The Crucible of the Transnational and National: The New Wave Anti-Fascist Production Trend and Fassbinder’s Despair

Despair (1978) was a watershed in Fassbinder’s career: as his first English-language production, it enjoyed his biggest budget until that point and featured multiple stars of European art cinema like Dirk Bogarde and Andréa Ferréol. Despair was also rare for Fassbinder’s career because the script was adapted from a Nabokov novella by another famous writer, Tom Stoppard. Scholars, however, have not adequately considered Despair within the mode of European art cinema that it was clearly geared to realize. The essay explores Despair in the context of transnational art cinema at the time, including its Cannes premiere, its reception at the festival, as well as a transnational production trend around this time of major anti-fascist works, including by Luchino Visconti (The Damned), Liliana Cavani (The Night Porter), and Joseph Losey (Mr. Klein). This context brings to the fore neglected aspects of Despair, for example, its engagement with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.