Berlin Alexanderplatz

"We take for granted that filmmakers are, if they so wish, in the game of recycling. Adapting novels is one of the most venerable types of movie projects, although a book that calls itself a novelization seems-rightly-barbarous. Being a hybrid art as well as a late one, film has always been in a dialogue with other narrative genres.(...)

In Berlin Alexanderplatz, cinema has at last achieved some of the accumulative power of the novel by being as long as it is- and by being theatrical."

                                                                      -Susan Sontag, Novel Into Film, Vanity Fair 1983

Susan Sontag said in the same article the film is best experienced broken up into four days. The Gene Siskel Film Center decided to one up the advice and present it in two days. A novel broken up into 13 chapters and an Epilogue, the theater broken it down as such:

SATURDAY

Pts I-II

(20 minute break)

Pts III-V

(20 minute break)

Pts VI-VII

SUNDAY

Pts. VIII- IX

(10 minute break)

Pts. X- XI

(20 minute break)

Pts. XII-XIII

(10 minute break)

Epilogue

The cumulative effect of having watched such a long work is to have the parts play off each other. The themes are more present and in tune. 

Since the age of 14, Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been obssessed with Alfred Doblin's 1922 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Alfred Doblin's novel is about Franz Biberkopf, a man who has just been released from prison for the murder of a woman. The narrative concerns itself with the fight for Franz's soul and his quest to live as honestly as he can. So it is fitting the first part of Fassbinder's opus is titled The Punishment Begins. His struggle doesn't so much happen to him in prison, but once he is released.

When RWF was finally ready to tackle the adaptation, he had already made 34 films. He was only 35. The prolific nature of Fassbinder brings to mind the studio system of the 30s and 40s. But even then you don't have the consistency in quality Fassbinder was pumping out. The only director I can think of who has been more prolific is Jess Franco. And still, the ratio of quality films to mediocre films is not that good. 

Fassbinder regulars Hanna Schygulla, Gottfried John and Brigitte Mira plays prominent parts. On an aesthetic level, he chooses to shoot in 16mm with Xaver Schwarzenberger behind the camera. Someone whom he worked with for the first time. 

Ian Penman describes Fassbinder as having been a part of the center of a 5 circle venn diagram. One is political: left-wing post-1968 gay liberation. Two: Hollywood and popular TV/film, taking in noir and melodrama with special reference to Sirk. Three: European film including Godard, Bresson, Melville, Bunuel, Chabrol. Four: radical theatre with special reference to Brecht. Five: European culture, including Genet, Doblin, Artaud and Van Gogh. 

Unlike his peers of the New German movement, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, he has become difficult to smooth down. Too untidy and paradoxical. Over four decades after his passing in 1982 at the age of 37, his messiness remains. 

The 15 hour magnum opus can be considered a summation of his filmography as much as it be of the themes he regularly displays. The intersection of sex and sexuality, masculinity and misogny, money and labor, politics and ideology. 

In an interview with the director in 1980, he was asked if he sees similarities from Alexanderplatz to the present days. His response: "I am certain that an exact description of the Weimar Republic, which Alexanderplatz is, has something to do with our republic. I believe it is becoming more right wing just as the Weimar Republic had. So I think there are parallels. Individual points can be refuted, but I think this is a general tendency in politics. I will continue to try to at least make the audience aware of this right-wing trend so that they don't just stupidly and unconsciously go along with it like in the past."