Description
A new reading of Fassbinder's most popular film that highlights the roles of race and gender.The Marriage of Maria Braun is the most popular film by the enfant terrible director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the leading exponent of the "New German Cinema" of the early sixties to early eighties. It exemplifies his use and abuse of the genre of melodrama. Set in the immediate postwar period and centered around a strong female protagonist, Maria Braun (1978) was the first film in a trilogy that attempts to work through West Germany's fraught past and the legacy of Nazi Germany through the eyes of characters marginalized by their gender, race, sexuality, or (dis)ability. Maria attempts to navigate the poverty and sexism of the immediate postwar years by making her relationships with men, including the Black American G.I., Bill, as beneficial as possible. In the end, she discovers she has been a pawn in a power game between her husband, Hermann, for whom she has been pining while he has been in
