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.