Eight Hours Don't Make a Day

Amongst R.W. Fassbinder's work (66 films, if short films and episodes are counted single) one finds all genres, including TV dramas and documentary, but no horror and no sex movies. This has a good reason: The German film after World War II. consisted mainly in "Crime and Sex". There were first he Lederhosen- and Heimatfilms, later those controversial elaborates like the "Schulmädchen-Reporte" on the one side and the Edgar Wallace and later Wallace-like thrillers which were almost all written by Herbert Reinecker and many of them directed by Alfred Vohrer, on the other side. This were the genres one intended to forget. And since TV stations (at least in the 60ies and 70ies in Germany) became technically capable of getting a competition for the cinemas, this possibility to reach a wider audience was used by the directors of the New German Cinema in order not to relapse again into the moor of Sodhom and Gomorrha. Fassbinder, at the time when the 5 parts of "Acht Stunden Sind Kein Tag" were broadcast (1972), only 26 years old, wanted to establish basically all those topics which were important for him in his films, also for TV. His only TV series (that got stopped although it was a big public success) gives insights in the everyday life of German lower-middle class couples or families. In the center are Jochen and Marion, the crew is the extended "Fassbinder family". Codetermination at the working places of the laborers, apartment rent usury and prejudices against foreign workers are in the center of this series, but also solidarity, comradeship and social engagement. The title "Eight hours are not a day" became proverbial, meaning that the sense of life cannot be exhausted by slaving for a company during 8 hours, but needs in addition the butter of a bread-and-butter-job.