543 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 4, Germany, 1980. Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

543 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 4, Germany, 1980.  Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.

A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence.

Just so you know, I'll always be here for you.

There are those words again.

The words that everyone longs to hear.

This time they come from Eva.

Franz Biberkopf must be the luckiest man in the world.  He is one of the most difficult protagonists in literature with whom to sympathize.

And yet these women love him.

How did she find him?

We ended the last episode not knowing where he went.  With Lina and Meck left alone with each other, depending on each other, because their friend, and boyfriend, disappeared.

We begin this episode with Franz awakening in a new place.  A place that sells beer.

Franz has just run out of beer.

Good for him that he is staying here.  With the proprietors Mr. and Mrs. Greiner.  Mrs. Greiner nags Mr. Greiner, and Franz sympathizes with him.

He asks for beer for breakfast.  Or whatever time of day it is.  He has just awakened.  With him, who knows?

Mrs. Greiner is happy to give him as much as he wants.  She has plenty.  And she drinks with him.  While complaining that her husband drinks but does not work.  All he does is snooze and booze.

Franz comments on Mrs. Grillmann's shoe store across the street.  He observes that everything is always "tiptop" and that they employ six girls but never have any customers.  He implies, we infer, that the shoe store might be a front for some other kind of business.  He himself has worked in all the other kinds of businesses, so he has an eye for that sort of thing.

He then implies, we infer, that Mrs. Grillmann's husband, a man under 40, is the one behind all the company growth, that he married her for money, as she is an old woman, and he keeps her in the back.

A kind of Bertha Mason, perhaps?  (You look it up.  You may have already read it.)

"That's what you get for marrying a guy younger than yourself."

He continues to describe the neighbors, with the insight of a man who pays attention.

He moves into a stream of consciousness, as he moves through the city, that resembles the literature of the time.  As with Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.  As with Quentin Compson and Jason, and Dilsey, and Benji, in The Sound and the Fury.

He talks of Job lying in the cabbage patch, for example, while playing cards.  With Baumann, the man with the Abraham Lincoln beard.  And no mustache.  Under the hot overhead practical light.  Next to the warm candle.  As we look up from below the table in Dutch angles.  As they lean into the light and back into the shadows.

The light trims around the edges of his entire figure when we see him from behind.  Like a hair light on the body.

And now here is Eva.

Who has descended into the dirty, dingy dungeon of his demise.

How did you find me here?
I've known for a long time you were here.

She wants to work for him.  But he does not want anyone to work for him anymore.  Not like that.  As he said to her the last time he saw her.  And the time before that.  He is determined to go straight.

I must get out of this alone or it'll be the end of me.  One or the other.  There's no other way.

The light trims the edges of her entire figure as well.

The upper part of her face is in darkness. With a catch light sparkling in the center of her eyes.  In her pupils.  Where have you seen that before?

Xaver Schwarzenberger's legend as a cinematographer is going to grow as people discover his work.

The next day the inspectors--the insurance inspectors and the police inspectors--inspect the fifth burglary of a wholesale company in eighteen months.

No one rats on the people who did it.  Franz saw them.  He calls them a mob.  He will not rat on them.  But if he sees them again . . .

Did somebody say something?

A series of reaction shots.  Close-ups in Dutch angles, one after the other.  The officials and the people.

Franz's friend takes a step and steps on a bottle of liquor.  He looks down and in a full single second we see it and the reflection of his face in the water puddle on the cobbled street.  The puddled cobble.

He bends down to tie his shoe and puts it in his pocket.  Found alcohol.  A gift from the gods.

The inspectors can do nothing, so in an overhead shot we see the people disperse with blocking done to mathematical precision.

Baumann and Franz look up cigars.

Mr. and Mrs. Greiner fight and make up through the walls.

The police come.

Baumann knows Franz is going to leave.  He is fit now.  He has sweated out his disease.  He will move on.

This film, originally shown as a min-series, filmed on 16 mm, originally shown on equipment that could not handle what was on it (everything back then projected too darkly), is opening up into a strange, beautiful, confounding, mysterious, complex historical epic starring a No Man who stands in as the Everyman.

It will continue to unfold.

Train to Alexanderplatz.

All board!


*                              *                              *                              *


One beer is no cheer.

You can't stand on one leg. . . . Unless one was shot off in the war. . . . But that's not natural either, is it?

What do the two of them get out of life?
Well, they've got each other.

She's terribly skinny but really supple for someone who's had two kids.

He sleeps and plays the zither.

Whose business is it what I do?  Whose business is it?  If I want to sleep, then I'll sleep till the day after tomorrow without moving.

Did you lose your heart to nature?
I didn't lose my hear there, but I felt as if a primeval spirit were trying to tear me forth, when I stood face to face with the Alpine giants, or lay on the shore of the roaring sea, for it surged and seethed in my bones.

My heart was in tumult, yet I lost it neither there where the eagles nest, nor where the miner probes in hidden veins for ore.

Where then?  Did you lose your heart to sport?  In the roar of the Youth Movement?  In the turmoil of politics?  I didn't lose it there.

So you haven't lost it anywhere?  Are you the type of person who doesn't lose his heart anywhere, but keeps it for himself, conserves it clinically, mummifies it?

The man wants to put his house in order to sort things out.

It's good to be out of the parlor, not to have to hear the women shrieking.

People do the best they can.  They've got kids at home, hungry mouths, gaping like birds' beaks.

The moment of metamorphosis.  From the sun your blood came.
The sun hid itself in your body.  Now it comes forth again.

No one need waste prayers on me when I'm dead.

God and Satan, the angels and men.  They all want to help you.
God, because he loves you.
Satan, because he wants to possess you later.
The angels and men, because they are God's and Satan's helpers.

Franz Biberkopf continues to drink in his loathing of the world, in his discontent.  He drinks all he has, come what may.

He wanted to lead a decent life, but there's so much scum around he wants nothing to do with the world anymore.

Even if the world is full of meanness, full of filth, I swore to myself, I'm finished with it.

I know now what the strangest thing in the world is.
Do you?
People.

I don't rat on anyone.  Not even bums like that.

I just needed some peace and quiet, to be alone for awhile.

There's no place for me in a party that betrays its principles.

That's how it is.  People meet, get to know each other.  Then one day it's all over.