The Marriage of Maria Braun Paperback / softback
by Priscilla Layne
Part of the Camden House German Film Classics series
Paperback / softback
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 as beneficial as possible.
In the end, she discovers she has been a pawn in a power game between her husband, long thought killed on the Eastern Front, and her long-time lover Bill, an African-American GI.
Yet Maria is also complicit in racism and white patriarchy, a fact that scholarship on the film has barely registered.
In her new reading, Priscilla Layne draws on archival research, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought, and Critical Whiteness Studies to expand on the role of race and gender in the film.
Information
-
Pre-Order
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:112 pages, 4 colour and 39 b/w illus.
- Publisher:Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication Date:17/09/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9781571135049
Information
-
Pre-Order
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:112 pages, 4 colour and 39 b/w illus.
- Publisher:Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication Date:17/09/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9781571135049
