Category Archives: Uncategorized

Thinking Aloud About Film: Stronger Than Love/ Más fuerte que el amor (Cuba/ Mexico, Tulio Demicheli, 1955)

Another fascinating film showing on MUBI; part of the ‘Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema’ program; a lurid and very entertaining melodrama; interesting to compare with its contemporary Hollywood variant but perhaps best seen as an example of Spanish speaking transnational cinema. The director Tulio Demicheli is from Argentina, Jorge Mistral is Spanish, Miroslava originates in Czechoslovakia, from a Jewish family displaced by WWII. The film itself is a Mexican/Cuban co-production, in which, as we can see from the poster, the location shooting is a major attraction: ‘The exteriors for this movie were filmed in Santiago de Cuba, the beautiful Capital of Oriente.’ It’s a movie that condenses, symbolises and allegorises class oppression under patriarchy, interspersing the drama with some melo in the guise of very suggestive musical/ dance sequences.’ All this and much more is discussed in the podcast below:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Her Man (Tay Garnett, 1930)

A ‘pre-Code’ film set in Havana, probably so lots of drinking could take place during Prohibition,  and based on the Frankie and Johnny song about a prostitute who falls in love with a sailor and kills her pimp(see below). The roving camera in HER MAN challenges many of the pre-conceptions of cinema at the beginning of the sound period. Costs of the Havana footage were split with W. S. Van Dyke’s CUBAN LOVE SONG, with Havana street-scenes of the period remaining a major attraction. In the podcast we discuss the mobile camera, the subject-matter in relation to the Code, how music is mainly restricted to the diegetic, the opening titles, the connection of the comic gags to Garnett’s training with Hal Roach, and the performances of Phillips Holmes, Helen Twelvetrees and Marjorie Rambeau. Many thanks to the Film Foundation for once more offering an opportunity to see such a great restoration.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

An interesting article on how the film ‘cracks the Code’: https://www.film-foundation.org/her-man

The article Richard references  is from Film International and may be read here:

The Fim Foundation’s support materials may be seen here:

The New York Times article José mentions may be read here

This Louis Armstrong singing the song:

A version of the film may be seen here:

José Arroyo

Brian (Jeremy Cooper, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023

A novel that is also work of criticism, BRIAN feels very English to me, kitchen-sinky even – loneliness and alienation enveloped in cold and damp; and whereas the French might have abstracted the material into some heroic philosophical struggle, here the attempt at connection and meaning are almost pointillist, every precise dot adding up to a larger picture; there’s something endearingly Barbara Pym about BRIAN. The story is simple: a middle-aged man who works as a clerk for Camden Council, alone and scared of connection, finds meaning and community in attending the BFI screenings at the South Bank, becomes a film buff, a member of a group, a specialist in Japanese cinema, and a person who goes from controlling every aspect of his life so as to minimise the strange and unknown to someone who dares offer someone else a gift. A beautifully written paean to film-buffery and cinephilia.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 396 – The Equalizer 3

Listen on the players above, Apple PodcastsAudible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Listen to our podcast on The Equalizer 2 here.

Denzel Washington returns for the third and final instalment of the Equalizer trilogy, in which former government assassin Robert McCall devotes his time and skills to avenging for the little guy. This time, he finds himself in Mediterranean Europe, embroiled in a fight to protect a coastal town from terrorisation by the Camorra, the Mafia of southern Italy.

The Equalizer 3 shares the contemplative tone and pervasive sense of loss of its predecessors. Here, there’s a focus on physical infirmity and vulnerability, a gunshot McCall receives early on forcing a long recuperation, slow, careful approaches to walking down stairs, and the use of a cane. Action erupts quickly and violently, emphasised by director Antoine Fuqua’s camera and editing – McCall is wounded, but maintains his ruthlessness and murderous efficiency.

We compare the action and Washington to Rambo: Last Blood and its star, Sylvester Stallone, which took a similarly staccato approach to its action, clearly informed by Stallone’s age and inability to move as gracefully as he used to – this film is doing something similar, but less thuggishly, if no less violently. We question the ease with which moral decisions are made in this world, in which right and wrong are easily distinguished and the involvement of a vigilante is sold as an obvious necessity and benefit; the film’s look, which fails to show off its spectacular location; and some of its writing and contrivances, particularly concerning Dakota Fanning’s character, a CIA analyst contacted by Robert, and the Camorra. And we discuss McCall as a neurodivergent superhero.

