June 16, 2008 Biberkopf: “Stupidhead”
[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…
Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema
