OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

Thirty years ago this fall the artist Jim Pomeroy and SFMOMA curator Suzanne Foley were corresponding about his proposal to include his text “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog” in her survey of 1970s Bay Area conceptual and performance practices, Space/Time/Sound.  In light of recent discussions on Open Space about the New Langton Arts crisis and the role of nonprofit arts organizations, Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts, here revisits Pomeroy’s analysis of modern art museums vs. artists’ spaces. Wonderfully, we are also able to present for the first time a downloadable PDF of his original text and images of their letters.

“To what extent does a larger organization, in absorbing new artistic practices, need to support or point to the smaller institutions that pioneered them?”

In the midst of the debate in August surrounding the pending closure of the San Francisco-based nonprofit New Langton Arts (NLA) writer and curator Patricia Maloney posed this question as part of a larger comment on the perhaps inevitable comparison between NLA and SFMOMA as our blog brought increased visibility to the latter’s predicament. Open Space became a forum for the community to evaluate the struggling institution and speculate on its tactical errors, opening up space for criticism of both organizations.

This end-of-an-era reflection on the blog made me think back to the perceived paradoxes and inherent tensions surrounding SFMOMA’s own attempts, through a two-phase exhibition initiative held thirty years ago, to ‘support or point to the smaller institutions’ that had fostered the breadth of activity associated with Bay Area Conceptual art. In reading Julian Myers’s series of discussion threads on the NLA crisis and the political ethos that generated the emergence of the alternative visual arts space movement in the 1970s, I’ve kept returning to that moment. Specifically, to a text-based piece by the artist Jim Pomeroy (1945–1992) featured in the major SFMOMA survey Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (December 21, 1979–February 13, 1980). The work was in itself predicated on dialogues about the fundamental differences between collecting institutions and the parallel system of artist-run spaces. Entitled Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog, the piece consisted of enlarged reproductions of his correspondence with the exhibition’s curator, the late Suzanne Foley (at SFMOMA 1968–81) and Pomeroy’s paper, of the same title, written for The New Arts Space conference in Santa Monica organized by LAICA in 1978. It is worth noting here that Pomeroy lived upstairs from 80 Langton Street (what later became NLA) and as co-founder, had been instrumental in formulating its mission and goals. Back in 1978 Langton described itself as a “forum for art work, which requires a more flexible, responsive context and more direct critical/supportive feedback than traditional institutions can provide.”

Space/Time/Sound represented twenty-one of the more prominent artists/artist groups of the time, highlighting the work that came out of sculptural concerns—performance actions, installations, video art, slide projections—rather than the sculpture (objects), drawings, photography, etc. that we also associate with a number of the same artists and the broader scope of the movement. Pomeroy had performed as part of Foley’s Exchange DFW/SFO (1975-1976) at Fort Worth Museum of Art and at SFMOMA. Several of the artists on the Space/Time/Sound checklist had either been in that or other SFMOMA group presentations, and in certain cases had been given solo shows at the museum. Taken together, Space/Time/Sound was trying to tell a story of how often temporal or site-specific work produced in the Bay Area had inhabited a full range of other arts organizations and non-art spaces—university museums, temporary storefronts, alternative spaces, galleries, studios, streets.

Foley’s colleague Rolando Castellón (SFMOMA curator 1972–81, co-founder of Galería de la Raza) had the overall vision for a Bay Area-centric exhibition series that would include Foley’s presentation and would begin in 1978 with a more direct acknowledgement of the achievements of alternative spaces.  He invited the artist-directors of three prominent San Francisco-based alternative spaces—The Floating Museum (Lynn Hershman), Museum of Conceptual Art (Tom Marioni), La Mamelle, Inc. (Carl Loeffler)—to program at the museum, highlighting their roles as producer, promoter, and publisher. Each exhibition touched on a signature aspect of their respective projects including live events, while activating the transformed gallery space(s)—from a zine library of correspondence art to the social function of a simulated bar environment.

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This afternoon, SFMOMA is hosting a special memorial service honoring Bay Area sculptor and conceptual artist David Ireland, who passed away last spring. Ireland was a central figure in conceptual art in the Bay Area and beyond. From the 1970s until his death, he produced a highly idiosyncratic body of work concerned with the creation and function of art within everyday life. In place of the blog’s usual mid-month “Collection Rotation”, today we also pay tribute, with a collection of contributions from younger artists, organized by SF artist and musician Scott Hewicker.

My home, my work, my artistic and musical practices—essentially my whole life—co-exist on a steady fault line between David Ireland’s two Capp Street houses in San Francisco’s Mission District. 65 Capp Street was the site of the first Capp Street Project, and 500 Capp St, Ireland’s former home and studio, is now also, to my mind, his greatest lasting artwork. The two houses seem at times like two footprints of a standing giant, and he was a giant to me and to many. Fearlessly beginning his career late in life, David’s essential concern was the Zen-like observance of, and dedication to, the ever-lasting present. Using common, readily available materials such as concrete, found wood, and other debris, with the lightest of touch. David could make dirt sing, rewarding our acceptance of his work, but never asking for it. “You can’t make art by making art”, he often said, and you can see in some of the contributions below how many artists have taken that simple but profound idea to heart. I didn’t know him well, but his work and the ideas inherent in their making have always deeply resonated with me, as with others. David’s refusal of personal attachment to the works he made gave me the courage when I left art school to discard all my old work and start over again from scratch.

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Dear reader,

This is Tammy. Has this ever happened to you?

I was passing a casual afternoon in the SFMOMA sculpture garden the other day, sipping a glass of fresh tap water and soaking up some much needed vitamin D in my San Francisco summer attire , when I realized that my helmet with its tundra down lining resembled the Thought Screen Helmets made famous by our friends at Stop Alien Abductions.  Thought screen helmets prevent aliens from reading your thoughts, and ultimately, from abducting the wearer. Just for fun, I toyed with “anyone” who might be listening by creating a half-thought. And then, as if in answer,  an eerie pattern to the sculptures seemed to appear—an unwritten narrative that became more and more obvious the more I gazed at the objects on display and took into account the simple fact that rooftop gardens, like tennis courts, can easily be transformed into helipads.

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In response to my recent post “This land wasn’t made for you and me”, my fellow columnist, Anuradha Vikram asked me for examples of humanizing green building projects to compare to my critique of both the San Francisco’s Federal Building’s “public” plaza and the houses built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation (MIR) in New Orleans that I wrote about back in June. Over the past couple of days I’ve been trying hard to think of green building projects in the Bay Area that incorporate a functional shared public space.  Due to my lack of expertise in architecture, I’d like to open up Anu’s comment as a question for others to respond to:  What are good examples of humanizing green building projects in the Bay Area?

In contrast to building projects previously discussed, I’d like to briefly mention The Heidelberg Project started by Tyree Guyton in Detroit, Michigan. Back in 1986, East Detroit struggled to recover from the aftermath of the Detroit riots and faced a depleted economy and racially segregated neighborhoods. Guyton, a resident of Heidelberg Street since the age of 12, began cleaning up his increasingly abandoned and blighted neighborhood with an enclave of children who lived nearby. With the materials they gathered from the vacated residences and lots, Guyton and the neighborhood kids collaborated to create art environments and installations in the vacant lots, on street posts, and the facades of homes. The city of Detroit resisted, of course, demolishing a portion of the project in 1991 and then again in 1999.  However, The Heidelberg Project persisted and now operates as a non-profit arts organization, hosting a series of year round workshops and educational programs for schools and youth in the area.

Clearly, the context of The Heidelberg Project and the public plaza of the San Francisco Federal Building or MIR differ greatly and the comparison is a stretch, at best. However, I mention The Heidelberg Project as a way to push the possibilities of our collective spaces and as an example of a community-driven public art project that not only functions in the context of an urban neighborhood facing poverty and disenfranchisement, but employs the creative reuse of material and space—a thread that runs through many of my recent blog postings.

On that note, I look forward to hearing from Open Space readers about green building projects and public spaces in the Bay Area.

David Bernstein, Head of Music and Professor of Music at Mills College, demonstrating 4′33″ for staff performers, back in early November. On the piano is the Irwin Kremen 4′33″ score in proportional notation, and behind the piano is Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting (Three Panel).

[Throughout the run of the Art of Participation, we've been treated to daily performances of John Cage's seminal work 4'33", a composition of silence lasting -- well, yes -- four minutes and thirty-three seconds. A score of 'silence' highlights ambient sounds surrounding the performance. Cage was influenced by Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings, and together these two works form the opening or entrance to the exhibition. Below, SFMOMA visitor services attendant Michael Zelenko, on what it's been like to experience 4'33" day in and day out, for the last three months. There's also a nice YouTube clip with Cage discussing silence, here.]

4′33″

Once a day, six times a week, four weeks a month, for almost three months…I’ve seen John Cage’s 4′33″ performed at least three dozen times while I’ve been working part-time as a gallery attendant on the fourth floor. Maybe I needed to see it that many times in order to let the whole thing develop, to ripen. My feelings toward the piece have gone from veneration to frustration, fascination to boredom, and finally, in these last few weeks, a return to reverence. I now experience those four-odd minutes as a resting place in an otherwise scattered work day.

Over the weeks, my attention has shifted inevitably from the performance to the audience. On the wide spectrum between befuddlement and admiration, most visitors’ reactions fall somewhere in the middle. However, after a few weeks I realized that those listeners at either end have a common reaction–total and absolute silence. Admittedly, the completely attentive individuals are rare, but they have contributed more than their fair share to my experience. I remember in early December when an elderly Swedish music professor stood riveted next to the piano, intensely focused during those four and half minutes. Afterwards, he shared with me his theory regarding the length of the composition in a hushed tone: the 273 seconds that make up the piece are possibly a reference to -273 Celsius, or absolute zero, when all molecular motion stops, or at least reaches its minimal state, a sort of molecular silence. These audience members –the fans — are my favorite because they stick it out, smile, and applaud warmly when the performer stands up from the bench.

On the other hand, I’ve repeatedly heard the story of a visitor who brazenly tapped a performing staff member on the shoulder, asking for directions. When someone from the audience whispered that they were interrupting, the visitor stepped back in disbelief, as if suddenly awakened. For the most part though, visitors patiently watch the pianist for a couple of minutes before they look at each other and, smiling sideways and shrugging their shoulders,they move on. Others don’t stop at all, but simply throw an awkward glance in passing.

After almost three months, I’d yet to do the honors myself! So it was with excitement that I finally sat down behind that ominous looking piano last week. I have to admit I was a bit nervous. As the seconds ticked by, I began hearing the kinds of things I’d overlooked during all those other thirty-six performances: the droning tones of laughter from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Hole-In-Space or the abrasive sawing of Hans Haacke’s News printer, both installed nearby; and finally, a woman singing, right next to me, in front of Nam Jun Paik’s Participation TV, blissfully unaware she was engaged in two pieces at once, Paik’s and Cage’s. At some point during the third movement, as if orchestrated, all these previously unacknowledged sounds seemed to come together. It felt to me as if the museum itself was performing for us. When it was all over I turned to the audience and heard the pitter-patter of applause, not quite sure who it was for.

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Bay Area artist Stephanie Syjuco weighs in here on the successes and pitfalls of ‘participatory’ art, and takes a close look at New York design firm Freecell’s Stack-to-Fold project, currently in use in our second-floor “D-space“.

“(T)hese objects, once they are assembled, will lend themselves to certain functions, but they might also be reconfigured and used in ways that we can not foresee..Precisely because we might embrace the idea of dysfunctionality-the fact that it becomes more difficult to do something maybe is what makes it more interesting — and provide an open situation.” — SFMOMA curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling

The term D.I.Y., or “Do It Yourself,” has become something of a buzzword lately, an ethos. The acronym was spawned from early 1950s home repair manuals, grew to refer to alternative punk and hardcore music, and now encompasses everything from the burgeoning indie craft scene to the Slow Food movement. Doing It Yourself, it seems, is pretty darn cool because it means you can really “have it your way” and the term wears itself like the ultimate democratic and even populist statement. We are all creators! We are all designers!

However, left to their own devices, humans can be an unruly lot, especially when it comes to following a given set of instructions. Take it from someone who once worked as a designer at a hands-on science museum: a large part of my day was spent trying to design instructions and images to coax museum visitors into doings things a “certain way” (push this button) to get a “certain result” (make it go). The trick was to frame the instruction in a friendly and “rewarding” way that would make the visitor feel they had gained something (”I learned about quantum physics! Neat-o”), or had done something correctly (”I followed the instructions and the whirly thing spun around”). These were the basic goals, with conveying complex concepts falling at one end of the success spectrum, and delivering simple physical results falling on the other.

Mind you, these were the best outcomes one could hope for. What usually happened, comically enough, was a lot of museum visitors randomly banging around on high-tech machinery, buttons being pushed willy-nilly out of sequence, and the lovingly designed graphics ignored and thrown to the winds of instructional irrelevance. What I learned, essentially, is that humans are a messy, anarchic lot that, on the whole — and despite your best-designed intentions — will revert to a herd of cats with incredibly short attention spans.

Of course I’m being more than just a little cheeky here. For every fifty people who “do it wrong,” (or don’t do it at all) the one person who does it “right” may really get the right “something” out of it. And who says there’s no success in eliciting joy from randomly pushing buttons anyway? What is right, anyway? And what is, for lack of a better term… wrong?

Initial Freecell design proposal photographs

All of this is a rather long-winded way to begin a rumination on design group Freecell’s Stack-to-Fold , commissioned by SFMOMA for the Participation exhibition. Visiting on a crowded Free Tuesday at the museum last week, I encountered gorgeously designed cardboard panels available in the museum’s D-Space area for visitors to punch out (they are perforated) and assemble into different modular types of furniture-like structures: bench-like things and wedge-like table-things. Depending how the assembler wanted to interpret it, each person could design for themselves different useful components out of basic building blocks: perhaps a bench to sit on to watch the movies being projected in the space, or a comfy corner to sit against, or perhaps a platform to peruse a book on. In a prior blog interview the designers touched on the notion of dysfunction as inherent in their design setup and this is what intrigued me the most during my observation of their installation.

How do designers and viewer/participants gauge “success” when it comes to open-ended or participatory experiences? Especially when the viewer/participant is called upon to follow a given set of rules but also to bring in their own creativity (or even lethargy) and possibly do something unforeseen or deemed “unruly” by the designer? In other words, are all outcomes — especially the ugly — ones… good? Does inviting someone to respond to a work only to have them merely scribble graffiti on it a valid invitation-response exchange in itself? Should designers nod approvingly when their works get turned upside down? To take a well-known and ongoing online example, I wonder how much of the “crappy” or “wrong” responses end up online at the “Learning to Love You More” website by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July and how do they get weeded out as so? I assume that not every response is deemed a “right” response.What an artist/designer hopes for is a response to their solicitations for participation. But I suspect they also expect something in particular. How does a sliding scale of success become formulated?

OK, back to the unruly public:

I can appreciate when the best of intentions goes a bit haywire. Structured (or even semi-structured) situations like Freecell’s project have the potential to elicit the most interesting and off-the-wall end products simply because the public responses defy expectation.

I feel for anyone in the designer’s situation who finds themselves inviting a type of open-ended response but may also have a rather specific vision of what they want the outcome to be. As someone who has also tried her hand in projects that elicited outside participation, it was an interesting personal barometer as to what I deemed “acceptable” as a result. I have been both amused, shocked, and humbled by the off-the-wall end-products generated. The Counterfeit Crochet Project solicits crafters all over the world to hand-make designer products and then send me photographs of the results. These have ranged from stunning feats of verisimilitude and skill to the most banal or strangely made objects. And while I’ve been impressed at the “good” ones (interesting proposition: can you really counterfeit “correctly”?), it’s the “bad” results — the lumpy mistranslations, the not-so-perfect outcomes, the Christmas ornaments, doilies, and non-designer results that actually give me more insight into the real customized DIY experience, one that reflects personal tastes, concerns, and a “this is what I want to do, not so much what you want me to do” attitude. In the end, I keep all the results, promise to show all the items in some way, and have learned that you never can tell how people will interpret your proposition.

Left: original image of Coach handbag. Right: counterfeit crochet version, never finished, by Carrie Suchman from Ohio.

Institutional limitations

Suzanne Stein, SFMOMA community producer, pointed me in the direction of this video snippet showing SFMOMA visitors using Lygia Clark’s interactive work Rede de elástico (Elastic Net) as a jump rope in the galleries. This work requires visitors to collectively knot together individual rubber bands to create a “net” of sorts; life as a jump rope was unexpected and had to be quickly discouraged as it may have interfered with or bumped into other works in the gallery. To be fair, in an earlier Open Space blog interview, Art of Participation curator Rudolf Frieling acknowledges that there are always institutional restraints that keep artworks from getting too unruly and that may even hinder a fully “active” participatory experience. Clark intended her work to be actively played with. It’s just that SFMOMA can’t accommodate all the ways in which that can happen.

“There is a famous historic example of an exhibition by Robert Morris in 1971, at the Tate in London, that had to be closed after a few days because people were destroying some of the objects. There is an urge and an eagerness to do something and to participate that can be counterproductive to the usual aims of a museum.” – Rudolf Frieling

Freecell’s initial plan was devised for a minimal room with no other furniture in it, in which visitors could construct the modular units. But “D-space” is also the Koret Visitor Education center, and purity just wasn’t possible: Stack-to-Fold bumps up against a video projection area, and coloring/drawing area (The 1000 Journals Project), creating a bit of confusion as to what one is supposed to focus on or pay attention to. As the exhibition progressed, it was also apparent to the museum staff that folks weren’t utilizing the space “correctly” by making their own seating area and tables out of the Freecell units, so they added actual chairs and a formal sitting area with tables. This may have discouraged folks even more from thinking of their constructions as functioning as utility items. From my visit, it looked as if the Freecell units had become surfaces upon which to graffiti on or stack like Legos. It certainly looked like a far cry from the clean, platonic, designed experience originally depicted in their mock-ups.

The Participation show, and the Freecell project in particular, invites viewers to take part in a specific set of circumstances; artists/designers as well as the museum then have to stand back and hope that they have constructed a proposition that is both contained yet still open to interpretation. What’s interesting to me are the divergences that occur, the trajectories and unruliness that can come about from the public choosing to reinterpret or even ignore a given set of conditions within a participatory artwork and just “do it themselves” in their own way. Also, actual institutional circumstances (space constraints, budgets, etc) can hinder the execution of a “pure” vision. I’m curious if there’s such a thing as “failure” in these types of works, and if so, how do we evaluate this? As artists and curators, we try to frame our participatory proposition to the best of our abilities, and then it is up to us to step away and watch what happens when set upon by that fabulous, inventive, unruly, and chaotic public. Whether we like it or not.

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Stephanie Syjuco is a visual artist based in San Francisco. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. You can view her work at http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com.

[This Saturday! As part of our "Vegas Highs, Vegas Lows" film series, and in conjunction with the exhibition Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas, we're screening Viva Las Vegas (1pm) and Showgirls (3pm). Not to be missed!]

Never have there been two films so ripe for reassessment as George Sidney’s Viva Las Vegas, and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Made thirty years apart, they both reside in that basket reserved for the culturally unsanctioned. Maybe it’s due to the stain of Vegas — that fata Morgana that has traditionally made the highfalutin see red. Now, in the true era of anything goes, in which the Vegas aesthetic has established itself as the norm, it’s just possible their time has come…

Why reassess an Elvis movie? ‘Cause this one’s so damned fun! There are a few decent Elvis movies. Viva is the only great one. The King is as close as the United States ever came to producing an autochthonous deity. The lack of a worthy consort might explain the fallowness of the rest of his cinematic terrain. In Viva, Elvis meets his match, Ann-Margret. The plot of this film is a pretext for their sacred union, bringing with it the promise of fulfillment to the magical kingdom of Vegas — that ultimate flowering, refinement, end-point of the American mythos. Elvis plays an up-and-coming race-car driver, always a dice-toss away from attaining the motor of his dreams. Ann-Margret is a young goddess on the unconscious make for the proper consort. Together they will play, flirt, bicker, argue, make up, as well as sing and dance the rock-n-roll over the course of eighty-five increasingly ecstatic minutes. They inhabit a world of widescreen neon, in which every desire is attainable, and every dream has merely to be fantasized, and it’s suddenly reality — all without repercussion. Yes, this is the true American Dream.

I believe somewhere in the pages of Cahiers du cinema in the 1950’s, a proto-French New Wave director mused on the revolutionary concepts he hoped to enact in celluloid: gone would be artificial notions of plot and character not derived from action. Film was about the eternal now. Each moment would create its own reality, its own urgency. Life would be experienced by the glance, the gesture, the drama of expressions across the face, from second to second, shot to shot. If a character desired to sing, he’d sing. If she wanted to dance, she’d dance. If angry, they’d shoot to kill. If lusty, they’d go to town… Desire, thought, and action would again be one — and paradise regained. Each scene would exist for itself, build to a new shuddering climax, then be dismissed, in an endless quest for the new now now now…

This article must have been amongst the earliest of its kind to be translated from the French, and transported to Hollywood, for George Sidney, prince of the MGM musical-comedy, apparently read it and instantly put its principles into action. As an example of this New Wave genre, it has never been surpassed. Sidney was just the man for the job, having built an extensive body of work poised somewhere between primitive surrealist and naive absurdism, which had a long history of sending the literati into uncontrollable spasms of collective horror and outrage, and of gracing the faces of the average Jane or Joe with smiles of pleasure. There is something seriously strange about Sidney’s work, an unhinged yet vital deliriousness, a quality emitting from some now deep-buried, disclaimed and abandoned fold of the American Grain, which, I must admit, I find intoxicating.

Jonathan Rosenbaum once proposed Gentleman Prefer Blondes as the capitalist Potemkin, but for me this title goes to Viva Las Vegas. Though Blondes is arguably brilliantly embedded with capitalist ideology, Viva cuts to the chase by offering an unsurpassable platter of delights for our ecstatic delectation. This is the field of argument to which capitalism is best suited. Examples of what’s on offer: Elvis performing “What I Say” in a sequence that gives both Ray Charles and Bruce Conner runs for their money, the most mind-blowing first date in cinema history (not counting Last Tango in Paris), and, at the film’s climax, the most viscerally exciting auto race I’ve ever seen in a movie.

But this film is far more than capitalist apologia, for its convulsive beauty contains a religious dimension — an ecstatic vision, a mystical union of opposites, Viva Las Vegas presents such a profoundly affirmative view of the American psyche, that it suggests it’s capable of (witness the “fate” of Cesare Danova) transcending death itself.

If Viva is Vegas as utopia, the Vegas of Showgirls is a dystopia worthy of Blade Runner, or Brecht’s Mahagonny. Ambition, manipulation, corruption, the quest for power — these are the issues on this film’s agenda. Though its Vegas is as beautiful as that of Viva (in a 1995 kinda way), this work is a large and bitter pill — ultimately to your benefit, but scary for those in search of a quick and easy tease.

Showgirls follows the exploits of Nomi Malone, a dancer who seeks to protect her integrity while crawling to the top of the Vegas food-chain. Young, vital, infinitely ambitious, yet willfully naive, charming but profoundly undereducated in all but a modicum of the street-smarts she desperately wants to shed, Nomi is a mass of contradictions, a woman in severe need of Reichian analysis, in which every element of being is treated as neurotic symptom. All of her talents and symptoms will come into play as she battles her way from strip-club nymph to full-fledged Goddess of show business on the Vegas strip. Arrayed against her is a virtual network of the devious and duplicitous, all of whom want either to prevent her from attaining her rightful pedestal in the Pantheon, or gain access past her g-string. As she powers her way through power-mad would-be seducers (club and show managers, a choreographer manqué, the reigning Vegas Goddess, a sexually violent Michael Bolton doppelganger), she comes ever-so-close to a confrontation with her own heart of darkness, but like America, to which her character is an analog, Nomi will stop at nothing to protect her remaining shreds of innocence. Over the course of the film, the trail of self-deception and chaos in her wake reveals a latter-day incarnation of Inanna, Sumerian Goddess of passion, war, and destruction.

Paul Verhoeven’s audacity is seen in the way he vacuum-packs contrary elements into seemingly irresolvable structures. Dealing in a largely heterosexual eros, but in a self-consciously high-camp manner, relishing ambiguity and reveling in primal force, proffering both satirical social critique and an appreciation for the permutations of undying archetypes, and working in a style marked for its mixture of raw garishness and cold European aestheticism, it’s no wonder the works are so often misunderstood. Their aim tends both above the head and below the belt.

The difficulty of these films is compounded by Verhoeven’s open embrace of that despised form, melodrama. This isn’t a problem for his macho melodramas — Robocop and Starship Troopers — but the mode has become somehow threatening when applied to a female world view. Showgirls refers back to the genre of “women’s pictures”, now for the most part sadly defunct, which dealt with troublesome emotions — hysteria, say, or unrequited love — and were often centered around sympathetic portrayals of outsider women. They served as societal safety valves, providing catharsis, allowing for an imaginative exploration of a realm of extravagant emotionality, touching parts of the psyche now repressed. This instinctive, working-class genre has lost its currency, due, in part, to the intertwining rise of PC strictures and upwardly mobile aspirations, and their concomitant code of rigid decorum. Guy Maddin, in a recent, spirited defense, said “melodrama isn’t true life exaggerated — that would be bogus. It’s true life uninhibited, just like our dreams.” And uninhibited emotion in the classically “feminine” mode just ain’t in fashion.

In dream-like style, Showgirls (like Viva) romps through other genres (musical, soft-core porno, over-the-top exploitation film, martial-arts action) as well, in the best meta-Hollywood manner, making for a narrative and dramatic short-hand in which complex ideas and feelings are suggested with ruthlessly efficient, effortless speed. Genre play in a film overloaded with painful realities is, in fact, the most transgressive element of this radical work — and the cause of the emotional gag-reflex it has so often inspired. Ultimately, Showgirls is a “women’s picture” made for men, and therefore disturbing to just about everybody.

[Hello all. A small group of us have been having the occasional post-screening discussion in response to the Jarman retrospective now on. As I noted yesterday, none of us have been quite sure how to gauge our encounter with Derek Jarman. Weighing in below are Brecht Andersch, our projectionist, and Stephen Hartman, film-loving psychoanalyst! (You may remember them from our summer of Alexanderplatz). If you have thoughts, we'd love to hear them.]

Stephen Hartman:

So fond of techno am I that I have always refused to listen to—I’m sure I’ve even said “hated”—opera without knowing much about it. Then, recently, a dear friend set out to convert me. We spent a wonderful evening listening and comparing. As I write now, my new heroine Régine Crespin is belting out Verdi. Alas, me…a convert?

Unfortunately, diving back into Derek Jarman after many years had the opposite effect. Where I was once an Act Up boy overwhelmed by the poetry of The Garden and in tears at the New York premier of Blue (which, I hope, will still reduce me to rubble), I left Caravaggio mildly interested, The Last of England bored, and The Garden all but obtunded. People change. And the films and music that give us identity age. I embraced Jarman in the 1980’s because the lush sensibility mixed with righteous indignation and a certain academic veneration of beauty had operatic strength. Why now, I wonder, does Jarman’s vision seem dated dull? Postmodern without punch? Operatic in its hysteria but without a unifying beat?

There are so many magnificent images. Yet, in the way they knit together, something seems lacking, unmetabolized. It was, of course, a very different time. People were dying of AIDS everywhere with no end in sight and WMD’s were circling around the American southwest on train tracks, set to launch at any moment. It was a jittery time: melancholic even in advance of death. Jarman captured thanatos well—if not with a kind of aesthetic hyperbole that could be hypnotic or off-putting relative to your anger at the unassimilated thud of yet another death.

At some point, though, the fat lady sings and there is resolution. I’m afraid that for Jarman, at least in the films we have seen so far, the tragedy is still pending. I’m going to try to go back to that time of waiting for the inevitable. But it is rubbing me the wrong way now that my heroes are the ones armed with hope rather than despair.

Brecht Andersch:

While I must confess my previous encounters with Jarman’s work didn’t make me a fan, and this extensive retrospective has not been a conversion experience, I’ve nevertheless found some elements in the work to admire and enjoy, such as:

1) This is an artist of confidence and audacity – Jarman is a man full of feeling and passion, and whatever fears he faces regarding the difficulties of expressing a complex and thorny vision are met face-on and dispatched.

2) His work is deeply personal – each film seems to tell a version of his own story, or provide an update as to how events have affected the development of his vision. Many of my favorite filmmakers, writers, and artists work in this mode.

3) The filmmakers he emulates and to whom he pays repeated homage are artists I admire immensely: Michael Powell, Cocteau, Pasolini, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos. At one point in The Last of England, a rapid-fire montage of black and white imagery alternating with shots dominated by red or blue (in a manner clearly influenced by Anger and Markopoulos) is immediately followed by a homage to the ending of Pasolini’s Salo: two soldier/terrorists dance near a fire burning in the middle of the street, machine-guns slung over their shoulders as they waltz…

4) Jarman has a bold and unusual sense of color and film form in general, and the results are often beautiful. One technique he employs repeatedly is to blow up super-8 Kodachrome to 35mm. As a lover of this now almost defunct “home movie” stock, I find it very exciting to encounter its deep, saturated reds and blues on the big screen, though, as I’m also something of a film purist, the pixels acquired from the video intermediate of The Last of England are a bit disconcerting. More to my taste is that super-8 Kodachrome moment in Jubilee—blown up directly to 35mm—in which a ballerina performs, out-of-doors and nearby a fire. Through deft in-camera editing and graceful camera movement and zooms (Jarman no doubt operating the camera himself) Jarman becomes his dancer’s partner, and the film and the world come alive…

5) Jarman is unyieldingly honest, his work over-stuffed with contradictory impulses and ideas. Just when I’m ready to write him off as an unredeemable chiliast, for example, he makes a whole film—Wittgenstein—dedicated to the story of a man who must learn to live with all of life’s roughness and confusion. As alluded to above, each of Jarman’s films is a chapter in a too-early concluded spiritual autobiography, and this kind of rigorously honest self-appraisal—in a quest for a deeper encounter with Self—is extremely attractive to me.

[At 6am this Wednesday morning, the iconic and colorful Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings #935 and #936 will be "deinstalled" (read: painted over), in part to make room for some VERY BIG sculptures that will be part of the upcoming Martin Puryear exhibition in November. Any SFMOMA search on Flickr will immediately turn up dozens of images of these works. The drawings, having lived in the Atrium for eight years, seem practically synonymous with that space, or even with the museum itself. Local artist Chris Cobb was part of the team of artists who worked on the Sol LeWitt exhibition at SFMOMA in 2000, creating many drawings from LeWitt's instructions. He reflects on the strange 'passing' of the drawings:]

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As the Wall Drawings Vanish………………………………………………………. As SFMOMA prepares to remove Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #935 and #936 from its Atrium, I’ve been working at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, helping to install LeWitt’s last project and the largest retrospective of his work ever, consisting of over 100 of his wall drawings. MASS MoCA is working with Yale University and Williams College to create what’s got to be one of the most dynamic installations in the country. MASS MoCA has given an entire three-story factory building to the project and as of this writing it is has taken a small army of drawing installers, interns, and apprentices close to five months to complete. When all is said and done, the exhibition is scheduled to remain in place for twenty-five years.

Snapshot of a snapshot: LeWitt installation in progress @ SFMOMA, 2000. This was an ink wash wall drawing that was made by building up layers one at a time, letting them dry and then adding the next layer.  (Chris Cobb)

Wim Starkenburg, one of my fellow drawing installers here and at the SFMOMA retrospective, was in charge of executing #935 and #936 at SFMOMA back in 2000. He is now 61 and worked for Sol since the 1980s. When I broke the news to him about the deinstallation (after all, #935 and #936 have been there for eight years), Wim was surprised they were being removed because he thought they worked so well with the architecture. I speculated that maybe they went a little too well with the building and that rather than being a permanent motif it might be nice for them to vanish one day into memory. Longing, it seems to me, is one of the deeply moving aspects of LeWitt’s art. On one level it has a powerful physical presence but on another level the work is temporal and fragile. Still, the wall drawings exist only as a set of instructions. Because the drawings are a map of an idea, his concept is like that of an architect–an architect designs a building and then has people build the building. Sol LeWitt’s work is similar in that he comes up with the idea of how a drawing should look and how it should be made, and then he has others execute the plan for him. We drawing installers feel connected to them because we put our time and energy into making them, but in the end, they aren’t the art – the instructions are the art. Wim understood this.

Sol LeWitt, Working Drawing for Wall Drawing #936: Color arcs in four directions, 1999, Gift of the Artist

I remember that in 2000 I had just graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and that a teacher there, Léonie Guyer, asked me if I would be interested in working on the Sol LeWitt retrospective. I can’t remember how many wall drawings there were, but definitely more than thirty. Work teams changed up from time to time so I got to work a little bit on almost all of the drawings. But the first job I had was sharpening pencil leads. I remember estimating that in a week I had sharpened about five thousand pencil leads. Each wall drawing had a team of people working in either crayon, ink wash, acrylic paint, or in graphite. And if the drawing was in graphite, sharp lines were essential. As a pencil lead is dragged across the bumpy surface of a wall the line gradually becomes grainy. Depending on the wall, the leads might only last long enough to make two or three lines before the line quality is too rough, hence the need for someone like me to just sit and sharpen pencils. Working on LeWitt drawings can be like Zen Archery, where the student holds the bow for weeks before being given an arrow, but then holds the arrow in place with the bow again for weeks before being allowed to shoot. Only after holding the bow and then holding the arrow for a length of time is the target allowed to be shot at. In this way the student learns to be as close to his/her tools as possible so they can become second nature. Maybe this sounds a little bit hippie but if you sharpen five thousand pencils you really become familiar with them. You also develop a profound reluctance to waste materials or to take them for granted. I have found, in general, this is not taught in art schools much these days.

Chris & Wim,  North Adams, MA

I think that back in 2000 #935 and #936 were almost the last works to be completed. One of the best memories I have from then was standing on the scaffolding in front of the partly finished drawings with Wim, who came all the way from Holland to do the project. We were looking down at the empty lobby. We both knew that all the work we had done was going to be painted out one day because the eventual absence of the work was built in to its presence.

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Chris Cobb is a San Francisco-based artist represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery. An account of his work on the Sol LeWitt retrospective at MASS MoCA will appear in the Nov/Dec issue of The Believer magazine and a number of his photographs will appear in the October issue of Modern Painters Magazine. He is best known for an installation he did at the Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco in 2004.

Dear Reader,

This is Tammy. Hey look! Summer’s gone up in smoke and it’s back-to-school time. And although my academic pursuits were stopped short many years ago by an ergonomic accident, September still brings with it a pain in my gut. Summer vacation drifts into a landslide of work and anxiety. Will my coworkers laugh at my back-to-school Toughskins and non-name-brand sneakers AGAIN this year? I ignore their petty, school-kid crap and plunge head first into my work. Thankfully, Stein and my boss, curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling, are keeping me busy with a lot of assignments. Stein even proposed I make my little postings here a regular column. (Name options: True Random Thoughts, Non Sequitur, Obvious Observations.) I’ve also been gearing up for the Art of Participation show, opening in November, editing interviews with Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer, and some more mundane projects, like hiding the filing I didn’t do this year and reorganizing the office to confuse Rudolf now that he’s back from vacation. I am seriously busy, but I do have priorities. So, with that in mind, I’ve been checking out the summer shows, and I noticed something peculiar….

Lee Miller is cruisey. Or maybe it’s just the third-floor photography gallery in general. But I’ve been in the exhibition three times now, and each time I happen upon some kind of girl-on-girl sexual tension. Let it be known that my gaydar is technically flawed, but still, if I can identify this ancient ritual, it must be painfully obvious to everyone else. I have some questions about this: Is Lee Miller a gay icon? Or do girls just think she’s hot? Does an artist have to be beautiful or interesting biographically in order to be successful? If so, does this apply more so for women? What would Frida say? Would the cross-dressing, bisexual Frida notice these things too? Would Frida cruise Lee? Would Lee cruise Frida? Could they see past their obvious attraction for each other and just be friends?

[from guest writer Julian Myers]

“I quit the art business in 1967 for about three years… At that time, whenever I’d get any letters about art related events, I’d send them back or throw them out. Sometimes, I’d write deceased on them. I was listed in Who’s Who in American Art and I sent back all their correspondence with “Deceased.” After three years, Who’s Who believed me… So the artist is definitely dead.” On Monday, July 7, 2008, Bruce Conner died in San Francisco. It wasn’t the first time – in 1960 he advertised an exhibition of works by “the late Bruce Conner” – but it may be the last. Conner’s singular life isn’t really done justice by a list of his many roles and personae – but you need them, if only to understand just what a restless, curious, and prodigious figure he was: prankster, filmmaker, iconoclast, bullshitter, printmaker, performer, punk, sculptor, collagist, romantic, spiritualist, painter, candidate for City Supervisor and much more.

BURNING BRIGHT, Bruce Conner, 1996, Collection SFMOMA

I didn’t know Conner, though I wish I did. Now I won’t have the chance.

I know, and value greatly, his artworks, which isn’t the same thing – but it’s something. He was probably my favorite artist, and created what is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest films ever made: A Movie from 1958.

A Movie was constructed completely of found footage. As he described it, this was a “pseudo-criminal” process that nevertheless was little different than making a painting. Painting, no more or less than appropriating objects, was a kind of theft: “You’re stealing all the past experiences that everyone has had… You’re building on this huge pyramid which has millions of dead bodies down at the bottom of it.”

A Movie was a “new old movie” – it looked antique in 1959. It was a comedic archaeology of progress, and an elegy for American modernity. The twentieth century is pictured, first comically, then with increasing sadness, as doomed charge, a monumental hubris – a zeppelin exploding in midair. The last shot of the film, breathtaking in its context, shows a diver swimming into the hull a submerged ship. He’s exploring the ruins of a century barely half over.

BOOK PAGES, Bruce Conner, 1967, Collection SFMOMA

Conner’s relationship with SFMOMA was notoriously troubled. As Conner recounted in 1979 (in an interview published in Damage and reprinted in Stiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art), Henry Hopkins, then the museum’s director, had proposed doing a retrospective of the artist’s work to date. But they couldn’t agree on certain things. Conner wanted to take part in curating his own history, and demanded a role in the conservation of assemblages that he’d originally intended to change over time. He also wanted his show to be free – the museum wanted to charge $2 admission fee – or at least to share in a percentage of the earnings from an increased admission.

“[Hopkins] told me that this exhibition would be a terrific boon to my career. It would make me famous and rich. I’ve been told that since I was twenty-one years old… It’s one of the more fraudulent myths of the art business. Whereas, the only way you can make any money is to get a percentage of the gate. The concept that the museum and the galleries have been working on for so long is a 19th century one, wherein you confront a robber baron…who smashed millions of tiny babies into the ground, tore their eyeballs out and disemboweled them; he’s done this his whole life… And he’s built castles around the world.”

“They practically informed me it was a post-mortem,” the artist said – invoking, in part, the avant gardist cliché of the museum as mausoleum, or morgue. More to the point, however, Conner was hoping to retain, or recover, some determination over his work, and his public image. “Everything was being run as if I did not exist,” he declared. Needless to say, SFMOMA never did their retrospective. Perhaps those around at the time will have another perspective.

ST VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE/HOMAGE TO ERROL FLYN, Bruce Conner, 1960, Collection SFMOMA

It’s too bad. It would have been tremendous. As the works in SFMOMA’s collection attest, Conner made some of the most distinctive and intense works of the last century. Works by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose productions from the late 1950s are often connected to Conner’s, look by comparison mannered “moves” in an art historical game. Conner’s best assemblages – Homage to Jay Defeo, 1958, The Temptation of St. Barney Google, 1959, Snore, 1960, Looking Glass, 1964 (the last one he made) – leap out of history. They look like rotting encrustations, half-destroyed artifacts of a culture both distant and familiar. They’re also, sometimes, surprisingly femme: When I saw “2000 BC”, Conner’s retrospective at the de Young Museum in 1999, my friend kept saying, of the assemblages, “I can’t believe someone made these. What was her name again?” Sarah, I whispered, Bruce Conner is a boy. “No she isn’t!”

These wounded and delicate almost-objects seem organic, alive, about to crawl away. “I made them vulnerable,” said Conner in 1979, “They were designed with the idea that time, the elements, would change them.” Like a life.

There’s more to say, and so much I haven’t addressed. Hopefully the conversation can continue in the comment box or – as Conner might have preferred – out in the night.

And so at last we bid our beloved friend Franz Biberkopf goodbye. It’s been a long but wonderful month watching, thinking, and talking together with everyone about all things Berlin A & RWF. Farewell Mieze, farewell Lina, farewell Franzë, Cilly, Ida, Pums, Meck—look, even in a blogpost I’m loathe to wish “fare well” to those awful villains Rheinhold & Luders!—

Dominic & I both want to thank all of our round-table-ees: Brandon, Cynthia, Julian, & Stephen, as well as Brecht our projectionist, Dana Ward our Cincinnati correspondent, and everyone else who’s been along with us in the theater on Thursdays and Saturdays, and in the comment boxes all along the way.

It seems kind of sweetly fitting to close with this last post in from Dana Ward, who didn’t quite make the summit with us:

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“…What a shame for me that just as I had calibrated the pace of my reading with the bundles of your viewing, I was ‘laid low’, (to use a favorite phrase of Döbin’s) by a monstrous toothache. I abandoned writing and reading for distractions more befitting one in constant pain and deprived of sleep: cooking the softest of possible meals, watching copious amounts of baseball, and, if awoken by the nagging tooth, wandering about in the yard, staring at my neighbor’s mimosa tree, damp and sparkly in the sunrise, Codeine just starting to numb me up some. So this is an interruption story. And a boo-hoo story, but don’t cry for me! During most of these hours I was thinking of Biberkopf. I thought a lot too about Döbin’s Berlin, of the myriad intimate tragedies derived from enforced economic stratification, a stratification that’s so like our own, and how these wounds make a polity available to the most malign cures, how National Socialism exploited all that pain. Perhaps it’s redundant to say so. But that causality, obvious as it is, felt unbearable in its revivification as I paced in the yard waiting for my molar nerve to scream itself hoarse.

Its ironic that just as I entered into a few days of mild phantasmagoria, Döbin’s novel had arrived in a similar state. The juxtaposition of set pieces was growing more disturbing. Franz’s vision of the slaughterhouse was seen through a lens of creepy paternalistic gangster benevolence, as if to say “sorry little piggies, it’s just business”. He was almost Ronald Reagan! Then his uber-maudlin Job lament, which, in its Christianized bathos was like a tonal prophecy of something out of Kerouac. It was that evening, not long after the disembodied voice revealed itself as Satan, that the toothache arrived and I left behind the book.

At work I’ve kept up with the discussion on the blog, and wished terribly that I’d been reading along. I’ve got a root canal in the morning, and my neighbor is outside right now trimming branches away from her mimosa, scaling back my little narcotic totem which I hope I won’t need for comfort at dawn, as I should be asleep. So I’m down here halfway to the top of Mt. Everest. Sorry I didn’t get to the top with y’all. Once I’ve made it to the summit and back down again, maybe later we’ll all compare notes on the view.”

[Another illuminating post from Brecht Andersch, our projectionist and Berlin Alexanderplatz expert-in-residence, as we wind our way down:]

Hanna Schygulla has said that Fassbinder told her he identified profoundly with all three main characters of Alexanderplatz; “I am Biberkopf, Reinhold, and even Mieze, too.” He had discovered the novel at the age of fourteen, and it served as a mirror to this budding genius, reflecting back the splits within his own psyche. He used his experiences as petri-dish experiments in order to acquire both self-knowledge and an understanding of his world, and his findings became increasingly disturbing: humans, through their own natural needs – love, security, self-protection, etc. – were, consequent to their acquiescence to the powerful, or to the power of the collective, the source of their own oppression. The only answer lay in further, deeper self-knowledge – but how to achieve this in a nation of “Stupidheads” (with whom he by no means disassociated himself), in which the previous two generations (to which his parents and grand-parents belonged) had been participants in mass-murder? His solution to this conundrum was to make films (often for television) which would deliver shocks to the psyche, by means of stirring up subconscious energies, which would be forced to emerge as psychic boils in need of painful laceration, or, for those more self-aware, a forcing of the viewer into direct confrontation with Self.

Franz, Mieze, and Reinhold are all aspects of the collective German psyche. Franz, our sometimes squishy-soft and sweet every-man, does everything in his power to prevent true self-knowledge, which eventually leads to setting his two loves (the halves of his split personality) on collision course. That these two are so oppositional in nature – Mieze, a pure spirit of sorts, “gentle as a feather”, whose self-willed innocence prevents her from assuming responsibility for herself – and Reinhold, who has given himself over to an evil psychotic misogyny (he has an anvil tattooed to his chest because “someone must lie on it”) – indicates a failure of integration, a collective psyche at war with itself, and, deep inside, a center that cannot hold. The later crimes of Germany, and fascism in general, like Mieze’s murder, have their root causes in failures and/or refusals to see. The response to the trauma of WWI - an attempt to stay “strong” (one of the many charges repeatedly hurled at Franz in the dream-play Epilogue), a wide-spread holding on to a simplistic and self-pitying national identity/ideology, would cause Germany to fall prey as a collective to its latent psychoses.

[Continue reading this post: (more…)

[Or, the other side of the mountain. The BA roundtable/support group on the last round of Fassbinder's epic masterpiece. We'll wind down our discussion over the next few days. Ms. Heidi at Engineer's Daughter says everyone deserves a t-shirt; I'm like to agree that all of you readers do too.]

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Brandon Well, we watched Berlin Alexanderplatz.

I found everyone’s responses last week to be, to varying extents, trying to come to terms with the violence Franz displays against Mieze. The violence and initial recuperation took place at the very end of our screening. Even if indeed some of the bloggers may have been “tip-toeing” around it, everyone (including commenters) seemed to be trying to situate the crisis in terms of Franz’s character. Was it jealousy that provoked his outburst? Does Franz have enough of a subject position to really comprehend “jealousy” and act accordingly? Is Franz’s brutality derived from an abandonment complex, a repetition compulsion?

The epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz, “My Dream from the Dream of Franz Biberkopf”, far from providing reductive, controlled answers about Franz, instead infinitely complicates those (and other) issues. I find it so compelling, about the finale, that at the very moment that the film departs from the detached narrative frame, we go into the interior of Franz’s psyche. What we find there is Franz, yes, but moreover we find all the others. And part of what all the other characters of the film reappear to enact is a detailed history of brutality, with reference to Western civilization from ancient (say, biblical) to contemporary (and contemporary with Fassbinder, not “Franz”) times; but very specifically what we find in Franz Biberkopf’s psyche is a history of German violence.

