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

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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.

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/

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)

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

 

A note on Alex de la Iglesia

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I’ve been momentarily distracted from Fassbinder and in the midst of an Alex de la Iglesia mini-binge. There’s a view in Spain that he’s somehow a great filmmaker who’s never made a great film, a contradiction if there is one, but nonetheless plausible, if, in my estimation, wrong. I thought Day of the Beast/ El día de la Bestia (1995) and Common Wealth/ La Comunidad (2000)were great and recent viewings have not changed my view. Muertos de risa (1999) and The Ferpect Crime /El Crimen Ferpecto (2005) have risen in my estimation from my first viewing; 800 Bullets/ 800 balas (2002) is a film every lover of Spaghetti Westerns should see; As Luck Would Have It/ La chispa de la vida (2011) is a kind of remake of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), and I thought it brilliant except for a sentimental and righteous ending that would have made Wilder gag. I loved Elijah Woods in The Oxford Murders (2008) and Terele Pávez and Carmen Maura in Witching and Bitching/ Lasa brujas de Zurramagurdi (2013). Mutant Action/ Acción Mutante (1993), with all its imperfections and more than a tinge of misogyny is a splashy announcement of a new sensibility in Spanish cinema (one introduced by Almodóvar). As to Perdita Durango (1997)? Bardem is great; and it’s made from the same source material as Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990)…and it’s got a fantastic homage to Burt Lancaster. But…

 

José Arroyo

EPISODE ELEVEN OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER AND THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE WORM.

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Biberkopf goes to see Reinhold, who’s suspicious. What does he want from a man who’s caused him to lose his arm? It seems Biberkopf wants nothing but Reinhold’s friendship. He loves the man. And that love – non-sexual, rather mysterious, and more than a little bit masochistic – is one of the fascinating things about the series. Reinhold is resentful of Biberkop’s good nature, his physical strength, his social ease – all a skinny stutterer might aspire to: throwing him out of the car was pure impulsive malevolence. Biberkopf’s view is that resentment won’t make his arm grow back so why deny himself a friend? Reinhold wants all Biberkopf is and possesses, and that includes Mieze; and if he can’t get it, he’s happy to destroy it.

In ‘The Anti-Television Film’, the first essay in the pamphlet that accompanies the Criterion box set, Tom Tykwer writes that BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, ‘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 protests against the 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’.

darkness

According to Tykwer, the ‘night shots, which were obviously composed for the big screen and a sensitive film emulsion, were watered down into a faint, flat, grey-black blur on most of the German Telefunken TV sets available at the time’. They are fascinatingly dark, even in the restored version, and the work being shot on 16 mm, which makes the focus soft, and brings a faded quality to the image, adds a historic  quality to the image, like photographs turned yellow with age.

Focus

But it’s important also to remember that what undoubtedly enraged German viewers forty years ago, is something most likely to enrage viewers today: That crime is presented as a viable option not only to survive physically but to preserve one’s dignity; that Biberkopf is a pimp; that the film creates a view of love that encompasses loving more than one person at a time, and whilst selling sex for money; that Biberkopf loses control and almost kills Mieze, just as he did Ida, and she nonetheless, with all her bruises still fresh, pronounces her love for him. These are not conventional views of relationships, friendships, feelings, motivations for actions, or ways of conveying them.

Mieze’s Scream

Mieze’s scream, when she believes Biberkopf doesn’t love her and is out to sell her to Reinhold, is theatrical in its performance, staging and  duration – I’ve seen camp imitations of that moment by friends – yet remains a startling and effective scene in the film. Indeed, it’s a startling episode in what remains a radical conjunction of the intervention of film and television into public discourse.

José Arroyo

 

 

Thinking Aloud About Film: Comrades (Bill Douglas, UK, 1986)

