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

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

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

But some of us have strange pleasures—how about fifteen and half hours of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s legendary BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ?

Beginning this Thursday and continuing each week the month of June, we’re showing (in collaboration with the PFA & the Goethe Institut-SF) the West Coast premiere of the remastered, brand-new 35mm version of Fassbinder’s retelling of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel: optimistic but explosive criminal Franz Biberkopf leaves a prison stint with a hope for making the straight life, and with ‘an absurd faith in love.’ The dark epic serial of Berlin Alexanderplatz chronicles the destruction of that hope and that faith.

Called the “Mount Everest of modern cinema” by Andrew Sarris, Dominic Willsdon & I have been saying that the 15-and-a-half-hour endurance test of Berlin Alexanderplatz will be fun in the way mountain-climbing is fun: grueling, terrifying, emotional, and exhausting; but also fantastic, exhilarating, & great for a chat with your cohorts once you’re done. So, together with my friend the poet Brandon Brown, we’ve been working on getting a group together for a Berlin Alexanderplatz film-club for the duration. We’ll watch the four-hour program each Thursday night and then head out from ‘the literal and moral darkness’ (that’s Dominic) for the well-deserved drink. And we’ll see if we can follow up Friday afternoons with a group discussion here on the blog.

Would you like to join us?

If you can’t turn out every Thursday, the programs repeat on following Saturday afternoons, and you can still keep on with the conversation.

Program One, this Thursday June 5 at 6:30pm in the Wattis Theater, and again on Saturday at 2pm: Part 1 —The Punishment Begins — Part 2 — How Is One to Live If One Doesn’t Want to Die? — Part 3 — A Hammer Blow on the Head Can Injure the Soul — Part 4 — A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence

More detailed info on Fassbinder and on the film below. We’re looking forward to seeing/meeting/watching with you—

SS, DW, BB

——

There’s a shortish piece on Fassbinder’s life & work here; here’s A.O. Scott’s NYTimes piece on the film; and if you don’t mind a plot spoiler, there’s a discussion, and lengthy synopsis, here.

Here’s the PFA’s description of the film:

“Restored in 2006, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the summa of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s art, and the culmination of his lifelong relationship to Alfred Döblin’s monumental novel of Berlin in the 1920s-a book the filmmaker said was “embedded in my mind, my flesh, my body as a whole, and my soul.” Fassbinder pours knowing tenderness into the characterization of Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), an unemployed lumpen worker who earns his living as a thief and pimp following a stint in jail for murdering his mistress. Franz is a jovial if explosive figure in the Alexanderplatz district of Berlin, a man with optimistic dreams, a determination to “go straight,” and an absurd faith in love. Berlin Alexanderplatz chronicles the destruction of this faith, amid the poverty, hypocrisy, and violence of Berlin in the years just before Nazism took full hold. Unable to find work, Franz takes up with the hustler Reinhold (Gottfried John), who becomes his “best friend” and then betrays him in a number of important ways. Franz is also involved with several women during the course of the drama, but when he meets the young prostitute Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), he declares her “his most beloved in all the world.” It is upon losing her that Franz succumbs to despair-and allows himself to be transformed into a “useful member of society.” The film’s famous epilogue is Fassbinder’s comment on that.

With a hundred leading and supporting actors, including members of Fassbinder’s excellent stock company (along with Lamprecht, John, and Sukowa, Hanna Schygulla is featured as Franz’s friend Eva and Volker Spengler as the gang leader Pums), Berlin Alexanderplatz is filled with the characters and stories of Döblin’s Berlin. And at fifteen and a half hours, it comes closer than most film experiences to the engagement that a good novel offers. The beauty, richness, and cohesion of Fassbinder’s style can here be fully appreciated as it links one chapter to the next.”

&, Fassbinder on politics and Berlin Alexanderplatz:

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