Colour in "Berlin Alexanderplatz" as in other Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films most immediately influences me. Even his black and white films suggest a variety or kind of colour. I have read about variations in the colour from the original work to the DVD release but I do not recall the details. One could write a long piece on just this one aspect of this work Reading essays by those who worked with Fassbinder on this and other films does enrich viewing this work. The richness of the film comes to viewers slowly. Having it on DVD is a terrific boon because this is a film to watch many times.I watched this first on the old Bravo network during the 80s with utter fascination and devotion. I had a job that let me watch that network after midnight when my wife had gone to bed and to focus my attention on the movies broadcast. This work would haunt me then for weeks.This film deserves a long meditation that I have not been prepared to write yet. However, I think it important to recommend this film. It is an utter masterwork. I echo Ian Stott's thumbnail assessment on his terrific blog. Buy the DVD set if you can do that. Then watch it from beginning to end with as few breaks as possible. Then go back and watch it closely section by section. Writing about this film is hard; watching it is not.

It took me over four months to finish watching Berlin Alexanderplatz that Criterion released on seven discs. As with the other two my favorite TV Series (Ingmar Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander" and "Scenes from the Marriage), Criterion deserves the highest praise for the quality of the set. I would receive a disc from Netflix, watch without stopping and then I would need a break - so intense and involving, and demanding it was. It has been said a lot about Werner Rainer Fassbinder's most opulent, magnificent, and controversial work based on the novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz" written by Alfred Döblin in 1929 that Fassbinder had known by heart and always wanted to adapt. In short, "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is a story of an ex-convict Franz Biberkopf and his attempts to lead a good honest life after he was released from the prison where he had spent four years for accidentally murdering his girlfriend in the fit of rage. Döblin's book is considered one of the most important German novels, which used the techniques similar to and is as influential as James Joyce's "Ulysses" and John Dos Passos' "Manhattan". As Joyce and Dos Passos, Doblin paints the portrait of the city that we could recognize and re-build in our imagination even if Berlin of the 1920s, the most modern city of its time does not exist anymore. Doblin also had shown how the city affects the life of a person and tears them apart. There could be many reasons why Fassbinder felt so strongly about the novel and always dreamt about adapting it to the screen. He was certainly fascinated by the language of the book and he took it upon himself to narrate some of the most impressive pages as the comments to the action on the screen. Perhaps the young filmmaker was attracted to Doblin's non-judgmental approach in depicting marginality of criminal life, in accepting homosexuality and bisexuality as a part of life without neither glorifying nor demonizing them. The hero of Döblin'/Fassbinder's magnum opus is a deeply flawed man, a pimp, a thief, a murderer yet childishly naive and sympathetic who wants to start a new honest life (not pimping or joining the gang of thieves) but keeps forgetting that "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Fassbinder also could have seen the similarities in the political situations in Germany of 1970 and 1930.I realize that 15 1/2 hours long "Berlin Alexanderplatz" can evoke very controversial emotions from the viewers but I believe it is impossible not to admit the brilliance and magnificence of the project and of the final product, which is without doubt a truly outstanding event in the history of the medium. Just to think that such enormous work had been finished in the course of 150 days, that Fassbinder took only three months to write the script, and how he'd envisioned the main players even before they could imagine they would participate in the project. It was incredibly interesting to watch the documentary about making BA. I found it symbolic that some parts of the film were shot using the earlier set decorations for Ingmar Bergman's "Serpent's Egg" which I like very much and don't agree that it was Bergman's mistake. I also see the influence Fellini might have had on Fassbinder - the scenes in the Red Light District could've came come from the Italian master's films who knew how to stage the "freak shows" and Barbara Sukowa's confession that she had looked at Fellini's "La Strada" to understand better the character of Mieze. Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, and especially Gottfried John (who I believed had given the greatest performance in the film as one of the most mysterious villains ever on screen) all contributed their memories of the time they worked with Fassbinder on Berlin Alexanderplatz. I might have not perhaps "gotten" the whole complexity of the film and the novel it is based on but I feel greatness when I encounter it. Of all amazing 15+ hours, the final part, "My dream from the dream of Franz Biberkopf von Alfred Doeblin: An Epilogue" stands out even for Fassbinder. Rarely have I been so mesmerized and fascinated by what an artist's imagination is capable of as during the two final hours of the incredible filmmaking. The epilogue made me think that if ever a film director had lived who could have adapted to screen successfully "Divine Comedy", "The Book of Revelation", "Ulysses", and Goethe's Faust (the whole poem, not just a Margaret's affair) it was Rainer Werner Fassbinder. We lost our chance when he was gone and we would never see the likes of him again. Not often, I feel sorry that the film is over and I miss it as soon as I finish watching - it happened after the final scene of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" was over.

Nothing can be more melodramatic than German melodrama, particularly that of the beginning of the 20th century. Franz Biberkopf's story is such a deep, thick and sickening melodrama and Fassbinder makes it so dense, so heavy that we are totally overwhelmed by this hardening cast-plaster, a melodrama contained between Biberkopf's release from the prison where he has spent four years for killing his girlfriend, Ida, to the end of his life as a concierge in some factory after the trial in which he is a witness against the accused, his friend Reinhold who had assassinated Franz's last girl friend Mieze, after he was released from the mental institution to which he had been committed after the crime. Biberkopf is the perfect victim who is ready to do anything he is asked to do by the people he considers his friends at the moment of the request. He is totally dependent on women and at the same time reveals he is very particular about them and actually loves only very few. Eva of course, his permanent love who lives with a rich Herbert and carries his child for a few months. Ida, who he killed out of rage one morning. And Wieze who will be killed by Reinhold. The second characteristic of Franz Biberkopf is that he has the brain of a beaver, as his name implies. He is not very swift but he is faithful and he can suffer anything from his friends, though at times he may be taken, over by a fit of rage that makes him blind and murderous, though he can easily be stopped. But to survive in Germany in 1928-29 he is doing what he can, anything he comes across: selling newspapers, including the Nazi newspaper, selling erotic literature, selling shoelaces, being part of a gang of thieves, and being a pimp. Then the whole story is nothing but details of a sad ,life that can only be sad. Fassbinder makes it so dense, so packed with hefty details and events that we don't see the thirteen episode flying by. And yet the masterpiece of this long series is the epiloque. Then Fassbinder describes what is happening in Biberkopf's mind after his seizure of insanity when he realizes his Mieze was killed by his supposedly best friend who had caused him to lose an arm when this Reinhold had tried to kill him, the infamous Reinhold. In this epilogue, Fassbinder becomes the most baroque, or even rococo, of all screen artists you can imagine. He brings Biberkopf down into the deranged world of his insanity. He is cruder than Bosh, crueler than Goya, and he depicts the physical dereliction to which Biberkopf is reduced in that mental institution, the haughty condescending carelessness of doctors and personnel, and the haunted mind of his. And in this haunted nightmare he experiences, Fassbinder shows how he is tortured by Reinhold and a few others who have used him in life, how he is tortured by both his lubricity and his refusal to acknowledge it, how he is physically tormented in all kinds of cruel physical punishments repeated ad eternam, a vision of hell borrowed from Dante of course. The point here is that Biberkopf will come out of the institution when he reaches some personal peace in that insanity, in no way the consciousness of his own victimization, but a dull taming of his inner world into a senseless, meaningless and emotionless routine that will transform him into a faithful and reliable concierge looking after cars, lost and abandoned forever in his blessed solitude of the body and the soul. This epilogue is luxuriant and so dense that we just wonder how it could go on like that, over and over again, each situation of victimization opening onto another as naturally as a door you push open and drop closed behind you. Sickening and thickening at the same time, so that you feel totally buried in that grossness and in that cruelty. You are becoming Biberkopf and at the same time the torturing insanity because Biberkopf appears to you as deserving his fate, his insanity, hence your scourges and your violence. It is amazing at this moment to see how Fassbinder manages to make you be a double voyeur and transport you both into Biberkopf himself who cannot rebel in spite of you inhabiting him with the justification to rebel, and thus into the torturing insanity to punish him for not rebelling or to incite him to rebel. The only film-maker Fassbinder can compete with in this perverse mediatic transfer is Clive Barker in his early films or in his Hellraiser series, except that Fassbinder adds an ancient Greek dimension to that delirium that is vital since it will lead Biberkopf to surviving in a mixture of the International, patriotic sings and emerging Nazi military rites, rituals and marching beating tempos.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

************ SPOILERS ************I don't know that this review will really contain any spoilers or not, because I don't really think there's much to spoil. The structure of the story is very episodic and repetitive and nothing much happens. Instead, a lot of figurative cud chewing is done on what little does concretely happen. In any event, I'm not going to hold back in this review, so I might conceivably spoil something.This story is about a guy named Franz. The story is: 1) he gets out of prison (for murdering his girlfriend in a stupid drunken rage), 2) he bums around on the street and gets drunk a lot, 3) he meets a guy named Reinhold, 4) he joins a gang of petty gangsters, 5) his best buddy Reinhold pushes him out of the back of a moving car and he loses his arm when another car runs over it, 6) he bums around and gets drunk some more, 7) he goes mad and hallucinates for a long time in a mental hospital. And there's a closing scene in a courtroom where Franz (supposedly recovered from his mental illness) gives testimony that gets his best buddy Reinhold off with a light sentence for killing one of Reinhold's girlfriends.This is the plot as near as I can make it out. I apologize if it's not completely accurate. Fatigue and disgust prevent me from viewing another minute of this interminable nausea-fest.Maybe I should say at this juncture that I've never really "gotten" any of Fassbinder's films. Perhaps I'm just too locked into a breeder mentality, I don't know. Also, there might be a lot of historical and cultural information encoded here that's specific to Germany between the wars that I can't appreciate.Anyway, the relationship between Franz and Reinhold is the key feature of the story, everything else revolves around it. Franz is kind of a happy, dim-witted Homer Simpson type guy. And Reinhold is kind of a twisted, compulsive, neurotic guy given to spasms of intense misogyny.So the whole thing, to me, was just one long, dreary, alcoholic, ugly, perverse circus of horrors. There was no particular plot, the characters were merely repellent, and not in the least engaging. And the dialog seemed fairly dull and pedestrian. Franz was prone to loud, expansive public orations, but they just seemed to be the rantings of a dim-witted drunkard.It's not clear what the film maker (or the novelist, Alfred Doblin) were trying to show here. That drunken petty criminals had a hard time on the streets of Berlin during the period between the wars? I have a feeling that what was being reached for was a lot more evident in the novel. But I'm not sure I'll take the time to investigate it, though.And the misogyny in this mini-series is just totally grotesque and sickening. One memorable sequence is when Reinhold is trying to rid himself of his latest girlfriend (that's one of his problems, you see, he compulsively goes after women, and then, as soon as he gets one, he immediately detests her), and he hurls verbal abuse at her out of the blue and starts beating her and telling her to leave. When he finally succeeds in driving her out, he's frothing at the mouth. And then he says to another friend who has witnessed his performance: "Franz would be so proud of me!" He says this because prior to this, Reinhold had convinced Franz to take his ex-girlfriends off his hands. This is a key element of the plot, Reinhold's girlfriend problems. Real believable, easily empathizable stuff, huh?And on a different note: I thought it was quaint, in a very jarring way, to have 60's and 70's pop music playing in the background on the soundtrack during some of the hallucination sequences. A couple of the songs I recognized where by the Velvet Underground, "Candy Says", for example. Since the story takes place in the late 1920's, I believe, this was very disorienting to me. Also, we are treated to Fassbinder himself leering at Franz, and into the camera, for a few minutes, standing beside the two angels (dressed like Roman legionnaires, for some reason) that are visiting Franz during one of his hallucinations.Here's another little tidbit. At the end of a number of scenes, random news items and medical health items are read in voice over. These tend to be very bland and cold and impersonal. How this reflects on the story, I'm not completely sure. Those were cold, hard times in Berlin to be suffering through during that era? Modernity does have its downsides, that's for sure.The general overall feel of this mini-series was like a combination of old Eliot Ness "Untouchables" TV shows combined with boring out-takes from David Lynch's "Blue Velvet".I wouldn't recommend this mini-series to anyone. The amount of time I spent studying it, I feel, was completely wasted.