Four films made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) in the first half of the 70s, the period of most intense activity in his career, along with one of his best early works, Katzelmacher (1969).

Also included is his crucial television series Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (1972-1973), all in newly restored prints. "When I would stand in the morning at the entrance of a factory, leaflets in hand (I usually went to one of the electrical workshops in Berlin), almost none of the women would accept those leaflets."

So we couldn't know whether they (most of the unskilled and skilled workforce were women) couldn't or wouldn't engage with terms like "alienation," "desublimation," or "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall." That's why we decided to rewrite the pamphlets, translating them into the language of the supposed everyday experience of female factory workers.

The new political films seemed to me to be the same as this reformulation. Like the examples a teacher gives in school: embellished arithmetic problems. The images in the film conversed and acted so that the lesson content wouldn't become boring. A class-conscious or feminist position was also put into the mouths of the characters, so that at least in the movies, people would talk as we would have liked to hear in real life. […]

With his television series Eight Hours Don't Make a Day , [Fassbinder] came quite close to this false reconciliation. The series in question constantly tries to prove that workers or housewives can also be film or television heroes. When they assert their rights and talk about change, they do so in the same way that Katz elmacher 's images express their resentment. Their opinions are fervent. The device Fassbinder used in the factory conversations, switching from one worker to another with rapid pans, not only struck me as awful, but also demonstrated a certain disorientation resolved in an offensive manner.

The workers would signal to each other from one machine to another, like people chatting from table to table in a bar. This led to the comparison of the machines to bar tables, ignoring the fact that it is the machines that connect the workers, who are actually so separated by their work that brief conversations cannot easily bridge that gap. When we stood in front of a factory, leaflets in hand, the female workers wanted nothing to do with us, but the women in the offices looked at us with interest.

It wasn't our overt message that opened that door for us, but rather the gesture of our action. Politically it was a failure, but culturally it was a success. Fassbinder was never interested in promoting a new lifestyle. His success, however, helped us achieve ours, even if it was dubious. Fassbinder was successful in everything he did. Even a television series about workers that shows nothing of the collective or, at least, the mass appeal of proletarian life was considered a success.” (Harun Farocki, “A Diva with Glasses,” 2005)