BERLIN
ALEXANDERPLATZ

Rainer Werner Fassbinder edited by Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte,
published by Hanser Verlag, Film series, Volume 2, Edition 5, Munich 1985.
The Fassbinder quotations are taken from an article in DIE ZEIT, No. 12/1980.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story in Alfred Döblin's novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz" as follows:
"... The former transport worker Franz Biberkopf is released from prison where he served a four-year
sentence for killing his former girl-friend Ida with an egg-beater. Ida had turned to prostitution to support
him in Berlin in the economically troubled 20s. At first, the former jailbird has considerable problems with
his virility, but overcomes these by almost raping his victim's sister, so that he is subsequently able to start
a relationship with a Polish girl, Lina. Their relationship is such that they consider it to be love and Franz is
persuaded to swear that he will lead an honest life from now on, so help ... or something like that. The finan-
cial conditions are catastrophic and all attempts to establish a sound foundation prove futile, be it tie clasps,
erotic literature, the Völkischer Beobachter - but that creates trouble with former friends, communists,
with whom he had once sympathized because he liked them. And so he sells shoelaces, they are always
needed,  together with Lina's uncle, but he eventually takes advantage of Franz's trust in him and starts
blackmailing and threatening a widow whom Franz had once helped out in return for money.   With
his inshatterable faith in the goodness in people, Franz is so hurt that he withdraws from the world and
other people and spends several weeks just drinking, eventually returning to life and the rest of mankind.

Then he meets a man called Reinhold, a small crook, but somehow strangely fascinating. In fact,
he is so fascinated, that Franz finds himself doing Reinhold the strange service of getting rid of his
women for him because Reinhold gets fed up with women very fast: it's almost a compulsion for him,
first he has to have a woman, come what may, and then he has to get shot of her as fast as possible,
but somehow he finds that rather difficult.    Reinhold realizes that Franz is strangely fascinated by
him and he considers Franz to be just a little bit thick, but he gets rid of the women for him. First
one, then two, but the third time Franz refuses. Reinhold has got to learn to stick with one woman
for longer because it's healthy and not sick and because Franz wants to help Reinhold and wants to
help him properly. Franz Biberkopf fully understands that Reinhold cannot understand him and
is vexed, that's just the way life is. By coincidence, Franz becomes involved in what he at first
thinks is a regular fruit transport job, but then he suddenly realizes that it is in fact a burglary.
He stands guard, wants to run away but cannot. After the burglary, Franz is sitting in the car with
Reinhold when Reinhold suddenly has the feeling that someone is following them. Reinhold
experiences a mixture of fear at being followed and anger over Franz. And then, almost in a trance,
Reinhold suddenly pushes Franz out of the car. He is run over by their pursuer, it looks as if he is
dead.  But Franz Biberkopf is not dead, he merely loses his right arm. His former girl-friend Eva
and her pimp help him to recover his strength and he returns to the city without his right arm.
There, he meets a small crook for whom he fences stolen goods and becomes almost affluent.

Then Eva introduces him to a girl whom he calls Mieze. It turns out that she sells her body for him.
Franz accepts this and the two are happy for a while. They love one another, but then Reinhold barges
into the relationship, meets Mieze a few times and finally kills her. Franz is arrested for this murder
and confined to a lunatic asylum where he is converted into a useful member of society in a pro-
longed period of "reverse catharsis". He is no longer anything special. He will probably become
a National Socialist, so great is the destruction wreaked by his encounter with Reinhold."

The television film in thirteen parts plus epilogue also follows this version of the story: Franz
Biberkopf is released from prison, wants to become an honest man, meets Lina. Meck offers him
a job as a street vendor, he sells the "Völkischer Beobachter". He is cheated by Lina's uncle,
withdraws from the world, refuses to see anyone and just drinks. Then he meets the Pums gang
and Reinhold, gets rid of Reinhold's women for him, first Fränze and then Cilly, but not Trude.
Without really being aware of what he is doing, he stands guard while the Pums gang do a burglary,
is pushed out of the car by Reinhold and loses an arm. His former girl-friend Eva and her pimp
Herbert look  after him and he starts out on illegal deals. Eva introduces him to Mieze and the two
fall in love, she turns to prostitution for him and he remains jealous. He meets Reinhold again
and attends a political meeting attacking the parliamentary system. Mieze brings him to the
verge of despair for she wants to go away for three days with a rich customer. Then he joins
the Pums gang again,  humiliates himself in front of Reinhold and is informed by Mieze that
she loves someone else. He almost kills her, but she stays with him. However, she falls
into the trap set for her by  Reinhold who is also after her; he kills her. Franz Biberkopf
laughs when he is told that  she has been murdered: at least she did not leave him.
He is in the madhouse, dreaming.  Reinhold is sentenced to ten years in prison for
manslaughter and Franz finds work as a deputy gatekeeper in factory (epilogue).

