Berlin Alexanderplatz - Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The prolific career of German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been marked by decidedly minimal and vital films that have almost single-handedly defined German cinema during that period, with no credits taken away from Schlöndorff and Herzog. His mastery over the melodrama genre and understanding of the medium have consistently placed him at par with world cinema giants. But Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) forms the core of his cinematic achievements with the sheer length of the film capable of accommodating ten of his other films. Pulling off a film with a mammoth runtime of 931 minutes by itself is a landmark that only a few gifted souls can dream of.
Adapted from Alfred Doblin’s novel of the same name, Berlin Alexanderplatz was originally made as a 14 part television mini-series but is widely accepted as a monolithic piece. The film follows the life of Franz Biberkopf (played to perfection by Gunter Lamprecht), a visibly tormented man, right after he steps out from Tegel prison after serving for four long years. He tries gradually to return to normal life and meets his old acquaintances in the process. He is determined to turn over a new leaf and sets a strict moral code for himself that forbids him from taking to violence in even the most testing of times. He attempts to get a permanent and legal job but the city turns him down because of the prevalent social, political and economic conditions. He sells sleazy magazines, takes in women and dumps them later and takes up a fake political stand in order to earn but strictly adheres to his questionable code of conduct. His policy gains him more foes than friends and he is soon left with one arm amputated. In these testing times, his source of support comes from the various women he takes into his house. They are strangely attracted to him and believe Franz can really give a reboot to everything. He takes to alcoholism and casts off his policies. He continues to exist.
One will be tempted to think in the first scene as Biberkopf steps out of the jail that Fassbinder is going to show us what the cruel city is going to mete out to him and its consequences on his life. But Fassbinder adopts a totally different path. It isn’t the city that has brought Biberkopf to where he is, but his personal policies and principles that have got the better of him and have made him virtually devoid of any firm footing in life. Biberkopf is neither able to adopt himself to the changing times and its corruption of daily life nor is he able to fight it out in order to stay true to his resolution. As a result, he remains willingly passive to all the changes around him and hence becomes a victim of these very changes. He shuts himself from the world and immerses himself in excessive alcohol helplessly observing the world as it moves past him.
I’ve not read Alfred Doblin’s novel but Fassbinder’s visual version reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Both are set in tumultuous times where revolution is but evident and follow a simple individual battling his own troubles that are near independent of the socio-political conditions. Crime and Punishment is set when socialism was to take over the Russian elite administration whereas Berlin Alexanderplatz is set when “Fascism” was to oust the Socialistic regime in Germany. Both Raskolnikov and Biberkopf are individuals who have set high moral standards for themselves and get into deeper morass just because of that. Raskolnikov’s resolution is of utmost purity that he sticks to till the very end. On the other hand, Biberkopf’s fickle resolve is a product of his fear and is broken even before halfway. Also, Raskolnikov’s character is a mystery that grows more so as we progress whereas Fassbinder strips Biberkopf off all symptoms of a complex personality and leaves him as unsophisticated as an infant.
With such a huge runtime, one would naturally expect a meticulously etched character arc that takes a remorseful soul such as Franz Biberkopf and gradually portrays his transformation and ultimate attainment of redemption. Fassbinder, or perhaps Doblin, exactly shatters that presumption. Fassbinder carefully intersperses Biberkopf’s present with his moment of sin at multiple places. At one point in the film you feel bad for what the city has done to the man and appreciate his yearning for transformation and his mettle to put up with all this mess. In another, you loathe him for his reversion to crime and his attitude of acting upon impulses. This way, Biberkopf naturally becomes a multi-dimensional character and ultimately we come to know that he is as ordinary as a man can be with his own ideas of morality, with his own earthy human instincts and with his own set of flaws.
The two most critical factors for sustaining the film’s atmosphere are evidently its cinematography and production design. Xaver Schwarzenberger replaces long time collaborator Michael Ballhaus and does an equally impressive job. His organic camera movement sometimes cowers behind obstructions and at other times, accosts the characters aptly reflecting the mood of the scene. The masterful cinematography is enhanced by the haunting score by Fassbinder regular Peer Raben whose theme track is the X-factor the epic needed for its melodramatic completeness. For most part of the film, Fassbinder uses a brown tinge for his images which are supported by the excessive yellow lighting that provide the images the melodramatic quality it requires. Schwarzenberger employs the lens flare to the maximum extent with even the pupils of the characters looking like micro light sources. As a result, each image looks like an impressionist painting and the quality of the production shows in each frame.
The most and perhaps the only debated aspect of the film is its out and out surreal epilogue that sums up Fassbinder’s understanding of Doblin’s novel. Fassbinder sheds reality and shows us Biberkopf’s tour of the limbo using the most bizarre of images that include a torture factory and a human slaughterhouse. It is this chapter that will either increase the vitality of the film manifold or will pull it down to a wasted effort depending on your inclination to accept it as it is. We interestingly see Biberkopf being crucified with all his kith praying before him. Indeed, Biberkopf is like the messiah himself but his suffering has brought more sorrow to others than salvation. The epilogue by itself can concoct a full length film that forms an intensely personal chapter in Fassbinder’s life.
