Time and Place: Berlin Alexanderplatz

February’s featured review details the metaphorical and literal numbing that comes from watching a fifteen-hour film in one weekend

About eight years ago, the confidence I had in my artistic sensibility was briefly rocked by a pretty obvious revelation. As I defended the merits of Infinite Jest as a great novel (this was 2016 Sam after all), my friend asked whether IJ was truly the best novel I had read or simply the largest. After all, he wisely pointed out, you’re inevitably more interested in a work being great when you’ve invested so much of your own time and energy into it. At the time I had not considered this idea and so that version of me would have been horrified to learn that my favorite novel has continued to be whatever stands as the largest work I have most recently consumed (from present to past, In Search of Lost Time, Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Ulysses, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and so on).

It’s here I should also note that my favorite film, A Brighter Summer Day, also happens to be just about the longest non-episodic film I’ve seen. Thankfully, the me of today is not only at peace with this notion but even proud of it. It’s not that I simply love long works of art because I happen to be more invested in them. I love these long works precisely because I am more invested in them. The epiphanies, catharses, and even satisfactions one gets at the end of an In Search of Lost Time or A Brighter Summer Day are only made possible with the requisite amount of time that the piece requires you to spend with it. In many cases, this can be most easily seen cyclically. We see a repetition of an event or characters and come to realize what has changed (or remained the same) in them and in us. In Harry Potter, Harry, a character defined by defying death as a baby, realizes he must enter death willingly in order to preserve what’s so sacred about life. In simpler terms, more time equals more payoff.

This is all to set the stage for Berlin: Alexanderplatz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-hour, 32-minute, 1980 film adaption of the 1929 novel of the same name that, by over 11 hours, now stands as the longest screening I’ve ever seen. Funnily enough, it was made and produced episodically for German television so seeing it all at once over a weekend is almost like its own viewing anachronism (though I am absolutely delighted that the Film Center presented it this way). This, of course, is all a preamble to say that this review can only cover my initial surface-level impressions and feelings about the film because right now, that’s all there is. For those of you who haven’t seen it, this boy’s dense!

Though I began with a soliloquy on my love for long works, my first impression of Berlin Alexanderplatz is that it’s a decidedly different type of long film than any that I’ve seen. Typically in an epic, the outsized investment of time is rewarded by a deeper connection to or understanding of the work. And yet, with Berlin Alexanderplatz, I am more puzzled by the film as a whole than any of its component parts. What’s especially unusual about this is that in terms of plot, the beats of this story are fairly traditional: A man is freed from prison after killing his lover, makes a vow to do good, finds a lover, and in the end, she is killed despite (and perhaps because) of his attempts to change. And yet, in some ways, the fact that this work is perfectly cyclical is jarring because the film feels completely devoid of catharsis or meaning from this repetition…at least in its initial 13 parts, which brings me to my second impression.

Though Berlin Alexanderplatz is billed as one 15-hour film/miniseries, I think it’s really two distinct, mirrored films. The first film is the initial thirteen parts: a linear story detailing the gradual fall of Franz Biberkopf in his quest to become a good man. The second is the epilogue in which Fassbinder largely forgoes narrative in lieu of a surrealistic spectacle full of the emotionality that I found missing in the first part. I want to also mention here that despite it coming at hour 13 of this marathon, Berlin Alexanderplatz’s epilogue was not only my favorite part of the film but maybe ranks up there with my favorite films full-stop (time will tell).

So what makes this epilogue so effective? I’ve described the first thirteen parts of the film as largely devoid of catharsis. I want to make clear that I don’t think it’s devoid of emotion. There is, however, something that puts the audience at a distance from the events. The film is shot in a way that, to me, recalls a music box (this is most clearly seen with the sparkling, distorted reflections of light in each shot). What’s more, while the narrative, dialogue, and performances are all brilliant, there’s a layer of artificiality, or perhaps melodrama, baked into the film (Fassbinder comes from Germany’s folk theater scene and I imagine that’s the root of this element I’m talking about). Though the film documents a historic time and place (1928 Berlin), this does not feel like a real place. Surely people don’t talk and act like this? Surely even an impoverished, ineffective, and doomed state wouldn’t allow for anyone, including the audience, to be so mesmerized by and forgiving of Franz Biberkopf and his associates?

There is a chance I am overstating my reaction here because of the method in which I watched the film, but by the conclusion of Part 13, which on paper culminates a grand tragedy in brutal terms, I mostly felt numb. If there was a grand effect on me, it was the absence of catharsis. To me, it seemed we had watched 13 hours (hours which I mostly loved by the way) to end up exactly at the same place as we started. And then, the epilogue.

Believe it or not, I have actually not spent much time watching surrealist or experimental cinema in my life. It’s in many ways the opposite of my favorite types of films (all usually grounded firmly in realism). And so, really the only comparison I have for Berlin Alexanderplatz’s epilogue is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. But like Fire Walk With Me, Berlin Alexanderplatz’s epilogue plays as a fever dream of consequence for its preceding chapters (I don’t think it’s coincidental that the epilogue culminates in a literal trial of one of the characters). In any case, if the preceding 13 parts were all narrative largely devoid of catharsis, this epilogue was all catharsis largely devoid of narrative. It’s mesmerizing, horrifying, and even punishing (in the best way). Watching it, was like a delayed onset of conscience. I had spent 13 hours following a character who was spineless, ignorant, a murderer, a rapist, an abuser, a misogynist, and a thief and had been conditioned to find him amusing and helpless because that’s how he saw himself and how the world saw him.

When I watch a film, I try to judge it by this formula: “Did the film accomplish what it set out to achieve?” It’s obviously an easier question to ask than answer, but I think provides a good framework to judge a film on its own terms. So, does Berlin Alexanderplatz accomplish what it sets out to do? I’m probably going to read thirty more articles that will complicate this picture, but in its simplest terms, Berlin Alexanderplatz is an adaption of a novel that, from scanning the Wikipedia page, seems to be remarkable for one, being so experimental in its form and two, capturing the state of 1929 Germany and anticipating the horrors that were to come. By those standards, Berlin Alexanderplatz is wildly successful and unlike anything I’ve seen. Fassbinder obviously has an advantage that Alfred Döblin didn’t. He knows exactly what will happen to this place and these characters after the narrative ends. But in capturing this story as mirrored parts (the narrative first, then the reckoning second) he shows, and makes the audience complicit in its viewing, just how easy it is to be swept up in the tide of evil and how hard it is to realize before it’s too late.