Patrick Straumann's commentary "La Maison Fassbinder" is a scientific text and strongly based on French film semiotics as initiated by Christian Metz and thus indebted to structuralism in the tradition of De Saussure until Barthes and Levi-Strauss, searching in literature as well as in film recurrent topics, structural parallels, symmetries, Syntagmatic connections as well as paradigmatic variations. So, we learn, e.g., that the scene in the train where Maria Braun meets Mr. Oswald and the scene at the end where Maria moves into her new house are widely parallel. The affair between Maria and Oswald seems to be announced by Fassbinder's use of a Sirk-quotation: While Maria has already emptied her glass of wine, Oswald sits there, desolate, not even having touched his glass. Most interesting is Straumann's discovery that Fassbinder uses a Tripartite history model which corresponds to Hegel's and Marx dialectic schemes, but which hardly goes together with dyadic semiotics as the basis of structuralism.
Straumann's commentary "La Maison Fassbinder" which I have heard and seen as a special on a Dutch/French edition of Fassbinder's "Maria Braun", is from all Fassbinder commentaries I have heard and read so far - several hundreds in over 30 years -, including MA and PhD dissertations - simply the best. It is hard to believe that outside of France one would dare putting a commentary of such an extremely high level on a DVD. My most sincere recognitions.
Straumann's commentary "La Maison Fassbinder" which I have heard and seen as a special on a Dutch/French edition of Fassbinder's "Maria Braun", is from all Fassbinder commentaries I have heard and read so far - several hundreds in over 30 years -, including MA and PhD dissertations - simply the best. It is hard to believe that outside of France one would dare putting a commentary of such an extremely high level on a DVD. My most sincere recognitions.