Berlin Alexanderplatz forms the central showpiece in Fassbinder’s glorious career. It effortlessly obscures his other brilliant films and perhaps even sums up his whole style of working. Performances of a lifetime, brilliant direction, gorgeous camera work and a memorable score are but some of the reasons that the film is of perpetual interest. Agreed that it is depressing and unconventionally uninspiring but that is precisely the reason why it must be seen. Till date it remains the best representation of an ordinary life of an ordinary person entangled in extraordinary situations.
A long trailer of an Epic of a film
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Megha Dhaka Tara and Ali Fear Eats the Soul are two of the greatest melodrama ever made and two of my all time favorite films. Both movies mark and important shift in the style of the directors and the genre in the particular: melodrama. For both melodrama opened new avenues where they were not limited to the genre per se, but each of them developed a new visual language (mise-en-scene) particularly based on their own influences, social and political standing and experiences. Fassbinder, after watching Dougals Sirk, All That Heaven Allows found his vision( a potent way of achieving success and yet creating a personal work) the Sirk’s melodrama marked and important shift in understanding the ‘ visual patterns’ which become an important part of his mise-en-scene and later manifested into the mammoth masterpiece that is Berlin Alexanderplatz.
The Fassbinder before, All That Heaven Allows with his conscious Godarian, theatre and Brechtian influence (the latter continuing to be an important force even in his later works) which can be seen predominately in the dialogues, gestures, expression and acting methods used in The Merchant of Four Seasons or the visual style of Vernoika Voss used primarily to distance the audience and provide a space to think. An important aspect in the melodrama’s of Fassbinder. Even the opening of Berlin Alexanderplatz could have easily taken en-route in becoming something else, but through the course of the movie the ‘ narrative’ is woven around more mundane plot-driven characterization than the normal cause-effect structure that formulates any form of growth in narrative that gives one to form bonds with the character. But it hardly happens in this films, one can feel sorry, one can feel angry, one can feel any form of emotions but each of them have spaces to makes us think, and ask a question- “ Why”.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is a classic Fassbinder (uptill the episodes I have seen till now) wherein one can see his experiences, his rigorous methodology and his view of cinema come alive with great thrust onscreen. The screen is often populated with a dense and atmospheric visual style that has its roots in the mannerism of melodrama and Fassbinder’s self-realization of the potential of the genre itself. Where ‘visual’ formed an important core in talking about the subject and surrounding, both elements deeply rooted in the elements of melodrama where the mise-en-scene in particular works in unison to give rise to a visual language that is more concerned with an expression of subject - to reveal the state of characters.
This particular influence is directly linked with Sirk’s whose expressive mise-en-scene in which color, gestures, lighting, costumes all produced a film loaded with subtext and contextual meanings and can directly be seen even in this very film although not in the same varying degree as his earlier works but the lighting more diffused and sublimed unlike let say the colors or lighting of Ali Fear Eats the Soul. The visual style( excessive) became an important part of his melodramas, his camera whose position in his earlier works was static(observant) became an important tool to move between spaces: usually with the classic block and reveal technique to reveal new spaces or move either to or with a subject or surrounding one of the first glimpses of which could be seen in Ali Fear Eats the Soul It’s interesting how each of these elements along with his legendary habit of using his stock company of actors and technicians comes alive in this work and his never ending yet abusive stand to the social/ political structure of Germany.
Seriously, great see that you have reviewed the film here Srikanth good work, hoping to complete it soon and yeah add on to your insights. Beside couldn’t agree more with you:
‘Performances of a lifetime, brilliant direction, gorgeous camera work and a memorable score are but some of the reasons that the film is of perpetual interest. Agreed that it is depressing and unconventionally uninspiring but that is precisely the reason why it must be seen. Till date it remains the best representation of an ordinary life of an ordinary person entangled in extraordinary situations’
Fassbinder is one my all time favorite directors. I hope more of his films are reviewed and discussed here.
Thanks for reading Nitesh… And perfectly as you put, like Godard, Fassbinder too is a difficult director to get acquainted with and even more difficult to put him down. FOr a person starting from Merchant of 4 seasons or Beware of the holy whore, the Fassbinder journey may come to an end immediately. BUt digging deep would pay off real good.
Berlin Alexanderplatz and Joyce’s Ulysses are supernatural records of our inmost thoughts and dreams, where women are treated with utmost care and respect. This is true with other Fassbinder films.The closing epilogue is a shattering dream of metaphysical twilight. The continuous jostling of past memories with some of the most hauntingly ghostly visions of pure beauty and cruelty the cinema has ever produced creates a passionate story that matches events in the multi-faceted reality and in our subconscious. The slaughterhouse scenes are an anticipation of the Nazi extermination camps
Hi Raoul
Good to know that you liked the epilogue. And I agree that the imagery is a very difficult but enchanting one…
Thanks for visiting.
Another film director difficult to get acquainted is Robert Bresson. I would strongly recommend his masterpiece: “Au hasard Balthazar”
” C’est un chef d’ouevre… Un film à la fois terrible sur le monde et le mal dans le monde et, en meme temps, on ressent tout ça avec une espèce de douceur évangelique qui pour moi, est extraordinaire.” J-L Godard
“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.” - Robert Bresson