Berlin Alexanderplatz

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 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.

The most unique contribution of film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Alfred Döblin's novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz. The story of Franz Biberkopf" (1929) was his interpretation of the relationship between Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold as a love story. Therefore, in Fassbinder's interpretation, Franz Biberkopf's accident is seen as self-mutilation. In Fassbinder's last movie, Querelle (1982), we will hear the confession: "To kiss a man is like the confrontation with one's own face in the mirror". As different as Döblin's "Alexanderplatz" and Genet's "Querelle" may be, the two novels are alike because they meet one another like an object and its mirror image: the first novel deals with the good-guy Franz Biberkopf who is ruined by his love to humankind, and the other novel with the immoral murderer Querelle by which those who love him, perish.

Like many of Fassbinder's movies, "Berlin Alexanderplatz", too, shows clear autobiographical traces. Fassbinder said about the three protagonists Franz, Reinhold and Mieze: "All three together supply my chance to survive". As Fassbinder pointed out in his article "The cities of the human and his soul", unlike Döblin in his original novel, Fassbinder is not so much interested in the discovery of the outer reality of Berlin, but concentrates on their inhabitants. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is a journey into the souls of different people under the conviction that the reign of subjectivity of the inner realities is much bigger than the reign of the objective reality outside. As a matter of fact (as has been pointed out by several commentators), "Berlin Alexanderplatz" with its almost 100 roles gave Fassbinder the possibility to let appear in his movie practically every person who had been crucial in his own life. That he split himself over three persons (Franz, Reinhold, Mieze) is very typical in Fassbinder's work in which many persons have their Alter Egos (e.g., "Despair", 1977). As Fassbinder had pointed out in an interview: "Despair is the only condition of life that I can accept". Consistently, the movie shows the systematic destruction of Franz, since "he is an anarchical figure in a crowd of social beings, and in the end, he perishes because of that". In fifteen and half an hour, we can analyze "the constellations, how a human spoils his life by a certain incapability which he developed by his upbringing" (Fassbinder). The movie shows the shaping of Franz Biberkopf to a mentally destroyed but therefore useful member of society. Every connoisseur of Fassbinder's work will be remembered to the final scene of "Fear of Fear" (1975) in which Margot, after having been "cured" in a psychiatric clinic, types addresses on envelopes like a trained monkey. When Karli brings her the information that their neighbor, the depressive Mr. Bauer, has killed himself, she hardly recognizes this fact anymore telling to Karli that she is feeling fine.

First the positive. Fassbinder's direction is superb - The camera glides expressively from one composition to another, always precise, revealing, artistic. No amount of effort is spared in the creation of these shifting compositions; the intelligence and sensitivity of the camera contributes as much as the words do to character and meaning. There's also a terrific intensity about it. The performances of the main players are remarkable – Fassbinder seems to be squeezing them like lemons.

This still disappointed though. I expected something richer, quirkier, funnier, more meaningful – in short, smarter. Surprisingly, this plays it perfectly straight, which in itself causes confusion. It was hard to believe that our man Biberkopf was supposed to be a totally well-meaning chap, or that Mietze was just a silly good-natured girl. Seriously misled by the unrelentingly sombre, murky atmosphere, we are inclined to look (mistakenly) for deeper, darker things in everyone.

On his release from prison at the beginning Biberkopf comes across as barely sane, if not totally deranged, violent and immoral. He vows to make amends and lead a good life but he never really endears himself to us after that brutal introduction. He's as thick as two planks, he's fat, certainly not good looking, for much of the story he only has one arm, he is often cantankerous and easily goes off his head completely – he's a klutz and a galumph. I didn't much like Biberkopf to begin with and barely did so by the end when I finally realised I was supposed to.

Bizarrely, Biberkopf attracts a constant succession of doting women. These women, though they are viewed mainly as chattels, are the most interesting characters in the film, but one suspects that both Doblin and Fassbinder really don't understand heterosexual women at all. Quite what these beautiful women see in Biberkopf is a mystery, and it frustrates our efforts to understand him and what the film is about.

Fassbinder extracts amazing performances in what a was a very quick shoot for its length. Gunther Lamprecht as Biberkopf dominates the film but something of this length really needs more than one focus.

The length is another major problem. There is simply no reason for this to be so long in terms of both the narrative and the meaning – in fact the length works against both. Rather than giving itself time to breath, it often allows itself to tire. Almost every scene could have been done more economically. It is easy to identify entire scenes which could have been skipped, especially the repetitive ones.

The next problem is the gauzy sepia effect which, wearyingly, is maintained throughout. This creates an antique world remote in time and relevance, as if we are looking at people already dead and gone, an old photograph full of forgotten faces. This distances us both visually (apart from the grimy overlay, we are often looking through murky windows or reflections in tarnished mirrors) and emotionally. The lack of humour is another problem. Not a single laugh in a film of this length? Not even irony?

The narrative seems aimless in places due to repetition and lack of notable events. Apart from Biberkopf's stint at selling shoe-laces (one of the best sections), his various jobs are monumentally dull (such as standing in the U-bahn selling newspapers). There is one particularly tedious episode when he gets involved in politics. The last two episodes are much the best, when Gottfried John's diffident gangster Reinhold really comes to the fore. Reinhold is a much more complex and interesting character than Biberkopf. There is an extraordinary scene in which he lures Biberkopf's girl into a liason in the forest which shows us aspects of human nature that rocks our notions of propriety, skewing and denting human behaviour into barely recognisable shape. The scene is long and intense but it's memorable and is the only scene of real value and interest you might extract from the entire film.

Homosexual aspects are present but kept in the background. Biberkopf has a tender relationship with his old friend Meck, whose every appearance brings forth a melancholy (and woefully predictable) leitmotif as the two men stare deeply at each other. There are also strong hints that Biberkopf is emotionally attached to Reinhold despite the disaster that the man wreaks on his life. Perhaps therein lay the seed that attracted Fassbinder to the story – self-destruction through a relationship that dare not speak its name – does not even acknowledge its existence.

The music, characterised by a mournful trumpet solo unfortunately transported me to Yorkshire each time. Meck in particular looked like he'd stepped out of Last of the Summer Wine, and from what we saw of Berlin, this could easily have been Leeds. The mise en scene – partly thanks to the murky visuals - is mainly oppressive. In general, the early critics were right, it is all too dark on the eye.

In conclusion, an overlong adaptation of a novel that clearly is more concerned with literary fireworks than cogent observations on life. Some big mistakes were made in the mise-en-scene that almost made the film unwatchable, but it is generally redeemed by brilliant direction and acting.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is by far the most ambitious film of all time. It has a very unusual feel to it as it slips between the real world and the mental state of Franz Biberkopf (particularly when he relives again and again the crime which landed him in prison). Of special interest to film addicts who have not seen the movie is the final 90 minutes which evidently was Fassbinder's own filmed fantasy of the entire plot, done with a background picture of Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights." A fabulous richly-detailed film, but some may not be able to get past the politics.