Throughout the film there are several rebirths by blood. The rape of Minna which somehow restores “Franz Biberkopf” after prison, the Abraham/Isaac sacrifice motif, the “new” old Franz who emerges only after his arm is severed; Franz himself is sacrificed over and over again in the dream. Franz, who has meted out violence throughout the film and laughs loudly at reports of violence done to others, is now the object of violence. He is crucified, humiliated over and over again by Reinhold, slaughtered in a slaughterhouse/concentration camp, and is even the medicalized object of the psychiatrists.

What strikes me about these sacrifices is that the “rebirth” for which sake they are supposedly committed is very simply the entry of Franz Biberkopf into the repetitive worldlessness of laboring. It’s as if the central problem for Franz, both at the beginning of the film (what “work” will he do) and throughout (”what can you do with one arm?”) really is an inability to work, both in the sense of “function” and “labor for wage.”

It is obvious for anyone who has seen the last two episodes and epilogue that there is far too much to say, and that the tone of reconciliation I’ve displayed in this post is actually impossible. I really look forward to other observations and trajectories!

Julian I suppose I’ve found the question of whether Franz “can have enough of a subject position…to act,” to be somewhat circular. Franz is a character in crisis, but I am not convinced that his crisis is best articulated in psychological – as opposed to political, moral, or ethical – terms.

Can Franz act? Of course he can. I imagine Fassbinder answering this question in the epilogue. During a flight of madness in Buch mental facility, Franz is confronted with Ida, who is cringing and limping as if she is being beaten. Distressed, Franz asks her, “What is causing your pain? Who is beating you?” She replies, “You are Franz. “You are beating me. “You killed me.”

In your discussion of the epilogue I find more to agree with, especially in your observation that Franz’s central problem may be “an inability to work.” It’s a reading that helps me understand why Franz’s encounters with Communism and Syndicalism, ideologies in which labor is anything but “repetitive worldlessness,” are so fraught. I’ll watch that playground debate with renewed attention next time.

Episode thirteen I had a hard time with. After Mieze’s murder – an enervated fairytale starring Reinhold as the ambivalent Big Bad Wolf – I thought the last episode veered into TV cliché: in particular Meck’s confession and that final scene, where the sad pimp “goes mad” and kills the bird Mieze gave him (the stunted symbolism is Franz’s, but still).

By contrast the epilogue was wonderful: psychotic, crass, bizarre, gaudy, and macabre. Where Brandon saw it as a history of violence I saw it instead as a flash-forward, to the war, the Holocaust, the bomb, the GDR, gay liberation, sex clubs, televised boxing, Kraftwerk, Elvis and disco. The appearance of Margit Carstensen (her of Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant), as an angel of death, was a treat. I can’t imagine a better, weirder, or more profound ending.

Perhaps from the top of this “Mount Everest of Modern Cinema,” it might be fun to look back at where we began. It’s a long way down!

Stephen Wow! This has been an amazing ride. Thanks to Dominic and Suzanne for organizing the film and discussions. I agree with Brandon that the epilogue launches the psychological investigation of Franz into the public realm.

I can’t resist commenting on the scene where the three psychiatrists are debating whether to treat Franz. We have a well-meaning, if not naïve, psychoanalyst intent on Franz’s submission to the talking cure to address his mental block, a nay-saying, smug, pharmacologist who wants to zap him with ECT to reign in psychosis (and then relax into his newspaper), and a vain nose-hair trimming behaviorist who argues that trash is trash, so why bother? (It could be the scene at any HMO). None of them is ready to entertain Franz’s experience. No one thinks about the social construction of Franz’s condition. No one really takes responsibility. This debate among “critics” precedes the most outrageous, campy, hallucinatory shenanigans yet to come in the film.

The three doctors could just as well be commenting on the film’s narrative/visual arc. They would reserve “two thumbs up” for the costume drama that preceded the epilogue, and they would like to return Franz to an agreeable if not gauzy frame. They are also, in the diagnoses of Franz, cynically noting—but passively accepting—Germans’ strategy to account for the holocaust (and Americans Hiroshima). How dissociated and barely capable of assuming responsibility for the horror is the post-war industrial giant—blocked, medicated, why bother…wouldn’t a Hollywood ending be nicer than the glossy operatic mess we are forced to deal with when we allow ourselves to fall apart? “Come close to the light and see death so that you can become human,” says the reaper Martin Luther / Abe Lincoln impersonator. Try as he might, this is something that Franz can’t yet do, saddled still with the burden of his own guilt and Reinhold’s off-loaded evil. (He is barely getting by in Bush America). Our every German dies before he can be cured for our sins.

Cynthia I want to take what Julian says regarding episode thirteen to revel in its soap opera qualities. But also because, as someone points out, B.A starts with a murder and ends with a murder. If the epilogue is chaotic, impressionistic, “bizarre, ” the episodes leading up to it, pound the same problems between authorities and power, impotence and murder, playfulness and aggression, etc. Episode 12 begins with Mieze washing underneath Franz’s bedclothes, right at his groin. We bask in Mieze’s ways of being the playful coquette. Never so clear as to what she wants or how far she will go. Following, she makes an appointment to go to the countryside with Meck, eventually finding Reinhold in the place she fell in love with Franz (the soap opera narrative line). But she is not sure how to lure information out of him. “How long have you known Franz? Reinhold asks, “is he still yours… Who am I? Who is this Mieze? She tackles him. Is Franz so enigmatic to her that she may sleep with Reinhold to find out about him? It appears she will go all the way for his information, although she says, “okay Reinhold. Let go of me…you’re lying on me so heavy again.” Reinhold is like a political oppressive body, one can get up temporarily, only to be seduced and overtaken again.

It’s hard to separate the psychology of individuals from group psychology, of how people just fall into line; as Mieze says, “everything’s getting dirty.” Reinhold exchanges information for sex and so when he does not get what he bargained for, and because he doesn’t “assault women,” he lamely suffocates her. Before this happens: Mieze is laying on Reinhold, licking his chest. I am reminded that Franz has both Mieze and Reinhold in his heart. Reinhold so poignantly says, “I was just considering what you are doing to me.” It is the tragedy of B.A. that people cannot take this question to its furthest point, cannot recognize how social and political forces are acting on them, how their own autonomy is being divested with meaning, and more simply how the other impacts them.

I want to reemphasize the gross value of this, in both an economic and political sense (of trading dead, lifeless, objects, “goods”) and the psychological sense of losing oneself, the intolerance (we see in Franz/Reinhold) of their desire and the delay in the fulfillment of those desires. In both the case of Franz and Reinhold, they must snuff the Other out. And while the murder of Mieze is elaborated in episode 13, we see its tricky progression, Reinhold is even more impotent, in a way, than Franz. He annihilates Mieze with the same questionable cluelessness/cruelty as Franz does with the bird. This is the more dangerous form of murder, we’ll see in the larger political movement, of a numb form of annihilation, as individuals conform to group illusions ‘to create the pure man.’

Dominic
I finished the book. There is no epilogue, but the final phase of the novel that corresponds to Fassbinder’s epilogue begins on page 319 (in the Continuum paperback). The story of the epilogue is very much carried over from the book, and Franz’s madness is similarly represented as a terrible clash of all the forces that have brought him to this point. And he dies, and is reborn. There are also the intimations of war we see in the film (by the way, Julian’s idea that Franz’s dreams the post-war world made the whole epilogue make sense to me). A major figure in Döblin’s last 50 pages is a personification of Death. In the film the figure who comes closest to this role is Fassbinder himself. The book is every bit as compelling as the film. But I find that Döblin’s ending is hard to take. His introduction (which I read out at the first screening) foretold that Franz would emerge the other side of his suffering with an understanding of the meaning of his life. What is this understanding? It’s an awareness of the need for solidarity with others. And the awareness comes through work. Franz gets a job.

Suzanne “Mieze, Mieze, Mieze” and “bitte, bitte, bitte” are the refrains I keep hearing in mind since Thursday’s screening. At a complete loss for a method, in a just a few words’ time, of encapsulation of my experience of the last overwhelming round of BA, I’ll name a few of many moments still very present with me now, on Saturday morning, and let us get on into the comment boxes. These are: the long shot of the just-strangled Mieze lying limp on the forest floor, like a lost blond doll or child; Mieze curled up in the too-small wooden box they buried her in, looking so much like a sleeping, but cold, but dead, but dirty, child-prostitute-doll, the gold-dust effect we’ve seen previously only in the whore-of-bablyon sequences (and when Franz is playing cards with Satan) sparkling over her face and shoulders; Franz on his knees in the dirt in the opening street-scene of the Epilogue underworld/fantasy, trying to embrace the as-if-just-dead body of Mieze; and Reinhold’s embodied, sensual and gentle embrace of his gay prison lover, so different from the dead (and deadening) suffocating grasp of Mieze that Cynthia describes above.

[Who isn't at least a little in love with the sweet creature Mieze? I have so many feelings of excitement & anxious anticipation for tonight's Berlin Alexanderplatz finale! Here to give us a sweeping recap and analysis of much of what we've seen thus far, is our projectionist Brecht. If you haven't been following along to date, you can see ALL our Alexanderplatz posts by clicking the tag Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema. See you tonight!]

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Early in the film, Franz visits the sister of his manslaughter victim, Minna, and rapes her. In the book, it is clear that he is in some kind of dream-like, hallucinatory state, in which he conflates Minna with Ida, and by “making love” to her sister somehow restores her, and himself, to life. (”Franz Biberkopf is back!”) Love, passion, violence, and the repression of reflection are all intertwined here in this German everyman.

In the film another element in the same scene is teased out of its latency: Minna’s behavior suggests some degree of complicity. However much she protests, and although she fights it, her behavior indicates no small amount of attraction for Franz. Whether she had a thing for him years before, and how much the knowledge of his violence adds to the charge are not to be known, but it can’t be doubted that both she and Franz are reflective of, and participants in, a sadomasochistic social-sexual network that rips through this city and era. The S/M nature of the world Döblin and Fassbinder are creating is elaborated in episode four, in the lyrical montage in the slaughterhouse, which is followed by a mythopoeic evocation of the God of this world – a creepy, nearly naked old man with long white hair, who takes a lamb to sit with him on a bench, then slits its throat, gentling it to its death with calming words about the necessity of its slaughter, finally leaving it to attend to his accounting at a stand-up desk, Donald Rumsfeld-style.

In the middle section of the film, Franz consorts with a series of “Satans,” who all contribute to his education. Despite, or because of (?) all these consortings with evil, Franz is seemingly rewarded: his earthly Guardian Angel Eva delivers to him yet another, more pure, rarefied angel – Mieze, who appears in the golden light borrowed from the Annunciation. With Mieze, Franz forgets all troubles, and seems delivered into a paradise, every passing moment rendered pregnant with beauty and joy. (Several of these moments are given a highly unusual cinematic treatment by Fassbinder – prolonged bouts of ecstasy, alternating with lyrically charged depictions of the everyday.) Unfortunately, this relationship means that Franz is now a pimp, which he seems to discover through the delivery of a “love-letter” from her patron into his hands, provoking one of the many flashbacks to his killing of Ida, in this case occasioned by his feelings of abandonment. Now that Mieze has made his life, or at least those moments with her, idyllic, his moments of loneliness are all the more painful, and lead to further consorting with his other love – Reinhold (the occasional black text on white screen informs us, at one point, that he loves them both). Franz is buffeted between these two, and there is a sense that somehow there is a competition between them (or at least between the archetypal forces that each represents) over Franz, and it becomes clear that they both have very different ideas about what should be done to/for him.

[Continue reading this post:] (more…)

[Continuing our month-long discussion of Berlin Alexanderplatz]

Brandon, Dom, Suzanne,

Forgive me for saying so, but I think you’ve been tiptoeing around what all of us experienced as a profoundly disturbing passage of film – the last forty minutes of episode eleven, wherein Franz tries to murder Mieze, the person he loves most, in exactly the same way, in exactly the same place, as he murdered Ida. Indeed Fassbinder insists on this disconcerting repetition, replaying Ida’s murder three times in the previous episodes, investing it with an ominous and totemic power.

