Word: schygulla
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...history of postwar Germany in terms set by the vivid melodramas that Fassbinder adored. (BRD stands for Bundesrepublik Deutschland - German for West Germany.) Among the more than three hours of documentaries and specially produced features on disc four are exceptionally lucid interviews with Fassbinder's three stars, Hanna Schygulla, Rosel Zech and Barbara Sukowa. The audio commentary on Maria Braun is by director Wim Wenders and Michael Ballhaus, Fassbinder's (and now Martin Scorsese's) always brilliant cinematographer...
...continue viewing classic pictures, among which is The Marriage of Maria Braun (Somerville Theater). Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this 1978 film tells the tale of post-World-War-II Germany through the life of the title character. A ruthlessly ambitious but visually stunning woman, Maria Braun (Hanna Schygulla) starts off her career as a whore, servicing American soldiers, blackmarketeers and anyone else who has cash. Braun quickly moves up in the world, settling in with a business firm, only to blow her self to bits accidently...
...films, The Marriage of Maria Braun is slow-paced and often confusing Despite some sluggishness, however, the lush colors used to capture often horrible scenes are visually fascinating. Even when you don't know what's going on, you become entranced by the mere look of the film. Also, Schygulla's performance is excellent: she's alternately the Virgin Mary in slut's garter belt or Bloody Mary wearing a false halo. At its core, The Marriage of Maria Braun is a story of the mental and moral devastation of war, told in a fashion much like "Alice In Wonderland...
...insertion of a subplot focusing on a Jewish couple who had been held in a Nazi concentration camp during the second world war was just too much to take. The airline stewardess, Ingrid (Hanna Schygulla), is asked by the hijackers to select Jewish-sounding names from the collection of passenger's passports. She refuses, saying, "Don't you know I'm German...I won't do it again!" The director goes on to demonstrate that he is aiming at the lowest common denominator of human intelligence when he shows us a close-up of a Jewish passenger's tatooed forearm...
...proverbial cast of thousands, the eight- hour, $27 million epic looks spectacular. Maximillian Schell, the most prominent of four actors who play Peter, has moments of leonine power, and Vanessa Redgrave is striking as his treacherous sister. But the rest of the all-star cast--including Hannah Schygulla, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard and Mel Ferrer--is lost in the pageantry. Edward Anhalt's script is flabby and inert, and history is contaminated with hokey invention (a bogus meeting in London, for instance, between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton...