Focus on R.W. FASSBINDER II: Martha (1974)

I'm not sure if it is just the selection of films I've left till last, but of late I've noticed just how much of an influence Fassbinder had on the burgeoning melodramatic splendour of Pedro Almodóvar. I almost mentioned it in my discussion of Beware of a Holy Whore's erratic black comedy but I held back. Here, in Martha, the similarities are unmistakeable. It's no surprise now that Pedro eventually found a way to get himself and a crew over to Germany to film immersed in the Fassbinder milieu.

Martha shines amongst these second round Fassbinders. Even though it is a television production, it is one of his more acclaimed efforts. It is one I wasn't able to get my hands on it last time around, so now it is a welcome reminder of what Fassbinder is capable of. Darkness. Melodrama. Emotional intensity.

And mise en scène to die for.

Seriously, there are shots here structured so tightly structured that you could parse a whole film out of them. That could have had Martha come across as overly mannered, but with the high calibre of its melodrama and Margit Carstensen's delicious performative mania.

I'd like to go back and experience Martha amidst Ali and Fox. While it may not have the resonance of either of those marvels, its sensibility puts it squarely in line with Fassbinder’s German melodramas in which he ripped bourgeois life a new one. Here he posits through Carstensen that the German middle class is complicit in its own control. And they delight in it. Seriously, Carstensen's Martha is an exceptional piece of work. From her morbid, attention-seeking delight at the death of her father to the curious pleasure she initially takes at her marital entrapment, Martha ability to seek out and revel in domestic horror is as fascinating to watch as it is unsettling.

Though it is difficult to argue that Martha's treatment isn't gendered (something that becomes a problem when her masochistic tendencies are taken into account), there is a clear caveat from the misogynist minefield that such a reading presents in that, as with Fox's take on homosexuality, what would now be a more favoured reading of the film (along gender lines) is sublimated to Fassbinder's concern with class structures, here the domination of bourgeois coupling.

That is not to say that the patriarchy isn't still very much in play (Karlheinz Böhm's control-fetishist husband bears that millstone with chilling mastery), just that there is a complicity here that extends beyond the dominator and the dominated. We, Fassbinder insists, love the prison we put ourselves in, be we the prison master or the inmate. And though we may try to break ourselves free, as with Martha's small rebellions, our efforts are ultimately ineffectual.

It's a theme Fassbinder returned to regularly but in Martha it finds its purest expression. For that, I am glad to have finally caught up with her.

Next up: Fear of Fear...

This post contributes to Director Focus: Rainer Werner Fassbinder II.