Fassbinder draws on an actual case from turn-of-the-century Bremen in which your basic God-fearing housewife and mother took the lives of fifteen victims before being revealed as a mass murderer. Margit Carstensen again stars, as if to somehow rehabilitate passive Martha of tonight's companion film (made the following year). Geesche poisons her tyrannical husband (Ulli Lommel), but then further exacts revenge on her always-reproachful mother (Lilo Pempeit, who is actually Fassbinder's mother and who appears in many of the films), her screaming children, her lover on their wedding day. But as he did also in Whity, Fassbinder presents a bloody emancipation proclamation to show the loneliness of such misguided rebellion: "Liberation isn't only a women's problem....The main question isn't one of women against men but of the poor against the rich, the oppressed against their oppressors," he said. "You have to show people how to revolt without ending up in the wilderness." The film retains the stylized mise-en-scène of the original stage production: an almost bare set, enormous projected oceanic images, and antipsychological acting. Repeated Thursday, July 24.