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Fassbinder Unbound: Berlin Alexanderplatz
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
(Criterion)
Friday, February 01, 2008
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
(Criterion)
Reviewed by Andy Beta
Pimple-plagued, deeply closeted, all but abandoned by his own mother and reared by a cabal of prostitutes in the streets of Germany, the angst-riddled teenaged Fassbinder found solace in a cornerstone tome of German modernism. “In the grip of an almost murderous puberty,” as he wrote at the time, he came across Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin: “[It] bored me so completely.” But the slog turned into a Catcher in the Rye moment for the 14-year-old, who became mesmerized by how “this incredibly banal…plot is narrated.” Chunks of interpolated text — news articles, ads, songs — blare into the book, capturing in amber an entire way of life of Weimar-era Berlin. “It embedded in my mind, my flesh, my body as a whole and my soul,” wrote Fassbinder. “It provided genuine, naked, concrete life support when I was…really at risk during puberty, because I was able to apply the story to my own problems and dilemmas.”
What Fassbinder gleaned in the story of a murderous pimp felon named Franz Biberkopf who tries to go straight fueled one of the most exhaustive cinematic runs of the last half-century. Before mountains of cocaine and oceans of booze (not to mention sleeping pills, uppers, and reefer) turned Fassbinder cold and gray in 1983, the director wrote, directed and brought to the screen some 41 films over 13 years. These include such lurid peaks of West German cinema as Effi Briest, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Satan’s Brew, Veronika Voss, In a Year of 13 Moons and Fox and his Friends. He interrupted the breakneck pace to realize his lifelong dream of telling the story of Biberkopf (in another instance of Fassbinder’s professional tendency to name characters based on himself “Franz”). Fassbinder devoted 15 months to the project — a timespan that would’ve generally spawned five more Fassbinder films — even kicking his prodigal cocaine habit so as to focus on the mountainous task.
First broadcast on German television in 1980, and here a PBS staple throughout the decade, the 16mm film stock has been painstakingly restored across seven DVDs. And I do mean painstaking, as the final run-time is 940 minutes (four percent longer than it was on the German small screen, the notes say, “in order to provide a frame-accurate progressive transfer”). A recent exhibition celebrating Berlin Alexanderplatz’s restoration at P.S. 1 occupied over a dozen rooms, each screening one of the original 13 episodes; with the two-hour fever-dream coda on constant loop, the experience re-created the inescapable, purgatorial feel of the series.
In an era of sagas like The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under, told over weeks and years, Berlin Alexanderplatz would seem easier to swallow. In fact, the bear-like, misogynistic Biberkopf even anticipates a loathsome anti-hero like Tony Soprano. Today’s audiences, regularly asked to juggle multiple storylines and even more unwieldy plots on the likes of Lost or 24, can handle such tentacular tendencies better than ever.
Yet what makes watching Berlin Alexanderplatz such an exacting endeavor is how it gets honed down to a single tale, dictated steadfastly, gathering speed like a glacier. Not once does it stray or divert from its path.
Anyone familiar with Fassbinder’s work knows his tendency to linger, to let a painful, knife-twisting scene stretch on and on. You can see the tragedy coming from miles off, the inevitability. His movies offer a respite of sorts: No matter the human atrocity taking place, soon the scene comes to a close, as the downward spiral must conclude. But there’s little comfort of the clock to be had in Berlin Alexanderplatz though. Here, an awkward scene might stretch upwards of 35 minutes.
Adding to such suspension is the work by Fassbinder’s frequent collaborators, director of photography Xaver Schwarzenberger and composer Peer Raben. The darkness of the interiors overshadows Rembrandt with its inkiness and indistinct shapes moving about while bronze, sienna, ambers and umbers abound, the diminished lights filtered so that each source twinkles like small stars, casting a dim, drunken pall over the entire proceeding. We float in shoe-leather browns and lager, as if slushing about at the bottom of a large stein.
Scoring 15 hours is no mean feat, and Raben stretches a few themes — some conveyed via harmonica, others suspended by piano — evoking both Popol Vuh and Brian Eno’s discreet music. Take Episode 5, “A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord,” when Franz Biberkopf casts out one woman and seduces another in a scene that unfurls for a good twenty minutes, before a nearly static camera. Raben’s score of piano and synth is both gorgeous and infused with dread, turning ever so slowly in suspense. The most audacious music comes at the epilogue, wherein Fassbinder tape-splices and chops’n’screws a montage of his “playlist”: VU’s “Candy Says,” Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity,” Leonard Cohen, Donovan and Fassbinder’s favorite song — one that played over his casket — Janis Joplin’s beyond-the-grave rendering of “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Just don’t expect to feel freedom here. As for the audience, a sense of entrapment builds as each episode plays on. One of Fassbinder’s familiar visual tropes is crucial here: shooting from behind objects. The camera is one room over, or else a voyeur, roaming behind panes of glass. Doorframes, tabletops and ledges obscure certain actions; elsewhere, our eyes alight on scenes through keyholes, monkey cages. When we glimpse Franz’s bloated, destitute face at the end of Episode 13, “The Outside and The Inside and The Secret of Fear of the Secret,” it is through an empty birdcage, its lone occupant crushed in his mitt but a minute before. Now Franz’s face is behind bars once more.
What could that teen Fassbinder have learned from Berlin Alexanderplatz? That no good deed goes unpunished? That the bad, the dishonorable, carry on scot-free? “Even if the world is full of meanness, full of filth, I swore to myself, I’m finished with it,” Biberkopf swears early on, before his slow dive back into the world of pimpdom. We see the gruesome crime that put him behind bars the first time (killing his prostitute girlfriend in a fit of rage) recapitulated throughout the series, each time with a different voiceover, be it from the Bible or Longfellow. He relives it once more with his new girlfriend, Mieze, in a 35-minute scene that one almost can’t bear to watch.
Condemned to relive and recreate the past in the present as anyone of us, cycles of violence rear up again and again, and the episode titles hint at such wheels within wheels: “The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent,” “The Secret of the Fear of the Secret.” Just as there is no escape — either for the birds in their birdcages, or the humans in their flats — there’s no eluding fate, Fassbinder realizes. And he aims that steamroller of destiny directly at his audience. Thankfully, there’s neither light nor hope of escape in the 15 hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz.