Berlin Alexanderplatz (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

A very good and excellent seven disc box set of Alfred Dobin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. The first five discs are the story of fourteen episodes and disc six is the final when Franz Biberkopf is accused off killing his partner Mieze but is turns out Reinhold is accused of manslaughter and sentenced to prison. Has for the seven disc it brings the documentary of the making a comment on the end and the original 1931 Berlin Alexanderplatz film of one hour and thirty minutes. The disc is value for money. Fassinbender the direvtor had more time to produce the full story line unlike the 1931 film which tends to be shorter. Franz Biberkopf after spending four years in Tegel prison, is released for the murder of his girlfriend Ida, and wants to go straight, but unfortunately things don't go according to plan. He is involved in a grave accident and suffers and amputation of his right arm, and the friends or so he thinks are users and are not really interested in him: only for an accomplice in their crimes. He tries to have a steady relationship but as several along the way. A poor man who can have a serious raging temper. Sad story but very enjoyable to watch. Plus there is a fantastic little book inside about the making.

If one selects a key text from the huge output of Rainer Werner Fassbinder which incorporates over 40 feature films, 3 TV series, and 24 plays, it would be Berlin Alexanderplatz. The great dynamo of the New German Cinema often likened his filmmaking to building a house. If the BDR Trilogy (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola and Veronika Voss) is the grand central staircase while the other films are the various rooms, walls and fixtures, his great 15½ hour TV series spread across 14 gripping episodes is the foundation which informs everything else built on top of it. To watch it is to snap a whole film career into sharp focus, even those annoying early gangster films suddenly acquiring fresh meaning. For lovers of Fassbinder and for anyone interested in the New German Cinema Berlin Alexanderplatz is absolutely essential viewing. For lovers of Alfred Döblin’s great 1929 modernist novel of the same title it is also essential viewing as it is one of the great screen adaptations of literature. Fassbinder stays remarkably faithful to Döblin’s text, even in the epilog where seemingly idiosyncratic tawdry campiness is in fact based firmly on the novel’s concluding chapters. And for lovers of TV drama, this is simply one of the best series I have ever come across. I’d place it beside Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988) at the acme of what that particular medium can do. The 2007 restoration presented here by Second Sight enhances the attraction. Contemporary audiences moaned about the darkness of the visuals, but this was something carefully achieved by Fassbinder with his cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger and receives beautiful clarity here. The only slight drawback is the graininess of a few sequences. I watched the series once all the way through, then I read the novel, and then I watched it all again. What follows then is the fruit of a considerable investment of time and energy and is a thematic review with spoilers.Döblin’s (and Fassbinder’s) narrative is the story of Franz Biberkopf (the amazingly empathetic Günter Lamprecht), a disenfranchised World War One veteran released from Tegel prison in 1928 after spending 4 years inside for manslaughter – the killing of his girlfriend named Ida (Barbara Valentin). Three times he picks himself up and three times he is knocked back down again over the course of a year. At first he goes straight, working odd jobs (selling tie clips, then newspapers and then shoelaces) as he attempts a relationship with a prostitute named Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar). He’s brought crashing down when he’s betrayed by his friend/colleague, Lina’s ‘uncle’ Lüders (Hark Böhm). Deserting Lina, a bout of depression leads to his return to criminality via association with a gang of thieves, pimps and fences run by Pums (Ivan Desny). He is mysteriously attracted to Reinhold (Gottfried John), a voracious womanizer who passes women on to Franz once he’s done with them. Peeked by Franz’s refusal to take one woman, Reinhold pushes him out of a moving car after a botched burglary. Franz loses an arm and is reduced to zero again. Picked up by his friend and ex-lover Eva (Hanna Schygulla) and her current partner Herbert (Roger Fritz), he’s introduced by Eva to Mieze (Barbara Sukowa) who he falls in love with. He pimps her the same way he pimped Ida years before, the whole narrative being cyclical in both novel and film. As with Ida, Mieze’s end is tragic. Franz introduces her to Pums’ gang including Reinhold who blackmails Franz’s friend Meck (Franz Buchrieser) into arranging a tryst in the country. There Reinhold murders Mieze, her absence and then the news of her killing driving Franz into a nervous breakdown which cues fantastical sequences in both book and film as he attempts to come to terms with his life. After his recovery he attends Reinhold’s trial, sees his friend put away for 10 years for manslaughter, and lands a job as a factory night-watchman. The whole narrative charts the death of a child who rises and falls thrice over to be eventually reborn as ‘a worthwhile human being.’For both Döblin and Fassbinder the story is a kind of passion play, the film cutting the narrative into 14 stations on the way to Franz’s crucifixion and ironic resurrection, the journey being at once Jewish (the Old Testament trials of Job) and Christian (the New Testament Christ), the blending of two Biblical mythologies of suffering being crucial to the Germany both artists depict. In book and film references to both mythologies are voluminous. There are of course differences between the two. Where Döblin’s modernist collage-like text constantly threatens to bury Franz’s story with incessant statistical, documentary and archival information about Berlin, Fassbinder focuses more on the key relationship between Franz and Reinhold and the way they use and abuse women. Fassbinder does incorporate some of the collage (the radio is constantly on, newspaper articles and books are often read, and the key depiction of the Berlin slaughterhouses is retained in the epilog), but where Döblin’s main character is dwarfed by the portrait of a city, Fassbinder’s attention rarely strays from Franz who is on screen virtually from start to finish. Another change is made by Fassbinder deciding to focus the action onto key locations which are omnipresent. This entails building up characters who barely appear in the novel. These include Frau Bast (Brigitte Mira) as the landlady of Franz’s room and Max (Claus Holm), the keeper of a bar. Together these two locations are deployed in about a third of the total action. A change is also made to Meck. In the book he is Franz’s friend and stays that way. He is linked with Pums’ gang, but he certainly doesn’t collude with Reinhold in covering up Mieze’s murder. The betrayal of friendship is something added by Fassbinder. Eva is also changed. She figures mostly in the book after Franz loses his arm, but she figures in the film fairly constantly before this, possibly as a commercial concession from Fassbinder to show Schygulla who was then an international star courtesy of The Marriage of Maria Braun. It was on the back of that film’s success that he got the 13 million DM funding for what was at the time the most expensive German TV drama series ever made.Key to any appreciation of Fassbinder’s achievement is the astonishing extent to which the director identified with Franz Biberkopf. He first read the novel at the age of 14 and then again at 19, the book being, according to him, the only bracket between his life and his work. He said, “On second reading, from page to page, it became ever clearer to me […] that a huge part of myself, my behavior, my reactions, in other words, much that I had considered to be my own, was in fact nothing other than what Döblin had described in Berlin Alexanderplatz.” From his first feature Love is Colder than Death through to Lola he adopted the name ‘Franz Walsch’ for his credit as editor. ‘Walsch’ refers to Raoul Walsh, his favorite Hollywood director while ‘Franz’ refers to Franz Biberkopf. In addition, his films are littered with references to the same. ‘Franz Walsch’ is the name of characters in Love is Colder than Death and The American Soldier (also played by Fassbinder). It’s also the name of the main character in Gods of the Plague who checks into a hotel as ‘Franz Biberkopf.’ Franz Biberkopf is the name of the main character in Fox and His Friends again played by Fassbinder. Franz is usually the little guy at the bottom of the social heap, who doesn’t have a chance in a harsh life which will squash him repeatedly. Fassbinder saw himself in this way and reading Döblin’s novel was to read a blueprint for his spiritual future in which his life was “to work on something which finally […] relatively completely was to become what one calls an identity.”Fassbinder found it impossible to separate his life from his work and the main thing that Berlin Alexanderplatz underlines is how comprehensively his entire œuvre is bound up with Döblin’s novel. His films can be broken down into three main periods, 1969-1970 (the gangster films), 1971-1976 (the melodramas) and 1976-1982 (the German history films). Berlin Alexanderplatz incorporates the essential elements from all three periods and that (together with the high degree of personal identification) is what makes it such a key film. Aside from the question of name and disenfranchised social milieu, the early gangster films posit triangular human relationships between two men sharing a woman in pimp-whore-client configurations. The impossibility of happiness in traditional heterosexual relationships is highlighted by a search for happiness in relationships which are not fixed down, which are open to flux. This is precisely what lies at the center of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Like Franz in Gods of the Plague, the Franz of the later film starts by leaving prison. Unlike his earlier namesake, he initially essays a safe traditional heterosexual relationship with Lina with no pimping involved and the intention of living honestly. But he falls for a war widow and is deceived by Lüders. He’s disillusioned and finds happiness in triangular relationships between him, Reinhold and whatever girl comes into the equation. Reinhold is a repressed homosexual who cannot enjoy women unless he has another man take them off his hands while Franz is bisexual in taking on Reinhold’s women as an expression of his real love for Reinhold. The gay impulse is never acted on physically, but is made explicit in the epilog which has Reinhold with another man in a prison cell and Franz refusing to testify badly against him because he loves him more than Mieze, the girl he had put back into circulation earlier in the film, exposing her to Reinhold. Franz is incapable of keeping ‘normal’ heterosexual sexual relationships with women. He can only function by sharing his women (Mieze with her clients, Eva with Herbert, and the various women with Reinhold). This is pretty much how Fassbinder was in real life, a homosexual who had numerous male lovers, but who also always needed a woman around as well. The central distrust of ‘normal’ heterosexual relationships with commitment to family units lies beneath the whole of his work. In this film, the relationship between Franz and Reinhold is a statement of where Fassbinder himself was coming from and underlines precisely what those early gangster films are actually all about.Totally unlike his early films, Berlin Alexanderplatz is firmly melodramatic and the model is (as ever) Douglas Sirk. No one specific Sirk film is invoked, but the fingerprints are there. The melodrama is the grand love story between man and woman as Fassbinder charts Franz’s progress from woman to woman with its ups and downs. Peer Raben’s soft romantic (mainly accordion-led) score accompanies soft focus images of various women (the camera is especially kind to Hanna Schygulla and Barbara Sukowa) as Franz’s heart is delighted/broken repeatedly as the big-dipper narrative swoops and swoons according to his fortune in the grand game of life. The set-piece scenes (the release from prison, the romance with Lina, Lüders’ betrayal, the drunken depression, the gangster antics of Pums’ gang replete with his forced exit from the moving car, his big fight and then love scene in the forest with Mieze, Reinhold’s murder of the same and then the grand nervous breakdown – the film is the very stuff of Sirkean melodrama, but as with Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder constantly undercuts it. Where Sirk’s melodramas are always very clear in the way characters are motivated, the stories easily demarcated for commercial audiences to lap up without having to think too much, Fassbinder leaves his character motivation unexplained. We never learn why Franz killed Ida, why Lüders’ betrayal leads to such a complete break from Lina (we see Lüders virtually rape the widow, but Franz doesn’t), why the descent into depression is so catastrophic, why Reinhold pushes Franz from the car, why Franz doesn’t seem to mind, why Franz puts Mieze back into circulation for Reinhold to exploit, and indeed why he doesn’t show anger at him for killing Mieze. This absence of motivation is lethal in traditional melodrama and is no doubt the reason why German audience figures quickly dropped away. Fassbinder offers a film wrapped as ‘melodrama,’ but actually his attention is less on motivation than it is on the uncertain nature of human relationships which I mention above. The narrative is instead given extraordinary cohesion in three different ways – the repetition of the same sets backing the various scenes, the presence of the whole Fassbinder crew in front of the camera (Ingrid Caven and Kurt Raab are absent, otherwise everyone else is there), and most of all, through the deployment of various doubling relationships of scenes and characters which bridge across the 14 episodes in the most compelling way. The film is the journey from one murder (of Ida) to another (of Mieze) through the deception of one repressed homosexual (Lüders) mirrored by another (Reinhold). Franz is part of triangular relationships with Reinhold and a number of women, but when Eva gives him Mieze to play with, she takes Reinhold’s place in another triangle. Franz’s romantic escape to the country with Mieze is doubled later by Reinhold’s murder of her in the same place. The film lacks the usual obviousness of Sirkean melodrama, instead replacing it with mysterious connections which distance us and force us to connect with the text in a different way.This works with the film’s visual presentation which also undercuts the melodrama. There’s the deliberate darkness purposefully designed to irritate TV audiences used to bright pictures. Then there are the numerous long static scenes in which the camera moves barely at all and we are forced to listen to dialogue which seems interminable because it isn’t edited into easy chunks as per TV drama convention. And then there’s the extraordinarily cluttered feel to almost every camera set-up. Characters are never shot straight on. They are forever framed by windows and doorways, shot through clutters of objects, reflected in mirrors, and constantly juxtaposed with placed ‘observers’ within scenes. This carries on the same style established in his other melodramas and serves to distance us, forcing us into an intellectual response to what we see as opposed to an emotional one. In the early films and even the melodramas, the template was that of Brechtian alienation. Here it survives as we are forced to observe melodrama without responding to melodrama in the usual way. Usually, melodrama relies on audiences identifying with characters, being involved in the drama by being made a part of it. Here we are excluded from things by both the narrative construction and the visual presentation. We do not empathize with Franz. Instead we are forced into watching Fassbinder empathizing with Franz. The film is in this way above all exhibitionist, Fassbinder placing himself center-stage for everyone to look at. This is made clearest of all perhaps in the epilog where he places himself on screen watching the body of his double (Franz) being hacked up in the abattoir.Finally, Berlin Alexanderplatz fits squarely into Fassbinder’s ongoing survey of German history. It sits alongside Despair as one of two films on the Weimar Republic. Both offer subtle critiques (based on men rather than the women of the BDR Trilogy) of Germany between the wars. Franz is a World War I veteran and the manner of Germany’s defeat is crucial for determining both the instability of the Weimar years and the instability of Franz’s life which echoes it as yet another of Fassbinder’s parallel doubles. Leaving prison he is reminded of Ida, the woman he killed 4 years previously in 1924 (the year of Germany’s worst hyper-inflation). He determines to visit her double, her sister Minna whose apartment is dominated by a famous painting depicting Germany’s humiliating surrender, beneath which he rapes her. We must understand the importance of the surrender for the end of the war was crucial for the later rise of Nazism. Franz’s political beliefs are inchoate and the first section of the film leading up to Lüders’ betrayal shows him oscillating between the extreme left (communist comrades from the war) and the extreme right (a Nazi who gives him a swastika). He agrees to sell a Nazi newspaper and insists on singing a nationalist song (‘Watch on the Rhine’) in preference to the ‘Internationale’ preferred by his comrades. He has no firm political beliefs and his naïveté leaves him open to abuse. Later he’s used by the left in the shape of the shady underground figure Willy (Fritz Schediwy) who takes him to communist meetings. The crucial sequence in Fassbinder’s political commentary is once again Lüders’ betrayal. Franz meets a war widow who mistakes him for her dead husband seemingly resurrected from the dead. A photograph shows Franz to be a dead-ringer (another double) and he is reminded of the responsibility he once had as a soldier which was betrayed (‘stabbed in the back’ Hitler would later say) by the home front collapse. Franz happily jumps into bed with the widow and later tells Lüders about it. Lüders, however, betrays his friend by visiting the woman to shame her for her behavior. Franz returns to her not knowing why she refuses to see him, but we can guess he feels overwhelming shame here both for taking advantage of a war widow and for betraying Lina. A letter from the widow cements his disillusion with straight life. It turns Franz ‘green’ and triggers withdrawal into drunken stupor, his later rejection of normal heterosexual love, and his return to crime. His sharing of women with Reinhold and his activities with Pums’ gang mirror the turmoil of a rotten Germany ridden with unemployment, the gradual collapse of democracy and the persistent rise of Nazism. The political argument comes into focus in the stylized echt-Syberberg/Pasolini epilog which goes back over events with attention paid to politics in a highly poeticized way. We see a staged battle at the newspaper stand between communists and fascists and the appearance of the same painting of Germany’s defeat we saw in Minna’s apartment laid on its side in the extraordinary tableau featuring Germany and all the characters of the series as part of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, at the center of which Franz is crucified. Beside the cross Frau Bast plays Mother Mary with the baby Jesus Nazism incarnate as the war widow hovers in the background. The moment when the Bosch painting disappears in a flash and is replaced by an atomic explosion to the sound of Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’ (the later triumph of American economic imperialism which heralded the 50s economic miracle) is one of the most striking images in all of Fassbinder, the director seeking to extend his portrait of Germany beyond the war to the present day in Franz’s (re Fassbinder’s) delirious mad imagination.There is a lot more to the epilog and I don’t have space to go into it further, but it’s obvious Berlin Alexanderplatz is extraordinary for blending the three main areas of Fassbinder’s filmmaking into one seamless magnificent whole. It’s a wonderful statement of everything Fassbinder was really about. Watch this film without being familiar with the rest of his œuvre and you may be confused, even annoyed. But watch it with the rest of his films in mind and suddenly the house Fassbinder built becomes a magnificent whole, a building to withstand comparison with the greatest œuvres any other top director has to offer.

Really enjoyed reading all of the reviews - really enjoyed reading so many of them. Last saw this series/seasons in the 1980s and can barely wait until my DVDs are delivered. It has been a long time :-)