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Finally, at long last, R.W. Fassbinder's Epic Drama BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ Arrives on DVD!

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fifteen-hour-plus adaptation of Alfred Döblin's novel, one of the most revered classics of German literature, is the German auteur's most lavish and complex production ever. It's also his most personal, a dream project with roots that reach back to Fassbinder's youth, when he read the novel for the first time at age 14. Fassbinder, grappling with his own identity and his emerging homosexuality, saw himself in the character of Franz Biberkopf, the trusting, emotionally naïve, almost childlike hero who begins the novel wandering an alienated Berlin plunged into depression and enters into a destructive relationship with a cruel thug. Five years later he re-read the novel and "it became clearer and clearer to me that a huge part of myself, my behavior, my reactions, many things I had considered a part of me, were nothing other than things described by Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz," he wrote in 1980. "I had, quite simply, without realizing it, made Döblin's fantasy into my life."

Berlin Alexanderplatz became Fassbinder's touchstone throughout his career. He named the protagonist of Fox and His Friends, which he portrayed on screen himself, Franz Biberkopf, while the central characters of many other films were named Franz (including those played by himself in his first feature Love Is Colder Than Death and in The American Soldier). His own pseudonym used for editing credit, Franz Walsh, is a mesh of Döblin and the American director Raoul Walsh. Even the plots of two early films (Love is Colder Than Death and Gods of the Plague) have their roots in Döblin's novel.

In 1974, Fassbinder re-screened all his features in a four day marathon and, astounded at the references he found to the novel all through his work, proceeded to re-read the novel. For years Fassbinder had dreamed of making a film of Berlin Alexanderplatz and this third reading only intensified his desires. His initial plan had been for a feature length adaptation, but when he was approached by a German television production group to turn the novel into a six-part mini-series, Fassbinder came back with a plan to more than double that length. He began writing the script in 1977 and started shooting in April 1980, having completed four more features – Despair, The Marriage of Maria Braun, In a Year of 13 Moons, and The Third Generation – in the interim. Producers suggested shooting in Paris, where they could find standing streets to evoke the architecture of 1927 Berlin. Fassbinder insisted on staying in Germany and recreating the era in the studio, reusing Bergman's standing street set leftover from his production of "The Serpent's Egg" to save on construction.

Fassbinder described Berlin Alexanderplatz as "the story of two men whose little lives on this earth are destroyed because they never get the opportunity to muster up the courage even to recognize, much less to be able to admit to themselves, that they desire one another in an unusual way." It's a devastating love story between the three central characters: the trusting and loyal Franz Biberkopf (played with almost childlike openness and vulnerability by Gunter Lamprecht), his manipulative and predatory friend Reinhold (Gottfried John), and Mieze, Biberkopf's naïve and adoring girlfriend, played with heartbreaking purity and simplicity by Barbara Sukowa. Fassbinder favorite Hanna Schygulla co-stars as Eva, a prostitute devoted to Biberkopf, her former pimp, even after he vows to go straight, and the cast features numerous faces familiar from past Fassbinder productions, among them Claus Holm, Barbara Valentin, Brigitte Mira, Roger Fritz, Mark Bohm, Ivan Desny, and Elisabeth Trissenaar. All told, there are 100 featured characters and 3000 extras in the production.

It was the longest and most expensive project (12.5 million marks) ever commissioned for German TV. Originally set for a 200 day shoot, Fassbinder scaled back the schedule to 154 days (partly, according to production manager Dieter Minx, to make up for the cost overruns on the sets), and he hired young cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger because of his ability to work fast. He captures the tawdry underworld with such nostalgic glamour and lush style that you'd never guess the schedule was anything but luxurious. Schwarzenberger recalled: "I couldn’t keep up with him, but after the first three weeks, he slowed to my fastest pace, and I realized that the opening burst had been a test that I guess I passed." They continued working together until Fassbinder's untimely death three years later. Still, the shooting sprawled over nine months and post-production took another three months, an enormous amount of time for a director whose longest shooting schedule up until then had been 36 days.

Fassbinder's connection to Franz Biberkopf is a telling insight to his own psychology. Just like the Franz Biberkopf played by Fassbinder in Fox and his Friends, the hero of Alexanderplatz is an innocent, a naive soul looking for love and friendship who becomes the victim of a manipulative, predatory friend, Reinhold, the man with whom he has invested his trust and affection. This was a common thread throughout Fassbinder's career: relationships built on emotional exploitation, trust rewarded with betrayal, love punished with hate. In his private life, however, Fassbinder was far more Reinhold than Franz. As a director he notoriously played members of his company off one another, cajoling, ridiculing, taunting, praising, anything to get what he wanted from his friends and workers, yet his own self image is that of the injured man exploited by those around him. If Fassbinder related publicly to Franz, he understood Reinhold, whose actions seem to stem from a love-hate relationship with Franz, a need for his friendship and a fear of those feelings. Fassbinder's presentation of Reinhold is surprisingly tender, as if he knows all too well Reinhold's emotional turmoil hidden beneath bullying violence and betrayal.

Berlin Alexanderplatz proved a disastrous flop with the German public. Historian Anna K. Kuhn described it as "probably the single most controversial production ever to appear on German TV." The film was dark, visually and thematically, and pushed 1980 TV technology to the limits. Seen on modern television screens, the densely composed image and nuanced lighting is a cinematic wonder, but back then the broadcast image, at least for some viewers, tended to dissolve into haze and darkness. Fassbinder was working through his "Post World War II Germany" trilogy in theaters, but this production grapples with issues even more troubling than Germany’s reconstruction. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a portrait of reckless decadence and extreme poverty, with the rise of National Socialism sketched in the background of the story. And after 13 chapters of Alfred Döblin's novel have been adapted to the screen, Fassbinder replays, rethinks, and entirely re-imagines the novel in the daring epilogue, appropriately titled "Rainer Werner Fassbinder: My Dream of Franz Biberkopf’s Dream." An impressionistic reflection on everything we've seen, it was as unconventional a television work as had likely been seen by anyone in the television audience.

The film's "rehabilitation" came about in epic theatrical screening events around the world projected from 16mm prints (film screenings were not a consideration when Fassbinder originally shot the production) and the production was hailed a masterpiece. In the eyes of many critics this is Fassbinder's finest hour (or rather fifteen hours), the culmination of his career. In 2006, the Fassbinder Foundation embarked on a six-month project to preserve, restore, and digitally remaster the film from the original, 26-year-old 16mm negative. Juliane Lorenz – Fassbinder's long-time editor, possibly his wife (she claims they were married but there are no records or living witnesses to the event), and the controversial director of the Fassbinder Foundation – and cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger oversaw the process, which resulted in both a new digital master for DVD and new 35mm prints for future theatrical screenings. In regards to the latter, Fassbinder shot the film at 25 fps (frames per second) to match the German broadcast standard. As a result, all theatrical showings (projected at 24 fps) run 4% slower and thus slightly longer than the original broadcast.

Not without some controversy, Criterion chose to master their American DVD release at 24 fps rate, which is a natural fit with the American video broadcast standard of 30 fps, rather attempt to digitally adjust to 25 fps. "By sacrificing actual clock time we preserve the integrity of the picture, ensure natural movement between frames, and avoid introducing digital artifacts," explained DVD producer Peter Becker on the Criterion blog. The American DVD runs slightly (though imperceptibly) slower than the 15-hour German broadcast/video version, but the same as the 15 ½-hour theatrical screenings. The image is rich and vivid, with soft, deep colors (Schwarzenberger personally oversaw the restoration of the fading color), and cleaner than it's looked in decades, thanks to the digital repairs and image cleaning. But the restoration is also not without controversy; some critics have charged that Schwarzenberger has "corrected" too much, brightening the image beyond Fassbinder's intentions. The debate became rather heated in critical circles in Germany, but this is undeniably the finest presentation that American audiences have had a chance to see of the production.

The entire restoration process is documented in detail in the 32-minute Berlin Alexanderplatz Remastered, directed by Lorenz herself. The exhaustive production is one of the many supplements on Criterion's lavish seven-disc set presentation of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Lorenz also directs Berlin Alexanderplatz: A Mega Movie and Its Story, a 65-minute retrospective where she revisits stars Gunter Lamprecht, Gottfried John, Barbara Sukowa, and Hanna Schygulla, cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger, and others, to discuss the production. The 1980 documentary Notes on the Making of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Hans-Dieter Hartl's 44-minute snapshot of the production, features invaluable behind-the-scenes glimpses of Fassbinder at work, but apart from revealing Fassbinder's calm control and meticulous organization of a sprawling production (a side of him not often seen on film sets; he had reportedly kicked his notorious drug habit for the duration of the shoot), it offers little insight to the production. Also features a video interview with historian Peter Jelavich (an expert on Alfred Döblin's original novel and its adaptation) and a booklet with essays and interviews.

Finally there is Phil Jutzi's 1931 adaptation of the novel, a 91-minute feature directed from a script co-written by author Alfred Döblin himself and starring stage actor Heinrich George as an outwardly jolly but inwardly melancholy Franz Biberkopf. Jutzi, who had previously directed Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness (the inspiration for Fassbinder's Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven) and re-edited Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin 1926 for German release, pares the story down to the central relationships while offering a vivid snapshot of 1931 Berlin with his numerous montage sequences, beginning with Biberkopf's trolley-ride from prison to the city. The print is not restored and has some choppy passages, but is watchable.

For more information about Berlin Alexanderplatz, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Berlin Alexanderplatz, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker