[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 c... More

……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... More

[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;... More