Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

(Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through March 20)

The little that most American moviegoers know about the prolific gay German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder isn't pretty. By reputation the director was dictatorial, self-indulgent, mean-spirited, racist, overly dependent on chemical substances, and, if one believes his most zealous detractors, a factor in the suicides of two former lovers.

That's quite a rap sheet for any artist--or human being for that matter. A key architect of what came to he known as the New German Cinema, Fassbinder knew that "nasty" sells. So he cultivated the bad-boy image or at least didn't refute it.

But according to a 1996 biography by Wallace Steadman Watson, the accuracy of much of the above is subject to debate, including Fassbinder's sexuality. Watson quotes Fassbinder colleagues who found the filmmaker to be flexible, supportive, and loving and suggests that despite publicly identifying himself as gay, he was really bisexual.

One fact, however, is incontrovertible: The man was talented. Using a potent mix of impassioned melodrama and biting satire, Fass-binder produced an entirely original body of work that remains as incisive today as when he was alive. He was also one of the most productive filmmakers in the history of cinema. Between 1969 and his death in 1982 at age 37, Fassbinder directed more than 40 feature-length works, among them The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Stationmaster's Wife, Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Fox and His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Querelle, and the 15-hour epic Perlin Alexanderplatz. The first complete Fassbinder retrospective, which opens January 23 at New York's Museum of Modern Art, will likely spark a reevaluation of his life and career. And since it's set to tour 14 North American cities between February 1997 and February 1998, it may also introduce Fassbinder to a new generation of cinema lovers.

The films these audiences will see are not without flaws. Few artists could have worked at Fass-binder's pace without occasional missteps, such as the humbling attempt at satire that is Satan's Brew. In dealing with his main preoccupations--interpersonal relationships and the devastation of post-World War II Germany--Fassbinder occasionally falters as a storyteller. But his cinematic flourishes are consistently evocative, even in the lower-budgeted projects of the early 1970s. Though his cinematographers obviously deserve credit, one of the most memorable sequences in his entire canon--a transsexual's woeful account of betrayal in love, set inside a slaughterhouse--occurs in a picture (In a Year of 13 Moons) on which the director himself operated the camera.

The particular edge to Fass-binder's films came from the uneasy marriage of his astringent cinematic style and his penchant for melodrama, borrowed from such Hollywood directors as Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession). Fassbinder's stated goal was to adapt Sirk's refined dramatic style to produce a German variation that was less Hollywood-slick and more overtly political. There's no missing the social commentary, for instance, that underlies Fox and His Friends, in which wealthy gays prey on a working-class lottery winner--with Fassbinder himself starring as the victimized tide character.

In the omnibus film Germany in Autumn, Fassbinder appears again, this time as the tormentor. Here his deteriorating real-life relationship with actor Armin Meier (the two more or less play themselves) becomes a metaphor for the fascist tendencies Fassbinder perceived in 1970s West German society.

Media activists in the days of scarce queer imagery found it galling that one of the era's few high-profile gay directors would construct mostly "negative" portraits. Fassbinder shrugged off the criticism, saying that his films weren't about sexual orientation, that he was merely depicting what he'd observed about life and that those who complained should make movies themselves if they wanted "positive" characters.

The MoMA retrospective tends to support Fassbinder's first claim, even with a character as odious as Petra von Kant. She may be abusive to all around her, but he doesn't position lesbianism as the cause. In any case it's difficult to stay mad at the filmmaker for Petra, what with present-day lesbians making multiple field trips to cheer on the dyke murderers in Bound.

If Fassbinder can be faulted for anything, it's his limited view of human behavior-people in his films rarely do anything except for monstrously selfish reasons. The paradox, one of the many mixed messages of his short life, is that he clearly conceived his cinema as a means to elevate consciousness. Or perhaps the paradox was intentional: His message lies in his ability to make us feel the consequences of our basest actions.