Actor · 1934–2017

Peter Berling

5: briefs
13:00: average
65 min: in total

On film.briefs5

Love Is Colder Than Death

Rainer Werner Fassbinder · 1969

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1969 debut is a stark, low-budget crime drama shot in Munich with his Anti-Theater ensemble. It follows a pimp, a sex worker, and a syndicate enforcer caught in a cycle of betrayal and violence. With flat cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann, sparse music by Peer Raben, and editing by Fassbinder himself, it prioritises structure over sentiment — a rigorous, unsentimental examination of transactional relationships in post-war West Germany.

13:00

The Marriage of Maria Braun

Rainer Werner Fassbinder · 1979

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 drama follows Maria Braun from her wartime wedding through fifteen years of survival, ambition, and moral compromise in postwar West Germany. Hanna Schygulla’s restrained performance anchors a film that charts national recovery through private sacrifice — loyalty weaponised, love instrumentalised, and agency steadily dissolved. Shot by Michael Ballhaus and scored by Peer Raben, it is the first of Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy.

13:00

Veronika Voss

Rainer Werner Fassbinder · 1982

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 black-and-white drama follows Veronika Voss, a faded UFA film star in 1955 Munich, as she unravels under morphine addiction and the control of a corrupt neurologist. Loosely based on actress Sybille Schmitz, the film uses stark monochrome cinematography, sparse scoring, and Rosel Zech’s tightly controlled performance to dissect how institutions discard compromised women while preserving their image. It is the final film released in Fassbinder’s lifetime and the last of his BRD Trilogy.

13:00

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Werner Herzog · 1972

Werner Herzog's 1972 film follows Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre, played by Klaus Kinski in the first of five collaborations between the two, as he leads a splinter group of Spanish soldiers deeper into the Amazon in a doomed search for the mythical city of gold, El Dorado. Written in under three days, shot chronologically over five weeks entirely on location in the Peruvian rainforest on a budget of roughly $370,000, and scored by Popol Vuh, the film became a cult favourite whose off-screen production stories, including Kinski's on-set volatility, are nearly as well known as the film itself.

13:00

Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog · 1982

Werner Herzog's 1982 account of an Irish rubber-boom dreamer who portages a real steamship over a Peruvian hillside to fund an opera house, filmed with a real ship, a volatile Klaus Kinski, and none of the effects that would have made it easier.