OPEN SPACE

………………………………………………………………………”As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency”………—John Cage……………….

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:

———

“…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.”

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema, same time next year?

[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…)

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

[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.

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

[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…)

Posted by Suzanne under Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

[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

Posted by Julian under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

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.’

Posted by bb under Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

For everyone looking for the Berlin Alexanderplatz support/discussion group posts, you can catch up with us by following the tag Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema. We’ll post the next support-group installment sometime on Saturday.

Posted by Suzanne under Miscellany | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

……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

Posted by Suzanne under Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

[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…

(more…)

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

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?

Posted by bb under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

[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]

Posted by Suzanne under Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

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.

Posted by Suzanne under News, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

“…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.”

Posted by Suzanne under News, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

[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’.

Posted by Suzanne under News, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

Friends, it’s one giant kaleidescopic Döblin/Fassbinder mountain. We’re still cooling our hamstrings before writing onto the blog. If you’re planning to attend the Saturday screening, a word to the wise and therefore comfortable: snacks and coffee. (which you can’t of course bring in to the theater). And, you’re in for a real treat.

On Thursday I’ll bring out the trail mix.

Posted by Suzanne under Miscellany | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

We did have a round of Berlin Alexanderplatz screening and post-screening drinking and talking last night, and it was fun! I’m a little bit hoping we’ll hijack the SFMOMA blog for a JUNE ALEXANDERPLATZ extravaganza all month long, but of course there’s this whole FRIDA KAHLO thing happening you might want to hear something about along the way… Meanwhile: In a few hours we’ll have our roundtable up and started, everyone’s still waking up and thinking up all the smart things they want to think up about it.

I’ll say here just for a moment though a couple of the things I DID NOT EXPECT to see last night, but that I got! I didn’t expect the MELODRAMA; I didn’t quite expect the miniseries to feel just so much like a miniseries, with hourly cliffhangers and what looked to me a lot like televisual staging; I wasn’t expecting all that SEX (why not I have no idea); and I was expecting so MUCH MORE VIOLENCE. Which is not to say those last two weren’t present in almost equal parts and usually indistinguishable. Also, honestly, I never expected it would be this much FUN. It’s an addictive drama, good-looking, curious, weird, engaging, funny. And of course only just starting. As a friend said at the end of the night, like many good novels, the first hundred pages are just the set-up, and even kind of lousy. After four hours, I’d say we’re about 100 pages in. Which is to also say, it’s probably just now getting good.

More detail in just a bit—-

Posted by Suzanne under Miscellany | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

Dear All,

Dominic & Brandon & I are hoping you’ll join us for the Berlin Alexanderplatz support group we’ve worked up for the month of June (see post just below). On Friday afternoons we’ll post in round-table-like discussions, together with a few others, of what we’re thinking and observing as we’re watching.

If you’re interested in a little more background reading, Dominic posted an interesting link in the comment box the other day, I repost it here. There’s a comprehensive analysis not only of Fassbinder’s film, but also on the novel the film was based on, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf; a bit on the life and personality of the author, Alfred Döblin; AND a review of Klaus Biesenbach’s recently released book, Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz. And More! (Including the occasional odd but engaging digression, for example a paragraph on 19th c. gay author and naturalist “genius” Alexander von Humboldt).

Below, Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s longtime editor and sometime partner, on the director’s single-take approach shooting Berlin Alexanderplatz.

See you tonight!

Posted by Suzanne under News | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema