Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781635901887

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""A book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time."" —Betsy Reed, The Guardian"

"""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"

A book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time. -Betsy Reed, The Guardian

Author Information

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and City Journal. He is the author of Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

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