Friday, December 21, 2018
549 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 10, Germany, 1980. Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.
Loneliness Tears Cracks of Madness Even in Walls.
Eva and Mieze enter.
Eva asks Ilse to make coffee for two. Eva has a servant. Or shall we say, she has use of a servant. Her client is doing well. Her client is treating her well. Her client likes her. And he is jealous of Herbert. Which is just the way Eva wants it. As long as her client is jealous of Herbert, he will stay with her and keep giving her good things, as he tries to win her away from Herbert. She is using him. So Eva has more than just the use of his servant. She also has the use of him.
Mieze looks at the room in awe. It contains a cage with real monkeys. The client has set up the room with the monkeys for Eva.
We remember Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (1972), and the restaurant the family frequented. It too had a monkey cage, along with a fish tank. Eight Hours Don't Make a Day was an original work made eight years before Berlin Alexandreplatz, which is an adapted work. We imagine that Fassbinder lifted the monkey cage from the book for this scene. Is it coincidental that he placed a monkey cage in a restaurant in his own work eight years before? Or does it show the level of influence the book has had on his filmmaking all these years, informing his aesthetic ideas long before he adapted the novel itself.
The monkeys, for me, are a film reference. Not objectively speaking, but subjectively, through the use of words, in this case, rather than symbols.
In English, the term monkeyshines is slang for "mischievous behavior," and the first films ever made in the United States were titled Monkeyshines. William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson and William Heise worked in the Edison Labs for Thomas Edison, and Dickson invented an early prototype for a motion picture camera. In the process of testing the new equipment, the men made Monkeyshines No. 1, Monkeyshines No. 2, and Monkeyshines No. 3, beginning in either 1889 or 1890.
Monkeyshines No. 1 was the first film ever made in the United States.
Donald O'Connor refers to this term when he sings "Make 'Em Laugh" in the film Singin' in the Rain (1952) (set in 1927). The song begins with the verse, "Make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh, / Don't you know everyone wants to laugh? / My Dad said, 'Be an actor, my son, / But be a comical one! / They'll be standing in lines / For those old honky-tonk monkeyshines.'" He is performing one of the greatest song-and-dance routines ever done in one of the greatest movie musicals ever made, whose subject is the birth of the talking pictures in the early days of motion pictures, and I have always heard in that song a call back to the birth of the movies themselves. When he sings the refrain for the last time, his voice trails off on that word--"monkeyshi---"--which may have to do with his grabbing a breath in the midst of his physicality, but it takes on an emotional resonance, a kind of a wistful tone, as if not just the character Cosmo Brown (named in honor of songwriter Nacio Brown) but also the man Donald O'Connor is making a comment on the history of movies themselves. As if he is saying, "It all began with Monkeyshines. And here we are now. What emotion this medium has given the world." And the song itself is talking about that very thing--slipping on a banana peel rather than quoting Shakespeare--and the movie itself is talking about that very thing--jumping out of a cake and throwing a cake in the face and the ironic flashbacks of "Always dignity." (And Shakespeare himself was talking about that very thing--with flatulence jokes given to the groundlings.)
In some ways Fassbinder is giving us monkeyshines, or mischievous behavior, dressed up as sociopolitical commentary. Franz Bieberkopf does not understand politics or economics, and when he talks about them he merely repeats bits and pieces he has overheard. He ends up all over the map, taking a stand at some point for nearly ever position. He is an ordinary man, not classically considered important, and he will have no discernible effect on society beyond the lives of the people who love him. His interests lie in his own immediate pleasures, which are mainly women and drinking. He struggles to keep a job.
The woman talk about having babies.
Eva says she would not want to have a baby with her client. She does not love him. She would, however, like to have a baby with Herbert. But Herbert would not have a baby with her.
Then Eva offhandly mentions she would like to have a baby with Franz.
We know. Franz is the love of her life. She is willing to give Mieze to Franz because this is the world that these people inhabit, and it is the only way she knows to show her love to Franz. But she really loves him, and this is the expression of her true heart's desire.
Eva enters into an altered state. She goes silent. Her eyes roll to the top of her head. She moves against the wall. We expect her to be filled with jealous anger. She turns and wails and throws herself against the cage and clutches it like a monkey. While wailing. She turns and throws herself into Eva and clutches her. Like the cage. And begins stamping Eva's neck and shoulder and arm with kisses.
Eva asks her to stop. Mieze explains that she is not mad at Eva but happy for her. Happy that she likes Franz. Happy that she wants to have a baby with him. Mieze says she wants to give that gift to Eva. She wants to keep Franz--he is hers--but she wants to let Eva have his baby--as she is hers as well.
Eva does not understand Mieze. What has gotten into her?
The two of them debate the point, Mieze insisting, Eva resisting, that Franz should stay with Mieze but Eva should have his baby. Then Eva explains to Mieze that she has a responsibility to protect Franz, to take care of him. She informs Mieze that Willy is a bad influence on Franz, that his going to these political meetings are not good for him, and that she should do her best to stop him from going and to wedge Willy out of Franz's life.
