World on a Wire

World on a Wire is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mind-bending sci-fi epic, a two-part, over three-hour examination of the nature of reality, thought and perception. Based on Daniel Galouye's sci-fi novel Simulacron 3, the film is concerned with the creation of simulated computer worlds, populated with synthetic, programmed beings unaware that they're living in a virtual reality rather than a tangible flesh-and-blood world. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) is appointed to become the technical director for this "simulacron" computer system after the project's previous administrator seemingly has a mental breakdown before dying in an accident. Almost immediately, however, Stiller is subjected to tremendous pressures and odd incidents relating to the computer and the company he's working for. There's some kind of industrial intrigue going on — the company's director, Siskins (Karl Heinz Vosgerau) wants to use the computer to benefit his corporate friends — and bizarre events make Stiller doubt his own sanity. A man (Ivan Desny) tries to tell Stiller about the strange circumstances of his predecessor's death, only to disappear into thin air — and soon enough, no one even remembers that this man ever existed. Stiller experiences other strange visions, and is beset by crippling headaches almost constantly, quickly developing a paranoid outlook that encompasses nearly every moment of his day and everyone he meets.

It's obvious enough where all of this is heading, even before Fassbinder explicitly states the twist in the final scene of the first part. Yet the film's careful study of the layers of reality remains engrossing, because Fassbinder's visual mastery is at its highest level here. There is little in the plot to justify the film's length, and the characters are, for the most part, doll-like ciphers prone to staring emptily into space, posing within Fassbinder's meticulously arranged compositions, caught in frames of mirrors, remaining static as the camera turns circles around them. Fassbinder underlines the film's central theme of perception by continually distorting and reflecting his images, emphasizing how what we see is dependent on the angle from which we're looking. In the film's opening scenes, Stiller's predecessor Vollmer (Adrian Hoven) accosts two government representatives, asking them to look at themselves in a handheld mirror and describe what they see. They are not really themselves, he says, they are just images, images imagined by other people. Even beyond the film's sci-fi premise, this idea resonates: each person is the culmination of images created and maintained in the minds of others, and what we see when we look in the mirror is not necessarily what others see when they look at us.


To this end, Fassbinder inventively packs his film with mirrors and distortions. In his melodramas, such devices are stylized routes into character, picked up from Sirk, a way of positioning characters in abstracted relationships to one another, capturing two reactions in the same frame. Here, the perpetual mirroring emphasizes how fragile vision is, how easily it is subjected to distortions. When Stiller goes to see Siskins one afternoon in the latter's office, Siskins has a tremendous glass funnel perched on top of his desk. The curved glass distorts Siskins' face, rendering him at times multi-eyed and blurry, almost insectile, his smirk stretched out so that it seems to stretch across his entire face. It's a subjective image of Stiller's boss, a collection of attributes rather than a coherent image of a face. In the reverse shot, when Fassbinder turns the camera onto Stiller instead, his face is reflected in the shiny surface of the desk, but chopped in half, only his eyes looking out hauntingly as though trapped within this reflective prison, his mouth and the lower half of his face cut off by the desk's edge. The boss is distorted and magnified, his all-seeing eyes multiplied, while the employee is made voiceless and trapped; the mirrors don't lie.

Unless, sometimes, they do. Later Siskins visits the computer lab — with its funhouse mirror walls and clusters of TV screens — to watch a computer doppelganger of himself perform a song-and-dance routine as programmed by Stiller. Fassbinder frames the image so that we see the the TV monitor, and Siskins' warped reflection next to it, and layered on top of this, Siskins' back as he watches the screen. It's a man and, essentially, two false doppelgangers of himself, one computer-created and one a blurred reflection of himself stretched out across the wavy surface of the wall. Still another form of mirroring exists in the scene where Stiller goes to visit his sick secretary Maya (Margrit Carstensen). She is lying down, looking at herself in a mirror to put on lipstick, but because the mirror is two-sided, the side facing the camera actually reflects the offscreen Stiller. One side of the mirror then presumably shows her, while he appears in the other, so that the mirror becomes a link between them, their reflections joined like the image of Janus, two sides of the same head. The mirror divides and distorts, it reveals the truth, it connects people and shatters the illusion of a smooth, tangible reality. When Vollmer dies at the beginning of the film, he is seen through a sheet of cracked glass, as though reality itself has been broken by his departure from it.


Fassbinder makes these examinations of sensation and perception the film's true focal point. The ostensible thriller plot is inert, and the corporate intrigue simply seems irrelevant, to the point that when Stiller finds out the answers to questions relating to the corporate politics, rather than the more metaphysical mysteries he's really interested in, he simply laughs. There is an analogue here for those religious and philosophical ideas that insist that the world is essentially an illusion, or at best a warm-up for the afterlife. If the world is not real, or is only a secondary stage of reality, if the "true" life is on a higher plane of reality, it renders the physicality and events of the world somewhat moot. Once Stiller begins to believe that his world is only an illusion that's secondary to another world, he ceases to care about any of the things had previously occupied his attention: job, friends, love, even life and death itself. Does the world become irrelevant in comparison to the idea of Heaven? This would explain Stiller's "ascent" at the finale of the film.

So Fassbinder makes the whole film one big visual metaphor, his camera moves mapping out Stiller's quest for truth. During a meeting with Siskins and a government official, Stiller wanders around the large space of the office, swinging around on a chair in the foreground, then flinging open a pair of unusual double doors, the kind usually seen between neighboring suites in hotels. Finally, he appears again at the rear of the space, visible only from a distance in a mirror. It's like he's constantly searching, always peeking behind the doors, into closed-off rooms. He does a lot of spinning around in chairs too, like a bored and restless kid, eager to discover something new, or simply a man who wants to see the fullest possible 360-degree view of his surroundings. In one of the film's most playful scenes, Siskins and Stiller conduct an entire conversation while they're both spinning around in their chairs, rendering office politics goofy and funny.

These oddball touches, like a dance club populated with muscular Arab models and topless dancers, give the film its distinctively surreal Fassbinderian aura. It's a weird and disjointed film, perhaps a little repetitive, padded out with multiple scenes of Stiller trying to explain his theories to skeptical listeners. But the characters, flat as they are, make an impact, because Fassbinder has developed such a versatile troupe of actors that even when most of them are just making token cameo appearances (Eddie Constantine as a dapper but sinister businessman; Kurt Raab as Stiller's bald, oafish office rival; El Hedi ben Salem as a quiet, sensitive bodyguard) they are vivid and memorable. This is a fascinating experiment from Fassbinder, transplanting his usual cast and his Sirkian aesthetic strategies into the unfamiliar genre of the sci-fi thriller, with very compelling results.

TOERIFC: The Merchant of Four Seasons

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Fox from Tractor Facts. Visit his site to see Fox's thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

The films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder often tread a fine line between stylized melodrama and blunt naturalism. His characters act in exaggerated ways, stumbling and falling in a weeping heap, pounding violently on tables, taking long, meditative walks. Their emotions exist right on the surface, overwhelming them like characters in a soap opera. And yet, within the bleak worlds that Fassbinder constructs such maudlin melodramatics are not unwarranted; his characters are not overreacting but rather doing the only thing possible in the face of a cruel, suffocating existence. The Merchant of Four Seasons is a typically relentless Fassbinder film in this respect, telling the story of the fruit vendor Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller), a man who takes as much as he possibly can from an unfair and unrewarding life before finally giving up. Hans is a pathetic man, a man who's made all the wrong decisions whenever he had a choice, and who at other times has had choices cruelly taken away from him. His domineering mother (Gusti Kreissl) refused to let him pursue his chosen career as a mechanic, viewing it as beneath her family's station, and she ignored Hans' distaste for the school she forced him to attend instead. In the film's opening scenes, Hans has returned after running away from school to join the Foreign Legion; instead of greeting him, his mother treats him with contempt, ending with the searing put-down, "once a no-good, always a no-good."

That pretty much sums up what's in store for Hans. Once back, he settles into a life as a fruit vendor with his wife Irmgard (Irm Hermann), though he's predictably miserable: the couple are constantly bickering, and Hans responds to these arguments by running away, going off to bars for drinks. Throughout the film, flashbacks fill in the details about Hans' life that had led him to this state. He had once been a policeman, but in a moment of weakness gave in to the seduction of a prostitute and was caught, thus losing his job. He had once loved another woman (Ingrid Caven), who throughout the film goes unnamed, referred to only as "the love of Hans' life." He had planned to marry her, but she rejected him, saying that her upper-class father would never accept her marrying a fruit vendor. Both through his own fault and through the simple combination of circumstances, Hans' life was a series of one disappointment after another, a series of compromises and settling for second best, never getting what he really wanted. He is an utter loser, a nothing, and he knows it and hurts from it.

