Veronika Voss

The last film in Fassbinder's trilogy about postwar Germany. Veronika Voss was once a famous screen actress. She was among the stars of the UFA studio under the Nazis; now nobody calls her. A sportswriter runs into her on a rainy night and follows. What emerges is this: she is kept at a doctor's clinic and maintained on morphine. The doctor controls both her medication and her property. So the narrative is less about a star's collapse than about how the collapse was turned into a business. The look of the film is tied to the character's condition. It was shot in black and white and in the clinic scenes the light is pushed so far that the white nearly burns; the actress's face sometimes disappears inside it. The character was drawn from a real person: one of the stars of prewar German cinema, later forgotten, who died young. Rosel Zech plays Veronika. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin and became one of the best-known works of Fassbinder's final years. A strong example for anyone who likes German cinema and criticism of the postwar period. For a viewer expecting a nostalgic portrait of a star, the film is cold, distant, and shows its character no pity.