In some highly skilled human and camera blocking, the women move to the door and then move back to a spot in the room. And settle in. We watch them through the cage. Then Eva separates herself from Mieze and we see her standing against the cage with Mieze still seated and then, in a tracking shot, walking behind the cage towards Eva. They come around the corner of the cage, and Eva moves past the leaf fronds and stand in the threshold of another room. Mieze turns and clasps the cage again, now from this side, as she makes her case. We circle around her, past the flares from the window slats, and turn into Mieze and she turns into us in close-up. We cut to Eva reentering the room and picking up two drinks, already poured, from behind the large leaf fronds. They both return to the threshold, pass the threshold into the other room, and the light shafts thrust up the open door as Mieze kneels before Eva, and pleads with her. Eva gives Mieze a drink, and takes a drink herself, in some kind of communion, claiming it will help her speak more sensibly. They drink their drinks, and Eva walks the glasses back to the hidden table behind the large leaf fronds. As Eva crosses camera and exits frame we push in from afar to a close-up of Mieze standing against the door jamb, and then turning into profile. Then we cut to a close-up of Eva looking through the cage, the wires forming square shadows on her face. We cut back to the medium close-up of Mieze in profile and then circle 180 degrees around her, with her back against the door jamb, into a medium close-up of the other profile, now with Eva in the background behind the cage, and the monkey climbing on the tree inside the cage, in front of Eva. Mieze walks back over to Eva and we stay in a wide shot watching the women through the cage with the monkey moving freely in front of them inside the cage. We cut to an OTS of Eva, and as she leans in, we shift left and the ribbon hanging from Mieze's pink hair bow vertically cuts a line through Eva's right eye. We cut to the OTS of Mieze as she reacts to what Eva has just said. The music begins on the soundtrack underneath--the man singing in operatic style. Eva turns left, her face into the warm light, her left profile into dramatic shadow, the catch light always strong in the center of her eyes, the hot light on her golden hair spilling into a trim around the contours of her face--her nose, her lips, and her chin. Mieze turns to see what Eva sees.
Ilse is bringing the coffee. A pitcher, sugar and creamer, cups and saucers--in matching gold-trimmed fine china on a serving tray. We circle around behind Mieze as Ilse circles into the room. And we rise slightly over the flowers as she sets the tray on the coffee table. We stay still as she moves to the back of the room, to the door, and they talk. We expect to cut after she exits the room, but we stay in the shot and circle back to the two shot and back around behind Mieze into the OTS of Eva, and sit there as Eva talks. We stay in the shot still as Mieze gets up and walks to the back wall, and we circle back to the right, slowly, so that the women and the flowers align themselves--with Mieze's torso in the background on top, Eva's head in the middle, and the flowers in the foreground at the bottom--and we pass through the axis into an "over-the-flower" shot of Eva that settles into a close-up, and then tilt up to a close-up of Mieze. We finally cut, into a high angle OTS shot, looking down over Mieze's left shoulder upon Eva, still seated, with the table and the flowers and the tray and the china, and another shallow metal bowl now revealed, with finger foods in it, with Xaver Schwarzenberger's classic flare sparkling off the rim of the shallow bowl like the Star of Bethlehem. We follow Eva as she stands up, moving through the flare, and walks over and takes Mieze by the cheekbones and talks to her face to face. The music stops and we cut to a wide shot of them in the room, over by the large radio console by the door, leaning across it, talking, and then walking back behind the cage to the spot where they originally sat when they first entered the room when the scene began. Mieze ends the scene by singing a song to Eva.
Near Abrudpanta, the bandit horde
Roamed around, wild and free
Guito, though, their leader brave
A good and noble man was he
The singing touches them.
The narrator explains to us, over the script of the text of the novel, "Both know it is just a market song, where the music drones on. But still they have to weep when it is over. For sometimes life is too short for the eternity of feelings."
This scene takes up nearly 10 minutes of the one-hour episode, or 16%. It is a 9-minute-50-second technical and emotional tour-de-force.
It is a scene that begs to be studied in film school, or outside of film school. I do not know if it is studied formally, but I recommend that it be. The room is designed for movement, with the monkey cage in the middle, and the potential for camera angles and human behavior on all sides, along with multiple locations for entering and exiting and sitting and standing. The women hit their marks. The camera hits its marks. The light hits its marks. And the monkey hits its marks. Seriously. (Remember the cats in the opening credits of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)). There is one point when it walks across a limb above frame and its drooping tail makes it seem as if the boom mic has dipped into frame. Until you see that it is a monkey tail and not the boom mic. But otherwise, it spends some of the time staying out of the way and other times blocking our view of a human face on the other side, in ways that seem intentional rather than at random.
