Ulli Lommel

If you’re used to the lush Sirkian Technicolor of Fassbinder’s later films, this feature debut might come as something of a bracing shock. Its monochromatic minimalism and coolly detached subversion of gangster-film tropes are served up with an extra dose of nihilism, because, well, it’s Fassbinder.

Effi Briest tells of a seventeen-year-old girl who is married off by her parents to a wealthy Baron more than twice her age. Lonely and dissatisfied, she seeks solace in the companionship of her husband's friend, Major Crampas.

In this surreal drama, a young woman faces the darkness of her past, and uncertain future, as she struggles to find her own identity.

Chinese Roulette, set in an isolated house during a weekend break, is like Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None without the murders - a tense psychodrama in which infidelities are revealed and families breakdown. At its centre is nouvelle vague icon Anna Karina, a rare outsider alongside the familiar Fassbinder faces.