If these scenes don’t erase my great enjoyment of the series so far, they certainly transform, violently, the terms of that enjoyment. It’s not just the beating that Franz inflicts. Unbearable as it is, we at least know it is coming. What is so horrible is first the character of Mieze’s anguish – a strangulated screaming that goes on for what feels like minutes. Is any moment in cinema so raw and devastating? Perhaps only Michael Haneke has come close.

Worse still is what happens next. Choking on blood, Mieze immediately forgives him, and they embark for the countryside where first they fell in love. The scenes here verge on the blackest of comedy – Mieze, with split lip and clawed neck, defiantly orders ice cream from her stunned waitress. The profound horror of these moments is in Mieze’s choosing to share in Franz’s crime – her deciding that somehow, to follow Suzanne’s phrasing, their suffering was mutual.

Even as I understand that this is a fiction, I simply cannot bear her choice. Yet it speaks to the power of Fassbinder’s mini-series, that it gets so under my skin.

To answer quickly a question Dom posed to me during the screening, about the character of the political rally Franz and Willy attend in episode nine: Could it be that these strange creatures were anarcho-syndicalists? Syndicalism was a going concern in Germany in the late 20s, though many like Rudolph Rocker and Milly Witkop fled the country in the early 30s, after the Nazis came to power.

–Julian

Hi readers! It’s Brandon, just here in small print to say how happy I am that this conversation has continued here on the blog! If it is the Mount Everest of modern cinema, then I think we’re seeing some clouds breaking at the top. Which is exciting, and terrifying! See you in the comment box!

Brandon
We made it through another thrilling four episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz!

One thing I noticed about our discussion last week and going into this week is an increased awareness of and interest in both Fassbinder’s direction and cinematography and the acting performances in the film. We’ve now seen twelve hours of this film, more or less, and while the narrative continues with varying degrees of continuity and diversion, I am interested in the posts and comments about Berlin Alexanderplatz as a material production, from the terrific insights of Brecht to comments about the soundtrack and camerawork.

I say this despite the fact that by the end of the episodes screened last night, the focus couldn’t be on anything but the drastic violence depicted in the final episode. These four episodes center on the introduction of Mieze. This introduction is accompanied by the repeated flashback to Franz’s murder of Ida, each time from a slightly different angle. This repetition with difference has the effect of insisting the elements of the scene and preserving the sheer brutality of which Franz is capable. When the crisis happens with Mieze, her screams are both referential (they evoke Ida’s scream) and utterly unique.

But I don’t want to make this whole post about the ending, shocking and impressive as it was. I was interested in so many different things in these four episodes. I loved dwelling on Franz’s laughter through much of these episodes. In the first screened episode, Franz reads the story of a couple who murder their children—and laughs hysterically while giving the account. This laughter later manifests as glee, and I am now thinking of the amazing scene with Willy and the man from the political rally. After leaving the men’s room (a place we’re often at with Franz and other men), Franz claims that “he doesn’t like political discussions”, after which he delivers a near monologue on politics and work. Repeatedly he claims that he does “nothing for work”, all the while he and Willy play on a teeter-totter and swing set, inexplicably located in the dingiest of all dingy, broken down basements!

Dominic
Berlin Alexanderplatzploitation? That was a disturbing evening. I was speechless afterwards. Let me try and at least ask a question. So last night’s program (episodes 8-11) centers on Franz’s relationship with Mieze. It starts out joyous. Episode 8 is even a little cutesy in parts, except for the repeated flashbacks to the killing of Ida. Then the violence of that killing is visited on Mieze. Here’s the main thing I don’t understand: whether against Ida or Mieze, it is jealousy that motivates Franz’s violence. This is clear in the book too (see pages 270-277). But we talk about Franz as if he’s a character without substance, a kind of animal who’s pulled this way and that by outside forces. (The moment he’s just done beating Mieze, he becomes anonymous: ‘…Franz Biberkopf — Peeperkopf, Sleeperkopf, he’s got no name — the room’s turing round… Franz Biberkopf, Heebiekopf, Jeebiekopf, Sleepykopf… page 275.) So how is he capable of jealousy? One other question: how does Mieze understand her bond with Franz. He always says he loves her, but she always says only that she belongs to him, even if she loves another. What does that mean?

Suzanne
It was a brutal evening. But not unfun. For point of entry, I’ll try to address Dominic’s questions—

First, I don’t think Franz is capable of jealousy, is it that jealousy is a subtler emotion? One that requires imagination? One that’s complicated by eroticism? (Franz’s desires are (only) base–remember the scene w/ the ‘benefactor’, who says the most beautiful movements a woman makes are when she is dressing; for Franz it’s unfathomable that the woman putting her clothes ON could be pleasure) But Franz is capable of, or buffeted by, pain and rage (primal emotion). When Mieze explains the benefactor’s rented an apartment for her, Franz sinks to his knees and starts wailing and biting the armchair, pure grief, pure despair. It’s not jealousy. (Mieze mirrors Franz, when she thinks he’s leaving her, same story, grief and wailing) But something different happens when Reinhold is there as voyeur: Franz wants to prove Mieze’s goodness, but she confesses she’s fallen in love. In front of Reinhold, Franz is— humiliated? Then he’s experiencing shame AND grief at the loss of the beloved Mieze (but he hasn’t lost her), —my final, clumsy, counterpoint/suggestion: we agreed last night two things about Ida’s murder: 1] she is about to leave Franz for a ‘client’ and 2] she is ridiculing him—ie, intolerable pain of loss plus humiliation—not jealousy—equals rage & brutality?

As to love/belonging, Mieze says several times that she loves Franz; to Eva, & at least once to Franz directly: “I love you. I think I will always love you. I will never leave you, never.” For me, a moving expression of how Mieze loves /understands their relation, is what she says just before Franz begins to beat her: “I told him (the boy/the nephew) that it could never be, I belong to you, and now YOU SHOULD CONSOLE ME” (since I can’t be with this boy I love, as I belong to you). Of course that’s exactly what Franz should do—Franz & Mieze belong to each other, to have fallen in love with a boy that afternoon is NOTHING compared to the belonging to (she couldn’t belong to without first having loved). The boy could never console her for the loss of having belonged to Franz, but Franz and Mieze could love each other more/belong better by having shared a kind of mutual suffering (her infidelity & loss), which we soon hear Mieze calling ‘a secret’: now the shame & violence of the beating. It is true though that, after Franz has beaten her so terribly, and asks Mieze, do you still love me, she answers only, “I belong to you.’

……This just in from Julian, who’s sticking it out with us for the Thursday night duration…..
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I want to follow up on Brecht’s fantastic post. He mentions in his description the “cynical yet upbeat tone of Weimar culture.” Insofar as the series has a theme, it might be this mindset and way of viewing the world; atrocities occur, but are met by a strange and passive acceptance. Franz loses his arm and barely seems to react. The newspaperman has his balls removed one after the other, but well, ever forward. I recalled Hannah Arendt’s puzzlement, in her analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem, over the “odd limits” of his conscience. I want to say that Fassbinder presents Franz as inhabiting a particular, peculiar, brittle, false sort of innocence – if that didn’t immediately sound so daft. (We know what is coming…)

To recall just a few moments that have stuck with me: The glittering sweat on Franz’s face as Eva begs him to return from his epic alcoholic stupor in episode four – and her sudden kick at the dozens of bottles to emphasize her quiet outrage; Pums’ hazy mafia-modernist office, with his consort-wife-bodyguard clutching a pistol against her fur coat; the little scream that Franz imagines for his Schnapps as he prepares to send it down his gullet: “I’ve been distilled!!!” I must also remark on the adorably earthy sex scenes between Franz and Cilly. Far from the calisthenics of porn or the fragmented instants of Hollywood love-montage, their sex is portrayed as an affectionate, comic tussle. I’m sure I’ve never seen anything like it.

—Julian

[Joining our ongoing discussion of Berlin Alexanderplatz is BRECHT ANDERSCH, our projectionist, who is seeing the film with us for THE SIXTH TIME. Brecht has, not surprisingly! a lot to say, please click "more" below for the full article. Welcome Brecht!]

Palo Alto, 1984. I’m employed for the first time as a projectionist at the Bijou Theatre, a repertory cinema run by two hippie-era utopians who grant full rein to this young cinephile’s incipient madness, with 24-hour access to booth and screen. Late into the night, I’m able to project films on the big screen for myself alone, and one of the first is Berlin Alexanderplatz, a film I’d initially avoided as being merely “made for TV”, and therefore of minor interest. A few episodes into it, I find myself beguiled, seduced, then totally transfixed. I watch it over the course of several very late nights, and by the end, it’s become my favorite film for – among other reasons – its ability to venture into every cinematic terrain I find interesting: classic Hollywood narrative, European Art Cinema, Experimental Film.

As I project it at SFMOMA, I’m now seeing it for the sixth time, and after 24 years of it being a part of my life, I’m taking the time to re-read the novel and study the film in an attempt to delve even deeper into its hallucinatory, ecstatic, murky depths.

On Fassbinder: Biberkopf means “Stupidhead”. Fassbinder read the novel as a teenager, and casually identified with it, eventually realizing later that it had filled-in much of his world-view. He played the lead in his first feature film, Love is Colder Than Death, as a character named “Franz Biberkopf,” repeating this homage later in Fox and His Friends. Fassbinder’s films are riddled with various Franzes; and cut together by another: editor “Franz Walsch” – is a pseudonym for Fassbinder, combining Döblin’s character with one of Fassbinder’s filmmaking idols, the great Hollywood director of Westerns and gangster pictures, Raoul Walsh. Clearly Fassbinder had taken Döblin’s German underworld everyman to heart. And Fassbinder needed an everyman to get to the issue which haunted him all his life, and which is behind his many works laden with resentment against his parent’s generation: how does one get to be a Nazi, anyway? Fassbinder saw fascism everywhere, including within himself – this led him on the path towards melodramatic empathy. If one could understand these drives within the human psyche, first by filmmaker, then by audience, it might be possible to transcend, transform…

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Hi readers! It’s Brandon, just here in small print to say how happy I am that this conversation is continuing here on OPEN SPACE, pertaining to Fassbinder’s epic (and ever more enjoyable) Berlin Alexanderplatz. Comments are not only welcomed but highly encouraged. Enjoy!

Brandon
Much of our discussion of the first episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz explored Franz’s character as a subject from psychoanalytic and socioeconomic perspectives. A crucial point of departure for all the bloggers and commenters is the fact of Franz in relation to others, which overwhelmingly take the form of social/sexual violence. It’s difficult to imagine a conversation about this work that doesn’t center on Franz to the moderate exclusion of the other characters, though one viewer last night suggested to me that the conversation on the blog was, in her view, excessively judgmental of Franz as a character in a narrative. I noticed some sense of that concern in the comment box, where a marked effort to discuss other characters emerged. I am also interested, back to Franz, to know what our more psychoanalytic-minded commenters and bloggers will have to say about the very explicit themes of castration and impotence as they emerge in the dialogue and, indeed, in the physical tribulations of Franz and others.

The second round of episodes, screened last night, seemed very different than the opening ones. In these four episodes, Franz has to negotiate with an oath, the promise-to-self he makes in the opening of the film to “never again” return to his former role as a pimp. That this oath will be subject to intense temptation and finally reversal is adumbrated in the Job story, with Franz clearly representing Job. His companion, despite the fact that he takes the name “Satan,” actually plays a stabilizing role, attempting to help Franz emerge from drunken chaos.

Job, tempted to deny the power of God, maintains his faith in a sort of given promise. Franz’s relationship to his own oath tends toward complication in these episodes. The triangulations he negotiates with Reinhold are at first determined as behaviors of loyalty and friendship, but when Franz asserts his desire to end the series of “handovers,” Reinhold’s mode of persuasion centers completely upon what material objects he can tempt Franz with (a silver watch, etc.) Franz then plays the role of prostitute, or one (vast) step removed from breaking his oath.

