Berlin Alexanderplatz (I)

I’m not certain how to approach Fassbinder’s 16 hour plus adaptation of Alfred Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a TV series shown in 1982 and comprised of ninety minute episodes. Persistence and fortitude will be my watchwords, and, I suppose, a simple episode-by-episode consideration of this Himalayan enterprise is best – step by step and the summit is ultimately achieved.
 "The Punishment Begins" (1) – Franz Biberkopf, a burly, sweaty fellow who looks somewhat like an unhealthy walrus, is released from Tegel Prison. After a couple of exterior shots, the film retreats into a series of brownish-amber interiors, generally shadowy and tightly constrained. From one cell, Biberkopf has been liberated into a series of cells. The night-time shots on the street are clearly studio images and they have some of sooty, gloomy glamour of film noir. The interiors, the color of flat beer, are inhabited by sexually voracious women. The opening episode has something of the eerie quality of a Kafka novel. All the women, reasonably attractive if a little worn-looking, seem to desire the hero and are ready and willing to have sex with him, an enterprise that he accomplishes with some violence –‘it’s my way,” he tells one lady after he has provoked squeals of pain and injured her intimately in some way. Curiously, the women seem to regard Biberkopf, who doesn’t look much like a matinee idol, as a kind of chick-magnet, someone like Frank Sinatra (and, I suppose, in fairness, I should note that Frank Sinatra didn’t look like a matinee idol either.) The acting is broadly expressionistic, but effective, the people emoting something like the brutish characters in early Brecht, A Man is a Man or Baal. Most of the first episode details Biberkopf’s romantic adventures: he mauls a prostitute, rapes the sister of the woman that he beat to death (this is why he was in jail for four years), and, then, initiates a relationship with a Polish prostitute. Voice-over narration sometimes supplies the thoughts of the characters, invariably not particularly informative, and, periodically, we hear a pedantic, pseudo-scientific discourse – presumably imitating the dry sociological and mechanistic voice of the novelist Biberkopf alternates between rage, grim despair, and wild elation. He repeatedly sings “The Watch on the Rhine” and resolves that he will “go straight.” All of this happens in a warren of dimly lit enclosures humid with sexual intimidation. Needless to say, the prospects for poor Biberkopf don’t seem too promising.
 "How is one to live if one doesn’t want to die" (2) – With more than 600,000 others, Biberkopf is unemployed. His girlfriend, Polish Lina, suggests turning a few tricks for cash, a proposal that the bearish Biberkopf indignantly rejects. The camera rotates around the couple’s small pile of coins. Money, and how to get it, is central to this episode – and, indeed, central to most of Fassbinder’s picture. For a few days, Biberkopf tries to hawk some sort of tie-tack on the congested Berlin streets. This doesn’t work and so he is deputized to sell pornography by a vendor in the squalid colonnades of the subway. Lina is violently opposed to pornography, particularly of the gay variety, and returns the stroke-books to the subterranean vendor – most of this episode seems to take place underground. With their last pennies, Lina and Biberkopf go to a cavernous beerhall where the meet a Nazi. He hires Biberkopf to sell a National Socialist newspaper, Der Volkischer Beobachter, and Franz is fitted-out with a natty swastika armband. He debates politics with a Jewish hotdog vendor and, then, at his favorite tavern, gets threatened by some Communist thugs – he stares them down singing his favorite tune, The Watch on the Rhine. Fassbinder’s characters suffer whiplash changes in emotion – they menace one another and, then, sink into beery embraces. Biberkopf bites Polish Lina’s throat like a vampire and everything takes place in what seem to be vaults buried far underground, chambers oozing murky yellowish light, gloomy corridors, streets like cisterns. From time to time, interpolated narration seems to slow the action to molasses – a torrent of swiftly pronounced words flowing against an image of figures threatening one another in the murk.
 "A Hammerblow to the Head can injure the Soul" (3) – Franz Biberkopf abandons his job selling Nazi newspapers. Lina and Biberkopf visit Lina’s aunt, the sinister Herr Lueders, played by the impeccably noisome Hark Bohm. (Bohm looks like a haggard Peter Lorre). Lueders, also unemployed for two years, immediately recognizes that Biberkopf has done time in Tegel. He agrees that Franz can sell shoelaces door-to-door for him – at least, it’s a job. Biberkopf, continuing his improbable career as a ladies’ man, meets a lonely widow. The widow says that Franz reminds Biberkopf of her husband and, when Franz puts his paw on her shoulder, has sex with him and pays 10 marks to boot. Biberkopf boasts of the adventure to Lueders with whom he shares half of the loot. Lueders goes to the unfortunate widow’s house the next day and importunes her for sex. When she rejects him, Lueders threatens and robs her. Biberkopf runs into another old girlfriend – these hefty German criminals have lots of luck with the women. She’s turning tricks and, guess what? it’s Hanna Schygulla. Biberkopf goes to see the widow who is understandably enraged and won’t let him in her house. Biberkopf deserts Lina and hides in a wretched flophouse full of superannuated naked guys. Lina and her friend, Meck, a kind of Mack the Knife gangster, threaten Lueders who, then, seeks out Biberkopf. Biberkopf is going to kill the vicious Lueders but refrains, a neatly lettered Fraktur title telling us that Franz really wants to go straight but that this isn’t so easy. Biberkopf vanishes again, seemingly half-crazed, and Lina decides to take-up with Meck, the gangster. This episode, although squalid, is very interesting and the scenes between Biberkopf and the widow (as well as the chilling scene with Lueders and that woman) are intense, pathetic, even, perhaps, tragic – the poor widow is destroyed, it seems, for a moment of ill-advised yearning. Scenes of Biberkopf trying to sell shoelaces in the apartment block courtyards are similar to images of Hans Epps in Merchant of Four Seasons hawking pears in an identical setting. Fassbinder’s staging of this episode is exemplary – in one shot, he features Meck and Lina in a tavern, talking together while a man (the bar-owner) slurps soup in the foreground. Ultimately, after thirty or forty seconds of dialogue, the bar-owner looks up from his soup and provides some crucial expository dialogue; this is an example of Fassbinder’s “over-the-shoulder” shots, frequent in this film, and designed to avoid multiple camera set-ups and unnecessary expense – the trick works here and it’s even rather stylish. The series is marred by a horrible Muzak-style score, a harmonica tune that always seems to be about to resolve into the Civil War era ballad, Lorena – “the years creep slowly by Lorena” – a melody much-beloved by John Ford. Fassbinder’s complete identification with Biberkopf gives this film an unsettling power.
 "A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence" (4) – This nasty episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz is a narrative black hole, a dull and hopeless hiatus that sucks the film’s little light into its dark core. Biberkopf is trying to drink himself to death in the company of an enabler named Baumann, a fellow who looks exactly like Raymond Massey’s version of Abe Lincoln. Biberkopf is lodging in a filthy apartment above a conveniently located tavern run by Frau Greiner. She and her unemployed husband are small-time criminals, apparently, specializing in some kind of insurance fraud. When not pouring beer down his gullet in his room, Biberkopf wanders the streets accosting people and babbling to them visions of collapsing houses and streets full of rubble – the apocalyptic imagery is similar to Ludwig Meidner’s expressionistic images of a collapsing city painted just before World War Two. Maintaining that he is Ehrlich und Treu (“honest and loyal”), Biberkopf staggers around hallucinating. Sometimes, he plays some kind of card game with Baumann, accusing his friend of being “Satan” to his “Job.” Baumann obligingly cleans up huge sprays of vomit in Biberkopf’s room; his motives are completely opaque – he insists that Biberkopf can be saved only by himself, a mantra repeated by Biberkopf himself when Eva (Hanna Schygulla) shows up, scrambling through mountains of beer bottles and offers to help our hero. The entire episode is scored to vaguely atonal caterwauling, the score of an opera proceeding uninterruptedly as Biberkopf crawls around in empty bottles or trudges up and down the stairs lugging crates of beer. In the end, the sickness is sweated-out of Biberkopf and he returns to the newspaper vendor in the subway near Alexanderplatz. Construction is underway and the news vendor has lost a testicle to cancer. Biberkopf finds his friend, the criminal Meck, now selling men’s clothing and the two embrace in front of a poster on which the name Carl v. Ossietzky appears. (Ossietzky was the Edward Snowden of Weimar Germany. In 1929, Ossietzky published secret government information about German rearmament. Unlike Snowden, he didn’t flee Germany, was arrested, convicted and sent to a concentration camp. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935 and died in 1936. The more things change, the more they stay the same – Ossietzky’s family petitioned for a re-trial in 1992 to clear the dead man’s name. The German Court ruled that the Weimar-era conviction should be upheld – state secrets are state secrets and it’s disloyal to broadcast them to the world at large; the conviction was warranted under 1931 law.)
 "A Reaper with the Power of the Lord" (5) – Biberkopf was, apparently, once a successful pimp. The basis for his unerring seductive powers remains obscure to me. In this episode, he functions as a girlfriend disposal system for Reinhold, an even more homely and morose-looking fellow, also improbably successful with women. Reinhold meets women, seduces them, and, then, after three or four weeks can’t stand the sight of them. (Reinhold’s problems may arise from some strangled religious impulse – he takes Biberkopf to a Salvation Army meeting, ashamed as if he were bringing his friend to an opium den.) Reinhold sends the women as messengers to Biberkopf who, then, entices them into sex with him. When the unfortunate woman returns to Reinhold, she finds that he has booted her out, her suitcase is on the sidewalk, and she is forced to take up lodging with Biberkopf. When Reinhold tires of his new conquest, he contacts Biberkopf who devises some method for expelling his current girlfriend so that he can take possession of his friend’s most recently discarded paramour. We see this heartless scheme enacted with Fraense, a plump and hardworking matron, and Cilly, a decayed socialite said to look “like a film star”. The women are not particularly attractive and, apparently, completely fungible, although they are spunky, and protest ineffectually – our sympathies are entirely with them and this episode is spectacularly loathsome. Biberkopf even casts his rejects off to his employer the elderly newspaper vendor who inhabits the moist and dim subway like a rat. In one spectacular scene, we see Cilly dancing a Charleston. Biberkopf dances himself, grinning, and, suddenly, for an instant, I think, we glimpse what excites the women about him – despite his monumental size and gorilla-like build, Biberkopf is tremendously light and agile on his feet – he is a fantastic dancer and a look of sheer boyish abandon illuminates his coarse features. Throughout this episode, the soundtrack reverts to the nasty Muzak from earlier episodes but with a long interpolation of atonal piano underscoring the seduction and rejection scenes, an irritant, an itch that you can’t scratch, something like the piano ceaselessly sounding three or four dull notes in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.