The Equalizer 3 is a flawed film with a fair bit of dumbness to overlook, but it is easy to do so when the portrait it paints of local life and close community is so absorbing and inviting, and its star has such presence, warmth, and intelligence. It’s an easy film to recommend, bearing in mind that it’s a work of vigilante fantasy. After all, if Batman’s allowed to take the law into his own hands when the institutions around him fail, why shouldn’t Denzel be? At least he doesn’t pretend not to kill people.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 395 – Passages

Listen on the players above, Apple PodcastsAudible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

José enjoys the examination of contemporary relationships in Ira Sachs’ Passages, a Paris-set romantic drama in which a marriage is disrupted when one partner begins an affair with a friend. Mike thinks that the characters’ problems aren’t real problems and that if the unfaithful partner just grew up then everything would be fine.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Streetwalker/ Trotacalles (Matilde Landeta, Mexico, 1951)

Two sisters, one a prostitute and one a bourgeois housewife, meet accidentally after many years. Turns out the pimp of one is trying to con the other out of her money. Marriage ends up offering no security and the bourgeois also ends up on the street, like her sister. A female perspective on sex and marriage evoking a great mistrust of the social construction of romantic love. Truly radical for its time, in the way that it so clearly positions marriage as equivalent to prostitution, and makes husbands equivalents to pimps. The third film directed by Matilde Landeta, who had to fight the director’s guild in order to be allowed to direct at all, and who would not direct another film after this one for another forty years. A film to see. Currently screening under the rubric of Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema, on MUBI. With Miroslava, Ernesto Alonso and Elda Peralta.

The podcast may be listened to here:

 

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo

Blue Beetle (Angel Manuel Soto, 20230

I was eager to catch this before it left theatres and glad I made the effort (and an effort it was). The only Mexican-American superhero I know of. The film is extremely ambitious, with considerations of class, capitalism, imperialism and ethnicity completely woven into a narrative that is immersed in the US’s Hispanic cultures. References abound from Macario to Calle 13’s Atrevete. It’s very enjoyable and well done if also a bit obvious and overly sentimental about family.

JA

The Beast Must Die (Viñoly Barreto, Argentina, 1952)

THE BEAST MUST DIE (1952) is another fabulous rescue mission from Flicker Alley and The Film Noir Foundation. An adaptation of a detective novel by Cecil Day Lewis – Daniel’s father – under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, the fourth novel in the Strangeways series. The beast is a rich industrialist who beats his wife, abuses his stepchild, and is openly having an affair with his business partner’s wife. He must die because one drunken evening driving with his sister-in-law, a famous actress, he killed a child in a hit and run, and the father, a writer of mystery novels is now out to get him. The film begins as the beast, tellingly named Rattery, imbibes some poison. But who did it? Flashback structure upended by biblical quotations from Ecclesiastes, suspects gathered in a stately home, a novelist and film star as protagonist, a journal as clue, expressionist lighting and fabulous nightmare montages: a superb film. In one of the extras to the DVD, one of  Viñoly Barreto’s sons speaks on how Argentina doesn’t have a national cinematheque or archive; how much of its film heritage has already been lost and even more is in danger. A crime. The novel has also been adapted by Chabrol (Que la bête meure, 1969) and there’s been a recent TV series based on it with Jared Harris as The Beast of the title.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: The Eloquent Peasant (Shadi Abdel Salam, Egypt, 1970)

We podcast on our second Shadi Abdel Salam film, the beautiful Film Foundation restoration of The Eloquent Peasant. The film is a parable, a moral lesson. A peasant is robbed of his cargo by a rich man. Is justice for the powerless possible or are the rich protected by too many vested interests? As relevant a question now as it was in Ancient Times. The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

We have done two previous podcasts on Shadi Abdel Salam’s Al Momia: The Night of Counting the Stars, which the film foundation screened in conjunction with The Eloquent Peasant. 

 

These podcasts may be listened to here:

The Youssef Chahine Podcast No. 35: An Egyptian Perspective on Al-Momia/ The Night of Counting The Years

The Youssef Chahine Podcast No. 33: Al-mummia/ The Night of Counting The Years (Shadi Abdel Salam, Egypt, 1969)

 

You can see how striking the restoration is from some of these screengrabs:

The film foundation page has wonderful supporting materials on the film, and they may be accessed here.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Deep Crimson/ Profundo carmesí (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico, 1996)

 

This is our eighth podcast on Arturo Ripstein films. Increased exposure has only increased our appreciation; and Deep Crimson seems the best of the films we’ve seen. Based on a true story that was then made into a film by Leonard Kastle in 1970 — The Honeymoon KillersDeep Crimson has a very particular tone, black and funny, encased in the structures of feelings of 1940s popular romances, and edging them towards the savage and brutal as the film unfurls. It’s an extraordinary work. Why it’s so funny and so disturbing is the subject of the podcast.

 

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The film’s opening, a woman enmeshed in romance.

A visit to Hold Back the Dawn, with Boyer and Olivia de Havilland

A wedding in a cemetery

Precise and telling compositions

Our previous podcasts on Arturo Ripstein films may be accessed here:

El Castillo de la pureza/ Castle Of Purity (1972)

EL SANTO OFICIO/ THE HOLY OFFICE / THE HOLY INQUISITION (1974)

La viuda negra/ The Black Widow (1977)

The Place Without Limits/ El lugar sin limites (1978)

Cadena perpetua/ Life Sentence (1979)

El Imperio de la fortuna/ The Realm of Fortune (1986)

José Arroyo

 

Thinking Aloud About Film: Bushman (David Schickele, 1971)

BUSHMAN (David Schickele, 1971) is a real discovery, already the subject of much excitement when shown at Ritrovato in Bologna, and now made available to us through Cinema Re-Discovered this coming weekend, where it is being screened Sunday 30th of July at 18.30. Set in 1968, in the context of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, with the Nigerian Civil War in its second year, the film centres around the experiences of Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Opokam), a Nigerian graduate student also teaching at San Francisco State College, the cross-cultural experiences he’s afforded, and the different types of racism he encounters. In the accompanying podcast, we discuss the film’s beauty, its politics, how it fluidly seems to condense so many of the burning issues in Black American cinema in the following four decades, and the important shifts in register near the film’s end. A really great film, so far little known, in a superb restoration by Milestone Films,  that’s bound to encourage much discussion, as indeed it did with us.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The Cinema Re-Discovered Program may be seen below and also accessed here: wat_cr2023_a4_schedule_online_web (1)

For those interested, this is an interesting article on a film David Schickeles made earlier for, and during his time at, the Peace Corps:

 

Making David Schickele’s (Nigeria) Peace Corps film “Give Me A Riddle”

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies 393: Barbie

Listen on the players above, Apple PodcastsAudible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

After a few months off, during which Mike has forgotten how to record podcasts – sorry about the audio early on – we’re back for Barbenheimer weekend. Never mind your Infinity Wars, this is the crossover they said would never happen, and the clash of tone between joy-of-pink Barbie and sin-of-man Oppenheimer, coincidentally released during the same weekend, has unexpectedly and charmingly reignited the public’s interest in going to the pictures. The question isn’t, “which one will you see?”, it’s, “which one will you see first?”

And we picked Barbie. Our screening was packed with young girls typically unaddressed by the biggest releases, and this film does a great job of correcting that. José describes its treatment of patriarchy as a fact as one of the most radical things he’s seen, and it’s a sign of where we are culturally that it can be, and that every joke and piece of commentary the film builds upon it is implicitly understood by an audience the film treats as intelligent.

Yes, Barbie‘s a toy advert. Yes, you’re always aware that every joke at the expense of Mattel and Barbie’s cultural footprint has the company’s stamp of approval. Yes, Mike brings up Jean Baudrillard. (He’s such a Ken at times.) But it’s also witty, ironic, self-knowing, and really good fun.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Thinking Aloud About Film: Cinema Rediscovered 2023

Cinema Rediscovered, which takes place annually in Bristol, is one of the most exciting events in the cinema calendar year. In the accompanying podcast, Richard discusses the various strands of the program (Reframing Film; Restored and Re-discovered; Look Who’s Back — The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist; Dowb abd Dirty: American D.IY, Restored) and José offers tips on many of the various films that make up the program. There are many reasons to visit Bristol, and attending this festival is tops of the list.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The program may be seen below and also accessed here: wat_cr2023_a4_schedule_online_web (1)

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: The Killers (1946 & 1964)

Many thanks once more to the Film Foundation for making available two gorgeous restorations of the 1946 and 1964 versions of The Killers. It was a real pleasure to be able to see them side by side and we’re also very appreciative of all the support documents that the film foundation provides, including very illuminating interviews with Eddie Muller, Imogen Sara Smith and Cassandra Moore and which you can explore  here:

https://delphiquest.com/film-foundation/restoration-screening-room/

 

In the podcast we compare the two films, a noir and a neo-noir, the 46 version made stars of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. We then compare both to the Tarkovsky 1956 student version of the film, what they use of the Hemingway short story, and what needed to be invented as background.  We discuss why the 1946 continues to fascinate through its Citizen Kane style investigatory structure, its use of music, Woody Bredell’s textured, expressive cinematography, and its depiction of a man driven to death by his love of a woman who constantly lies and who the film shows as unknowable. We discuss the two versions of the 1964 Killers (José prefers the widescreen rather than the 1.33), the casting of the major characters, including Ronald Reagan, and a certain attitudinal cool that the film embodies and evokes.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

 

The BBC documentary on the film: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p05c3yjk

The Hemingway Short Story can be accessed here: The Killers

The Tarkovsky student film of The Killers is on You Tube:

José Arroyo

THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY (Robert Siodmak, 1945)

HE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY is another interesting Siodmak, his second collaboration with producer Joan Harrison, not as successful as PHANTOM LADY. Still, it’s a fascinating film, influenced by MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, bordering on the Gothic, tinged with perversity and marred by a duplicitous ending no one is meant to believe. Milquetoasty George Sanders lives with two sisters in the vast house that is all the remains of the family fortune. Ella Raines appears in town and threatens the homely menage. Will George choose his sisters or his lover? Geraldine Fitzgerald is entertainingly chilling as George Sanders’ possessive sister; Angela Lansbury’s mother, Moyna MacGill, is the other sister, well-meaning and adorably flighty. A roving camera and superb mise-en-scène. A film that seems less than the sum of its parts but that nonetheless lingers in the mind the way other, more seamless films, don’t. Travis Banton designed the outfits.

Thinking Aloud About Film: Overview of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023

 

I was unable to attend this year’s Ritrovato; a pity as the programming is often a preview of films that subsequently screen elsewhere and inevitably become highlights of the year. Luckily, Richard was there to report on what he saw he saw.

In the podcast, we discuss the following sections of the festival:The Time Machine: 1923, where films from a century ago get highlighted; The Space Machine section, particularly the Cinema Libero selections, of which Richard was able to see every feature film. We discuss the New Film Foundation Restorations, of which Richard highlights BUSHMAN ( David Schickele, 1981) and TIME OF THE HEATHEN(Peter Kass, 1961) . BUSHMAN will be shown at Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered this year. Richard also highlights two Iranian films by Bharam Beyzaie, director of DOWNPOUR Like with  CHESS IN THE WIND, programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht describes THE STRANGER AND THE FOG and THE BALLAD OF TARA as a holy grail of Iranian Cinema, pre-revolutionary films thought lost and now  restored.

Richard touches on some of the restorations he saw: MAN’S CASTLE (Frank Borzage),  A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL,  CROSS OF IRON, CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY (Zoltan Korda); MARRIAGE CIRCLE  and  LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN,  the latter with a score by Timothy Brock and shown with a  full orchestra; Stella Dallas, with Stephen Horne’s orchestral score and an equally  wonderful orchestra.

We discuss the Anna Magnani section; the Rouben Mamoulian section, which Richard views as an opportunity to see the films at their best rather than any revelations; The Michael Powell section, mostly Powell without Pressburger. Powell himself said he didn’t think his reputation would survive many more discoveries of his quota quickies. Has it?

We also discuss  being at the festival this year: The pros and cons of seeing films on the Square; the system of advance bookings; the faults and virtues of the introductions; and whether Ritrovato should continue the digital programming it began during COVID.

