Despair (film)
1978 Film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Despair (German: Despair – Eine Reise ins Licht, lit. 'Despair – A Journey into the Light') is a 1978 psychological historical-drama film directed and co-edited by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, adapted by Tom Stoppard from Vladimir Nabokov's 1934 novel. It stars Dirk Bogarde, Andréa Ferréol, Klaus Löwitsch, Volker Spengler and Bernhard Wicki.
The film follows a wealthy chocolatier in Weimar Germany (Bogarde), who plots to kill and impersonate his own apparent doppelgänger in order to escape his life. The tone of the film, like that of the novel is satiric and ironic. The plot is mostly similar to the novel, although one of the key characters is significantly altered in the adaptation.
Despair was a West German and French co-production, and was Fassbinder's first English-language film. It premiered at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. It won in three categories at the 1978 German Film Awards, including Best Director for Fassbinder.
Plot
Hermann Hermann lives in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. A refugee from Soviet Russia, with a Baltic German father and a wealthy Jewish mother, he has inherited a business making chocolates.
The public source identifies “Despair (film)” as 1978 Film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Despair, film and Film.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1962376. VIAF identifies the subject as 210972850. 12 of 13 selected statements include explicit references; 12 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Despair (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.