Event

VERONIKA VOSS in 35mm

Monday, April 3 @ 7:00 PM
VERONIKA VOSS
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1982
In German with English subtitles
Rainer Werner Fassbinders most unambiguously beautiful film was also the last one he lived to see released. Months after VERONIKA VOSS premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it would win the Golden Bear, Fassbinder would be dead of a drug overdose and his penultimate film would take on autobiographical echoes. VERONIKA VOSS draws from the life and mysterious death of German actress Sybille Schmitz, best known abroad for her work in Carl Dreyers VAMPYR but notorious in her home country for remaining active in the German film industry throughout the Third Reich. Fassbinder tracks the final days of his titular character (played with otherworldly abandon by the phenomenal German TV actress Rosel Zech), a has-been movie star with a paralyzing morphine addiction, as she is besieged by parasitic medical professionals, carries on an affair with a local sports reporter, and attempts to mount a comeback in the German film industry of the 1950s. Recalling the heyday of American film noir, as well as the horror-tinged melodramas SUNSET BOULEVARD and THE SEVENTH VICTIM, with the addition of more than a smidge of pitch-black humor and a quietly droning soundtrack of country music hits, VERONIKA VOSS is an icy, monochrome masterpiece, in love with classic cinema and at odds with the industry behind it. (CW)
104 min Tango Film 35mm from Janus Films