Even when a heart attack after a bout of drinking and violence seems to give Hans a second chance, it all quickly falls apart again. Before the heart attack, Irmgard had been ready to leave him because of his violence, but afterward she decides to stay with him after all. Since he can't do the heavy work anymore, they decide to hire a worker and set up a stationary stand as well, and the new approach to the business makes them more successful than ever before. Hans briefly seems rejuvenated, but when he hires a man named Anzell (Karl Scheydt) to help with the business, his wife is horrified: she had slept with this man during a brief flirtation with becoming a prostitute. So she schemes to get him fired, and succeeds. Fassbinder stages the sequence where her treachery becomes clear to Anzell as a taut exchange of glances between the three protagonists, their eyes veiled, filled with understanding and restrained rage. It is a decisive moment, though Fassbinder never makes it clear just how much Hans actually understands about what has gone on here.


In any event, Hans' downward spiral resumes after this, only temporarily interrupted by a joyous reunion with his old Legion buddy Harry (Klaus Löwitsch), who takes over Anzell's job as fruit hawker. The film's final stretch is a funereal procession in which it's obvious that Hans is preparing for death, saying goodbye to a life he never enjoyed. He visits the people in his life one by one, reaffirming his disconnection from them, even from the love of his life, who no longer excites him, and from his affectionate sister Anna (Hanna Schygulla), the only person who ever stood up for him. When he goes to visit her, however, she's distracted by work, and Fassbinder accentuates how little attention she's paying to Hans' depression by placing her in the foreground, reading and writing, while her brother quietly mopes in the background, saying little, virtually ignored.

This is Hans' fate, to be ignored and mistreated, and Fassbinder never misses an opportunity to emphasize his protagonist's pathetic life with stylized touches. After a drunken, miserable Hans beats Irmgard one night — a harrowing, horrifying scene, with the couple's daughter struggling to protect her mother — Irmgard runs away to Hans' family. When he shows up, contrite and begging for her back, his family reacts with almost comical horror, freezing into gothic poses right out of a silent melodrama; they all but sweep their hands across their brows as their eyes pop out of their heads. Only Anna reacts with calm and patience, treating the situation with adult restraint and sympathy for everyone involved, comforting the couple's weeping daughter while everyone else projects their emotions in shrill upper registers. These people are so wrapped up in their own lives, their own emotions and worries, that they have no empathy for anyone else, and certainly not for poor, pathetic Hans.

Fassbinder contrasts these outsized, melodramatic emotions against the mostly quiet suffering of Hans. He has only one real outburst, and it's enough to completely destroy his heart; otherwise, his life is a slow, sad descent, with little struggle or attempt to change things. Like many of Fassbinder's protagonists, he seems to have accepted his fate, making the final scene, in which he commits suicide by drinking himself to death, inevitable. Fassbinder stages this sequence as a series of formalist closeups: as Hans raises a glass to each person in his life in turn, Fassbinder cuts away to direct, intimate closeups, as each person looks silently on, doing nothing as Hans destroys his life for good. This final scene is a metaphor for the entirety of Hans' self-destructive, unlucky life: no one cares, no one does anything to help him, and Fassbinder's constricting mise en scène forces the audience into a position of numbing complicity, as we also watch this man destroy himself. It's a typically tough, unflinching film from Fassbinder, an inquiry into the ways in which people place limits on their own lives and those of others.

Querelle

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film was the bizarre, abrasive and often unbearably silly Querelle, an unsettling final note in a brief but prolific career defined by the director's near-total disregard for conventions. An adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet, this is Fassbinder's most off-putting film, his most purposefully Brechtian in the distance it creates between the audience and the narrative. In fact, Fassbinder erects a nearly unbridgeable gap between the viewer and the material, a bottomless gulf into which all attempts at understanding or approaching this essentially unlikeable film must fall. The film's staging is exaggeratedly theatrical and campy, its action taking place on stagey sets with bright orange backgrounds and homoerotic architecture, in a port city whose walls are buttressed with phallic statuary. It is a gay dreamworld, a brightly colored fantasy in which women are almost entirely absent and muscular sailors, policemen and laborers stalk each other, seeking violence and sex in this city's streets and brothels. Fassbinder does everything he can to keep his audience at arm's length: the grotesque high camp of the mise en scène; the uninflected performances of the multilingual cast, excacerbated by rough, echoey dubbing; the awkwardness of the dialogue, with characters delivering stilted monologues on their inner states in weighty, tortured language. It's all contrived to create a thoroughly unpleasant, disturbing experience: despite the bright colors and ridiculous imagery, the tendency to dress up men in uniform like ersatz Village People, the movie is just no fun at all.

In keeping with this emphasis on Brechtian surfaces, the film's narrative is presented with a flat, affectless quality that levels off the various strands of the story, eliminating the drama and emotion otherwise inherent in it. Querelle (Brad Davis) is one of several sailors who arrives in a raucous port city when his ship put into the harbor. The real story of the film, beneath all its various threads and diversions and impenetrable scenes, is the initiation of Querelle into homosexual desire, first with the hulking brothel owner Nono (Günther Kaufmann), then with the macho, leather-clad cop Mario (Burkhard Driest), and finally with the first man who he feels genuine love and affection for, the workman Gil (Hanno Pöschl). Throughout it all, however, the subtext of Querelle's developing sexuality is his relationship with his brother Robert (also played, tellingly, by Pöschl), with whom he shares a fierce, violent rivalry and affection. When the two men greet each other at the beginning of the film, they embrace and begin simultaneously punching each other in the stomach, a gesture of love and hatred intertwined. Querelle's attraction to Gil thus stems from two sources. The first is the men's shared criminality, since both have committed murders: Gil killed a friend who would not stop taunting and ridiculing him for his homosexuality, while Querelle killed, for unexplained reasons, a fellow sailor. Querelle allows Gil to take on the responsibility for the latter crime as well, but he feels bound to the man because they have both shed blood. More obviously, however, they are bound together by brotherly affection: Querelle transforms Gil into Robert by pasting a mustache across his upper lip, a disguise that erases the only distinction between his brother and the man he loves.

This is, to say the least, some heavyhanded symbolism; Fassbinder is painting with very broad strokes here. This is undoubtedly his most naked and unfettered portrayal of gay desire, but it seems to be a vision borne more out of despair than love or satisfaction. It's a film, basically, about the impossibility of love, a film whose message could be summed up by the dirge-like pop tune sung by brothel mistress Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau, the film's sole female presence): "each man kills the thing he loves." This is a phrase that could easily provide a summation for much of Fassbinder's oeuvre, so often centering around the destructiveness and violence of love, the painfully unfulfilled needs that we all feel. There is usually in Fassbinder's films, even in those that deal explicitly with gay desire (Fox and His Friends, In a Year With 13 Moons, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant), a sense that the issues he's dealing with are universal, that gay desire and straight desire are united in the painful feelings and complicated betrayals they involve. Fassbinder's characters suffer and yearn and struggle not because they are gay or straight, but because they're human, dealing with the emotional torment that Fassbinder saw as fundamental to existence.


Querelle, to some extent, is the only Fassbinder film that is entirely gay, where straight desire and straight experience can find no foothold, no ground for comparison. Even a great actress like Jeanne Moreau seems wasted, her role as a woman to be ignored and cast aside, a pawn for the men. And yet the gay imagery that Fassbinder chooses to employ here is caricatured, almost stereotyped, all leather and homoerotic sailor boys going around everywhere barechested, bathed in the glistening, pastel lights that Fassbinder strobes across them. The campy stylization results in some stunning and potent images — the choreographed, balletic knife fights that look like something out of a surrealistic West Side Story; the intensity of the sex scene between Nono and Querelle, filmed in sweaty closeups — but the overall effect is incoherent. It's all unavoidably silly and campy in the worst way, continually distracting from whatever Fassbinder's trying to say with this film.

It's obvious that this is a deeply personal film for the director, coping with great loss at the end of his life, but it is impenetrable to the viewer: Querelle presents an inward-looking dreamworld whose meaning and mystery are hidden behind an opaque, glittering surface. The film is never less than beautiful to look at. Fassbinder's mastery of color was intact, and the film is awash in candy-colored lights that create complex areas of interlocking color within each frame. Visually, the film is most reminiscent of the director's sublime Lola, made just a year earlier, or to the nightmarish two-hour epilogue of his epic TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz.

But whereas in Fassbinder's earlier films his mannered stylistic touches often concretized the emotional subtexts of his characters and stories, expressing in light and color the inner essence of his tragic heroes, the style in Querelle seems to be expressing only itself. Of the actors, only Davis expresses anything beyond a deadpan blankness, letting brief flashes of personality escape in the hint of a mischievous grin. Everyone else seems deadened, barely even awake, and their zombified stares and sleepwalking mannerisms make the film's glossy surface seem like so much superficial flash, signifying nothing deeper. Fassbinder is continually subverting any possibility of emotional engagement, peppering the film with intertitles quoting from various sources, commenting obliquely on the story. Moreover, the voiceover, which recites from Genet's source novel, is — at least in the English version — so disinterested and stilted that the narrator hardly seems to realize what he's even saying.

As Fassbinder's final work before his death, Querelle is an interesting dilemma for admirers of the great director: a seemingly impenetrable film that Fassbinder apparently intended to be his final statement to the world. It is, of course, appropriate that Fassbinder last communique should be such a confounding, destabilizing work, one that challenges even the modes of expression established by his most difficult previous films. Fassbinder's final film is one of his least characteristic, and possibly his least successful as well. It's a flawed, messy, but nevertheless sporadically intriguing work, a glossy gay fantasia that Fassbinder offered up as the final image torn from the depths of his tortured mind.

Films I Love #20: In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

Nearly all of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's many films revolve around the human need for love, affection, respect, and acceptance, but perhaps none of his films treat this subject with the intense focus of In a Year With 13 Moons. It is arguably one of Fassbinder's most personal films, a direct response to the suicide of his lover Armin Meier, and Fassbinder not only wrote and directed it but handled the cinematography on one of his own films for the first time (the only other film he shot himself was The Third Generation). The result is one of the director's most visually sumptuous films, as well as his most harrowing melodrama, rigidly structured as a series of set pieces in which the transsexual Erwin/Elvira (Volker Spengler) tries to make sense of his/her shattered life. Erwin is the archetypal Fassbinder hero(ine), so desperate for love and attention that when his straight friend Anton (Gottfried John) offhandedly jokes that they could get together if only Erwin was a woman, the naïve Erwin takes him at his word. He goes to Casablanca for an illicit operation and comes back as Elvira, but Anton doesn't know what to make of his friend's literal-mindedness, and rejects him. The film is set many years later, as Elvira attempts to recover from yet another horrible break-up. She is floundering, often uncertain about her sexual identity; Erwin didn't want to be a woman so much as he just wanted to be with Anton, but now he's trapped between genders.

The film is structured as a spiritual journey or epic quest, with Elvira engaging in emotionally and psychologically fraught encounters with both strangers and figures from her own life: her prostitute friend Zora (Ingrid Caven), her wife (Elisabeth Trissenaar) and daughter (Eva Mattes), the nun who raised her as a foster child (Fassbinder's own mother Lilo Pempeit), and of course Anton himself. In one of the film's most bizarre scenes, the mysterious Anton is revealed as a reclusive real estate developer who enacts strange musical numbers with his troop of bodyguards: it's an unsettling mixture of fascist goose-stepping with gay pageantry, with Anton portrayed as martinet whose economic power has gone to his head. If Elvira is Fassbinder's archetypal victim, Anton is the corresponding oppressor and user, an upper-class economic leech who screws over his employees and those who get in his way just as casually and thoughtlessly as he emotionally screwed over Elvira.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Epilogue)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

The final stretch of Fassbinder's 15-hour epic Berlin Alexanderplatz is comprised of a two-hour epilogue, which Fassbinder has appropriately titled, "Rainer Werner Fassbinder: My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin." The epilogue is a radical aesthetic break with the preceding 13 hours, a fragmentary collage of dreamlike incidents, imaginings, and visions that reflect the devastated mental landscape of Franz, following Reinhold's murder of Mieze. The film occasionally emerges into the reality of Franz's life at the time — he's collapsed, virtually comatose, in a mental institute — but the majority of the episode takes place wholly in the scarred surfaces of Franz's mind. Or actually, as the self-referential title of the epilogue reminds us, in Franz's mind as imagined and commented upon by Fassbinder, who himself appears in one scene as a silent witness, his eyes covered in dark glasses, smoking a cigarette, mutely documenting Franz's dreams and hidden obsessions. The epilogue is as much Fassbinder's fantasy as Franz's, a record of the ideas and obsessions that so moved him in Döblin's original novel, which apparently affected him a great deal.

Because of the dreamlike nature of this epilogue, it brings to the surface many of the ideas and images that had remained mainly subtexts in the film proper — allowing parts of Franz that he wouldn't even be aware of to run rampant. In particular, this segment of the film is rich in Christian iconography, gay culture (particularly S&M), and Nazi symbols and imagery. Fassbinder delves much deeper into the gay identities of Reinhold and Franz, especially in a touchingly awkward scene between Reinhold and another male prisoner, which clearly references Jean Genet's iconic prison sex film Un chant d'amour. In prison, Reinhold comes to understand his lifelong love/hate relationships with women as the result of his conflicted and suppressed true sexuality — an epiphany arrived at too late for anyone concerned. As for Franz, what he could barely articulate or understand in life, he unleashes in his mind in a barrage of homoerotic imagery, often masochistic, like the sequences of Reinhold whipping him, or a sparring match with his rival that ends with a kiss rather than a punch.

Franz's confused ramble through the dreamlike pastiche of his mind brings him into contact, sooner or later, with virtually every cast member who's appeared throughout the series. The major figures in Franz's life are of course all there — Reinhold, Mieze, Eva, Meck, Ida, all of Franz's various girlfriends — but his dreamscape is also populated with a string of minor figures too, characters who appeared in only one or two episodes earlier in the series, sometimes only briefly, who recur here, recast by the workings of Franz's clouded mind. These characters wander through a world strewn with trash and wreckage, and many of them present themselves to Franz as suicides, suggesting that he's in some kind of purgatorial limbo for lost souls — both the gangster boss Pums and Franz's discarded girlfriend Fränze tell him that they've committed suicide. Franz is accompanied through these wanderings by a pair of "angels" dressed in gold armor, who later watch Franz's sufferings, standing by the side of Fassbinder.

The scene they're watching is one of the most richly suggestive in the epilogue, a slaughterhouse sequence that suggests a multitude of different meanings. Franz is laying on top of a pile of naked bodies, as Reinhold and the other members of the gang, armed with axes and hatchets and dressed as butchers, chop at these limp bodies and flay them like animals. This is on one level a literal visualization of a metaphor that Fassbinder employed throughout the film, in comparing the oft-clueless Franz to an animal being led to slaughter by the societal forces around him. In this scene, he is literally strung up, hacked at, his body treated like a piece of meat. It's a scene that also recalls, somewhat inevitably, the Nazi death camps, with the heap of naked bodies and the subhuman conditions surrounding this wholesale murder and butchery. And yet, in a later scene, Franz happens across the same pile of bodies again, only this time they seem to be engaged in a kind of lackluster orgy, which Franz shrugs and joins in on. The subtle shift in meaning across the two scenes, which share similar images, suggests the mutable frontier between sex and violence, pleasure and punishment.

This extended epilogue also represents a change in musical strategies for Fassbinder, as well as visual and narrative ones. Previous episodes were almost exclusively scored by the expressive music of Fassbinder's usual musical collaborator, Peer Raben, with his repetitive patterns and haunting tension between melody and disharmony. In this episode, though, Fassbinder abandons a traditional score, instead stitching together the soundtrack from songs by Kraftwerk, the Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, and fragments of opera and classical music. He repeats these songs and segments of songs at rhythmic intervals, returning to the same musical and lyrical ideas (Joplin's assertion that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," Kraftwerk's apocalyptic musings on radioactivity) over and over again. In one particularly powerful scene, Franz appears to Reinhold wearing heavy makeup, looking somewhere between a cross-dresser and a clown, while the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says," an ode to Warhol Factory transvestite Candy Darling, murmurs in the background. These musical undercurrents further divide this two-hour coda from the rest of the film, emphasizing Fassbinder's drastically different aesthetic decisions in this section.

Not that all of these decisions work. The epilogue, unhinged from the solid ground of the narrative, sometimes drags and falters in ways that none of the earlier episodes ever did — a few scenes drag on too long with little change, or worse yet with dialogue that seems like mere space-filling, the kind of near-nonsense that is meant to convey a mind out of control. There's also a sense that Fassbinder doesn't push hard enough at the visual possibilities available to him, that he allows too much of the epilogue to inhabit the same brown-and-black visual terrain as the more grounded main narrative. The occasional diversions are all the more powerful for the contrast, though, like the bone-chilling slaughterhouse scenes with their splashes of brilliant red, or the climactic scene where Franz is crucified with an A-bomb exploding behind him, a moment of rebirth for the film's hero. Even so, the visual grandeur of these scenes is missed elsewhere in the epilogue, as too many of the interior scenes seem like more aimless extensions of their narrative counterparts.

These are minor complaints, though, in the context of a two-hour distillation of the film's overarching ideas, as well as a critical extension of some of its subtler subtexts into fully-developed themes. This is a fitting end to Fassbinder's epic achievement, a coda that draws together everything in the preceding work. The epilogue works on both a literal level, as a record of Franz's dreams and hallucinations while he's in the mental institute, and on a secondary level as Fassbinder's own reaction to the novel, a jumbled but evocative expression of the novel's effect on his life. It is, in some ways, an act of literary criticism, drawing out the novel's underlying themes and ideas as Fassbinder sees them. This is probably the first point in the film when Fassbinder takes on a psychological perspective, attempting an analysis of Franz rather than simply an observation — he even inserts a lengthy argument between two doctors at the mental hospital, about whether medicine should venture into the psychological dimensions opened by Freud or not. Fassbinder's sympathies are clearly with the Freudian doctor, who advocates for an understanding of the way the mind can make us sick. This emphasis on the mind, coupled with an understanding of society's influence on mental processes, is a key component in Fassbinder's work, brought to its fruition here.

The epilogue concludes a work of staggering ambition, a crowning achievement in Fassbinder's brilliant and prolific career. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a drastically extended character study, with Fassbinder taking full advantage of the large canvas available to him to delve deeper than ever before into his recurring fascination with the way societal factors shape and alter the individual. In Franz's case, this shaping is often literal, physical, as well as mental, and it encompasses political, social, and sexual dimensions. Franz Biberkopf is the ultimate Fassbinder hero, a tragic figure who suffers greatly for not fitting comfortably into the societal roles allotted to him, and who dies and is reborn only when he realizes his own role in accepting the oppressing structures around him. It's an overwhelming film, impossible to summarize here, sweeping in its scope. I readily accept that even the lengthy comments I've recorded here thus far only scratch the surface of this infinitely rich film.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (parts XII-XIII)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

Now that Berlin Alexanderplatz is finally wearing down to a close — after tonight's two episodes, I only have the infamously strange two-hour epilogue left — I'm almost sad it's over. I've been so immersed in Franz Biberkopf and his troubled life for the past week that I can hardly believe the end is in sight. It's been an exhausting but edifying experience, and I'm glad I watched it all in such a short time period. In fact, I think whenever I revisit this film someday, I'd like to condense my viewing even more. What Fassbinder has achieved is a work that essentially combines the best aspects of both television (its original medium) and film (for which he reportedly intended it despite the TV commission). From TV, Fassbinder took the measured episode-by-episode pacing, which allows him to not only cram the film with incident and narrative detail — thinking back to the first episode, it's hard to believe just how much happened to poor Franz since then — but also to move organically through a number of stylistic and tonal shifts. Even so, the film as a whole doesn't really play out episodically, but feels like a continuous flow from one moment to the next, so much so that the boundaries between different episodes often blend together. Even the way the opening titles fade into the first image of each episode, which is often the very same image as the last one from the previous episode, heightens the sensation of continuity within the film as a whole. The miniseries flows like a single film, even as its great length and episodic divisions allow Fassbinder to stretch out and do things with his storytelling that he couldn't have achieved in any of his shorter theatrical films.

The twelfth episode begins languidly, quietly, with Franz and Mieze hanging around their apartment, having made up after Franz's explosion in the last episode. This kind of gentle domestic scene has recurred periodically throughout the film, with the couple playfully sparring, hugging and kissing, and generally enjoying the camaraderie of lovers. There is nothing here to indicate that this episode will provide a cataclysmic climax to the film, and to Franz Biberkopf's life. The climax comes about as a result of Mieze's introduction into the previously separate milieu of Franz's criminal associates at Maxie's bar. Franz had purposefully kept Mieze apart from his friends, and especially Reinhold, out of a sense that Mieze's essential innocence and goodness should in some way be isolated from the crudity of his criminal acquaintances. It was, certainly, a good instinct. When he brings her to the bar in order to introduce her to his friends, her appearance only inflames Reinhold's raging and complicated feelings about Franz — a combination of jealousy, desire, and a complete lack of understanding about what makes his "friend" tick. The nervous, stammering, sickly Reinhold seems to be continually set on edge by Franz's self-assured, robust manner and acceptance of whatever life throws him.

It's unclear whether Reinhold envies Franz for having the seemingly unshakable love of Mieze, or whether he's jealous of her for having Franz. In any event, his jealousy drives him to trick Mieze away from Franz, blackmailing Meck to get him to lure her away into the country. What follows is a lengthy back and forth between Mieze and Reinhold, shifting fluidly between threats, flirtation, and manipulation. Throughout their conversation, Mieze is trying to pump Reinhold for information about Franz's past, while Reinhold attempts to seduce the girl, with sometimes successful results. Mieze is sending out decidedly mixed signals here, sometimes acting as though Reinhold is trying to rape her, and pulling violently away from him, but at other points literally throwing herself at him, expressing her love for him. Mieze is a strange, impenetrable character, clearly capable of spreading her love far and wide, but nevertheless possessing her own variety of loyalty to her one true man, Franz. Throughout this scene, the one thing Reinhold can't seem to make her do is denounce Franz — he could have her, for a day or perhaps even for a continuing affair, but he could never make her abandon her Franz.

As this becomes clear, it infuriates him all the more, and his attentions to her become increasingly violent and suffocating, until he finally flings her to the ground and falls on her, choking her and then leaving her limp body behind in the woods as he walks away into a thick fog. Reinhold's jealousy and complex, suppressed feelings about Franz have led to an unthinkable, shocking climax — shocking not so much because Mieze was murdered, but because Franz wasn't the one to do it. Fassbinder obliquely drives home the Reinhold/Franz distinction by filming Mieze's murder from such a distance that the two figures are lost in the composition, dwarfed by the woods all around them. It's an image of isolation very different from the murder of Ida that has recurred throughout the film, which Fassbinder filmed from a much closer vantage point, the camera weaving around the scene to capture the murder's brutality. By the end of the film, Reinhold's cold, strangled emotions have replaced Franz's white-hot ardor and quick temper, and the second murder is not so much a crime of passion as the clinical dispatch of a troublesome distraction.

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With this brutal but distanced climax, the film has essentially come full circle — Franz Biberkopf's tale began with one murder, and it more or less ends with another. There is still, of course, the epilogue, but the thirteenth and final episode already functions as an epilogue of sorts, a quiet and pensive denouement in the aftermath of Mieze's death. Curiously, Fassbinder actually diverts the narrative attention away from Mieze's absence for the vast majority of this episode, instead concentrating on Franz and his continued associations with the Pums gang. The episode opens with a devastating shot of Franz, made up in Mieze's lipstick and dressed in her clothes, as though he's trying to become her. Contrary to the initial impression, though, Franz has not learned of Mieze's death, and he is distressed because he believes she's walked out on him.

Although this scene is undeniably moving in its over-the-top melodrama, it also seems like a very self-conscious gesture from Fassbinder, an example of the ways in which he plays with episodic structuring and audience expectations in this film. Franz's behavior here is exactly the kind of maudlin reaction that one would expect following the ending of the last episode, and Fassbinder seems to be briefly holding out the possibility that the series' final proper episode will be an extended wake of sorts for Mieze. The image of Franz in makeup works on at least two other levels though, in terms of the theme of suppressed homosexuality that was hinted at over the last few episodes, and in the idea of Biberkopf as a sad clown, parading his misfortunes for the amusement of others. Moreover, Fassbinder doesn't allow Franz's depression to last too long, and to the extent that this final episode serves as a valedictory for Mieze, it does so in terms of absence, structuring the narrative around the hole where she might have been.

Franz soon pulls himself together, at least enough to go see Pums and Reinhold, and he becomes involved in the gang's latest robbery. Fassbinder dedicates an extraordinary amount of time to a lengthy argument in which the gang members are disputing with Pums over their next job. Several of the men, including Reinhold and Meck, have come up with a plan to rob a safe that's loaded with cash, for one of their biggest robberies yet, and they are trying to convince Pums to go along with this plan. Franz stands off to the side, mostly uncomprehending, and Fassbinder films this scene with his familiar style of fluid camera moves following the weaving patterns of the characters as they cross paths around the room, a choreography of conversation. Throughout this scene, which seemingly has nothing to do with anything that's taken place in the film before, the memory of Mieze's tragic death nevertheless hangs over everything, as it does throughout this episode. Fassbinder seems to intuitively realize that her character has had enough of an impact that he doesn't have to belabor her disappearance — that final shot of her body lying in the woods lingers on unbidden, as does this episode's comic, melancholy image of Franz mourning her absence by donning her wardrobe. Thus, though the bulk of the episode concerns the debate over the robbery and then the (botched) robbery itself, the unspoken subtext of Mieze's death is always present.

The episode, and the series proper, ends with a final scene back at Franz's apartment, when he learns about what really happened to Mieze through a newspaper article, while a distraught Eva and Frau Bast look on. Meck had betrayed Reinhold to the police, revealing that Reinhold had killed her and then buried the body in the woods. Nevertheless, the ending scene suggests that Franz is going to be blamed anyway, and Fassbinder inserts another brief replay from Ida's murder to finally close the circle. The film's last episode ends with Franz facing the violent death of his lover for the second time, and now only the epilogue awaits.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (parts IX-XI)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

Tonight's viewing of three more episodes from Berlin Alexanderplatz brings me ever closer to the end of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's grand masterpiece, and the work is starting to take shape as a whole by this point, with "just" four hours left to go. The ninth episode concludes the conversation that Franz and Eva were in the middle of at the end of the previous episode, where Franz learns about Mieze's work as a prostitute. Franz, recovering from his initial anger, goes to Mieze and forgives her, and then he surprisingly goes to see Reinhold, who he hasn't seen since the "accident" in which Reinhold played such a decisive role.

His old friend is initially fearful, but as he realizes that Franz is not there to kill or blackmail him, he reverts into his sneering, hateful posturing. He even expresses his disgust at cripples, and asks to see Franz's injury. Reinhold says that cripples, useless to society as they are, should simply be killed, and Franz sadly agrees. The undercurrent here is an ugly popular reflection of Nazi ideology, with its casual anti-humanism and relegation of certain groups to sub-human status — Hitler was nearly as adamant about eliminating the handicapped as he was about the Jews. Reinhold's easy dismissal of the worth of an entire subset of society is the kind of mentality that allowed the Nazis to rise to power so easily just a few years later.

The killing of Ida is replayed twice more in this episode, each time accompanied by a different voiceover, so that the two iterations of the scene wind up playing out in very different ways. This memory has a pivotal importance in Franz's life. It is both where he came from and where he could yet return to, and it is also the catalyst for everything that happened subsequently in his life, from his prison stint to his vow to go straight to the tragic consequences of this vow that then led him right back to a life of crime. This scene thus means many things to Franz, beyond the shocking violence he commits, which serves to remind the audience that the man they're watching, who is often so sympathetic and emotionally complex, is also capable of truly terrible acts. By repeating the scene so many times, though, Fassbinder allows it to acquire a totemic power beyond the shock value of its brutality, so that the audience might explore the scene's multiple meanings in the way Franz does.

In this episode, the first time it's shown, the murder is accompanied by narrated news updates about political figures, an airplane making a transcontinental flight, and royal romances. This places the murder footage in a purely documentary mode, as another incident worthy to be reported, along with any number of other inanities about daily life in Germany. The film, like Döblin's novel, is concerned with the way that the specificity of Franz's life and milieu fits into the broader picture of the city he lives in, and the country it's situated in. Fassbinder doesn't make any cliché "the personal is political" statement, but he nevertheless situates his protagonist in a broader political context, always through oblique suggestion and multilayered commentary of this sort. The second iteration of Ida's murder scene in this episode makes this even more clear. It's overlaid with an imagined biblical dialogue between Abraham and Isaac, with father and son debating the merits of the proposed sacrifice. Of course, they decide to go through with it, all the while believing that God will step in and call it off, which He does at the last minute, rejoicing because they were obedient. As with the earlier conversation with Reinhold, the Abraham story obliquely suggests fascist anti-humanism, equating Isaac with a ram to be slaughtered, sacrificed for a greater cause. Sacrifice is a recurring theme in Berlin Alexanderplatz, and especially the idea that in capitalism the lower classes sacrifice themselves for the sake of the upper. In this sense, the God of the Abraham story becomes the State, asking for (and receiving) total obedience from its subjects.

In the second half of the episode, this political exploration carries over from the subtext into the narrative when Franz and Willy go to a socialist meeting. The speakers there advocate for much stronger, more decisive action to end oppression than the socialists in the government have achieved. But Franz is hardly interested, and in the midst of the meeting, he daydreams about Mieze. Fassbinder cuts away from the meeting, in a bombed-out room, to a wonderfully dirty closeup shot of Mieze, her tongue licking Franz's hand, her mouth sucking suggestively on his fingers. It's an evocative, nearly obscene moment, like peeking in on some unbearably private fantasy — no one was ever better than Fassbinder at evoking the dirty, sensual awkwardness of desire and fantasy.

Afterwards, Franz argues strenuously against socialism with one of the meeting's attendees, an old worker who is in favor of general strikes and socialist organizations to achieve proletarian solidarity. But then Franz and Willy go to see Eva and Herbert, and Franz argues strongly, albeit with sometimes hesitant language, for socialism, decrying the way the ruling classes use the poor to increase profits, and arguing that the earth and all its lands should be owned by no one. How strange it is, he says at the end of the episode, that one can think about and advocate for contrary positions on the same issue. Franz is the ultimate dumb prole, unable to decide for himself or relate abstractions to reality in any meaningful way — he winds up spitting back nearly undigested fragments of things he's heard, while the capacity to put it all together remains beyond his reach. This is Fassbinder's typically bleak idea of the prospect for real political change, a reminder that the vast majority of people at any time are like Franz, preferring the immediacy of their own lives to the abstractions of large-scale politics, and not really understanding even when they do decide to pay attention.

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One strange thing I'm noticing while watching Berlin Alexanderplatz is that Fassbinder was not especially rigorous or consistent in relating Franz's story with the larger context of Weimar Germany. Certain episodes (like the previous one) really lend themselves to rich subtextual analysis, drawing in a wealth of references to political and social realities outside of Franz's immediate story. Other episodes, however, seem rooted much more in the details of Franz's life and character, indulging in Fassbinder's taste for melodrama and rarely engaging in the kinds of distancing techniques and self-conscious literary adaptation that peppers the more formally radical episodes. Part of the benefit of the film's great length is that these stylistic, aesthetic, and thematic shifts work within the context of the whole. The film encompasses the entirety of Franz's life, both his most private dramas, and those moments where his story touches or comments upon the world around him. Episode ten is more of a narrative episode, largely abandoning the political exploration of the previous episode, settling back into the domestic melodrama of Franz's relationship with Mieze.

The episode begins with a conversation between Mieze and Eva, the two most important women in Franz's life. Mieze's character is slowly being defined as someone with an almost overly generous heart, willing to let in whatever love and sentiment is offered to her. Thus, Eva's offhand comment that she'd have a baby with, for example, Franz, is taken entirely seriously by Mieze, who insists that Eva follow through on it. This scene is played out with definite lesbian overtones, as Eva attempts to rebuff what appear to be advances from Mieze, who nevertheless insists that she's not a lesbian. In fact, it seems she's omnivorous when it comes to love, and even willing to accept another's love for Franz. Franz, meanwhile, degenerates further and further into drunkenness, his life cycling back around so that it begins to resemble his time with Ida more and more.

There are two especially crucial scenes in this regard. The first is a fight with Mieze over her prostitution that constantly threatens to escalate into violence, though eventually Mieze is able to defuse Franz's fury. This provides a glimpse of the angry, potentially brutal Franz who beat his girlfriend to death in an uncontrollable fit of rage. Fassbinder pointedly doesn't cut away to the earlier murder scene at this point, although the repeated retreading of that sequence during moments of stress over the course of the last few episodes certainly primed the audience to expect it. It doesn't come, though, and the action remains solidly in the present tense, providing no escape from the tension of the situation.

In the second important scene, Mieze and Franz get drunk together, in an epic drinking bout that goes from silliness to unfettered sexuality, the two of them rolling around on the floor, pawing each other, screaming and laughing. The couple crosses back and forth between lust and violence, emphasizing the thin line between the two in terms of physicality. Fassbinder documents it all from a stoic distance, letting the camera sway and circle around them, but keeping their frolicking always at arm's length. The scene's tone completely changes when Mieze's regular client shows up, asking Mieze to come away with him for a few days. This is, of course, catastrophic for Franz, who weeps as Mieze leaves with her client. It's obvious that Franz's descent into his past is spiraling dangerously close to the well of violence and rage that caused him to kill Ida so many years before. His drinking is intensifying, he's turning back to crime, and he's in a relationship with a girl who inspires complex and contradictory emotions in him: jealousy, impotence, adoration, desire. Franz is at a low point in his life, and it doesn't look like it's likely to improve anytime soon.

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Indeed, the eleventh episode chronicles the complete breakdown of everything Franz had been doing to hold himself together since his release from prison — he returns entirely to the unfettered state he was in when he killed Ida. This episode also marks Franz's real reunion with Reinhold, the reinstatement of their friendship, and Franz's renewed association with the Pums gang, this time genuinely helping them out on their crimes. It's at this point that Franz's relationship with Reinhold becomes increasingly ambiguous and tangled, verging on masochistic — after all, Franz is insinuating himself with a man who tried to kill him and wound up horribly maiming him instead. He brings Reinhold to his apartment, planning to introduce his friend to Mieze, but hiding Reinhold under the covers on the bed first, so that he can watch from hiding for a while before revealing himself. The real intent of this maneuver is never apparent, though Franz tells Mieze that he wanted the notorious womanizer Reinhold to witness the way a "decent woman" behaves. Regardless, the coded homosexuality of the scene is glaringly obvious, despite the fact that there has been no previous reference to this kind of relationship between Franz and Reinhold, other than an intertitle which referred to Reinhold and Mieze as the two people who Franz loved.

In fact, throughout this episode, Fassbinder inserts some curious coded references to homosexuality, which in some ways is puzzling from an openly gay director who, when he wanted to include homosexual relationships in his other films, simply did so outright. The suppressed nature of the gay undertones in this case may be an outgrowth of the source material, or a reflection of the conservative social climate in which the story is set, or a comment on the likelihood that neither man really understands the nature of the friendship they feel for each other. The film's gay subtext is coded in much the same way as it often was in so many classical Hollywood films, with subtle references and knowing gestures or words that could be understood as gay by those inclined to read the film in that way. The gay subtext here seems especially obvious, though, and Fassbinder even provides a knowing wink in this direction when he has Eva ask, "Why would he hide a man in the bed?" It's a pointed question with a rather obvious answer, one that neither woman supplies in response.

There are other unsubtle indicators here, suggestions of a gay reading for the relationship between Franz and Reinhold, not least of which is the guilty glance that Reinhold casts around the bar before he walks into the bathroom, following Franz. Moreover, Reinhold tells Mieze that he and Franz once shared "strange things" together, suggesting that there was a lot between the two men that she didn't know about. He is of course referring to the exchange of girlfriends that he talked Franz into, but the vagueness of his wording inevitably conjures up other associations as well. Fassbinder's sudden establishment of a previously unexplored gay subtext for Frank Biberkopf is rather surprising, though it also makes a surprising amount of sense in the context of his ambivalent relationship with Reinhold.

In addition to this newly flowing undercurrent, the episode comes to a head with Franz's complete meltdown at Mieze, while Reinhold watches from hiding. He completely snaps, erupting into frightening physical violence that recalls the murder of Ida in every respect, right down to the room it occurs in, the staging of the sequence, the way the girl's body falls, and the presence of the landlady Frau Bast as a horrified onlooker. Franz stops short of killing Mieze, mainly because Reinhold intervenes to stop him, but in every other way the two scenes mirror each other, and Fassbinder's constant hammering home of the details of the earlier scene through repetition ensures that the similarities are readily apparent. It's a startling and harrowing scene, made even more so by the moment when Mieze, during a break in the violence, spends nearly a full minute standing in the middle of the apartment and shrieking at the top of her lungs, her voice finally cracking and going ever higher the longer she screams. It's an utterly disarming scene, totally erasing any sense of distance that Fassbinder had previously upheld in the film's scenes of violence or physicality. The raw emotional quality of Mieze's screams signals an intense vulnerability and unfettered humanity — this is not a newspaper account of violence, or violence as a metaphor for class oppression, or the mass violence of war. This is violence at an individual human level, pure suffering, and Fassbinder's frayed-nerves presentation of this scene is the very opposite of dehumanizing fascism.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (parts V-VIII)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

At the beginning of episode five of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf has returned to the familiar pattern of his life before Otto's betrayal and Franz's sudden departure. He's back in his old haunts, hanging around the local bar drinking with Meck, even taking up residence at the old apartment he rents from Frau Bast — where, upon his return, he finds Eva waiting for him. This is an especially active and pivotal episode, in terms of the narrative, as it introduces the crucial new character of Reinhold (Gottfried John) and sets Franz on yet another new path. It appears that Franz's latest experiences had not, after all, cured him of his endemic trustfulness and naiveté. He instantly befriends the slimy, sickly-looking Reinhold, who is employed in some way by the equally shady "boss" Pums (Ivan Desny), a local gangster who says he's in the fruit business.

Franz continues to resist becoming involved in the obvious crimes his new friends are committing, but he does agree to help Reinhold out with the latter's "problem" with women. Reinhold gets sick of his girlfriends after less than a month, and he enlists Franz to take them off his hands once he's finished with them, so that he can move on to someone new. Franz does this first with the plump, homely Fränze (Helen Vita), who is Franz's female counterpart not only in name, but in temperament and appearance, a kindly and pliant woman with a surprising sexual appetite. Franz likes her well enough, but still passes her off to his friend the newspaper vendor when Reinhold decides to get rid of his latest girlfriend, Cilly (Annemarie Düringer). Cilly is a lively, energetic redhead, and Franz instantly takes to her as well. There's a wonderful scene, towards the end of the episode, where Franz comes home to find her dancing to an uptempo 20s jazz record, and he spontaneously joins her, tapping his feet with a big, infectious grin on his face. It's hard to watch without grinning along with him.

Such moments of warmth and humor are sprinkled throughout Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Cilly especially brings a sense of vitality and verve into Franz's brown-hued life. Franz seems to attract a never-ending succession of women with his slanted grin and oddly compelling charm. In this episode, he simply goes with the flow, sleeping with Eva for old time's sake when he finds her at his apartment, letting Fränze drift in and out of his life, and finally settling in with Cilly. Franz is truly adrift by this point, back in his familiar territory, and settling into familiar habits of boozing it up and creating a domestic space with his latest woman.

This is a low-key episode overall, setting things up for the greater tension and conflict that is soon to develop surrounding the character of Reinhold and his interactions with Franz. This episode does drive home to me the extent to which length dictates the form of a film. This episode, starting over four hours into the film as a whole, begins at a point where most ordinary films would probably come in — the ex-convict with a troubled past becomes involved with the machinations of some petty gangsters. This film has a more expansive way of handling narrative, allowing new stories to arise organically from the fabric of the main character's life, rather than dictating the particular moments of interest. The sprawling length and attention to detail in this film allows viewers to determine for themselves what is important in Franz's life, whether it's the day-by-day development of his relationships with women, or the friendships and betrayals that shake his impression of the world. Franz's association with Reinhold, which in a more traditional film would be the sole focus of the narrative, here comes as a new wrinkle in a life that has already seen many changes and experiences, and will doubtless see many more.

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In the sixth episode, Franz finally agrees to work with Pums and Reinhold, after infuriating his new friend by refusing to trade in Cilly for Reinhold's latest rejected girlfriend, Trude (Irm Hermann). Franz tries to convince Reinhold that he intends the best for him, that he needs to learn to settle down with one girl, but the refusal changes the nature of the duo's relationship, and the always offputting Reinhold becomes even more withdrawn and taciturn, especially with Franz. Nevertheless, Franz is talked into working with Pums, helping him to pick up some goods one night — he naïvely seems to believe that he's really getting involved in a legitimate business, but when the night comes around, he realizes that he's just being enlisted to stand lookout while the rest of the gang rob a house. Franz is wracked with guilt and fear, but is forced to stay with the gang, and the episode ends with a life-altering "accident" for Franz.

