The Marriage of Maria Braun

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (German: Die Ehe der Maria Braun) won Hanna Schygulla the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 1979 Berlin International Film Festival. The role made her one of the most internationally recognised German screen presences of the postwar generation, and the prize was the first major recognition for her long collaboration with Fassbinder, which had begun with Love Is Colder Than Death in 1969.

It is the first film of Fassbinder's BRD-Trilogie (Federal Republic of Germany trilogy), which continued with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982). He conceived the trilogy as a single project examining the postwar reconstruction of West Germany (the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s) through three female leads in different economic positions. The Marriage of Maria Braun, the first panel, is to our mind the centrepiece of Fassbinder's mature work and one of the founding texts of New German Cinema.

Schygulla is paired with Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny, Gisela Uhlen, Elisabeth Trissenaar and George Byrd. The cinematographer is Michael Ballhaus, who would soon emigrate to the United States to work with Martin Scorsese on After Hours, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and many others, and the score is by Peer Raben, Fassbinder's regular composer. Fassbinder died in 1982 at thirty-seven, having directed over forty features in fourteen years, and the BRD trilogy is the summit of that body of work. Sight & Sound returned the film to its 2022 Greatest Films of All Time list.