The atmosphere of In a Year of Thirteen Moons is dark, claustrophobic, filmed in hot colors, often at bizarre, cubist angles and heavy with Weltschmerz. Time and again it pauses for long, philosophical contemplation of the distastefulness of being and the seduction of ending—maunderings of the sort I thought even the Germans had renounced in our time….

Fassbinder mistrusts the social system as profoundly as he despairs of human relationships. He expresses this most explicitly through the history of Saitz, who had risen from black-market trickster to whoremaster to real estate millionaire and whom Elvira runs to earth in one of his vast but empty high-rises, locked in with a few henchmen and engaged in a childish parody of an old Jerry Lewis comedy he apparently keeps running endlessly on a TV set. This occupation I take to be a warning to tycoons that the fate of...