The German (rather, West German) director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first feature, “Love Is Colder Than Death,” from 1969, is one of the great first features. The genre came into being with “Citizen Kane”; before Orson Welles, filmmakers tended to made lots of films quickly before emerging with their first enduring classics. Welles established the notion of the epochal first feature that didn’t just launch a career but knocked the history of cinema into a new orbit. Next came Jean-Luc Godard, who did so in early 1960 with “Breathless,” a Parisian version of an American film noir that nonetheless plays like an intimately personal story.

Fassbinder, too, made a gangster film, setting it in his home town of Munich and turning it personal in his own way—not least, through his performance in the lead role of Franz, a small-time pimp who refuses to accept a mobster’s offer that he can’t refuse. As a result, he’s pursued by a killer, all the while also being hunted by another pimp.

The story, rooted not in Fassbinder’s experience but in his cinematic mythology—both his viewing of American movies and of French New Wave films that borrowed from them—nonetheless suggests his own sense of himself as an outsider in the crosshairs for not playing the game. He made the film as an independent filmmaker, putting some of his own money (earned by acting) into the film, and got some money from a private backer, but working utterly outside the system of German filmmaking. He was twenty-three at the time.

A couple of weeks ago, at the Berlin Festival, I brought up the subject of Fassbinder and his leap into filmmaking. The topic under discussion was the current state of German filmmaking, and what became clear is that it’s inseparable from the current German state: government subsidy has become, for the most part, the sine qua non for most German filmmakers, beginners as well as veterans, and discussions, public and private, revealed that the bureaucrats whose decisions matter exert a disproportionate influence on the substance of films as well as on the determination of methods of production. The very process of entering the financing pipeline slows filmmakers’ plans and projects to a crawl and creates undue delays in the making even of relatively low-budget movies. It’s the antithesis of youth and its ardor, its urgency, its irrepressible outpouring of creative energy—which is exactly what’s on view in Fassbinder’s first film.