Mother Küsters Goes To Heaven 1975 DEU SUB ENG 1080p BluRay x264

Year: 1975
Country: West Germany
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cast: Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Margit Carstensen, Karlheinz Böhm
IMDB: Link

Language : German
Subtitles : English





Fassbinder's Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven provides a contemporary take on the late Weimar era silent workers' film Phil "Piel" Jutzi's Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness (1929) with key revisions politically and aesthetically. The film was a Prometheus production that sought to "synthesize narrative forms of popular cinema and politically committed cinema." Jutzi's silent film commemorates the work of popular Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, well known for his illustrations of working class people of Berlin. The film opens with a handwritten text, signed by Zille, which describes the Wedding district of Berlin and the situation of the workers, the unemployed, drunks, prostitutes, and children, as documentary footage depicts it, using montage, unusual camera angles and the then relatively new technique of the unchained camera. Throughout, the film intercuts documentary footage and enacted fictional feature footage.

In Jutzi's film, the main character, Mother Krause, a widow, lives in a tenement apartment in Berlin in close quarters with her son and daughter; as well as a lodger, who is also a pimp and thief; his lover, who is a prostitute; and the prostitute's daughter. Struggling to make ends meet, Mother Krause earns money from her lodgers and by delivering newspapers. Her son, Paul, is an unemployed alcoholic and occasional rag-picker, who relies on Mother Krause for money. Her daughter, Erna, meets a young Communist, Max. Unable to make ends meet, Mother Krause despondently commits suicide at the film's end by turning on the gas in her apartment, also killing the prostitute's daughter. The film closes with Erna and Max at a march of the Communist Party. Released at the outset of the Weimar Era's final turbulent years (1929-1933), which witnessed, after the Great Depression, an uptick in tensions between right-wing and left-wing politics, often manifesting in fatal street-fights and assassinations, the film depicts Communism—through the young couple, Max and Erna—as a salvaging force.

Fassbinder's Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, by contrast, places agency and hope on Mother Küsters and her politicization, and casts a critical eye on both the Communist party and anarchist militant action, and both on Mother Küsters' daughter, Corinna, and son, Ernst. The film depicts the political coming of age of Emma Küsters (Brigitte Mira), as she tries to understand what led her husband to commit a crime (murder); the media's representations of it; and the actions suggested by people of various political persuasions—from communist organizers to anarchist activists.

Stylistically, Jutzi's Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness is recognized for how it combined "proletarian melodrama, Soviet montage" techniques and documentary footage.The use of melodrama tempers the stark documentary footage of everyday life of the Weimar era working class. As Marc Silberman puts it, Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness relies on "conventional narrative and visual structures aimed at awakening empathy in the spectator through pathos." In this way, it contrasted with contemporaneous Weimar era workers' films, such as Kuhle Wampe, which, as Theodore Rippey puts it, "modeled a pattern of constructive, analytical engagement with the present." Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven would build on the combination of conventions associated with melodrama and workers' film in Mother Krause's, tap into visual stylistics associated with (Sirkean) melodrama and focus on the working class.

A subtle stylistic progression also exists from Jutzi's Mother Krause's to Fassbinder's Mother Küsters via Sirk's oft-overlooked first feature film April, April! (1935). Katie Trumpener, focusing on one sequence of Sirk's April, April!, discusses how “throughout much of this sequence the camera works to dismember, isolate, and dissect the servants’ bodies, reducing them metonymically to their 'functional' parts. This old operation...turns the servants into ‘hands.’” This reduction, she argues, contrasts with earlier depictions of the masses:

The iconographic representation of these bodies occupies a middle ground between the "mass ornament" and the "new masses," between the comically ubiquitous chores-lines of servants in Ernst Lubitsch's Oyster Princess/Die Austernprinzessin (1919) and the comically massed employees in Three from the Gas Station, between the anonymous, synchronized mass body of the Tiller Girls and the Busby Berkeley spectacular of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will / Triumph des Willens (1936), and the suffering, marching proletarian bodies portrayed in Piel Jutzi's Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness / Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Gluck (1929) as in Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe (1932).

Sirk's April, April!, by contrast, focuses not on the masses but specifically, metonymically, on the body parts. Fassbinder, continues this shift from the masses, by opening Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven similarly by focusing on labor and on hands. In Fassbinder's Mother Küsters, however, as we shall see, his focus on the body parts depicts a shift in labor that took place between the Weimar era and the 1970s. (Christina Gerhardt)


The release contains the two different endings Fassbinder shot for his film. In the original Mother Küsters, Knab and a group of anarchists attempt to take over the editorial office of the publication that slandered her husband. Much to Emma’s surprise and horror, the anarchist takes out a gun and threatens the editor with violence if the lying story about Hermann Küsters is not retracted. This version of the film ends with a freeze-frame. A concluding text explains that the security forces gunned Emma Küsters down.

In the second version Emma and two anarchists stage a sit-in at the magazine editorial offices. When the editor and his staff simply ignore them and leave for the day, the pair of anarchists take off too, leaving Mother Küsters alone in a heap on the floor. A night watchman, a widower, invites her to his home for “heaven and earth,” a meal of apples and potatoes. In the end, she is betrayed by everyone, but her humanism and class instincts have matured in the process.

In an interview in 1977, Fassbinder spoke about the two versions of the film: “And really I prefer the so-called happy ending [the second ending]. I made it because many people told me that the first ending was too hard. So I tried a gentler ending which I prefer because it is actually tougher than the original. The first ending, with the text, is perhaps more intellectual—but the other affects people more emotionally.”

He suggested that the second ending was, in fact, more uncompromising, “When the woman has fought for something for so long—and even gets sympathy for it...but has to give up, because no one will support her.” A critic once referred to Fassbinder’s cinema as a “solidarity of victims.”

[ About file ]

Name: Mother Küsters Goes To Heaven.Rainer Werner Fassbinder.1975.BluRay.AVC.ZONE.mkv
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:30:40 +0200
Size: 10,072,187,905 bytes (9605.586915 MiB)

[ Magic ]

File type: Matroska data
File type: EBML file, creator matroska

[ Generic infos ]

Duration: 01:57:57 (7077.154 s)
Container: matroska
Production date: Fri, 09 Jun 2023 06:57:49 +0200
Total tracks: 4
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[ Relevant data ]

Resolution: 1440 x 1080
Width: multiple of 32
Height: multiple of 8
Average DRF: 21.703375
Standard deviation: 4.046294
Std. dev. weighted mean: 3.977352

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Duration (bs): 01:57:57 (7077.15336 s)
Bitrate (bs): 10999.838747 kbps
Qf: 0.295001

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Sampling frequency: 48000 Hz
Channels: 1
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Bitstream type (bs): AC3
Frames (bs): 220,481
Duration (bs): 01:57:35 (7055.392 s)
Chunk-aligned (bs): Yes
Bitrate (bs): 192 kbps CBR
Sampling frequency (bs): 48000 Hz
Mode (bs): mono

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Duration (bs): 01:57:56 (7076.096 s)
Chunk-aligned (bs): Yes
Bitrate (bs): 192 kbps CBR
Sampling frequency (bs): 48000 Hz
Mode (bs): stereo

[ Video bitstream ]

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P-slices: 22262 ( 13.120 %) ###
B-slices: 146307 ( 86.224 %) #################
I-slices: 1113 ( 0.656 %)
SP-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)
SI-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)

[ DRF analysis ]

average DRF: 21.703375
standard deviation: 4.046294
max DRF: 32

DRF=1: 42 ( 0.025 %)
DRF=2: 26 ( 0.015 %)
DRF=3: 42 ( 0.025 %)
DRF=4: 60 ( 0.035 %)
DRF=5: 86 ( 0.051 %)
DRF=6: 155 ( 0.091 %)
DRF=7: 230 ( 0.136 %)
DRF=8: 360 ( 0.212 %)
DRF=9: 456 ( 0.269 %)
DRF=10: 822 ( 0.484 %)
DRF=11: 680 ( 0.401 %)
DRF=12: 943 ( 0.556 %)
DRF=13: 1414 ( 0.833 %)
DRF=14: 2546 ( 1.500 %)
DRF=15: 4337 ( 2.556 %) #
DRF=16: 6284 ( 3.703 %) #
DRF=17: 5406 ( 3.186 %) #
DRF=18: 6252 ( 3.685 %) #
DRF=19: 8783 ( 5.176 %) #
DRF=20: 8214 ( 4.841 %) #
DRF=21: 13256 ( 7.812 %) ##
DRF=22: 21375 ( 12.597 %) ###
DRF=23: 24944 ( 14.700 %) ###
DRF=24: 27031 ( 15.930 %) ###
DRF=25: 17516 ( 10.323 %) ##
DRF=26: 8223 ( 4.846 %) #
DRF=27: 3881 ( 2.287 %)
DRF=28: 3303 ( 1.947 %)
DRF=29: 962 ( 0.567 %)
DRF=30: 1269 ( 0.748 %)
DRF=31: 125 ( 0.074 %)
DRF=32: 4 ( 0.002 %)
DRF>32: 0 ( 0.000 %)

P-slices average DRF: 20.034903
P-slices std. deviation: 4.274548
P-slices max DRF: 30

B-slices average DRF: 21.987649
B-slices std. deviation: 3.931248
B-slices max DRF: 32

I-slices average DRF: 17.707098
I-slices std. deviation: 4.093309
I-slices max DRF: 28

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 9-07-2026 17:56:25