With its innumerable main and subsidiary plots, the story of the film BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ
is as difficult to relate as the story of the novel. Nor is the story really so important to Fassbinder:
it is just a "series of nasty little episodes each of which could provide the obscene popular
press with the obscenest of front-page stories" (Fassbinder). What is important is the author's
attitude towards his characters: he finds that even the shabbiest actions express a desire for
tenderness, that violence is simply a different form of love, that people always hurt one another
as soon as they pay any attention to one another.  BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ has its place in
Fassbinder's overall work; it is his provisional finale, the result a major, possibly excessive effort.

Fassbinder had been fascinated by the novel ever since his youth, had read it as a fourteen or fifteen-year-
old and discovered its "real theme", namely "the encounter between the "hero"  Franz Biberkopf and the
other "hero" Reinhold, an encounter that was to decide the rest of these two men's lives".  In Fassbinder's
opinion, these two  men love one another, but refuse to admit to themselves that "something mysterious
brings them closer together than is normally considered decent between men".  They are not homosexuals,
for "there is nothing more and nothing less  between them than a pure love that is not jeopardized by any-
thing social". As social beings, however, they cannot accept this love. Döblin's novel helped Fassbinder
come to terms with his own life,  his fears and his "homosexual desires"; "it helped me to survive".

The novel is reflected in all of Fassbinder's films, from his very first feature film onwards.   His films
repeatedly deal with a young man called Franz (he is even called Franz Biberkopf in FAUSTRECHT
DER FREIHEIT) who is betrayed, despairs over his love, is shot, poisons himself, is sentenced to
gaol and can only narrowly escape once (LIEBE IST KÄLTER ALS DER TOD).  He is played by
Fassbinder himself or by his alter ego Harry Baer, his most important colleague in  BERLIN
ALEXANDERPLATZ; the part was only played by Günther Kaufmann in DRITTE GENERATION.

These attempts to portray Franz Biberkopf culminate in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ
and Günter Lamprecht (although he is really too old for the part). The early Franz was
frequently a fairly one-dimensional person with pubertarian traits and a dash of self-pity
(especially in FAUSTRECHT), but now Franz Biberkopf has become a mature man who
already has a fair bit of life behind him while his predecessors were only just setting
out in life (and in that respect Lamprecht was probably the right choice after all).

Franz Biberkopf is a man full of contradictions and opposites. We never really know how he will
react and it is hard to know just how to deal with him; he is down-to-earth yet fickle, inspiring
confidence but also aggressive, sure of himself and yet helpless, a small man experiencing a
great passion. He is hardly able to put his feelings into words and has to express them through
physical action instead; perhaps that is the reason why his relationship with Reinhold proves a
failure. Despite his affection for women, a great deal of uncertainty remains, for they are after all
strange beings, even Mieze, and their company offers only a momentary respite from loneliness.

Fassbinder has condensed the novel's multifaceted proliferating collage into the story of a
few people and abridged it accordingly. The background, namely the big city in the late 20s,
would have been impossible to reconstruct in any case and it is only present acoustically
but not visually in the film, with advertising inserts, music, a symphony of sounds, a
narrator's voice (Fassbinder himself). Here too, the film differs from the novel, for
Fassbinder has intensified the emotions and largely dispensed with Döblin's irony.
Fassbinder's characters are outcasts, beaten men and women who seek refuge in dark
caves, in gloomy cramped flats, in cheap dives. They are prisoners in an incompre-
hensible world, prisoners of their own emotions which they cannot analyse.

The film is set almost entirely indoors. The underground station is the only part of the Alexanderplatz
that is actually shown. The streets are also narrow and without light. The artificiality of the studio
settings is by no means offputting, but intensifies the feeling of claustrophobia. Real sunlight in real
streets would have transformed the film's realism into something documentary and thus destroyed it.
The few outside shots in the film are also totally devoid of naturalism. There is something ghostly
about the wood in which Reinhold kills Mieze; the trees and bars of light make escape impossible.

The film always returns to the people without the camera coming too close; it always leaves
them every opportunity to develop their own style in a way that is used by almost all the cast
and quite particularly by Günter Lamprecht (Biberkopf), Gottfried John (Reinhold) and Barbara
Sukowa (Mieze).  There is nothing exhibitionistic about their intense body language, for it is
born of speechlessness, full of nuances and often needing no more than a mere hint.

However, this accuracy and sensitivity is not characteristic of all passages. In some scenes,
the excessive clarity of the setting has a denunciatory effect (as in Pums' pompous office)
and some of the cast also overact sometimes, especially in the gang scenes. This leaves
viewers with the impression that some of the scenes were merely a matter of routine for
Fassbinder as he was compelled to include the various plots in order to make the main story
comprehensible; perhaps he just ran out of breath sometimes in the course of 15 hours. Yet
whenever he returns to the real story, i.e. the relationship between Biberkopf, Reinhold and
Mieze, the film once again becomes a personal confession. The fourth part, Biberkopf's
despair and his lonely bout of drinking, thus becomes the first climax in the series;  part 12,
Reinhold's meeting with Mieze in the woods, becomes a deeply disquieting analysis of the
emotions of rejection and attraction; the epilogue "My dream of Franz Biberkopf's dream" be-
comes a gloomy Pasolini-like phantasmagoria. Unfortunately it is not without a few awkward
moments, such as when Biberkopf is nailed to the cross, a nuclear mushroom rises into the
sky and Janis Joplin sings "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose". The director-
dreamer Fassbinder is once again overtaken on a very ambitious aesthetic level by the
self-pity already  found in FAUSTRECHT DER FREIHEIT and it depends very much on
the viewers' mood  whether or not they will find this collage of symbols to their taste.
Wilhelm Roth

FEATURE FILMS

LILI MARLEEN

(1:45)  English dubbed

Scandalous at the time of it's release, Lili Marleen is now ripe for reappraisal.  Fassbinder turned
the Nazi era into lavish spectacle: Bubsy Berkley does Watch on the Rhine.  (Fassbinder: "Whenever
anything happens in history, you´ll find music. Hitler didn´t  put on these shows for nothing, like
those emotionally charged events in the Sportspalast. Music is also a means of spellbinding people.")

Hanna Schygulla plays a singing star, a favorite of the Nazis, who falls in love with a Jewish
conductor (Giancarlo Giannini).  His family is determind to break up their romance so as
not to jeopardize their underground work smuggling Jews out of the country. Denounced
as a kitschy, irresponsible misuse of the Nazi period, Lili was also praised as:

"A movie with a fantastic plot and very rich and energetic mise-en-scene. The feelings Fassbinder
expresses in Lili Marleen are sweeter and more compassionate than any he has expressed before"
Andrew Sarris

"In Lili Marleen I have a main character who is driven more by emotion than by thought.
With this in mind I have tried to base the direction of the film on emotions. And for that I
also need music. With music you can make a lot of people crazy because it´s so suggestive."
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980

The German public's reaction to this film by Fassbinder was astonishment. In the first place, the director
worked with Luggi Waldleitner, a producer who was seen as the embodiment of the "old style", long
proclaimed dead by young film-makers.  Even more baffling was Fassbinder's cooperation with co-author
Manfred Purzer, as the two had fought out a heated political argument a few years before. Finally the material
did not seem exactly typical for Fassbinder. The result is nevertheless an unmistakably personal film.

On the one hand Fassbinder was interested in the "great love story between two people, a love which
is all the greater because it is unfulfilled, and cannot be fulfilled, because the two are separated. One is
a  Swiss Jew and works for Hagana, the other sings in Nazi Germany. This love only works because it is
unfulfilled, and that alone is something that interested me. The second thing is to admit to someone, even
inside the Nazi regime or any such regime anywhere, that you want to survive in a way that is not just a
matter of being a supporter. Wilkie does want to survive, very definitely. The third thing is that anyone
who thinks they are an artist also has ambitions even in a regime like that. These are all things with which
I am familiar enough from my previous stories, so you cannot say that this is something very new and
strange, - in other words, things with which I am sufficiently familiar to say: yes, I'll do that."

