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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - In a Year of 13 Moons
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List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $39.85
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: New Yorker Video
Starring: Spengler, Caven, John
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786303386430
Format: Color
ISBN: 6303386431
Label: New Yorker Video
Manufacturer: New Yorker Video
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: New Yorker Video
Release Date: 1998-01-01
Running Time: 119
Studio: New Yorker Video
Theatrical Release Date: 1980-06-11
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Editorial Reviews:
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In 1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Fox and His Friends, inspired by his relationship with working-class butcher Armin Meier. When Fassbinder dumped his longtime lover in 1978, the distraught Meier committed suicide, and Fassbinder fell into a deep depression. Whether driven by guilt or helplessness, the director drew from the experience for another film, the story of transsexual Elvira Weishaupt (Volker Spengler in a haunting performance). Elvira, formerly Erwin, is a working-class butcher who changed her sex for a lover who promptly left her. She now spends her days wandering the alienating industrial Frankfurt cityscape while reminiscing about her painful past. Coming after the lush, soft-focus beauty of the international hit The Marriage of Maria Braun, the bleak landscape of Frankfurt and Elvira's harsh, stylized flashbacks are almost shocking. The faint of heart should be warned of a gruesome slaughterhouse scene where cattle are killed and butchered--a display of cruelty that echoes the emotional brutality of Elvira's past. It's one of Fassbinder's most personal projects (in addition to writing and directing he serves as cinematographer, editor, and set designer), a strikingly stylized film and one of his most emotionally wrenching works. Meier may have inspired Elvira, but Fassbinder invests himself into the character, and his identification creates a powerful, painful portrait drenched in despair. --Sean Axmaker
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: In a year of personal catastrophe.
Comment: "Every seventh year is a lunar year. Those people whose lives are essentially dominated by their emotions suffer particularly strongly from depressions in these lunar years. The same is also true of years with 13 new moons, albeit not quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also happens to be a year with 13 new moons, the result is often a personal catastrophe."
During his short life (1945-1982), Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 43 films in all, establishing him as one of the most prodigious directors in film. Many of his films involve characters considered to be social deviants. Inspired by his romantic relationship with butcher Armin Meier, who starred in seven of the director's films before committing suicide in 1978, Fassbinder's film, In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden), is about a personal catastrophe. It tells the story of an unhappy transsexual, Elvira Weishaupt (Volker Spengler), who is forced to confront her deviant existence after undergoing a sex change for a lover who then left her. The film is set in Frankfurt during a year of 13 moons: 1978, also the year of Meier's suicide. Humiliated by her lover Christoph (Karl Scheydt), Elvira's resulting descent into sadness, emptiness, and loneliness is a universal journey of anyone who has ever been betrayed by love. In a Year of 13 Moons is not so much a film about despair, social cruelty, or ennui, as it is a lesson in what it means to be human, and in compassion for social outcasts. While this was my first Fassbinder film, it does not surprise me that other reviewers below have called In a Year of 13 Moons their favorite Fassbinder film. There is much to love about this film. It is a rare film with the power to change one's perceptions, which is the quality of any truly great work of art.
G. Merritt
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fassbinder's most complex work...
Comment: I initally saw this in a really poor VHS transfer from New Yorker Video, but obviously, the DVD is much better. This, along with Berlin Alexanderplatz, are my favorites of Fassbinder's work. There is such a strange, haunting quality to this film, from the early strains of Mahler's 5th symphony, 4th movement at the beginning (which is one of the most majestic pieces ever recorded, and one of my favorite symphonies that moves me to tears at times) that haunts the film to the very end. Even though it's about a transgender woman being jilted by her lover (the man she got the sex change for), her struggle for love is universal, which is why you can identify with it so strongly. It's incredibly sad, yet funny in spots too (much like life). It's one of Fassbinder's most complex films (which is saying something), and certainly one of his top 5 films. He made over 40 features in a 13 year time span (including miniseries and shorts), and he would probably be still going today if he didn't die of a drug overdose. I miss the ambition and the deep artistry of Rainer, whose films still haunt me (and us) today.
The DVD has some excellent interviews with those who worked on this film and with Rainer on many occasions. They talk about him with great feeling as if he were still alive today (in many ways, he is, as his work lives on). But you can skip Richard Linklater's tedious, self indulgent, and completely unrehearsed introduction. Linklater says a few interesting things, but he ends up coming across like a film professor who doesn't really understand Fassbinder's film except from an academic, overly intellectual point of view, and he talks about himself WAY too much.
Customer Rating:
Summary: everything is great, but the price!
Comment: a great movie, but little bit expensive.....
after i brought it, i found that i could buy it in my city with half of the price.....regret!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brutal, honest, excellent
Comment: The movie should have been called "Despair" had Fassbinder himself not made the film with that title just before "In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden" (1978) which was very personal for the writer/director who had to come to terms with his lover's suicide. This drama follows the last few days in the life of Elvira - Erwin Weisshaupt. Several years back, Ervin underwent the sex change operation in hopes to win love of the man he loved. It did not help him to make Anton love him and it did not make him happier. It may sound beautiful, "I'll do anything for love, I'll be anything you want me to be" but by trying to be someone else, a person simply loses his/her own identity, becomes lonely and desperate and has no way out.
The movie is the most touching, moving, powerful and devastating Fassbinder ever made - it is impossibly difficult to watch at times but it does not make it a bad movie. The acting is fantastic by everyone; the directing is tight and Fassbinder is always in control taking movie from its melodramatic roots to the heights of pure tragedy, never been over-sentimental and even providing some humor. The choice of music with the references to "Death in Venice" (eternal and never fulfilled longing) and to Fellini's "Amarcord" (looking back at one's life trying to find the roots in the childhood, to understand how and why the things happened the way they did) makes the film even more compelling.
Warning: there is a scene in the slaughterhouse which is almost unbearable to watch. It is the very important scene but be prepared for it. It does not spare any details of the job done and in its emotional impact is as horrifying as "The Blood of the Beasts" (1949), the short documentary by Georges Franju.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A bleak and crude vision of the multiple facets of love!
Comment: Just only a very few filmmakers in cinema ' s story have had the supreme virtue of treat th human being with such load of affection, respect and indulgency no matter the circumstances of religious, social, racial or psychological orders we talk.
Fassbinder literally embraced and loved the human being, and he dared to present many unsaid realities of universal repercussions. This awful and penetrating movie deals around a sex change of a man who tries to please his male lover, and then to be abandoned and deal with this stigma against the world.
An awful and incisive film which demands all your possible attention. It is not an easy going picture which anticipated itself by far to many actual issues.
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