Rainer Werner Fassbinder was, along with Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Wim Wenders, one of the key filmmakers of the New German Cinema of the 1970s, but this description seems barely sufficient to characterise an oeuvre which is unprecedented in the history of film, both in quality and quantity. Between 1969 and 1982, Fassbinder made 33 feature films for cinema and TV, four TV series (a total of 23 episodes) and four feature-length video films – a total of 60 pieces for film and television in 13 years.
Berlin Alexanderplatz, his monumental 15-and-a-half hour opus made in 1980, was both his most personal film and the summation of 13 years of unrelenting experimentation in a variety of media, genres and settings. It is, along with Reitz’s Heimat, one of the most triumphant examples of a filmmaker casting aside the snobbishness many film directors have toward the medium of television and adapting to its unique aesthetic. Also, given his singular, intense affinity with the character of Franz Biberkopf, it is a film which - especially for those familiar only with films such as Fear Eats the Soul (1972) or The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) - provides a whole new perspective on Fassbinder the author.
‘You may laugh,’ said Fassbinder in 1980, ‘but I believe my life would have turned out very differently if I hadn’t carried around with me, in my heart, my flesh, my soul, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Having read the novel during his ‘almost murderous puberty’, Fassbinder re-read it upon embarking on his own career and was determined to adapt it for cinema, a process which took over a decade. During this time, many of the themes and much of the flavour of Döblin’s novel would filter through into his many feature films.
Published in 1929, the novel tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, who, on his release from prison, is confronted with the poverty, unemployment, crime and burgeoning Nazism of 1920s Germany. One of the first German novels to adopt the technique of James Joyce – with its rapid shifts between interior monologue, collage of quotations and interior monologue – it is a post-Ulysses city-novel that ranks alongside John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.
Of Fassbinder’s film, Susan Sontag observed that: ‘In Berlin Alexanderplatz, cinema, that hybrid art, has at last achieved some of the dilatory, open form and accumulative power of the novel. The more one can watch of the film over the shortest time works best . . . exactly as one reads a long novel, with maximum pleasure and intensity.’
Fassbinder's staggering 15 1/2 hour epic is a universally-acclaimed monument of late 20th-century filmmaking. Following a massive restoration project overseen by the original editor, it is now available for the first time on DVD.
Franz Biberkopf is an unforgettable man: good-natured, soft, tender, but also hard, violent and brutal. Released from prison following a four year sentence for the manslaughter of his girlfriend, he plans to make a new start and a decent life for himself. But a chaotic, decadent Berlin of the 1920s is not the easiest place for an ex-con to go straight and work is hard to come by. When Franz becomes fascinated by Reinhold, a psychotic small-time crook, he is soon drawn back into a world he cannot escape.
