This paper reconsiders the significance of the performing body in Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun by supplementing the well-documented influences of Brechtian theatre and Sirkian melodrama with the rarely examined influence of Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty. In this analysis, the Brechtian and Artaudian perspectives emerge as complementary, rather than oppositional, models. I argue that in Fassbinder the Brechtian distanciation effect prevents his concern with emotions from sliding into clichd sentimentality, instead fostering the emergence of a more confronting affective dimension in both the actors' performances and the viewers' experience of the film. Through a detailed examination of Hanna Schygulla's gestural and kinetic language in two crucial scenes, I suggest that Fassbinder reconciles historical/social and affective/individual concerns by blending the Brechtian concept of the body as intelligible social sign and the Artaudian concept of the body as irrational force exceeding social and linguistic boundaries.