."The Marriage of Maria Braun" is the fourth volume in the Rutgers Films in Print Series and the most contemporary of those to appear in it thus far. Because of the enormous influence of New German Cinema and the importance of Fassbinder himself, the film is already considered a classic. "Maria Braun" is its director's attempt to recount and assess postwar German history through the personal example of his main character, played brilliantly by Hanna Schygulla. It is also a tribute to the Hollywood directors of the women's movies of the thirties and forties. Maria, and in the loose allegory...

In the preliminary notes for a film he never made, Fassbinder wrote that he wanted to allow his audience, without any help from him, to make the choice between a short, fulfilled life, and a longer existence that would for the most part be alienated and lived outside a fully conscious state. He explored varieties of that longer existence in his controversial anti-theatre plays, six of which are collected here with a critical introduction.