Fassbinder films Franz's guilty recriminations in near-complete darkness, as Franz is shrouded in shadows on the nighttime streets, worrying aloud about his role in these crimes and the path that has led him to this point. The darkness, rather than hiding Franz's guilt, as one would expect, amplifies it, makes it fearsome, with voices coming out of nowhere, the speaker unclear. Franz is surrounded by friends, including Meck and Reinhold, but he is very much alone nonetheless, and Reinhold in particular reveals a prodigious nasty streak that causes him to berate and beat Franz for hampering the robbery with his worrying. This is another betrayal, another case of Franz trusting too much in the wrong people, and this time he won't be getting off as easily as he did with Otto.

This episode also makes extensive use of an aesthetic device that Fassbinder had been periodically using throughout the earlier episodes as well, but here brings to its true fruition. The original Döblin novel apparently includes a great deal of extraneous material not directly related to Franz's story, in order to provide a sense of place and setting for the main narrative. Fassbinder incorporates this material, always in a self-consciously literary way, through the use of newspapers and other textual means of telling stories not directly related to Franz's life. Franz frequently reads from the newspaper aloud, sampling mostly just the headlines, reading in a monotone voice that gives equal weight to sports results, local murders, political machinations, or anything else, great or small. In this way, the outside world enters the hermetic space of Franz Biberkopf, who is always Fassbinder's central point of interest in this story. Berlin, and Weimar Germany as a whole, are reflected and refracted through Franz as though through a prism, but always indirectly, always through words, while the images are reserved for Franz's story itself.

The logical extension of this idea comes in this episode when the narrator recounts a story about a young man and his lover who agree to kill each other because they are too poor to get married. The narrator intones this tragic tale as though it's just another newspaper article, and the whole time, on screen Fassbinder shows Franz and Cilly having wild sex under the covers, laughing and having fun with each other. The obvious contrast between image and narration serves to present two different alternatives for dealing with oppressive conditions — Franz and Cilly are every bit as poor as the young couple in the story, but they are unencumbered by traditional ideas like marriage, and rather than lament the things they don't have, they throw themselves into their lives headfirst. On another level, Fassbinder's use of voiceover here suggests a whole other world outside the boundaries of Franz's circle, a whole city of people every bit as much affected by the societal and economic forces of the era as Franz is. Such moments serve as periodic reminders that Franz's story, though highly specific and individual, is also part of a larger narrative of the pre-war German populace.

The episode ends with the narrator's somewhat hollow assurance that there is "no cause to despair." It seems, at first, a mere platitude, especially in light of what's just happened, but on closer inspection the phrase reveals itself as a much deeper expression of the film's thesis on life in general. It's not just that there is "no cause" in the recent events of the film for despair, which would be a highly specific interpretation of this vague expression. More generally, the narrator seems to suggest that there is never cause for despair, that there is no situation so untenable or terrible that it should entirely crush the human spirit. In the context of such a generally depressing and downtrodden work, it's a bold assertion for human positivism in the face of tragedy and defeat.

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Episode seven picks up after this accident, focusing on Franz's recovery period, which he spends staying with Eva and her pimp boyfriend Herbert (Roger Fritz). This is a strange episode, initially having the laidback atmosphere that one would expect for such a recovery narrative, but soon branching off into some of the most extreme stylistic diversions in the film thus far. Fassbinder has always played with shifts in tone in his work, and especially the superimposition of the comedic with the tragic, but Berlin Alexanderplatz thus far has been much more even-keeled, not subject to such wild mood swings until now.

The first hint of this shift comes when Eva and Franz have a shrill, melodramatic standoff with Bruno (the great Volker Spengler), a member of Pums' gang, which is the only scene in the film thus far where I've been hesitant about Fassbinder's choices. He has never been averse to such over-the-top shrillness, especially in films like the acidic comedy Satan's Brew, but this is a truly startling tonal shift coming at pretty much the halfway mark of Berlin Alexanderplatz. It's a ridiculously overacted scene that finally pauses as a static tableau, with Fassbinder holding the shot for an uncomfortably long time once the confrontation has ended. Moreover, Hanna Schygulla is an odd choice to be delivering this angry outburst, since she usually plays more of a quiet, reserved, sensual center in Fassbinder's films, emotionally cool in a white-hot world. She handles the explosion somewhat awkwardly, and the scene is a troubling wrong note in what has otherwise been a dazzlingly executed masterwork. The effect is as startling as though a single fuzzy chord from a toy piano had suddenly been inserted, amplified and reverberating, into the center of a Beethoven sonata. I have to think, though, that to some extent this was Fassbinder's intention, and there's no doubt that my mind keeps returning to this scene. Its awkwardness, its exaggerated acting, its tonal disparity to the rest of the film, makes it hit with special force, driving home the extent of Eva and Franz's fear by the absurdity of their reactions.

The rest of the episode is less troubling, but nevertheless more heterogeneous than the first six episodes. Fassbinder also includes one of the film's most heavily stylized scenes thus far, in Franz's brief sojourn into Berlin's decadent equivalent of a Red Light District. He's led through this utterly fantastic street by a kind of carnival barker figure, decked out in a cape and top hat, who leads him past topless women whipping their customers, torches lighting the path, through a shower of golden glitter, all the while promising him a sexual demoness for his enjoyment. Franz declines, though, and instead goes for some beers at a nearby pub.

Lamprecht then provides perhaps the finest sequence in his tour-de-force performance so far, a hilarious and oddly poignant scene in which he holds an imaginary conversation with three mugs of beer and a tiny shot of schnapps. He gives the beers a thick, deep voice, and the schnapps a squeaky childlike yelp, and as he drinks down each in turn, his ventriloquist performance allows him to speak about the way in which alcohol helps to drown out "superfluous thoughts," which, he soon admits, are most thoughts. It's a ridiculous conceit, but Lamprecht pulls it off without the least touch of irony, and infuses this duel of silly voices with a real pathos and sadness. Franz has truly come to a low point in his life, and his genuine struggle with drink links back to the fourth episode's epic drinking binge. Nevertheless, despite the scene's sadder undertones, it's by far the funniest scene in the film to this point, an interlude of true virtuoso comedic acting.

Later, at a nightclub, Franz meets the lowlife gangster Willy (Fritz Schediwy) and sees his former flame Cilly, now a singer, perform a song until she recognizes him in the audience and flees, enraged at Reinhold for not telling her that Franz survived his accident. Franz's encounter with Willy foreshadows his new acceptance of crime and corruption, his realization that his earlier vow to go straight has only brought him great trouble and betrayals from even those he thought were his closest friends. Each new episode so far has at least subtly shifted the direction of Franz's life, and the amount of incident packed into each of these segments is often staggering, but this seems like a decisive break in Franz's life, the abandonment of the orienting ideas which had anchored his worldview before this point.

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The eighth episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz opens with Franz returning once more to the bar where he spends so much of his time, and talking with the bartender, who's surprised to see him. Franz reads from a newspaper an account of a man whose wife committed suicide, and he responded by drowning their three children. This scene recalls the earlier use of textual material to suggest the wider world of Berlin, but Franz reacts in this case with hysterical laughter, indicating a shift in his opinions towards the news. In his newspaper reading, Franz usually took on the objective tone of a narrator, never reacting to the headlines he recited, simply presenting them as a sampling of the city's reality from outside his own life. Franz's laughter here prompts the bartender to comment that this is a side of Franz he has not seen before, and the film's audience can only agree; this is a whole new Franz.

This new Franz becomes a second-rate gangster, dealing in stolen goods with Willy, and as a result living a life of comparative luxury for the first time in his life, even decking himself out in a fancy suit. His new direction is cemented with the introduction of Mieze (the radiant Barbara Sukowa), who Eva brings to Franz to be his girlfriend. Franz's relationship with Mieze introduces a brighter, lighter palette of colors, with sunshine streaming in everywhere and colors that expand beyond the miniseries' typical browns and yellows. When Mieze first appears, Fassbinder keeps the camera on Franz's profile while she walks into the room, her footsteps lightly pattering on the soundtrack as the only hint of her presence. The awed, almost worshipful look on Franz's face is deeply moving, suggesting the churning emotions behind his gaze, and signaling the arrival of the full-fledged melodrama that Fassbinder has always prized in his films. He holds the shot of Franz's face long enough to build up the tension about the girl's arrival, and when he finally shows her, standing in the doorway, it's a transcendent moment. She's bathed in light, dressed all in white, so that she seems to glow, standing out from the dull brown surroundings. Her appearance is reminiscent of the way Fassbinder allows light sources to flare in this film, so that any time there's a lamp or a bare bulb anywhere, it looks like a star glistening — Mieze's arrival has exactly that effect.