This statement also reveals the point of view from which LILI MARLEEN should be seen.
Fassbinder wanted least of all to make a historical film, and Fassbinder's production, in very
controversial discussions, has been heatedly accused of imprecision in historical details. It is not
history, it is myth - the myth of a song which silenced the weapons for moments during the war,
the myth of a woman who became a star by chance, and the myth of an innocent career in a guilty
country. Fassbinder himself has repeatedly emphasized in public that he himself did not want to and
could not identify himself with the political development of Germany, and despite this, he became
established in the country as a person and as a producer, and to a certain extent also integrated.
The conflict of the singer Wilkie who in her performances serves a system she rejects, may not suffer
comparison with people, history and systems, but it is also a very personal conflict of Fassbinder.
The historical Lale Andersen and her autobiography were only a starting point for him. It is charac-
teristic that the director did not himself produce the scenes outside of the personal story, especially
the war scenes; these are bought from Sam Peckinpah's German film STEINER - DAS EISERNE KREUZ.

Fassbinder consciously uses stylistic devices from Nazi film production,  at the same time
keeping his political awareness and using today's knowledge of events. "He always also
produces the function of the slush film: ... to be war propaganda"  (Wilhelm Roth).
Most of all this is shown by the most impressive sequence of the film,  when in the middle
of Wilkie's song, pictures of the terror of the downfall burst in and tip the kitsch into horror.
    Hans Günther Pflaum

  LOLA

(2:00)  in German with English subtitles

This homage to Josef von Sternberg's Blue Angel depicts the story of von Bohm, the new, idealistic
building  commissioner who loses his heart and very nearly his mind to Lola, the star performer
in a cabaret/brothel.  Under Lola's magic spell, he abandons his original principles and gives
up his former opposition to the building plans of the city's corrupt, principal developer.

This big-budget, candy-coloured update and hommage to The Blue Angel was one of the
director's greatest successes, and helped introduce Barbara Sukowa (Rosa Luxemburg, Europa)
and Armin Mueller-Stahl (Shine) to wider international audiences. Set in a Bavarian city in 1957,
Lola stars Sukowa as an ambitious, social-climbing cabaret singer and prostitute who sets
her calculated sights on town's only honest politician, building commissioner Von Bohm
(Mueller-Stahl), while maintaining her long-time affair with a corrupt developer.  With
The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronika Voss,  the film forms part of an informal Fass-
binder trilogy on the moral bankruptcy at heart of Germany's postwar "Economic Miracle."

"One of Fassbinder's four masterpieces."
Vincent Canby, The New York Times

"The prostitution metaphors come undiluted from early Godard, the poster-art visuals from
the magnificent melodramas of Sirk and Minnelli; the provocations are all Fassbinder's own"
Paul Taylor, Time Out

"Lola is a rarity, a work of art important and fun in equal proportions"
Jay Scott, Globe & Mail

"Arguably [Fassbinder's] best, perhaps his masterpiece. . . easily his most accessible
film . . .  [Lola] stands as the best expression of his extraordinary personal cinema"
Ronald Bowers

MARTHA

(2:00)  in German with English subtitles

When Martha's father dies while vacationing in Rome, she finds a replacement in the charming Helmut,
whom she eventually marries. During their peculiar honeymoon he begins to reveal his domineering
and sadistic character, which at first fascinates Martha and nourishes her masochistic needs. However,
after the newlyweds settle into a big, isolated house and their brief period of domestic bliss is over,
she discovers just how cruel he can be. Martha was not screened for over twenty years
due to legal wrangling, and finally resurfaced in 1995 in a beautifully restored print.

"(Martha) is a treasure amongst treasures:  the most pure, most exaltant of Fassbinder's melodramas."
Eithne O'Neill, Positif, January 1996

"Of the films I´ve made with Fassbinder up to now, I like Martha best. For Martha we had, by Fassbinder´s
standards, a lot of time: Fassbinder wanted me to photograph the entire film with one lense, without
zoom.  We maintained this principle with a few exeptions, and this was after we just exploited the
full range of technical possibilities doing World on a Wire. This restriction led to new ways of
thinking about things and fresh experiments, and I noticed that because it was photographed
this way, the film attained a strength and consistency that we wouldn´t have achieved otherwise."
Michael Ballhaus, cameraman, 1974

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