Rainer Werner Fassbinder made films like someone trying to outrun his own nervous system.

Across an absurdly compressed life, he became one of the central figures of New German Cinema, producing a body of work that moved through melodrama, cruelty, beauty, addiction, politics, sex, performance, class, loneliness and postwar Germany’s very bad habit of pretending the past had politely left the room.

Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors is not a neat biography and would be worse if it were. It moves in fragments, reflections, digressions and sharp little turns: part film criticism, part self-portrait, part drug memoir, part cold war atmosphere, part love letter with its teeth still in. Penman writes about Fassbinder as a filmmaker, myth, worker, destroyer, symptom and mirror, but also about what it means to be young, watching films, inventing a self from scraps, scenes, poses and private obsessions.

This is cult criticism in the proper sense: not fandom, not summary, not polite cultural homework, but an attempt to think through why certain artists get lodged in the machinery of a life. For readers of Maggie Nelson, Chris Kraus, Mark Fisher, Wayne Koestenbaum, McKenzie Wark, or anyone who wants criticism that still has weather in it.

Fitzcarraldo Editions paperback, first published in Great Britain in 2023. Minor marks and light shelf wear to the white cover, because Fitzcarraldo covers appear to have been designed by someone who enjoys punishing booksellers/tote bag owners. Internally clean, binding sound.