Berlin Alexanderplatz

Very long (15 hours in all), very worth seeing. Based on Alfred Doeblin's novel of the same name, "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is set in and around Berlin during the Weimar Republic era, the decade immediately preceding the establishment Hitler's Third Reich in 1933.

The workers of '20s Berlin are taking it on the chin. Mass unemployment reigns alongside the greed of the landlord and capitalist classes. People are reacting and acting in various ways to survive. As usual, some of the unemployed turn to crime; others to prostitution. Most of the film's cast will see the dawn of the "thousand year Reich" with their eyes only half way open.

But life must go on and it will go on and it does go on in Berlin during Weimar. It's an exciting time as well, a time when the puritanism of the countryside is being exchanged for a chance to live free and wild in a sleepless city chock full of cabarets and kniepe. Of course, the Nazis didn't like this and neither did their supporters, the conservative majorities of rural Germany.

As the film's director,R.W. Fassbinder put it,Doeblin's novel,BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, "offered a precise characterization of the twenties; for anyone who knows what came of all that, it's fairly easy to recognize the reasons that made the average German capable of embracing his National Socialism."

All this turmoil and potential for explosive change are seen by the audience of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" through the eyes of one guy, Franz Biberkopf. Walk, ride, rob, love, drink and despair with Franz Biberkopf. Best bring along a case or two of good lager while you're immersing yourself in the prelude to "Gotterdamerung".

Alfred Doeblin's poignant novel must have impressed Fassbinder deeply. In an interview talking about his episodic masterpiece, Fassbinder announces, in a matter-of-fact manner, that writing the script was not difficult because he pretty much knew the book "by heart". And, indeed, we should take his words literally, considering the extent of the work and the cinematic achievement it represents. Berlin Alexanderplatz is not an easy film to watch; not because of some artistic imperfection. On the contrary, because it is a dense and tortuous, but honest, observation of the human condition, its contradictions and dark nature. Fassbinder approached this project with an open heart and a razor-sharp discipline. He knew what he wanted to recreate, and the world he conjured up captures our attention by tearing away any romanticized notion of reality. The story takes place in Berlin around the years of 1926 and 1928: Germany, at the brink of one of the darkest periods of human existence. A universe breathing betrayal at a cellular level. Murder, jealousy, perversity, hatred, maliciousness, innocence, fragility, fear, longing, guilt, embarrassment, lack of hope, evil, passion, lust, doubt, indecision, suffering, pain, sex, death, blood, insecurity, poverty, uncertainty, madness, hell, despair, surrender, shock, chaos, dirt, soul, faith, and a constant flow in a spectacle of the Shadow of the human Psyche and their intrinsic Divinity. The story is told in thirteen parts and an epilogue. It is a long cinematic experience. Mr. Fassbinder acts as a sort of Brechtian observer with a soft spot on his heart. The first part runs around 82 minutes. The next twelve which follow are about an hour-long each. The last is the epilogue that is 112 minutes of an odyssey into madness and surreal visions of the Unconscious. This last part plays like a roller-coaster ride through the past, the present and the future as we exchange empiric data in order to survive. It's a spiral descent into hell. Dante's inferno is revealed in every corner. The main character in this story is Franz Bieberkopf. He re-enters the world after a four-year sentence in the Prison of Tegel. His crime: killing his girlfriend in a fit of anger and despair. He is the anti-hero we make acquaintance with, Nietzsche's Superman in anguish. Our limitations and awe. In times of terror the arrows flow amply. Doeblin's complex narrative and Rainer's impeccable rendition outlive their creative minds. The parallels can be tracked into our times. We can only hope we have learned some lessons. The Weimar Republic was created after WWI in an attempt to establish Germany as a liberal democracy. It failed with the ascent of Adolf Hitler to power, and with the formation of the Nazi party. In 1933, the Third Reich takes over. Doeblin's narrative takes place in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a phenomenal work of art that needs to be absorbed slowly. Fassbinder's work offers the viewer a similar involvement to reading the book. We get to spend more time with the characters and their settings. I watched one episode per day on average, but there were times I watched two on the same day. I also took breaks over the weekends, accommodating my schedule and my mood. This is undoubtedly a remarkable cinematic experience!

This is my third time through, the first having been at its US theatrical release in the early 1980's and the second on video cassette in 1994. The new DVD set confirms my feeling this is the best work of performance in German since Wagner's Ring.

I am put in a trance by the mise-en-scene, the obsessive repetition of themes and variations in music, narrative, visual detail, camera angle, color coordination.

This elegy to the Age of Reason, the illusion of progress, the delusions of civilization, to my way of seeing, killed its creator and left us with a paradox: How can a work so pessimistic of our primacy as animals prove so conclusively the very primacy it refutes?

This mega-movie is an expressionist, modernist masterpiece that combines the best of Wellesian cinema (expressionistic) with Godardian cinema (modernist). The (Godardian) voice-over snatches of random news items and medical health items (referenced in the prior 'review') are simply being faithful to Dobler's novel, which is a somewhat Germanic version of Joyce's Ulysses. But instead of the Joycian modernist take on the travels of Odysseus, Dobler's novel presented us with a modernist take on the Passion Play.

This film is not for simpletons. Just like a long, great novel… there will be stretches that will bore you a bit… and other stretches that are riveting and will break your heart.

Two major points:

1) Don't get too caught up with what some people see as a form of homo-eroticism between Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold. Although expressionistic, Fassbinder has presented the material with enough objectivity that different people will come away with different subtexts. Fassbinder has explained the film as a love story between Franz and Reinhold… but Fassbinder was bisexual.

Franz is a grown up naive child. One could easily see Franz's 'curiosity' about Reinhold as a longing for an absent father. Eva, the one constant in Franz's life, could represent his longing for an absent/replacement mother/big sister/protector. How else to explain Franz's reluctance to mate with her?

2) The two-hour epilogue contains an extended surrealistic pastiche that upsets 90% of the people who like the previous (more realistic) 13 hours.

Biberkopf's brain snaps like a twig! How better to explain the mixture of chemicals… the bad cocktail suddenly coursing through his head? It's brilliant in it's off-puttingness! Bad cocktails don't taste good! Some people don't understand how Lou Reed and Kraftwerk can be on the soundtrack when Franz (in insane delirium) is living in 1928:

People… that's what they call 'modernist'. That's what they call… 'expressionist'. Were you expecting Robert Flaherty in a Fassbinder film?

Epilogue: See the film. If THE DECALOGUE is the great cinematic short story collection… BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is the great cinematic novel.

I think it's a perfect crime that this epic of human behavior has been neglected by German audiences. Even here on IMDb the people commenting on it are from various parts all over the wold but not from Germany. This is mostly due to the fact that "Berlin Alexanderplatz" was aired only once in 1980, under not very becoming conditions (it was a very bad copy of the original 16mm print that was much too dark for once), and then quickly thrown on the garbage heap of television-history. In the US for instance, Berlin Alexanderplatz was shown in cinemas and the association of American film critics at the end of the 80ies placed Günther Lamprecht under the top three actors of it's time, just behind Robert de Niro and Ben Kingsley. Figure that. Still the Germans go on saying that the Americans are mere barbarians when it comes to art. Thanks to "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and the people responsible for the quite expensive restoration-process of the series we now have a DVD and can watch the somnambulic masterpiece in all of it's original glory. It's the spiraling downfall of one man in a big Leviathan of a city, hard to swallow for most who rely on the silver or small screen for escapist entertainment. I just wish that today for every "Lost", "24" or "Profiler/CSI"-series there would at least be one "Berlin Alexanderplatz".