Fassbinder and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

We will discuss the following questions in today’s seminar. You do not have to discuss all of these areas in the study group session. The questions set before the screening are in bold.

1. How are the social realities of this particular period of German history embodied by Maria in Fassbinder’s melodrama?

2. How does Fassbinder create a sense of the historical moment and demonstrate changes in society in The Marriage of Maria Braun?

3. To what extent is Fassbinder’s film a self-conscious examination of how cinema presents the historical through the personal?

4. What is the political significance of positioning a woman at the centre of an exploration of German history? How does this differ from more ‘traditional’ histories?

5. Sentimental idealism can be thought of as a debased version of the values associated with nineteenth-century German Romanticism. It includes such vague and unquestioned notions as “the virtue of personal sacrifice”, “the ennobling power of love”, “freedom of the individual will”, along with indulgence in sentiment for its own sake and a belief in the ostensible moral simplicity and heroic glories of a mythicized past. (Rheuban, 1986:7)

- How are these values critiqued or subverted in The Marriage of Maria Braun?

6. Fassbinder therefore took some of melodrama’s cherished conventions – the predominance of a female protagonist, the obligatory happy ending, the profusion of coincidence – but employed them in his own unique way, opting more for irony and detachment over immersion and catharsis. (Rheuban, 1986: 12)

- How are these conventions used by Fassbinder in The Marriage of Maria Braun?

7. In your opinion, has Fassbinder achieved his aim of creating a film that is both political and entertaining?