Veronika Voss

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1982 / 104min / 35mm

The second film in Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy—films describing the early years of West Germany through the stories of women, which began with The Marriage of Maria Braun—Veronika Voss stars Rosel Zech as a faded screen star of the Nazi period, loosely based on actress Sybille Schmitz, now living in mid-’50s Munich and fed on a steady diet of opiates by a scheming neurologist. Fassbinder’s reworking of Sunset Boulevard, shot in searing black and white, achieves a level of immersive hysteria beyond anything in Billy Wilder’s film, its portrait of destructive addiction presaging the director’s own imminent death.