JAIL BAIT might be the first James Dean fantasy to ever use puppy love, motorcycles, and pomade hairdos as a twisted metaphor for processing a very German, very ugly past. On the surface, this film is about teenage rites of passage and the consequences of subverting societal sexual mores. Move past the premise of under age sex and scandal and what do you see? A postwar world where German youth are rebelling against the conservative social norms of their repressed parents, and by extension, historical fascism and the legacy of Nazism. These teens belong to a counter-culture that has emerged to question the rigid authoritarianism of the past, to which their parents are both victims and victimizers of. 

Fassbinder brings…

Having recently finished Rainer Werner Fassbinder's filmography, I felt like revisiting Jail Bait, which I have seen only once before, but loved. It is, alas, one of his hardest films to find, desperately in need of a restoration and a new release to the general public. I believe the main issue is a legal one (playwright Franz-Xaver Kroetz, who wrote the play the film is based on, initially even tried to stop the film's release because he was disgusted with it), but if the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation figured out a way to get World on a Wire released, they should somehow be able to get this one done, too. The only way of currently accessing it that I found…

Fassbinder's manipulation of the power dynamics in cinematic compositions; whose big and whose small, whose on top and whose on the bottom used here as a response to the German audience, the traditional framework for observation and the power dynamics as a product of the society. His treatment of emotions play in reverse to their very rigid and formulaic functions in the performances and the battle of glances frequent in Fassbinders work, for example long master shots bring us closer into the characters emotions. Instead of keeping us at a distance they draws us into their constant alienation in a single shot. So does his static direction of actors it serves to mask a deep emotional world and at the…

Die Nazis haben auch ihre Fehler gehabt

Eigentlich eine Schande, dass der Film so schwer in die Finger zu bekommen ist - vielleicht spricht da auch nur meine Vorliebe für das Obskure aus mir - aber ich würde ihn zu Fassbinders gelungensten Werken zählen. Im Prinzip ist es ja ein Vorgänger seiner BRD-Trilogie, ein inoffizieller Teil 0 und meiner Meinung nach der Beste aus dieser fiktiven Reihe.
Schauplatz bilden erneut die 50er Jahre, an denen er so häufig seine Gesellschaftskritik durchexerziert hat. Zum ersten Mal widmet Fassbinder sich auch den Problemen von Heranwachsenden, der Generation James Dean und damit schließlich einem extremen Konflikt zwischen Kriegs- und Nachkriegsgeneration.
Zu komplex und vielschichtig sind die sowohl psychologischen als auch sozialen Probleme, die…

I hope this eventually gets the remaster treatment that so many of Fassbinder's other films have gotten in the last few years. This is definitely a more minor work in his canon but it still deserves better than the blown out VHS rip that makes the rounds.

I'm not familiar with the play that this is based on but this feels like Fassbinder through and through. Jail Bait treads similar thematic ground to many of Fassbinder's other films but presents them in their most blunt and cynical forms. This film also leans into an almost exploitation style treatment of hot button issues as it piles on layers of incest, statutory rape, abortion, and patricide.

There's very little room or time…

Having recently finished Rainer Werner Fassbinder's filmography, I felt like revisiting Jail Bait, which I have seen only once before, but loved. It is, alas, one of his hardest films to find, desperately in need of a restoration and a new release to the general public. I believe the main issue is a legal one (playwright Franz-Xaver Kroetz, who wrote the play the film is based on, initially even tried to stop the film's release because he was disgusted with it), but if the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation figured out a way to get World on a Wire released, they should somehow be able to get this one done, too. The only way of currently accessing it that I found…

Die Nazis haben auch ihre Fehler gehabt

Eigentlich eine Schande, dass der Film so schwer in die Finger zu bekommen ist - vielleicht spricht da auch nur meine Vorliebe für das Obskure aus mir - aber ich würde ihn zu Fassbinders gelungensten Werken zählen. Im Prinzip ist es ja ein Vorgänger seiner BRD-Trilogie, ein inoffizieller Teil 0 und meiner Meinung nach der Beste aus dieser fiktiven Reihe.
Schauplatz bilden erneut die 50er Jahre, an denen er so häufig seine Gesellschaftskritik durchexerziert hat. Zum ersten Mal widmet Fassbinder sich auch den Problemen von Heranwachsenden, der Generation James Dean und damit schließlich einem extremen Konflikt zwischen Kriegs- und Nachkriegsgeneration.
Zu komplex und vielschichtig sind die sowohl psychologischen als auch sozialen Probleme, die…

I hope this eventually gets the remaster treatment that so many of Fassbinder's other films have gotten in the last few years. This is definitely a more minor work in his canon but it still deserves better than the blown out VHS rip that makes the rounds.

I'm not familiar with the play that this is based on but this feels like Fassbinder through and through. Jail Bait treads similar thematic ground to many of Fassbinder's other films but presents them in their most blunt and cynical forms. This film also leans into an almost exploitation style treatment of hot button issues as it piles on layers of incest, statutory rape, abortion, and patricide.

There's very little room or time…

JAIL BAIT might be the first James Dean fantasy to ever use puppy love, motorcycles, and pomade hairdos as a twisted metaphor for processing a very German, very ugly past. On the surface, this film is about teenage rites of passage and the consequences of subverting societal sexual mores. Move past the premise of under age sex and scandal and what do you see? A postwar world where German youth are rebelling against the conservative social norms of their repressed parents, and by extension, historical fascism and the legacy of Nazism. These teens belong to a counter-culture that has emerged to question the rigid authoritarianism of the past, to which their parents are both victims and victimizers of. 

Fassbinder brings…