540 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 1, Germany, 1980. Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.

Wednesday, December 11, 2018

540 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 1, Germany, 1980.  Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.

The Punishment Begins.

Franz Biberkopf has been released.

He has spent the last four years in Tegel prison.

Now they are discharging him.

He is terrified to the point of paralysis about going back into society.  Back into Berlin society.  Berlin Society in 1929.

1929 in The Weimar Republic.

The stock market crashed over the course of four market days, from Thursday, October 24 to Tuesday, October 29.

1929 was the year of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and Erich Maria Remarch's All Quiet on the Western Front.

The year before, in 1928, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil released The Threepenny Opera, their adaptation of John Gay's 1728 Beggar's Opera.

(Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil also cowrote Alabama Song with its refrain "The moon of Alabama" made famous by the Doors and by David Bowie.  Why did these two German men write a song about Alabama?  Don't ask me why.  Don't ask me why.)

Christopher Isherwood experienced Berlin during this time, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  He spoke of it openly and wrote about it in his Berlin Stories (1935-39) and his play I Am a Camera (1951).  I Am a Camera was made into a movie in 1955 by director Henry Cornelius.  It was adapted again into a musical in 1966 by Kander and Ebb, which was then released as a film in 1972 by Bob Fosse starring Joel Gray, Michael York, and Liza Minnelli.  You know it as Cabaret.

Liza Minelli's character is named Sally Bowles.  Some scholars have maintained that Truman Capote further adapted this character from his mentor Isherwood when he created Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

What else have we seen that dealt with this period?

Well, we began our blog with it.

People on Sunday (1930)

Our first entry dealt with People on Sunday (1930), a movie made in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, where we can see actual footage of the actual city filmed during the actual time.

https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/01/001-sunday-january-1-2017-people-on.html

Kameradschaft (1931)

We revisited the Weimar Republic when we looked at G.W. Pabst's 1931 film Kameradschaft which was also filmed during the time and on location in Germany.  It was on the German-French border rather than Berlin.

https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/12/529-kameradschaft-comeradeship-germany.html

The Silence of the Sea (1949)

The Weimar Republic was further memorialized by the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, who himself had been a member of the French Resistance during World War 2 and had been captured for it.  He shows the faded memories and lost romanticism through the disillusionment of his idealizing soldier Werner Von Ebrennac.

https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/03/083-silence-of-sea-le-silence-de-la-mer.html

1929 was also the year a writer named Alfred Doblin published his first novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz.

As with writers such as James Joyce and William Faulkner, Doblin used multiple narrators in his novel, including stream-of-consciousness of the characters themselves.  He also wove into it the writing of scientific journals, journalism, and songs.

Dolin's Berlin is a dark place, a society in decline, with human will shown pressed against the forces of fate.

His protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, is a product of that society.  A man who lives in the underground.  In the sordid, fetid squalor of a subterranean world.

Berlin Alexanderplatz was made into a sound film in 1931 by Phil Jutzi, with a screenplay co-written by Doblin.

And now it is made again.  By a man qualified to make it.  Fassbinder.  Who made his name on the Munich underworld.  And has the creativity and stamina for a 15-1/2 hour epic.

Remember, we discussed Eric von Stroheim's efforts to make Greed (1924) as a 10-hour film, based on Frank Norris's novel McTeague (1899), but the studios cut it down to 6 and then to 4 and then to 2.

https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/03/061-grand-illusion-1937-france-dir-jean.html

Now Fassbinder has made a 15-1/2 hour film with his studio's blessing.  Shown in episodes as a mini-series on television, but now put back together as as single film.

And from the beginning we see that this film is going to be something different.

Fassbinder is not working with his go-to cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann.  Nor his sometime cinematographer Michael Ballhaus.

He is working with Xavier Schwarzenberger.  For the first time.  He will work with him again on his next four films, before his death.

And Schwarzenberger delivers a period epic in muted tones, with compositions that reward a viewer with patience.

Fassbinder begins immediately with the operatic strains of Peer Raben's score.  With two images perpetually superimposed on top of one another.  A series of stills, in sepia tone, of the life of the time.  Workers.  Police officers.  Unionists.  Fire fighters.  Artists.  Fruit vendors.  People standing in line.  Victims of crime.  A man in a sandwich board.  The Altes Theater.  At a station appropriately named the Richard-Wagner-Platz.  These still photographs are superimposed over a filmed close-up of a wheel, and half the wheel behind it, and the mechanism driving them, of a racing locomotive.

We hear the racing locomotive rolling the tracks beneath the operatic male voice.

The credits fade in and out in a classic high-end script.

We open on a vegetable cart.  We might think of Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), but this one is pertinent to the period.  We jib up and over the park as a motorcycle passes by.  And traffic.  And pedestrians.  Up and above the walls of the prison.

The door opens.

Franz Biberkopf has been released.

  

He walks down the courtyard in a tracking shot similar to the one we saw in Gods of the Plague (1970), when the other Franz, Franz Walsch, was also released from prison and walked past the brick wall.

We noted in Gods of the Plague that the tracking shot lasted 1:39.

https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/12/532-gods-of-plague-germany-1970-dir.html

Here we have one tracking shot lasting 1:04.  From 2:13 to 3:17.  Beginning with Franz emerging from the prison door.  Watching him put on his hat.  Following him as he walks alongside the brick wall.  The Warden passes him, and we leave Franz to track with the Warden.  As the Warden speaks to the Guard, we pan over and tilt up to his face.

Franz is a afraid.  Paranoid, in fact.  How will he deal with the outside world?  So many people.  So little structure.  He was safe in jail, and everything was laid out for him.  But the real world is something else altogether.

Both the Warden and the Guard show compassion.  They encourage him.

The Guard practically has to coax him to leave.

He hears voices.

Frankly, we hear voices.

We hear the voice of the third-person narrator, who reads what we presume are passages taken directly from the novel.

We hear the voice inside Franz's head.

We hear the voices inside other people's heads.

And we hear a voice separate from the Narrator's, which we may imagine is the filmmaker's, someone speaking on behalf of Fassbinder, telling us how he really feels about all this.

A kind man finds him.  A Hasidic Jew named Nahum.  He helps Franz as he reels with vertigo.  He watches as Franz wrestles with the real sounds and imaginary voices in his ears and in his head.  He waits patiently as Franz sings to himself.  He takes him to his apartment.  A good Samaritan.

If only Blanche Dubois could have been here in this place at this time.  She has always depended on the kindness of strangers.  But has had to deal with her brother-in-law Stanley instead.  Franz, meanwhile, may indulge in the kindness of strangers.  They are here for him.

Nahum tells Franz The Parable of Zannowich.  Then his brother appears and finishes it for him.  Which changes its meaning.

Franz stumbles through the city and tries to make his way back into this society.  His old life.  His new life.

He fails to perform.  The woman reads to him from a scientific journal about men's health, demonstrating that it is not her fault but his.

He returns to his old haunt, to the landlady that has kept his room for him.  And to his dead girlfriend's sister.

He does bad things.

And declares after finishing one of them that he has been released.

At the bar he meets a new woman.  Who will be the start of his new life.

The bar where Schwarzenberger makes light glisten in sparkles on the chairtops and walls.  As if the Star of Bethlehem has born children who have filled the room with their delights.

Where Franz decides to go straight.  To live right.  To be good.

If the authorities will just not evict him from the city.

He finds a charity who will help him.  If he looks for work, and finds it, and reports to them monthly, and stays out of trouble, then he can stay.

He is happy.  He will live a good life.  And work honestly.  And have a woman by his side.

Do you believe it?

Biberkopf does.

But Doblin and Fassbinder see things turning out a different way.

*                              *                              *                              *

1 Gunter Lamprecht as Franz Biberkopf

10 Yaak Karsunke as the Jailer

5 Peter Kollek as Nahum

8 Hans Zander as Eliser (Nahum's brother and landlord)

7 Mechthild Grossmann as Paula

6 Brigitte Mira as Mrs. Bast

3 Karin Baal as Minna

9 Barbara Valentin as Ida

13 Hanna Schygulla as Eva

14 Roger Fritz as Herbert

4 Franz Buchreiser as Gottfried Meck

2 Elisabeth Trissenaar as Lina

11 Claus Holm as Wirt

12 Roger Fritz as Herbert

15 Juliane Lorenz as Official

*                              *                              *                              *

All these people, and the city, and the world, and me.

It doesn't fill your stomach, but it helps you to forget.

There's no justice in throwing a guy on a dung heap and pouring garbage over him.

Where thousands live, there will be room for one more

There comes a call like thunder's roar

Like the clash of swords, waves crashing on the shore

To the Rhine

The German, German Rhine

Guardians all we'd be of thine

Rest easy, dear Fatherland of mine

Rest easy, dear Fatherland of mine

Strong and true stands the watch

The watch on the Rhine

Strong and true stands the watch, the watch

The watch on the Rhine.

Rumbledy, bumbledy, bumbledy bee

I devote myself to you / With heart and hand

There's nothing you can do.  Men like this have arms of iron.

I'm not in jail anymore.

It's the Garden of Eden,

with fireworks.

You can scratch yourself if something itches.

You can't believe it, can you?  But it's the truth.  And the truth is the truth is the truth is the truth is the truth.

Even the most sensible guy comes to his senses.

Did you ever feel / Homesick?

Heartache that won't heal / Homesick

Everywhere around

Cold and gloom abound

Soft the sea's waves sound / Homesick, Homesick

Did you ever feel Homesick, Homesick, Homesick, Homesick?

Testifortan

Medication for Sexual Disturbances

Registered Trademark Number 365,635

Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, and

Dr. Bernhard Schapiro

Institute for Sexual Research, Berlin

A.  insufficient tension caused by a dysfunctioning of the internal secretory glands

B.  excessive resistance, caused by extreme psychological inhibitions or exhaustion of the erectile center

"Always," Irving Berlin

An Orphan's Fate, in Six Acts

Showing Today

Marienbad

Kino