FIRST SPECTRAL CINEMA PROGRAM OF 2026!
Loosely adapted from a Cornell Woolrich story, MARTHA follows Margit Carstensen as Martha Heyer, a lonely, unwed librarian who, after the death of her domineering father, enters a sadomasochistic marriage with a wealthy engineer, Helmut (PEEPING TOM's Karlheinz Böhm), escaping one domestic prison only to be locked inside another.
As Martha makes one concession after another, submitting to ever more extreme acts of subjugation and degradation to appease the man she loves, her masochistic self-annihilation reaches its apparent limit when she begins to suspect that her husband intends to K*ll her. Carefully threading the needle between high camp and horror, MARTHA is a pitch-black satire of the power dynamics in traditional heterosexual coupling, pushing Sirkian melodrama to its most punishing extreme and putting the audience through an emotional and intellectual endurance test.
A preeminent social critic within the New German Cinema coterie, Fassbinder frequently used cinema as a springboard to probe the moral rot at the core of postwar West German society in the wake of the Wirtschaftswunder, that period of rapid reconstruction and economic boom. Within Fassbinder’s Germany, exploitation, manipulation, and self-interest are the rule, and his protagonists alternately take advantage of, and fall victim to, oppressive social structures. Can one be complicit in one’s own oppression? What drives a person to debase themselves and uphold a toxic status quo when it seems to serve their interests?
Originally filmed for West German television, MARTHA remains Fassbinder’s most provocative and challenging exploration of these questions. Its initial broadcast dodged the barrier of the movie house, transmitting Fassbinder’s corrosive critique of bourgeois matrimony straight into middle-class German living rooms, a tacitly audacious act of subversion in itself. A singular and sorely overlooked work of melodrama, MARTHA features one of Margit Carstensen’s most intense and heartbreaking performances, cementing her collaboration with Fassbinder as one of cinema’s great actor–director partnerships.
Tickets: $10 per person.
Showtime: 7:30pm.
Doors open 30 minutes before showtime.
Tickets are available at thegaptheatre.com and at the door.
ABOUT SPECTRAL CINEMA:
Spectral Cinema is a collaboration between programmers Dan Santelli and Adrianna Gober.
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