Editing Rainer Werner Fassbinder (section)

====''The Merchant of Four Seasons'' (1971)====
Fassbinder scored his first domestic commercial success with ''[[The Merchant of Four Seasons]]'' (''Händler der vier Jahreszeiten'', 1971).<ref>{{harv|Watson|1996|p=117}}</ref> The film portrays a married couple who are fruit sellers. Hans faces rejection from his family after he violently assaults his wife for not bending to his will. She leaves him, but after he suffers a heart attack they reunite, though he now has to employ other men. His restricted ability to function leads him to ponder his own futility. He literally drinks himself to death.

''The Merchant of Four Seasons'' uses melodrama as a style to create critical studies of contemporary German life for a general audience. It was Fassbinder's first effort to create what he declared he aspired to: a cinematic statement of the human condition that would transcend national boundaries as the films of [[Michelangelo Antonioni]], [[Ingmar Bergman]] and [[Federico Fellini]] had done.<ref name="Pipolo">{{harv|Pipolo|2004|pp=18–25}}</ref> It is also his first realization of what he learned from Sirk: that people, however small they may be, and their emotions, however insignificant they may seem, could be big on the movie screen.<ref name="Pipolo"/>