(West Germany 1980 921m) DVD1/2
There is a reaper, he is called Death
p Peter Marthesheimer d/w Rainer Werner Fassbinder novel Alfred Döblin ph Xavier Schwarzenberger ed Jiliane Lorenz m Peer Raben art Harry Baer
Günter Lamprecht (Franz Biberkopf), Hanna Schygulla (Eva), Barbara Sukowa (Mieze), Gottfried John (Reinhold), Franz Buchrieser (Meck), Karin Baal (Minna), Peter Kolleck (Nachum), Elisabeth Trissenaar (Lina), Brigitte Mira (Frau Bast), Hans Zander (Eliser), Margit Carstensen (1st angel), Helmut Griem (2nd angel), Ivan Desny (Pums), Claus Holm (Max), Helen Vita (Franze), Hark Bohm (Lüders), Annemarie Düringer (Cilly), Roger Fritz (Herbert), Barbara Valentin (Ida), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (narrator),
There have been many truly great television drama serials made and many of them have been wonderful adaptations of classic novels (such as Granada’s Brideshead Revisited), yet Berlin Alexanderplatz is so much more than just a magisterial monumental adaptation of a piece of literature, it is the best pictorial and dramatic representation of any city at any given time as has yet been offered. Not that Döblin’s masterpiece is the only book to so capture a time and a place (one thinks of Petronius’ Satyricon for 1st century A.D. Rome and Joyce’s Ulysses for Dublin), but those works have proved rather elusive on screen. Fassbinder not only captured the essence of Döblin’s work, but in some ways improved on it, adding his own perspective, most notably in the phantasmagoric epilogue, which dispenses with plot for the most part, instead presenting a hallucinatory descent into a man’s near fatal madness, mixed with Wagner, Strauss, Glenn Miller, Kraftwerk, Dean Martin, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and sacrilegious imagery. The result is overpowering, egotistical but also essential Fassbinder, and one of the greatest in the German cinema.
In the light of the tapestry of Weimar Berlin that the director weaves, the story seems somehow irrelevant, which follows Franz Biberkopf on his release from prison after four years inside for murder and through attempts at reformation, losing his arm in a motor accident, his insane jealousy over his respective girlfriends (particularly the delicate but very naïve Mieze) and his equally insane loyalty to one of literature’s great scumbags, the cowardly Reinhold. The fact is that the story provides only the lynchpin for the painterly eye with which the director and his D.P. depict the decadence and darker side of life in Berlin at the time, perhaps familiar to those who know their Weill, Wedekind and Isherwood, but nonetheless even more real here. All the vices are in evidence, particularly unemployment; “it seems to be a contagious disease, unemployment…” bemoans Lina early on, but it’s what unemployment and a ruined economy result in – the lower vices and crime – that is really the issue, the symptoms. Women wander around like they’re auditioning for Salon Kitty, but such is as it was, and when Biberkopf wails “I’m nothing but an animal to be slaughtered” he speaks for an entire populace. Yet for all his violent tendencies and childish notions of loyalty, Biberkopf himself is a symptom, a victim, from his release from Tegel prison, singing ‘Watch on the Rhine’ to himself, through selling Nazi paper the “People’s Observer” to being talked into being lookout for a burglary to his final descent into madness and employment as an everyman porter. Dust thou art, we are continually told, and to dust we shall return.
Though Fassbinder’s work couldn’t be more pointed, and the delicate episodic narrative is rather like a house of cards as decayed and fragile as the society it depicts – remove one card and it all falls in – it could not work without its actors and they are all superb; from Fassbinder regulars Schygulla as eternally loyal Eva and Mira as Frau Bast to the truly repulsive John as Reinhold and lovely Sukowa as the doomed Mieze. Yet star of the show is surely Lamprecht, evoking memories of Mike Mazurki’s Moose Molloy and Bernard Hill’s Yosser Hughes, with a touch of Charles Laughton (who would once have made a great Biberkopf) thrown in. The whole thing is masterful and, more than anything else, shows how truly hard life can be on those with bad luck. “I just wanna live, just live” moans Max the bartender. So do we all, Max, so do we all.
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Wonders in the Dark 
Here’s another one I would’ve expected at the top, and never questioned. The bar is being raised awfully high here…
Well, here’s something I can notice since I have a “Wonders in the Dark” queue with the latest pick getting bumped to the top every time an applicable one comes along. You have lot of multidisc sets here, Allan. This, Heimat, the two Blade Runner discs (one of which is actually available on Instant, but never mind), Brideshead Revisited, Shoah, not to mention Das Boot, Boys from the Blackstuff and Hotel Terminus if they were available on Netflix, and Dekalog and Fanny and Alexander if I hadn’t seen them already. Plus, there are probably a few other long-runners I’m overlooking – from what I’ve counted there’s 9 out of 47 so far, and God knows how many discs…
Not sure what this means (except that the 80s being weak on the feature-film department, you have to turn in some other directions) but it is interesting…
Well, at least two of those plainly shouldn’t count as films, period. Fish’s television-as-cinema rule is really going to be put to the test in the 90’s, that’s all I’m going to say.
Eh, it’s Allan’s list, he can decide the criteria. If he was picking paintings or stage plays I might raise an eyebrow but miniseries muddy the waters enough to fall under the “film” tag.
By the way, our Polanski discussion of last week is no longer academic.
True, it’s his list, but I still feel that works like “Brideshead” and “Blackstuff” can’t really stand as cinema in the same way as the others, first of all because they were never shown–
Wait just a cotton pickin’ minute! Polanksi’s been arrested! Holy goddamn mackerel! I don’t know whether to feel overjoyed that he let his guard down enough to finally face justice in earnest for his offense, or disappointed that he very well might not get a chance to direct that odd little ghost movie he was planning! Well, I’ll see the glass as half-full, in this case. And hey, turns out the Swiss aren’t so neutral on some things, after all!
Okay, anyway… Um… What were we talking about, again?
Ha Ha Bob! I like that style. Bravo!
General Clark, as I have explained so often as to make bashing my head with a brick seem productive, ONLY CERTAIN TV IS ELIGIBLE – ONE OFF SERIALS, and I can tell you now there will be very little decent enough TV dramas to make it into the 90s top 50 (just 5 if memory serves correctly) and just . The 80s was the decade for masterworks of that kind (and there’s one still to come), partly because it was generally such a weak decade.
And as MM says, it’s our site, our rules. You can politely disagree, not bark orders like the head of a Junta! Remember the difference twixt HOSTS and GUESTS. If invited to a party and they say NO SMOKING, would you smoke saying “well, I don’t agree with that?”
Hey, if nobody’s smokin’ SOMEthing, Fish, what the hell kinda party is it?
Well, not the sort of party George Lucas would attend, as he’d have to be on something to have (a) created the ewoks, (b) thought we’d like them and (c) give them their own truly suicide-count raising spin-off. You’d have to be smoking ayahuasca to be that delusional.
Ewoks, Fish? Really? I’d try and come up with some crack against Whedon, but I’m in too good a mood for that right now. C’mon, let’s not bring bad vibes into this, and pass the peace-pipe around instead.
I told you were smoking something, Clark. Heap um peacepipe.
…did you just use “um” as a suffix?
Well, Bob, it will probably be disappointment all around because I highly doubt he will ever see a day in prison or even, truth be told, a day in court. Today’s events did spur me to see the movie about his trial and really, it was only because of the arbitrary (and borderline, occasionally even outright, illegal) whims of the judge that he was ever in any risk of seeing jailtime at all. Which isn’t to say he didn’t deserve to, of course.
And yeah, quite ironic it was Switzerland of all places…
You’re probably right, Man. But I’m just glad people are getting this reminder of his past deed, at the very least. Try as hard as he might, he’ll never quite live this down. There’s no statute of limitations on memory.
I placed this film in EXACTLY the same position. Allan and I are starting to think so alike we may get accused of being the same person. In any case, this is a film that becomes more and more relevant as our economic crisis rises. The desperation in people literally just wanting to live, sacrificing the few small dreams they have just to walk without worries are all brilliantly realized here. Yes, the film has an egotistically sharp edge to it, but had it been made by someone who was even the slightest bit soft it wouldn’t be here on the list. The more I see of Fassbinder’s work the more I’m convinced he’s one of the supreme minds in movies. I have yet to see his WORLD ON WIRES, but I’m convinced that after seeing some of his other works and this wonderful film that I won’t be disappointed. I love a movie that makes me work, and the pay-off on my work comes back double. This is, as Allan and Schmulee righfully refer to it, a mesmerizing work.
I am struggling to answer e mails, and prepare to see a 4:30 P.M. showing of Jane campion’s BRIGHT STAR in Tenafly, New Jersey, and am also planning the particulars of the MMD for tomorrow, and can’t say much here right now. BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is a staggering masterpiece, which i watch over a Saturday and Sunday of the same weekend three years ago. It’s Fassbinder’s greatest work, and certainly deserves this lofty position.
I’D LET POLANSKI ALONE JUST TO SEE HIM CONTINUE TO MAKE GREAT FILMS. REPULSION? CHINATOWN? KNIFE IN THE WATER? MACBETH? TESS? ART IS ART. I COULDN’T CARE LESS WHAT THE MAN DOES AWAY FROM THE CAMERA. THAT CASE IS OLDER THAN THE HAIR ON MY HEAD. LETS GET ON WITH THINGS.
I can’t agree, Dennis, at least not with what you’re suggesting, that art is art, as that would mean artists are above the law. No-one should be above the law. Saying that, I think there’s two sides to everything.
What gave me an ironic smile is that he was arrested in Switzerland, who stay out of World War II and give safe haven for thousands of tax dodgers, now letting the Americans take Polanski away on a 30 year old charge. Makes you wonder why they didn’t give Chaplin up to J Edgar Hoover as a communist.
Chaplin had a thing for young girls, too, didn’t he? Not as young as Polanski, of course (16 or 17) and as far as I know he certainly never physically or sexually abused anyone in the same way that Roman did.
At any rate, even if the charge is 30 years old and the country arresting him is flagrantly hypocritical on moral grounds, Polanski deserves at least some of what’s coming to him.
That’s what I mean though, Allan. This case is decades old. The person violated has been quoted in saying that it may have been consentual. Considering where Polanski’s head may have been and that some 15 year old cooze probably wanted to fuck a “famous movie director” , the faqct remains that after 30 years neither is in a position to state assuredly the facts of that incident. Polanski’s wife was torn apart by the Manson’s, he may not have been checking I’d’s before coipping a windy from slutty kid. I say leave it alone, the facts can never be proven accurately to a judge and jury. If anything I feel sorry for Jack Nicholson. Poor guy lends his digs out to an old friend and comes home to a messy house. I’m not saying Polanski or the girl are right. But, considering both are over it and have lived lives since, let it die. Let the man get back to work. IMO ONLY.
(1) Wasn’t the girl 13, Dennis?
(2) Since when is being drugged up with pills and wine-coolers, and then physically forced into sexual intercourse “consensual”? Has her story really changed that much?
This is getting downright ugly, in my opinion. Let’s steer this back to Fassbinder, where it belongs.
13 or 15? What’s the difference. Why was she in the house in the first place alone with a much older man? The parentys should be held as accountable as anyone. Its like the Micheal Jackson scandal from years back. If I even thought the KING OF POP even had a dream about a young child I wouldn’t put my kid in his company for a minute let alone sleep alone in his home. Same difference here.
Depending on some states, I think there is a difference (though God only knows why). California’s not one of them, of course, and you’re right, when it comes to rape it wouldn’t have mattered if Polanski had forced himself on a 13 year old or 30 year old. Just a minor correction compared to the rest.