A biography of the philosopher and activist who was for thirty-five years, the most influential thinker of France and the West.

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder was simultaneously a maker of films and a man who 'played with people'; the forty-three films he directed before his early death at the age of thirty-seven in 1982 were products of a convoluted game of emotions between him and a close-knit group of versatile actors. He wielded astonishing power over his artists, but though he was an oppressor, he made passionate cinematic statements about liberty in such productions as The...