Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors [Paperback]

A kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period in the spirit of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman’s equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution. A book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.
—Betsy Reed, The Guardian

Sneakily brilliant … Thousands of Mirrors is wise and chatty, keenly observed and casual.
—Christine Smallwood, 4Columns

A painfully self-interrogating book, at the centre of which is the monstrous figure of Fassbinder, a centrifuge of absurd, gargantuan appetites, impossible productivity, heartbreaking melancholy, ever present paranoia, bleak cruelty, volcanic tantrums and rare, dissembling sweetness.
—John Douglas Miller, Frieze Magazine

Unfolding as a sequence of 450 numbered fragments, the book intersperses insightful observations about Fassbinder’s life and work with Penman’s own first-person reflections on art, autobiography, and the culture of the 1970s.