“An eight-hour film spread across five feature-length episodes, the self-referential title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, 1972-1973) opens each chapter with a reminder that it is “a Family Series.” Not only a series about a specific family household, it is an examination of applying the term to larger contexts than its most familiar usage and what it means to be a part of one. Also at the forefront throughout is the human satisfaction that sprouts from a job well done, and the means by which every member of a family cultivates their own sense of fulfillment through different riffs on manual labor. Think Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972) for the whole family, but where the Frenchies’ rhetoric waxes cosmically esoteric, Fassbinder keeps things simple (if longwinded)…”
So begins my review, which you can read in full over at Photogenie.