This is a very happy relationship, filled with love, tenderness, and fun, captured in equal measures through the imagery and the periodic textual intertitles describing Mieze's gentle nature and some small moments between the two. Fassbinder allows his presentation of this romance to verge on cheesiness, shooting in sun-drenched exteriors for the first time, opening up the film's claustrophobic visual aesthetic, especially in a scene where the couple takes out a rowboat and romps in a forest together. The sunny visuals and warm tone of this material is a real departure from the film's gloomy mise en scène, perfectly capturing Franz's ecstatic happiness with his new girl. But even this happiness turns out to be a betrayal of sorts.

By the end of the episode, it is obvious that Mieze is sleeping with other men as a prostitute, in order to support the two of them, so that the situation becomes a mirror of the one that Franz used to have with Eva. When Franz first learns that Mieze might be duplicitous with him, Fassbinder abruptly cuts to a replay of the scene from the first episode in which Franz kills Ida. While the scene plays out again in its familiar way, the voiceover tells tangentially related stories about Franz helping to save a horse that fell into a hole, and men whose wives became prostitutes in order to support them. The scene becomes a multilayered commentary on Franz's complicated feelings at this moment, his anger incarnated by the replay of Ida's murder, which was his response to a much earlier betrayal. The anger is tempered by the dispassionate tone of the narrator, whose objectively presented stories suggest the themes at the heart of the Franz/Mieze relationship. The episode ends with a hint of reconciliation, but already the brief interlude of brightness and innocent love has passed, replaced with a darker and more complicated set of emotions.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (parts III-IV)

Other episodes:
ep. I-II | ep. III-IV | ep. V-VIII | ep. IX-XI | ep. XII-XIII | Epilogue

My viewing of Fassbinder's 15-hour miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz is still going strong, with two more episodes tonight. I'm starting to wish I had the time to just sit down and watch the whole thing in one marathon session, or at least two eight-hour blocs, because it's a truly absorbing work, built on the accumulation of detail and nuance. Already, over four hours in, Fassbinder has explored enough material to make up several entire films, and the leisurely pace allows for a depth of characterization hardly seen anywhere outside of the novel.

It's also become clear that, though in some ways Fassbinder always intended this to be a theatrical film first and foremost, he did take advantage of the episodic nature of the television series in structuring this material. The third episode begins with the shot that the second one ended on, Franz clutching Lina after his aborted encounter with some Communists at a local bar. Fassbinder's fondness for mirroring has him end the episode with a similar shot, except that by the end of the episode, Lina is with Franz's friend Meck instead. The episode thus provides a self-contained mini-narrative within the larger context of the film, tracing Franz's path away from the makeshift social order he'd managed to arrange with Lina and Meck.

The agent of change in Franz's life at this point is Lina's "uncle" Otto (venerable Fassbinder character actor Hark Bohm), a friend of her father's who Lina thinks might be able to help them with their troubles. When they call on Otto, though, he's as poor as they, unemployed for the last two years and engaged in the same daily grind of odd jobs as Franz. However, unlike Franz, he has found relative stability in one dependable moneymaker, selling shoelaces door to door, and he allows Franz to join in on this low-key business. Franz is as unsuccessful as ever with the new job, but is still grateful to the seemingly pleasant Otto, until one day when Franz is seduced by (or seduces) a lonely widow, sleeping with her and getting 20 marks for his trouble. When he tells Otto about it, though, the kindly uncle goes to see the woman himself, berating her for being a slut even as he subtly threatens her and then robs her apartment. This act of betrayal sets Franz loose from his comfortably established life, causing him to abandon Lina without a word and go into hiding. Franz's worldview seems remarkably unstable, subject to complete destruction with the slightest quiver, and the revelation of Otto's nasty, deceitful inner core is enough to shatter many of Franz's illusions about his quest to remain honest and pure.

Otto's character is important for more than his narrative function, though. He also introduces religion into the film in a decisive way, and especially religious hypocrisy. When Lina and Franz first go to his apartment, they find a Christian newspaper there, with inspirational poems about Jesus on its front page, and this would seem to link Otto with these religious sentiments. The first two episodes of the film established the political and social facets of Berlin life in the late 1920s, and here Fassbinder provides the first glimpse at religious life in the Weimar era. It's not a pretty picture. Otto is a model hypocrite, moralizing against the widow for sleeping with Franz even as he robs, insults, and threatens her — his moral fervor extends to his condemnation of sexuality, but not to his own acts of robbery and brutality.

The treachery of Otto sends Franz fleeing, now more unsure than ever that he can ever forge a decent life for himself amidst all this ugliness and criminality. Meck and Lina, trying to track down their missing friend, figure out that Otto betrayed him somehow, and enlist him to find Franz, which he does at a rundown motel. But after a tense showdown in which Franz again successfully resists doing violence to those who taunt and attack him, Otto leaves, and Franz disappears, leaving behind instructions that no one should follow him. The episode ends with Meck and Lina embracing, forming a new bond to protect each other in Franz's absence.

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If the third episode drives forward the narrative of Franz's journey of self-discovery and pushes him in a new direction, the fourth episode is, in contrast, more of an introspective and static character study. Already a pattern is forming with these four episodes, wherein every other episode further develops the narrative in decisive sequences of events (the first and third) while in between are more ruminative episodes in which not much happens but the characters are explored more fully (the second and fourth). It's still too soon, obviously, to tell how this pattern will fit in with the work as a whole as it continues to take shape. What is obvious at this point is that the great length of Berlin Alexanderplatz allowed Fassbinder to explore new possibilities for pacing and structure.

Throughout the fourth episode, Franz Biberkopf remains in a crippling stasis, living in a lonely apartment and drinking massive amounts of beer every day, his only contact with his neighbor Baumann (Gerhard Zwerenz) and the beer distributors in the building's basement. This is a maudlin, elegiac segment, sinking deep into the depths of Franz's depression and aimlessness. While Franz lounges around his apartment and staggers through the streets in a drunken stupor, Fassbinder intrudes on the narrative with greater and greater frequency, inserting intertitles and voiceovers taken from the Döblin novel. There's also a mid-episode break in which Fassbinder compares the treatment of the lower classes to the slaughter of a bull, in a scene very much reminiscent of the infamous slaughterhouse sequence from In a Year of 13 Moons. In this less bloody but still potent version of that scene, Fassbinder inserts a series of documentary photographs from a slaughterhouse, while the narration dispassionately describes the methodical process of killing and eviscerating animals. This documentary sequence is then matched by a vivid and unexplained dreamlike image of an old man, naked except for some patches of animal skins, who drags a sheep to a bench and slits its throat. This absurd, non-diegetic intrusion simply passes by without comment, presumably a manifestation of Franz's subconscious, a recognition by him of his own equal status with the beasts, as acknowledged by one of the intertitles: "Man's fate is like that of the beasts."

Not too much happens in terms of actual events in this fourth episode, but it does advance a great deal of thematic material, especially of a religious nature. Franz hardly goes through any kind of religious awakening in this segment, but in a subtle way his suffering and slow waking up to reality is nevertheless couched in religious terms. Baumann calls Franz Job, the poor Biblical figure who God robs of his land and family and subjects to an escalating series of punishments and persecutions as a test of his faith. To underscore the point, much of this episode is set to soaring choral music, haunting voices moaning to the heavens in the background as Franz staggers through his bottom-feeding existence. He's given a brief reprieve in the form of a visit from Eva (Hanna Schygulla), his former lover and a prostitute, who had appeared sporadically in the earlier episodes but here finally makes clear the nature of her relationship with Franz. She offers him unconditional love and the security of her home, but Franz cannot accept — he no longer wants to live off the work of another, especially one who walks the streets for him.

Franz's time in this self-imposed purgatory comes to an end by the time the episode is over, as he pushes himself out of his stupor and returns to society once again. This episode is about those who oppression has isolated and crushed — its title is "A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence" — and Franz spends time among them before recovering some sense of his stability. This is possibly the finest individual episode so far, its poetic tone and experimentation with formal structures representing a new development in the film's aesthetic arsenal. But more importantly, this episode advances Franz's character development in very interesting ways, and fits neatly into the expanding chronicle of his life. Fassbinder is delving deeper and deeper into the novelistic exploration of his main character's psychological foundations, moving ever closer to the roots of Franz Biberkopf and the time and place that made him who he is.