553 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 14, Germany, 1980. Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.
My Dream of the Dream of Franz Bieberkopf by Alfred Doblin.
The film Berlin Alexanderplatz has already finished.
Meaning, the mini-series made for television, filmed on 16mm film, and now repurposed as a film, which follows Alfred Doblin's novel of the same name, has finished.
Berlin Alexanderplatz, as an adaptation, has been told in 13 episodes.
The rest is epilogue.
This is not Episode 14.
It is Fassbinder's dream of Franz Bieberkopf's dream of Alfred Doblin's novel.
A reimagining.
A fantastical conclusion to the events that have transpired.
Through the mind of the man who has taken over the story. A mind that may well have been in an altered state of consciousness.
Franz has lost his mind.
He has been institutionalized.
The doctors discuss his diagnosis. Debate cures. A tumor in the midbrain. Catatonic stupor. Inhibition. Blockage caused by mental factors. A loss of reality. Disappointment. Denial. Childish, impulsive claims on reality. Unsuccessful attempts to restore his hold on it.
We see it. Objectively occasionally. Subjectively mostly. We plunge into the recesses of Franz's mind and live inside his dreams.
The bad dreams. The nightmares.
Guilt. Punishment. Fear. Desire. The parade of people from his life coming back to confront him. In the belly of a purgatorial world.
In Limbo. Abaddon. Gehenna. Hades.
Perdition.
Like an episode of Frasier mashed up with Hieronymus Bosch.
Reinhold finds his lover in a prison cell. As the lover is leaving. Separation through parole.
Franz in makeup. Return of the sad clown.
Franz in a slaughterhouse. Of people. Thrown in a pile. Taken off the pile to skin, to dismember, to gut. To flog his hind.
Bieberkopf is told he did not open his eyes. That he has no eyes. That he folded up like a pocketknife. That he chose to be blind.
Fassbinder appears onscreen as a witness. Watching. The watch on the Rhine. Watching from behind.
"'Boil him till he's savory!' Death beats his drum roll."
The whore Babylon has lost.
This epilogue is a hot mess. Experimental theater. A challenge for the actor. A test for the viewer.
The apex of unrestrained and self-indulgent excess. A stew of every ingredient Fassbinder could find in the pantry. With a few things thrown in from the garden. And a few more found in the wild.
A feast of the fantastical. A gala of the grotesque. A clambake of outlandish and astonishing ideas.
Signs and symbols pushed to the limit to push buttons.
Sadomasochistic angels. A menorah and a swastika. Reinhold wearing a crown of thorns. Bieberkopf hanging on a cross. Flagellation. Adult breastfeeding. Human torture. Candles.
In full-on Fassbinder fashion.
Without the limits of the source novel constraining him, his mind is free to run rampant. With his ideas on full parade. The culmination of associations he has had since first encountering the book at age 14. More than twenty years before.
Franz Bieberkopf has chosen death.
"When a guy has the word death on his lips, no one can tear it from him. He'll turn it over in his mouth, and it will be like a stone, a stony stone. And no nourishment will grow from it. In this way, many people have died. For them, there was no going on."
"Franz struggles as he waits for death, for a merciful death."
This film aired as a mini-series in October of 1980.
A year and eight months later, Werner Rainer Fassbinder was dead.
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The question is, Are you an actor? How far will you go to portray the human condition? . . . How far can you transcend your personal limits or your shyness. -- Gottfried John.
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I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore, choose life, that both you and your seed may live. - Deuteronomy 30:19.
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