Ahhhhhhhh...Berlin Week.
And what better way to start out this cavalcade of BDR and GDR goodness than with some Fassbinder. So sit back and watch what we come up with, and hope that we post some interesting and (mostly subtitled) stuff. Das wird gut!
From Tom Tykwer at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (translated by Stephen Locke):
“To listen to this, and to meditate on it, will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin, and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and butter.” —Alfred Döblin, from the preface to Berlin Alexanderplatz
It is once again time to think, to speak, and to write about this fifteen-hour film, which, at the onset of the eighties (that decade that would later bring with it an end to the cold war and a comeback for capital), enraged the national spirit and occasioned assaults by the yellow press and (in the wake of this) protests from “millions of television viewers” who felt themselves “robbed of their subscription fees” (Bild newspaper).
The public protest against this work, which everyone who was in the vicinity of Germany at the time remembers—and many remember the outrage even better than the film itself—was directed against the television stations, the filmmakers, the ensemble, and naturally, above all, against the director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although the film’s alleged unacceptability in technical matters (it was accused of considerable flaws in image and sound quality) was thrust into the center of attention, these problems, it appeared, were hardly worthy of such a storm of indignation. The pain caused by the film somehow went deeper, and with each further episode, broadcast one week after the other, it seemed like a dirty thorn was boring itself deeper and deeper into the wound of this republic, a country that wasn’t very comfortable in its own skin anyway and, accordingly, was soon thereafter to fall into a cultural and political stupor (Fassbinder died in 1982; Kohl became chancellor). At the time, Germany had no desire at all for the celebrated excesses of this film, its prancing obscenity and unshrinking crassness, a kind of German swan song, and all the more so since all these elements meandered—freely floating and without commentary, always asking but never answering, in other words completely ignoring the brief for public edification vested in public television—over a period of thirteen long television weeks.
If you take into account the almost unlimited freedom—despite, for that time, the considerable expense of the production—with which Fassbinder was able to realize this extremely introspective, almost inaccessible film concept, it sheds light on the exceptional position he enjoyed as a filmmaker then. Just having turned thirty-four years of age, he already had some forty films under his belt, including his latest and greatest box-office triumph, The Marriage of Maria Braun. Nowhere in Berlin Alexanderplatz does one get the feeling that he is holding back or censoring himself; it is one of those films, perhaps like only Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, that completely turns its back on traditional, economical narrative conventions—and that at the same time, seemingly paradoxically, feels bound to the narrative, coming back to it time and time again, sometimes even in a compulsively conservative way, only to undermine it right away for the sheer delight of it. It is a film that plunges directly into its topic, a story straight out of everyday life, tears it piece by piece away from its concrete, reality-oriented style, and, with an extremely intimate, almost private view, dissects it, stretches it, and then, above all, spins it out into time, expands it, as it were, to such a degree that interim spaces are torn open in this drawn-out time; and Fassbinder wants to gaze down into the fissures in this vastly stretched-out time, to rip them even farther apart, to look even deeper, until time itself seems no longer expansible—and then splits completely asunder.
What follows this is merely an epilogue, a final chord in the midst of the Black Hole of this temporal rift.
In other words, Berlin Alexanderplatz, this thirteen-part film plus the said “epilogue,” was never really a TV movie. It is a narrative experimental film that, juggling various theatrical principles, seeks a hideaway between the traditional and the avant-garde.
Concerning the visual aspect, Fassbinder and his cameraman, Xaver Schwarzenberger, appear to have been flouting the medium of television here as well: their joint disdain for the alarm signal on the camera’s light meter as it no doubt wildly lashed out seems otherwise too provocative. As a result, the night shots, which were obviously composed for the big screen and a sensitive film emulsion, were watered down into a faint, flat, gray-black blur on most of the German Telefunken TV sets available at the time.
From then on the film seemed ostracized as “unbroadcastable,” even “unshowable,” but resistance arose on the part of some festivals and individual movie theaters, and, long after Fassbinder’s death, a few increasingly scratched 16 mm prints began touring through the art houses and film museums of the world—until these prints, too, were no longer watchable.
Now, Juliane Lorenz, with her Fassbinder Foundation, has been able to convince a number of cultural and film subsidies, as well as technical film companies, to undertake, under Schwarzenberger’s direction, the painstaking restoration of the negative of the film—originally shot on 16 mm and blown up to 35 mm—and above all to dare to make a new optical and color correction, which, in view of the technology now available, appeared to be a very promising undertaking. And in fact the legendary “darkness problem” has more or less disappeared; except for a few shots, it was possible to bring out the contrasts in the monochrome night compositions to such a degree that there is always an intelligible picture and not just a picture puzzle. Never before have the filigree compositional stylistics of Berlin Alexanderplatz been seen—one could hardly even have imagined them—in this form. At the same time, Schwarzenberger has taken care not to lose the quality of this intimate night spectacle, precisely because the choking confinement evoked by the slightly soft-focused darkness of the images reflects the narrowness of a world that is constantly threatening to crush Franz Biberkopf.
Disc 1 Technical Information:
Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Disc: 01
Year: 1980
Country: West Germany
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC Format
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.04 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: German- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
Episode List:
Part I: The Punishment Begins
Part II: How Is One to Live if One Doesn't Want to Die?
Disc 1 Megaupload Links
Disc 2 Technical Information:
Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Disc: 02
Year: 1980
Country: West Germany
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC Format
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.41 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: German- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
Episode List:
Part III: A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul
Part IV: A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence
Part V: A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord
Disc 2 Megaupload Links
Disc 3 Technical Information:
Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Disc: 03
Year: 1980
Country: West Germany
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC Format
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.34 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: German- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
Episode List:
Part VI: Love Has Its Price
Part VII: Remember- An Oath Can Be Amputated
Part VIII: The Sun Warms the Skin, But Burns It Sometimes Too
Disc 3 Megaupload Links
Disc 4 Technical Information:
Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Disc: 04
Year: 1980
Country: West Germany
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC Format
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.45 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: German- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
Episode List:
Part IX: About the Eternities Between the Many and the Few
Part X: Loneliness Tears Cracks of Madness Even in Walls
Part XI: Knowledge Is Power and the Early Bird Catches the Worm
Disc 4 Megaupload Links
Disc 5 Technical Information:
Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Disc: 05
Year: 1980
Country: West Germany
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC Format
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.13 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: German- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
Episode List:
Part XII: The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent
Part XIII: The Outside and the Inside and the Secret of Fear of the Secret
Disc 5 Megaupload Links
Disc 6 Technical Information:
Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Disc: 06
Year: 1980
Country: West Germany
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC Format
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.55 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: German- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras:
- Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (2007)
Episode List:
Epilogue
Disc 6 Megaupload Links
Disc 7 Technical Information:
Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Disc: 07
Year: 1980
Country: West Germany
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC Format
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.63 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3/16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: German- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras:
- Notes on the Making of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1979)
- "Berlin Alexanderplatz" Remastered (2006)
- Berlin Alexanderplatz (1931)
- Peter Jelavich Interview (2007)
Disc 7 Megaupload Links