Likewise, he refuses the overtures of Pums, despite his apparent naiveté as to the true nature of Pums’ “fruit” business; but, again, under the flag of “loyalty” to his friend Reinhold, finds himself dangerously close to trespassing. The moment that is truly interesting to me, however, comes at the end of this set of episodes. The thief in the bar, whom David Brazil accurately described as a “sophist,” demonstrates that language is a tool of power, and that power has, well, the power to determine names, and therefore meanings, for any given worldly presence, “arms” as much as “oaths.” This sophistry works like a charm on Franz, who through his tribulations did not consider that the meaning of his oath might be subject to reappraisal in terms of its very words. The reversal which seems to have taken place at the end of episode seven is a classic mode of sophistry, in which Franz has found a way to both break his oath and not break his oath at the same time.

Dominic
My quick comment for now is related to Dana’s question from Thursday — does the film leave Franz and wander around Berlin, capturing aspects of Weimar era life, as the novel does? No, not really, as someone else said already, and in fact I have been struck by just how little Fassbinder tries to emulate the 1920s ‘portrait of a city’ genre that includes Doblin’s novel, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Ulysses, and aerial films like Man With a Movie Camera, and Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. I like that it doesn’t. The portrait of city became a cliché long ago (one of the few great later examples is Wenders’ Wings of Desire). The frame of Fassbinder’s film is very narrow, and the staging is theatrical rather than cinematic. This is partly to do with him having had a low budget (in fact the sets were left overs from an Ingmar Bergman production), and perhaps partly to do with being made for TV — although we’ve since seen how TV mini-series can be quite as cinematic as theatre films (e.g. Angels in America). In B. A. the action is almost always closely walled in, even in the exterior scenes. It’s a story played out in a set of boxes. It’s like a puppet theatre, draped in gauze curtains and lit from outside (off-stage) in amber and rose. The one scene that stands out as being not boxed, wide-screen, full-scale, open-air and day-lit, is the scene in the square right outside (or was it inside?) Tegel jail – the first scene of the film – just before we see Franz dodging traffic (a standard “portrait of a city” cliché). I think there was a flash-back to the scene in a recent episode. It seemed as if it was spliced from a different film.

Stephen
So much of our discussion has questioned Franz’s ability to apprehend the other and to experience something like empathy, not to mention self. I suspect Franz’s episodic depersonalization foreshadows the immanent colossal implosion of German culture and the dissociation from violence that will attend it. As in so many of his movies, I suspect Fassbinder wants to draw our attention to the disavowal of psychic trauma in postwar West Germany.

I noticed last night just how often Franz is dissociated. He seems to drift into a vacant (sometimes violent) clownish state every time he has to take in the experience of an other. This can be mild dissociation: when he reads the headlines (mimicking the radio always on in the background) but doesn’t ingest them. (Eva says, “how can you read that!” But it makes no impression on him). Or massive dissociation, years of lost time in prison after killing; a crazy (amazing to watch) drinking binge after imagining Otto raping the woman Franz betrayed. Indeed, he spends so much time betraying women that one can imagine he is a complete jerk. But it isn’t clear that he can take their experience in sufficiently to warrant contempt so much as pity. And, to his credit, he is struggling to take the other in bit by bit so as to reckon with himself. He has had more success with alcohol, so far, than women!

In walks Reinhold, a borderline who (to use jargon) evacuates everything bad about himself into the object of his desire. Though, since the feminine object of his desire is really the hated feminine part of himself, he needs to enlist and, ultimately, destroy a male accomplice to love/hate. Will this doppelganger somehow teach Franz to learn to take others in by being, himself, expelled. Once thrown out of the moving car, and having lost an arm, will he become more human? Why does he ask Meck about losing his father? Is he beginning to comprehend loss?

Suzanne
I’ve been reflecting on my experience in the theater the other night: Franz’s story becomes this quickly moving sojourn through so many allegorical theater sets (and set pieces?), that somewhere into the second hour I found I wasn’t reading the narrative (literally, the subtitles) attentively anymore, but wandering back and forth between episodes even while they were unfolding. Doblin’s novel’s so often called kaleidescopic, (and so often compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, on which it was partly modeled), & I think more than one of us has already asked how or how not Fassbinder’s film is representing that. We’ve talked among ourselves, at the bar, and maybe here online, about the fact that Fassbinder shot the whole film with a ‘lady’s stocking’ over the camera lens, and what effect this has on the look of the thing. Most particularly, it’s the way light gets refracted in goldish sunbursts off of any reflective surface: bottles (of which there are infinite number), windowpanes, mirrors, glasses, teeth, sweat, the human iris, all shine with this incredible glinting melodramatic, sultry, dangerous light. We talked at the bar especially about the scene where (is it ‘Otto’?) visits Franz with payback money for the amputated arm: Otto’s spectacles are thick orbs that make his eyes look enormous (bug-like), but half-hidden behind multiple—yeah, kaleidescopic—infinitely repeating reflections. I think that the narrative too has “just” (over the last four hours) done the same infinite breakup/refraction. And there’s so much structural and visual doubling and redoubling and refracting: Franz & Reinhold, Franz & Franze (the girlfriend who’s doppelganger for Franz) Franz as ‘dead ringer’ for the widow’s dead man; I feel there are a hundred threads I could take up to follow, in structure, in plot, in set, in allegory. Our conversation in the blog posts and the comment boxes and in the bar is starting to look like this too. How great. More in coming days. xo

Cynthia
Episode 4, beginning the second installment of Berlin Alexanderplatz, depicts the emergence of the social narrative in the form of gossip through the mouth of a salon owner. This voice over continues while the camera’s voyeuristic gaze watches Franz’s progressively destructive drinking binge, his deprivation and isolation from the outside world, although not without its humor (Franz throws his empty
beer bottles across the room, crawls around the floor. A real pig sty). Not only do these gossip lines create more overtly the “types” of characters we’ll see in Fassbinder’s films, e.g. “She’s just looking for a man. You know what I mean,” but the themes of vulgarity, excess, stinginess, fats/nutrition, bodily infections, cheating, indulgence, divorce, and the exploitation of the other. Gossip streams out, disseminating knowledge like Franz’s toxic sweat, always the problem of the other-”she’s a real gossip,” always referring to someone else. And, I think, Frantz responds, “whose business is it what I do?”

Franz cannot remain a separate entity from these social forces for long. He is soon folded into the gossip stream, implicated. Gossip frames (or in the sense of Franz’s pleasure in eavesdropping, “commingles” with) the slaughter scenes. I hadn’t realized until looking at my notes that the voice over is interrupted by the poetic and/or didactic montage of stills on how to slaughter a bull (is this Fassbinder’s voice now?) and the allegorical slaughter of the lamb. But then the gossip returns, in which Franz is now the object. It is reported a woman returns. Eva. He exclaims he doesn’t want to be a pimp anymore. Is this his resistance to the exchange of commodities for human emotion?

[Offering another view of the unfolding Berlin Alexanderplatz narrative, field correspondent Dana Ward is reading the novel but NOT watching the film. Welcome, Dana!]

Hey Brandon & Cynthia & Suzanne, & nice to meet you Dominic & Julian & Stephen & all readers. My name is Dana Ward, & Suzanne asked me to act as a correspondent to y’alls roundtable concerning Fassbinder’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” by reading Döblin’s novel, something I’d wanted to do and not found an occasion to– so I happily accepted! As such I’m reporting here both from the world of Döblin’s book and from the world of Cincinnati, Ohio. I’m following a few paces behind I think, though in having finished the “Third Book” as Döblin has it, I think I’ve about caught up.

First, the Continnum edition of the novel I’m reading is delightful as an object: a two-pound glossy rectangle with titles printed in what looks like the default font for thought-forms in Teletubby consciousness. This contrasts somewhat gruesomely with a close up of our man Franz’s bloodied sausage fingers dangling out from a pristine white shirtsleeve.

Döblin’s a fascinating writer, and the translation (by Eugene Jolas) is totally engrossing. I don’t have any German as they say and as such can’t vouch for anything more than the magnetic readability of the text, but I do vouch for that! Something I want to ask: in the novel sometimes we leave Franz and the ‘eye’ of the book floats away through Berlin, to some tragic or comic social incident manifesting a significant aspect of Weimar life. Wondering here if Fassbinder weaves these flights into the plot or stages them, intact and discrete, as they are in the novel? Much of this shading constitutes the books best bits so far.

I agree with what’s been said here regarding Franz’s subject positioning. He seems to be someone in search of an insoluble category to inhabit. Döblin suggests at times that ‘prisoner’ was that very category. Confronted with the ambiguities of social reality in Berlin, Franz usually gets pretty weepy for life behind the gate (”closed, as any good gate should be”). The transposition of prison life onto the unruly and uh…differently mediated experience of urbanity seems his fondest wish.

Too, I keep thinking of this idea, that perhaps Franz is some kind of anti-flaneur? He wanders aimlessly but resents modernity, his drifting is done under the auspices of work & his desired destination is an ill-defined horizon of “order” and “peace”. Franz himself is groping constantly after their tonic effect, this set in relation to the myriad homeopathies offered up by contemporary consumer culture, which in the novel occur as enormous catalogues that appear jarringly amid plot points and dialog.

So we’re seeing the channels through which Franz’s violence is routed, & its destination object is usually women, with the occasional communist thrown in the mix. Despite his occasional hangdog moments, he’s been on the whole an unsympathetic figure.

Such great pleasure and mystery in writing this and being in dialogue with all of you, not knowing at all what Fassbinder has or has not included and when. What aspects of the text has he seized on and elaborated, what aspects has he neglected entirely? I love all these blank spaces. Anyway, much looking forward to hearing from all of you on the next installment.

—Dana

[Tonight! Round 2: Part 4 - A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence - Part 5 - A Grim Reaper with Powers from Almighty God - Part 6 - Love Has Its Price - Part 7 - Remember: An Oath Can Be Amputated]

From the Daily Cal: “…Biberkopf’s punishment isn’t the time in jail but the reality of the Weimar era, a time of unemployment, decadence and criminal activity. It’s contemporary America, but without the literary elites who can blow countless hours a week leisure-reading by the fire (or leisure-watching in the study).”

And, Engineer’s Daughter is following along with us via Netflix, if you’d like to check in over there.

“…to dispute the SFMoma’s blog: it not at all like climbing Mount Everest in the least, it’s actually more like watching a super long, super German mini-series. Who falls asleep in the middle of climbing a mountain: not a lot of people. Who falls asleep while watching a super long, super German miniseries: a lot of people.”

[For those of you just tuning in, we decided to get a few people together from our BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ viewing support group to talk a little bit about what we're seeing. It's a lot of film and with so much and so many ways to talk about it, we nominated Brandon to get us started, and everyone added a bit just to get the conversation going. Chiming in here now are Cynthia Sailers, Julian Myers, Stephen Hartman, Dominic Willsdon, Brandon Brown & myself. Among us there are some poets, a poet/translator, an art historian, an analyst, a curator; none of us have before now seen the film. Please join us.]

Brandon
The opening scene depicts Franz Biberkopf being released from jail after serving a four year sentence. He pauses, however, on the threshold between the jail and the busy street, and as he encounters the great din coming from the traffic of the street, plugs his ears, assuming a pained gesture. At this moment, the title of the first episode (The Punishment Begins) appears on the screen, and directly afterwards, Franz attempts to go back into prison. On an allegorical level, the “punishment” is identical with the establishment of human beings (as in the biblical story) as laborers in a world of objects (and other humans). Prison, which for Franz was an experience of the worldless, by contrast produced less pain.

Later, we learn that Franz, in prison, kept to himself and talked to no one. This moment, then, on the threshold between the prison and the city, marks the emergence of Franz from worldlessness into worldliness. As he assumes presence in the space of appearance, he is confronted with a world of objects which he cannot seem to navigate (honking cars nearly hitting him) or even comprehend (the forks which do not puncture eater’s mouths).