The overall assessment is that it was a wonderful festival; that the catalogue itself is a tremendous work of scholarship and should be acknowledged as such; and I look forward to once more be present at it next year,

The podcast may be listened to here:

 

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

 

There’s a serial killer on the loose in a small New England Town. He’s after women who are ‘imperfect’, 40’s code for disability. Helen (Dorothy McGuire,) has been mute since she saw her parents burn alive in a fire as a child. She’s now the carer of a cantankerous old lady (Ethel Barrymore) who is living in a huge house full of tiger skins, taxidermy and other remnants of dead animals on the outskirts of town with her stepson (George Brent), her son (Gordon Oliver), an alcoholic cook (Elsa Lanchester) and a full time nurse (Sarah Allgood). Blanche (Rhonda Fleming), who first had an affair with one son and is now fooling around with the other, also seems to be living in the house. Why is not clear. But does she have long to live? There’s thunder and lighting, a roving camera that make the most of shadows cast, candles blowing out, a cellar full of cobwebs and murderous thoughts; flashbacks, canted angles, plays on point-of-view. Will Helen survive the night and get married to the Doctor (Kent Smith) who  loves her but who is away tending patients and about whom she has nightmares of not being able to voice ‘I do’ at their wedding?. Will she be able to scream? Will anyone hear her? THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE is a visually dazzling and hugely entertaining Gothic/Serial Killer film, and surely one of Siodmak’s greatest achievements in direction.

 BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: MY DREAM OF BIBERKOPF’S DREAM BY ALFRED DÖBLIN – AN EPILOGUE: THE DEATH OF A CHILD AND THE BIRTH OF A WORTHWHILE HUMAN BEING

 

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: MY DREAM OF BIBERKOPF’S DREAM BY ALFRED DÖBLIN – AN EPILOGUE: THE DEATH OF A CHILD AND THE BIRTH OF A WORTHWHILE HUMAN BEING

The epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz is a two-hour work, one of the greatest endings to any audio-visual work I’ve ever seen, and done in a very different vein to the rest of the series. Franz has been arrested for the murder of Mieze, has gone into a catatonic stupor, is tied up and force-fed in an Insane Asylum, and is drifting in and out of consciousness. This is the motivation for the narrative to go in a more experimental and poetic vein. Is Franz in purgatory? There are two angels watching over him as he walks over the ruins of his past, trying to make sense of the life he’s led, his attempts at being ‘decent’, the circumstances that prevented him from being so. The dream logic of the episode permits an intersection of theatre/film/ television; a narrative that can flit omnisciently from past to future, with extraordinary imagery that brings to mind the Holocaust: people as animals in an abattoir, bodies piled up, the infamous striped uniform. It also underlines the moral and ethical dimension of the work: Franz’s murder of Ida, a source of original sin the series constantly returns to, is given another spin. Ida, all broken up, confronts him by her very presence. It wasn’t my fault he says. I didn’t mean to do it. I served my time. He doesn’t seem to get that she’s dead, that doing four years at Tegel doesn’t compensate for a life, certainly not to her. The moral and ethical dimension of the series is sharpened, clarified and offered as a punctuation point to the work. All the different strands of the narrative – the characters, the betrayals, the bible readings, the Whore of Babylon, are brought back; set to an incredible range of music; opera, electronic, pop songs by Elvis, Janis Joplin, Dean Martin – and poeticised for power, clarity, and further reverbarations of meaning.  It’s really extraordinary.

The Epilogue also brings to the fore the queer dimension of the work. Reinhold is in jail, hiding from the law. He’s stolen a purse under a false identity. What safer place – from the law, from the gangs and from Biberkopf – than jail? But he’s fallen in love with a man in prison, and at least in Fassbinder’s accounting, his previous womanising is clearly the result of a repressed homosexuality that love has now brought to light. But that love also brings the fear of its loss. So here we get an intersection of the personal, political, social and sexual. It’s an indication of the kind of work that was being done in the pre-AIDS era that make one speculate on how it might have developed had AIDS, its decimations and the resulting re-marginalisation of queers not happened. Fassbinder’s work makes the New Queer Cinema films that appeared subsequently seem so partial, inward-looking, narrow in focus and in scope; works of mourning and militancy but with a clear separation from the dominant culture, its narratives and its history. This epilogue brings together queer desire as a driving force into the history of a person but also a city and a nation; brings bible and myth into its understanding. Queers are central to the culture. There is no separation. And because of that, there is also no absolution. It’s extraordinarily ambitious, formally daring, in-your-face poetic work such as I’ve rarely seen. I’ll have to see it again, read on it, and think about it some more. It’s a work that makes one want to.

