As she said in an interview here last year, she owes her career to him, but he was also ''a destructive force,'' someone who needed ''to possess'' his actors, ''to manipulate them, to play masochistic games with them.
Miss Schygulla was certainly not typecast by Fassbinder, and though he conceived brilliant films that made use of her talents even as he was showing them off, he was not an easy man to work with.
The most memorable of these are the small-time Munich tart in ''Katzelmacher,'' the obedient, doomed baroness in Fassbinder's adaptation of Theodor Fontane's ''Effi Briest,'' and the heroine of ''The Marriage of Maria Braun,'' a character described as ''the Mata Hari of the postwar German economic miracle'' and the role for which she received an Oscar nomination. It was with Fassbinder that she made her film debut in 1969 in ''Love Is Colder Than Death,'' which was also his first film, and with whom she then went on to create an entire gallery of Fassbinder-designed portraits. That it has taken Miss Schygulla some time to achieve this recognition - as an independent, fully developed, star personality - is only because her career has been so closely bound up with that of one filmmaker, the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With ''A Love in Germany,'' it is apparent that Miss Schygulla has at long last become one of the great European film actresses of our era, comparable only to Jeanne Moreau, who has been around a few more years but with whom Miss Schygulla shares a willingness toward career risks.
MARTA MAYER MOVIE
Though ''A Love in Germany'' is one of the Polish director's finest films in recent years, it is Miss Schygulla's presence that transforms the movie into a cinematic event. However, the big news of the festival's first week must be the triumphant performance by Hanna Schygulla in Andrzej Wajda's ''Love in Germany,'' an uncharacteristically romantic Wajda film with, characteristically, strong political implications. The 22d New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, now at midpoint, has gotten off to an unusally impressive start with the premieres of ''Country,'' a beautiful looking, sincere if sobersided paean to American agriculture with a good, tough performance by Jessica Lange, its star and co-producer ''Diary for My Children,'' Marta Meszaros' memoir about growing up in Stalinist Hungary, and Jim Jarmusch's very funny ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' one of the most original American comedies currently on view.
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