The majority of the first three episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz, then, depict Franz as he enters the exchange market by assuming a variety of social roles, including consumer (of prostitutes as well as beer) and laborer (vending shoelaces as well as Nazi propaganda.) The “betrayals” he is subject to, the absolute violence which marks his encounters with others and especially with women, the inability to apprehend objects (such as a swastika armband) as anything other than instruments for obtaining the means of subsistence: these are the hallmarks of the “new world” which Franz, the convicted murderer, crosses into from the safety of the prison walls. Despite his frequent insistence on the hardness of the hard time he served, it is clear that the objects and labors in Berlin are the true objects of risk, and these are what, we know, shall “lay him low”.

Stephen
I agree with Brandon. There is so much to say about this lush film. My way into the film is to locate the story in the psychoanalytic frame of its day. I read Franz as a hysteric: someone, as Brandon says, who lacks “the inability to apprehend objects” and to whom history happens without agency. As our hero wafts between subject and object states, unable to apprehend self and other, in a terror about sexuality, castrated by unemployment, vexed by genuine commitments, and soothed by suckling on maternal women (on whom he is dependent and with whom he is mostly impotent and ashamed), he floats in and out of consciousness. Having been massively dissociated in prison, he emerges into semi-consciousness only to fall into the determining embrace of others: an insane Hassid (a dybbuk); a series of husky-voiced prostitutes; a pornographer; a paternal Nazi; a cruisy sausage vendor (again a Jew); a blond red; a fallen Christian…and others who seduce him up only to cut him down. Rage overtakes him, and he completely gives himself over to violent nationalism. Then, every now and again, (as Dominic points out), Eva, an occasional, mysterious angel whose sexuality is not sullied, calms him, awakens him (or lulls him back to sleep). As of yet, there is no convincing father, no lasting identification, only threat and drift with occasional fetishized glimmers of hope.

I particularly love how the narrative floats through a sequence of atmospheres, (the underground station is the one I find most gorgeous), like a nightmare that keeps returning all through the night. What a fantastic way to speak about how the subject emerges and yet can’t escape from history–trapped in the frame of a dissolving film.

Cynthia
Who is Franz Biberkopf, this serial installment of a man? Why am I going to be invested in him for four weeks? I’m not a big fan of Fassbinder’s films because of the trope of the woman character, often really simplistic, the ambitious prostitute, the business woman, they seem to be sadly all the same.

In the women’s bathroom, during the intermission, all of the conversation seemed to be questioning Franz’s sexuality. Is he gay? Is he really impotent? We were trying to figure out to what degree he really can penetrate. He’s unemployed; he’s not really able to penetrate much. Other questions were about his brutishness, and the vampiric nature of his biting and grabbing and sucking. Something about this ambiguity seems to allow him to be read as a more complex character. I’m not that interested myself in his ambiguous sexuality or not, I’m reading it as more infantile, perverse.

I’m more interested in the ways his psyche ruptures or seeps through—he has multiple social positions, the Nationalist, the criminal, the unemployed, the proletariat, the salesman, the abusive man-but then his own psyche seems to leak through. My question is, can he really take up ANY role, or any identity?

Suzanne
A couple of observations: First, that several times during the first three episodes, Franz says he can’t speak, or that he doesn’t speak very well; he then goes on to speak beautifully, oratorically, poetically (sometimes by quotation or song).

It seems to me that both Franz’s impotence, and his speechlessness, are “cured” in the first episode, by RAPE. (Cynthia said, “by being bad”.) Soon after his release from prison, and after being unable to have sex with a prostitute, Franz visits Minna, the sister of the girlfriend he’s been doing time for murdering. Arriving at her door, he only mumbles, then he rapes her, then he shouts: “Franz Biberkopf is back!” It’s worth noting that the scene which follows (I think) is the flashback to the murder scene.

And, two metaphors of ’strength’: While Franz rapes Minna, she says in voiceover, “with men like this, there’s nothing you can do, they have arms of iron.” Later, Franz and ‘Polish Lina’ are at a dance hall, where Franz meets the Nazi who’ll have him selling papers the next day. The song playing over the dance-hall scene carries the refrain, “A woman can never know the strength of the man she loves”–(Moral) weakness & betrayal just ahead. It’s the beginning of the end for Franz & Lina.

Julian
I will confirm Stephen’s impression of Alexanderplatz as “a sequence of atmospheres.” The movie gives gives the impression, confirmed by the gauzy, fever dream look of the film, less of a modernist epic, than a sequence of melodramatic zones of action. This is modernism by way of Douglas Sirk and soap operas. “Dallas with Nazis” was Dominic’s neat description. Indeed Dallas had its debut in April 1978 as a five-part mini-series – as Fassbinder began filming. Both Dallas and Alexanderplatz make the case for the mini-series as a distinctive form; what the novel was for the 19th century, the mini-series may have been for the late 20th.

Like Dom, I was struck especially by the two confrontations at the end of the second episode: The challenge from the Jewish “sausage-vendor” (a joke there I think) in the underground station where Franz is hawking copies of the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter; and the near-brawl with the communists in the bar afterwards. After a less-than-rousing version of The Internationale, one of the communists challenges our hapless, murderous anti-hero to a fight. Brandishing a chair to defend himself, Franz has a meltdown worthy of the Cabaret Voltaire: Singing a chaotic rendition of patriotic war-anthem Die Wacht Am Rhein, and spouting half-understood nationalist calls to order, he seems a pathetic and egoless character, and is smugly dismissed by his leftist tormentors.

But of course he’s a sociopath and murderer. Even those who know he beat his fiancee Ida to death with a cream-whipper, don’t seem too bothered by it. “What a lovely fellow!” cries Frau Bast, who saw him crouched above her corpse with bloody fists.

From Alex Ross’s great recent study of avant-gardes in 20th century music, The Rest is Noise: “One night in 1928, Joseph Goebbels walked around the Tauentzienstrasse cabaret district and returned home to write: “This is not the true Berlin… The other Berlin is lurking, ready to pounce.”

Dominic
I can’t believe Julian quoted me on that ‘Dallas with Nazis’ line! That was me being a bit flippant. But it is true the film is more like a mini-series than an experimental epic. That’s its difference from the book (which I started reading yesterday). The film is more centered on the characters and more plot-based, in a way that’s more traditional, and more TV.

I’m interested to see if the film deals with the politics differently from the novel. You’d think so, given that Döblin is writing in 1928-9, during the so-called quiet years of National Socialism. We’ll see.

I don’t think Franz’s (maybe temporary) support for the Nazis is just about having a job (selling papers), as Brandon says. I think it’s somehow heartfelt. Franz wants order, because order means peace. The young Communists didn’t experience the war as he did, he thinks, so they don’t fear violence as he does. But then the next scene in the book (is it different in the film?) is the flash-back to Franz violently killing Ida. For me, it’s as if Franz believes the Nazis are the kind of people who know it’s necessary to control people like himself-if Germany is also going to ‘go straight’.

It’s all part of turning 40: the reunions with old friends (and they’re so old aren’t they?), the memories of youthful excess and lost opportunities, and a mildly self-pitying feeling that, from now on, things are going to stay pretty much how they are, or get worse.

It’s the 40th anniversary, this month, of May ‘68 – the date of the student protests in Paris, but also one that evokes a whole era of revolt and social change around the world. The legacy of the protest era has reached middle age. Various people are marking the occasion. I’ve put together a film series called Around ‘68. Also in the Bay Area, Steve Seid at the Pacific Film Archive has done a similar series called The Clash of ‘68; it’s linked to the Berkeley Art Museum’s Serge Hambourg exhibition. We share one title, Nagisa Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film.

Anniversaries aren’t interesting in themselves. Commemorating them is only worthwhile if it’s an opportunity to consider the meaning of an historical event, its legacy, and the difference between then and now. I’m not going to try and do that here; the films do it better. That’s why I wanted to present this series. The extra reason, I confess, is that this month is my 40th anniversary too.

I guess that having been born in May ‘68 (on the 7th, in the middle of les événements) has made me a little more interested in that period than I would have been otherwise. But lots of people roughly my age (not just the baby boomers who own the 60s) have been fascinated by those times. I think it’s something to do with the irony of being born during the protest era, which means that we first became world-aware during an especially cynical time of minimum social hope. Growing up in England, the first election I remember was that of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (followed, a year later, by Ronald Reagan’s). Thatcher liked to say ‘there’s no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women’, and (darkly) ‘there is no alternative’ (the phrase caught on and became known, for short, as TINA). The one thing teenagers have a right to expect is that there could be alternatives. It was hard even to play at them. We didn’t have any energizing, politicized sub-culture: too young for punk, a little too old by the time dance culture spread out of Manchester. We had synth pop and New Romantics. It was grim. No wonder so many of us (not me) became Goths.

So it was easy, too easy, for us to romanticize, even eroticize, the ‘60s, and May ‘68 in particular. (That’s what still appeals to some of us about Bernardo Bertolucci’s awful The Dreamers, which we’re not showing, and what’s so rigorously avoided in another recent film of the May ‘68 events in Paris, Louis Garrel’s excellent Regular Lovers, which we are showing.) It advertised itself as a time when young people insisted on alternatives.

The thrall of May ‘68, like any thrall, should be resisted. For one thing, it makes it harder to focus on what’s specific about our own times. But ‘68 does give us some ways of measuring the present. Four years ago, before I moved from London to San Francisco, I helped organize a symposium at the Royal College of Art that we called ‘The Unsurpassable Sixties’. It was about the hold that decade seems still to have over us – in art, culture, politics, society. You can see it today everywhere: in the way a museum like SFMOMA is curated (the 60s crisis of Modernism is often our center of gravity), in the current presidential contests, in the Bay Area’s favorite self-images (someone once said to me that San Francisco is a ‘museum of the ‘60s’ – I don’t agree but I know what she meant). At the RCA that day we did talk about the legacies of that time, and about the differences between then and now. And someone (a baby boomer) said something (he might have been quoting someone) that really stuck with me:

He said the difference is that, nowadays, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

It’s a compact and strangely compelling statement that contains, I think, a number of truths and half-truths. Different ones for different people. For me, it’s mainly about imagination and its blind spots. It’s about which alternatives have images and which don’t. Art, including cinema, is almost useless as a means of social change. But art, especially cinema I’d say, can be good at giving us images of alternatives; and that’s the minimum we have a right to expect.

I like an early critique.

“The blog is in BETA and today is only second day of posts, but one thing is obvious – the museum blog POV is not behind the times. As a matter of fact it fits perfectly into today’s corporate zeitgeist. The one that cannibalizes that which makes fun of it, attempting to create a new kind of hip.

Today’s entry is an interview with Lou Huang, a designer who two years ago in a tongue-in-cheek gesture planted himself in SFMOMA as a piece of art (kinda like a Duane Hansen) and filmed it.

Intervene in our space. We can take it. We’re not stodgy. We are web 2.0.”

Tim Buckwalter is not exactly wrong, and, “snarkiness aside,” he does neatly & immediately frame the problem or question of the possibility of an individual–or even collective!–agent trying to work and be effective under late capital. That’s all of our concern, isn’t it?

On the one hand, it could be difficult to read ANYTHING a monolithic institution does as other than ‘corporate zeitgeist’ self-servingness, but then, who and what does the institution serve? The place isn’t ONLY a repository for other people’s money in the shape of artworks, is it?

Healthy institutional distrust aside, this is exactly the problem that will continue to interest me as the blog unfolds and works to make visible the line between, or the convergence between, The Institution and The Individual.

Inside (staff) and around (the nonstaff public) an institution like SFMOMA is a collection of individuals trying to make a go of understanding how art can be or is effective in the world, and trying to further its agency. Lou Huang is asking one form of that question. The institutional–and personal, my own–intention in this case is to hear more from that individual about the set of curiosities that made him want to pose it.

Looking forward to more—