainment as so many movies are. It bleakly confronts the way the legacy of the holocaust in Germany and the alienation of modern capitalism have turned people into soulless machines: love is impossible, a real life of honest emotion becomes unlivable. The main character, Elvira Weishaupt, is a lonely, forgotten soul who is kicked around and ignored by the rest of the world; what gives her life meaning is that she once loved someone passionately enough to change her entire life and identity for him, which, nonetheless, did not make any difference at all. Fassbinder mourns, in this film, the violent mysterious deaths of two previous lovers, El Hedi Ben Salem and Armin Meier; he bears witness to the crushing collapse of the utopian dreams of free love and personal liberation that marked the 1960's. This is one of Fassbinder's most intellectual films (Schopenhauer, Kafka and Sartre are all explicitly referenced) but it's also one of his most human and heartfelt, using great music (Mahler, Roxy Music, Connie Francis) to express the bittersweet longings of the main character. This is a nihilist statement that can actually make people appreciate life -- Utopia is what we all make of it, and everyone is an "outsider" in one way or another.

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