DVD of the Week: Martha

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 melodrama “Martha,” which I discuss in the clip above, is both one of his most visually and emotionally extravagant films and one of his least-known—though, truth be told, most of his works are less well-known than they deserve to be, in part because there are just so many of them. Fassbinder’s career is perhaps the most explosive in the history of cinema. IMDb lists forty-one features that he directed—from “Love Is Colder Than Death,” his first, which he made at the age of twenty-three, to his last, “Querelle,” which he made shortly before his death, at thirty-seven, in 1982 (the list includes his astonishing fifteen-hour-long mini-series adaptation of “Berlin Alexanderplatz”). “Martha,” which he made at twenty-nine, is Fassbinder’s twentieth feature. His brief, furious career produced one of the most singular, personal, and influential bodies of cinematic work of all time. This film, like so many, is ripe for rediscovery. It’s good that it’s available on DVD; it’s one of the relatively few that are. An enterprising distributor ought to release the complete works in a boxed set, as has been done for Kurosawa; the Fassbinder box would be even more important, more artistically satisfying, more exhilarating, and more fun.