Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

Thousands of Mirrors is a study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder that moves between genres, taking in melodrama, biography, a cold war thriller, a drug memoir, an essay in fragments and a mystery. Ian Penman wrote it over a short period, and the book's restless form matches a director who often made films in only weeks or a few months.

Penman casts the filmmaker as a kind of urban poet, in the way Baudelaire was for Walter Benjamin: a figure working in a turbulent, messy era just before everything changed. The writing echoes fragmentary works by Roland Barthes, Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, and its subjects run from sexuality and drug use to art, urban life, film and political upheaval.

Edition note: published by Semiotext in 2023, 195 pages. ISBN-13 9781635901887. The book is part of the Native Agents series.