Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany, 1980
In German with English subtitles
Although I couldn't tell you if Rainer Werner Fassbinder really put the "germ" in New German Cinema, I wouldn't bet against it either. An immensely entertaining and occasionally pretty fucked-up fifteen and a half hour made-for-TV adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 modernist classic--here remastered and presented "in 13 parts & an epilogue" in a superior sepia print than was supposedly originally seen in Cold War living rooms back in the day--the willfully confrontational Berlin Alexanderplatz doggedly follows in the footsteps of oafish, not quite right in the head protagonist Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht in a bravura performance) as he attempts to go straight after being released from prison for the "accidental" beating death of his prostitute girlfriend Ida four years earlier. That some things just aren't meant to work out for the character will become clear early on with chapter titles like "The Punishment Begins" and "A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul," but romantic types just might be tempted to hold out hope for the guy whenever old love Eva (a spot-on Hanna Schygulla) and fetching new love Mieze (Barbara Sukowa, ditto) appear onscreen to try to protect their Franz from true evil in the form of "best friend" Reinhold Hoffman (a preternaturally sinister Gottfried John). However, as Fassbinder tells Döblin's story, Biberkopf's on again/off again struggles to avoid returning to a life of crime only serve as a launch pad for some even more unsettling reflections on crime and destiny on a metaphysical plane. Is the childlike but violent Biberkopf being tested by God or Satan? Are his Job-like troubles all caused by his poor life choices or is it just impossible for a man to "live in a human skin" in the Weimar Berlin of 1928-1929? Are God and Satan actually one and the same? Who or what is "The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent" in the Freienwalde forest? Whatever you make of Berlin Alexanderplatz's metaphysical concerns, one of the things that kept my eyes glued to the screen throughout Fassbinder's bleak but unexpectedly fascinating underworld epic was that many of his storytelling choices were as entirely unpredictable as his mercurial main character. An intrusive narrator (Fassbinder in a chillingly omniscient voiceover) frequently extends warnings to the characters, intones passages from the Old Testament, and recites grim catastrophe statistics from the newspapers at key moments, for example, alternating these pronouncements with soundless passages where text from Döblin's novel appears on silent movie intertitle cards. Visually, the film also offers deliberate provocations like the grainy slaughterhouse scene where man's fate is compared to that of cattle and another scene or two--mayhaps more amusing to this viewer--that pay homage to Weimar degeneracy with Biberkopf's visits to a Berlin brothel district where the Whore of Babylon is on sale to connoisseurs of human flesh looking for something different in the fetish department. Not for everybody and certainly not for book blogger squares but good, clean transgressive fun for anyone that can appreciate a rewrite of Ecclesiastes for a redemption story set in just pre-Nazi late 1920s Berlin: "And I turned and saw the injustice of everything that took place beneath the sun." (The Criterion Collection)
Fassbinder on the set
Berlin Alexanderplatz, my first Fassbinder ever if I'm not mistaken, is my German entry for the Foreign Film Festival and Caroline's World Cinema Series events. Mini-series over, the Döblin novel is now underway.
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