José Arroyo

EPISODE THIRTEEEN OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: THE OUTSIDE AND THE INSIDE AND THE SECRET OF THE FEAR OF THE SECRET

EPISODE THIRTEEEN OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: THE OUTSIDE AND THE INSIDE AND THE SECRET OF THE FEAR OF THE SECRET

 

The beginning of Episode Thirteen is extraordinary: a sad song playing on a victrola; the beautiful caged parakeet fluttering in its cage; Fassbinder in voice-over relaying the destruction of Mieze’s body; and then the image of Franz Biberkopf, next to the Victrola, ‘wearing’ Mieze: her cloche hat, her lipstick, smeared. He’s mourning the loss of Mieze without yet realising the extent of it. She hasn’t just left him as he thinks. And the whole episode will be about Franz finally understanding what the audience already knows: that the woman he loves has been murdered by the man he loves.

When Franz grabs the beautiful innocent parakeet from its cage and kills it with his bare fist — beauty and innocence are no protection against the evils of this world – he gets closer to Reinhold than he realises: not just a narrative structural opposition but a signal that the worst aspects of their character sometimes intersect. The ending, where he finally understands, is a clichéd moment, very theatrical – Franz’s laughter, which seems to go on forever, turns to messy inescapable grief within the shot – beautifully performed in close-up by Günther Laprecht – and very effective. A beautiful and powerful ending to a great episode.

José Arroyo

EPISODE TWELVE OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: THE SERPENT IN THE SOUL OF THE SERPENT

EPISODE TWELVE OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: THE SERPENT IN THE SOUL OF THE SERPENT

Each man kills the thing he loves. Reinhold’s tried once before, by throwing Biberkopf out of the car. But all that Biberkopf lost then is an arm, enough to extinguish most men. But here is that damned Biberkopf, if not quite a Phoenix risen from the ashes, a happy parakeet, prancing around town, with a new girl; a girl who’s happy to wash him, wash for him, keep him. They’re madly in love with each other. It’s driving Reinhold mad.

One of the achievements of this episode is to dramatize such a radical and complex view of love. Biberkop’s a pimp, but one who wants no one other than Mieze, which Mieze finds abnormal. For her part, Mieze is a prostitute, one who occasionally falls in love with her clients, but who ultimately chooses Biberkopf. The accent here is on feeling rather than sexual acts; and what Biberkopf and Mieze feel for each other is shown as pure, spiritual, even though one of Biberkop’s jealous rages resulted in Mieze almost ending up like Ida.

 

Mieze wants to know all about Biberkopf, and insists on meeting his friends, even though he wants to keep them away from her, suspecting their roughness and immorality might somehow contaminate her. His eventual consent is the beginning of this tragedy. That’s where she meets Meck, who will sell them both out, and that’s where Reinhold sees them, is affronted by their happiness and decides to destroy it.

The last half-hour takes place in the countryside. Mieze agrees to let Meck drive her to Bad Freinwalde, where she hopes he will tell her more about Biberkopf. Instead, he delivers her to Reinhold. Mysteriously, the same waitress who served Biberkop and Mieze, serves, and witnesses, now.

The last half hour is staged as a dance of death, with Fassbinder himself bursting into the scene via voiceover reading passages of Ecclesiastes: ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant; and a time to pluck up the planted.’

Mieze resists, Reinhold insists, the push and pull takes place in a woods that seems to get darker as the story advances; the dynamic becomes more dangerous; he shows her his tattoos (one is anvil); she’s seen many before; he’s never forced himself on a woman, says Reinhold, before doing so; does she know who she’s dealing with? Reinhold eventually admits that he’s the one who pushed Biberkopf out of the car; at which point, there’s no turning back; and beautiful, loving Mieze, so pure in loving feeling in spite of her many sins of the body, inevitably ends up a corpse in a misty woods. It’s a tour de force of acting and staging.

José Arroyo