After the women complete their agreement--that Mieze will stop Franz from spending time with Willy and going to political meetings, and that Eva will have his baby--we move on to a political meeting in the bar.
Our bartender has by now established himself as the moral voice in the film, and he resists when the men attempt to promote their various political causes. A young man says everyone should read Nietzsche and follow him.
Do whatever gives you pleasure.
Do you understand? Nietzsche. Anything else is drivel, old boy.
One suspects that Fassbinder is exposing a popular misconception of Nietzsche acquired by shallow reading. The young man posits a personal philosophy that could in fact result from following Nietzsche's logic, but he does not seem to appreciate the hard work that Nietzsche took to get there, or the more complex conclusions to which he came. On the other hand, the common man in the bar here is providing the bottom line to the philosophies that they discuss. By removing the nuances, they effectively assert their own response: We have to live life. You philosophers give us theories. We are either going to appropriate them into a pragmatic application for ourselves, or else they are worthless.
They discuss Marx and Lenin and Stalin as well.
Franz goes out on the street and observes a young man selling newspapers. He recalls his own experiences selling. The boy shouts the headline repeatedly. "Child molester scandal! Czech Jew abuses 20 boys. No arrests made." As the voice-over repeats one of the stories from inside the bar just now. "Her uterus has become joined to her rectum. They operated on her, but it didn't help internally." Fassbinder loves to jump into it. And poke at his viewer. And demand a reaction from us. And all this after the debate in the bar that I just glossed over.
Meanwhile, today there are molester scandals taking place inside newsrooms across the country. So the newsrooms focus on the ones taking place in the Catholic church.
The boy selling papers is confused by Franz's stare. And put off by it. What are you looking at? Nothing. I used to sell newspapers too.
He roams. Meanders. Finds his way back to the wall outside the Tegel prison and passes out on the ground. When the officer wakes him and confronts him, he said he came to visit his home. He misses it. The officer thinks he has lost his mind. He makes him leave. Franz finds a taxi home.
Back home, Franz falls into an emotional crisis. Mieze comes to him happy with the news that Eva is going to have his baby. Nevermind his opinion on the matter. The two women have decided. He fears she is trying to leave him. She assures him that she is not, that she loves him, and that she wants to make him happy. She says she has been to three doctors, and they have told her that she herself cannot have a baby. These seems to be new news to us and perhaps a further explanation for her previous behavior.
She leaves and Eva comes in and they discuss it. We jump past the activity to where Eva leaves and Mieze returns. This time she has different news, and it terrifies him even more. She now has a client who wants to treat her as Eva's client is treating her. To set her up in a nice apartment. Mieze wants that for Franz and her. She makes him smile. She makes him laugh. They enjoy their private time together. Until Mrs. Bast comes in and announces that the Gentleman has come to call. And Mieze says to let him in. When he enters, we see that he well-dressed, well-groomed, well-spoken, and well-bred. Sophisticated. The two man stand side-by-side in contrast as they watch Mieze get ready to leave with the client. Franz realizes the man wants to take Mieze out. Not just put her up. Not just spend trysts with her. But to take her on trips. And to woo her. Franz goes to Mieze, in front of the man, who offered to leave but who was asked by Franz to stay, and he confronts Mieze. She assures him that she is not leaving him. That this is for them.
It's my job, Franz. I have to do it. I have to.
And when she leaves with the man, Franz is left with a jealousy, a fear, a paranoia, and the torment that comes from it, that cuts him to the quick. He cries out for her. He bawls.
Mieze! Mieze! Mieze!
The closing tag line reads, "The serpent in the soul of the serpent."
Franz is like a lost little boy. A man given over to the caprices of his own emotions and the demands of his appetites, seemingly unaware of the consequences of his decisions, floating through life like a cork on the sea, without purpose, and without understanding. He is like a monkey released from its cage and let loose in the open world, engaging in monkeyshines while terrified of the chaos and unpredictability of the hostile environment around him, wishing to be back his cage where there is safety and order and stability and comfort. Unaware of spiritual consolation, or redemption. Unable to process events rationally. Responding viscerally to emotional stimuli. A body of buttons that can be pushed by others. Not knowing how to stop it. Or what causes it. Hurting without knowledge of a cure. Moving from pleasure to pleasure, and from pain to pain. Seeing no connection between them. Like a sheep without a shepherd. An orphan in a storm.
Despite all that Franz Bieberkopf has done, and the circumstances that he has brought on himself, one might have compassion for him.
For he is a man, as any other man.
With a heart, fearful and broken.
Who is terrified of being alone.
* * * *
I want to keep him. He's my Franz. But you're my Eva too.
Hey, Mieze. Are you a dyke?
Not at all. I just happen to like you.
And you'd really like a baby from Franz?
What's up with you?
Tell me, Eva, do you want one from him or not?
No! I just said it off the top of my head.
That's not true. You do want one. You're just saying you don't, but you do want one.
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