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In the accompanying podcast, we discuss Bill Douglas’ fourth and final film, COMRADES, very different from his earlier trilogy: A three-hour-long epic of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, a group of early 19th-century agricultural workers who band together to unite against the lowering of their wages, form The Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, an early form of trade union, campaign against rich landowners, end up on trial on a spurious charge — swearing an illegal oath — and get shipped to serve their sentence in Australia.
References to early forms of cinema structure the film’s narrative; the story is told through an account of the pre-history of motion pictures: shadow play, magic lanterns, camera obscura, heliotypes, dioramas.
The story is fascinating because it is a pre-history of the union movement and also pre-Marx.
We discuss how the film becomes less interesting in the second half where the narrative moves to Australia, partly because we lose sight of what happens in Britain: the rallying, the support, the organising. In Australia, the Tolpuddle martyrs and indigenous people are seen to share an experience of oppression. But we also see the limits of this, how some of the white oppressed themselves become oppressors as soon as they get a little power.
We also discuss how the FILM might be both an unwieldy mess and a very great film. What is beautiful about this movie is the way Douglas films working class people and landscape. There’s a real tension between the narrative and the poetic. The storytelling is tortured. Interesting to compare with MY WAY HOME, in which the Scottish section seemed stronger than the last part where he goes into the army and abroad. At it’s best, the film brings to mind Chahine’s THE LAND. At its worst, it feels uncompromising and a little bit self-indulgent.
The film has a very great cast with famous actors playing the upper classes (Robert Stephens, James Fox, Vanessa Redgrave) and then unknown actors playing the workers (Imelda Staunton, Keith Allen, Phil Davies).Barbara Windsor, falls somewhere in between and offers a wonderful turn.
England is shown as inhospitable, unfair, unjust. It’s a real condemnation.

 

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

Those interested may find a good background article on Comrades here: https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/about/bills-films/comrades/

The  Bill Douglas article about the pre-cinema stuff in the film that Richard references in the podcsat may be accessed here:  https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/about/bills-films/a-lanternist-and-his-comrades-by-bill-douglas/

The film is available to buy on BFI blu ray,  and is also available for rent on BFI Player and  on Amazon Prime in a very good print.

 

José Arroyo

Confusion by Stefan Zweig

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Finished reading Stefan Zweig’s CONFUSION last night. It’s a title that never cropped up in those days when I tried to read every novel I could find on the subject of homosexuality, perhaps because the author himself was heterosexual, or maybe because it was written in German. Yet, it is surprising that a novella on the subject, from 1927, by one of the most popular and important authors of the day, simply didn’t figure, at least in my particular context.

Zweig has a particular style, one as distinct as a 40s melodrama and as easy to parody as the Queen Mother’s thank you letters. It’s easy to reject but very beautiful and powerful if one lets oneself be taken over by it.

In CONFUSION and old professor at the end of his career looks over his Fettschrift and notes that it covers even the most minor aspect of his bibliography but bears no trace of the most important person in his life. As a young man he happened upon a lecture on English Literature that so enraptured him that it changed his life. He fell in love with the lecturer’s mind, gave over his life to helping him put those thoughts on paper, and was vulnerable to the older man’s every word and gesture, seeking approval. The confusion arises because the older man is interested in more than the young man’s mind. This finally comes to a head, when after a series of events, the young man sleeps with the older man’s wife and is so ashamed he gets ready to leave. Before he leaves however, the older man gives him an explanation for all the mixed signals and what they signified.

Near the end Zweig offers a dramatic condensation of all the ways homosexuals were oppressed in the period: blackmail, police raids, furtive and dangerous assignations etc. There’s a class bias in those views of sailors and workmen, but it remains sympathetic and powerful. And the last line, where the once young man, now a distinguished and retired professor, looks happily over his career, his life, his wife and children but notes of the older man, ‘I have never loved anyone more,’ is to me incredible in a novel from 1927.

Many thanks to Dan Callahan for bringing it to my attention.

 

José Arroyo

EPISODE TEN OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: LONELINESS OPENS CRACKS OF MADNESS EVEN IN THE WALLS

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EPISODE TEN OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: LONELINESS OPENS CRACKS OF MADNESS EVEN IN THE WALLS

 

Fassbinder sub-titled BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: ‘A Film in 13 Parts With an Epilogue’, and I’m now beginning to realise that this is not just some aggrandising claim for the series. Certainly, as his work in EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY or WORLD ON A WIRE demonstrate, Fassbinder embraced the medium of television, worked easily in it, and knew how to use its forms. I finally clued in to how BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is different – and I’m a real dummy; it took me a while; this is the tenth episode – when the title of the episode appeared almost exactly halfway through rather than, as is usual, near the beginning. For a while I thought my attention had lapsed and I’d missed it. And then it struck me that the consistency of structure from episode to episode that one expects of TV series was missing here. Episodes began differently, sometimes ended abruptly. There are a series of settings that get revisited (Max’s bar, the newsagents in the tube, Franz’s flat, etc.) but each episode can go in wildly varying directions. What is consistent is that there is a linear narrative, sometimes accompanied by almost incantatory flashbacks, such as the murder of Ida, and that that is accompanied with an underlaying of synchronic elements (songs, passages from the bible, the politics of the day, news headlines) to contextualise this particular story at a very specific historical moment: to evoke ‘the structure of feeling’ of a specific historical moment in the telling of this story.

This is a tragic and moving episode whose affect comes from an undercutting of expectations: Mieze wants to give him a baby but can’t so arranges for Eva to do so; Franz is obsessed with how the loss of his arm is the loss of his manhood but the only thing that seems to be working for him is his dick; he’s found love but is asked to give up his friend Willy, politics, and alcohol, i.e give up what has so far made life bearable; Mieze is in love with him and willing to ‘work’ for him; his tragedy is he’s now her pimp but he loves her so much he can’t bear for her to be with anyone else. The episode ends with Franz weeping as Mieze goes off with her John, ‘cause a girl’s gotta work.

Jose Arroyo

EPISODE NINE OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: ABOUT THE ETERNITIES BETWEEN THE MANY AND THE FEW

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Berlin Alexanderplatz was not a ratings success and the ninth episode vividly conveys why that is so. Biberkop’s murderous attack on his wife is shown at the beginning and the middle of the episode. In the beginning during a fainting fit as Eva is trying to rationalise why becoming Mieze’s pimp is best for everyone. In the middle, as Fassbinder in voice-over reads the parable of a father’s sacrifice of his son to fulfil the will of God.

The parable of the sacrifice

This is also the episode where Bieberkopf goes to confront Reinhold. Reinhold through him out of the car, tried to kill him, caused the loss of right arm; he’s the reason Bieberkopf is once more a pimp after all his attempts at leading a decent life. Why did Reinhold do it? He really ought to kill him. After all, he’s less than a man now, chicken feed. What’s the use of cripples? Better to do away with them altogether, they both agree. But of course they are both crippled in different ways, and this is the episode that shows how they’re tied together through a bond that is equal parts love and resentment.

The episode also has an extended discussion of the state and of capital, of how workers are exploited and of which system might benefit workers most. Bieberkop goes to a political meeting for lack of anything better to but during the speeches he drifts away into dreams of sex. Besides, he’s no longer a worker, he’s a pimp. Morover, The German Reich is a Republic and anyone who doesn’t believe it will get a bullet through the neck.

One can understand why viewers might nor rush to their TV sets. But it is great.

José Arroyo

EPISODE EIGHT OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: THE SUN WARMS THE SKIN BUT BURNS IT SOMETIMES TOO.

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EPISODE EIGHT OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: THE SUN WARMS THE SKIN BUT BURNS IT SOMETIMES TOO.

 

Biberkopf had a lot to learn about life. He thinks a man who’s lost an arm, particularly a right arm is done for. But he’s got to make a living and he’s vowed to go straight. His business dealings are all in disarray. He’s in discussions with Willy (Fritz Schediwy) about fencing low profile stolen goods that don’t seem to lead to much.  It’s the  women in his life who seem to be there for him, even though he’s served four years in Tegel for the involuntary slaughter of his wife Ida (Barbara Valentin). Mrs. Bast (Brigitte Mira), the landlady, who witnessed the murder, tries to cheer him up, brings him coffee and offers suggestions as to how he can earn a living with his one arm.

Fran meets Mieze

Eva (Hanna Schygulla)  is going out with Herbert (Roger Fritz) in love with Franz and screwing Johns out of their money with Herbert’s help. Franz was Eva’s pimp once, but he doesn’t want to live off women any more. Yet forces conspire. Eva still desires him. And she arranges to find him a nice girl. She introduces Franz to Mieze, known about town as Sonia but really named Emilie, and they quickly fall in love. Fassbinder shows the sequences where they meet with great tenderness. But the scene by the lake where we are shown the progression of their feelings is filmed in long shot, at a distance. Love is always a problem for Fassbinder and for Döblin. Franz discovers a love letter to Mieze from another man. Is their affair over, or will it go in a new direction? Mieze is in love with him so why can’t she do nice things for him, Eval tells Biberkopf. By the end of the episode Franz and Mieze are in love and he’s basically become her pimp, forces outside his control once more drawing him into a life he’s vowed to leave.

Mieze in love

Another brilliant episode with as complex a view of human relationships as I’ve seen. Biberkofp is like the canary imprisoned by forces outside his control.

José Arroyo

 

EPISODE SEVEN OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ — REMEMBER: AN OATH CAN BE AMPUTATED

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Biberkopf has survived being thrown out of a running car but has lost an arm. How will Pum’s gang react? Will Biberkopf squeal and let everyone know Reinhold did it? What happened to Scilly? Will Biberkopf overcome his loss? How will he make a living? These are some of the questions overhanging this episode.

Biberkopf’s  had bad luck losing an arm but he’s caused bad luck by killing Ida, however unwittingly. He’s lost an arm but he’s no eunuch. What is a man and how to continue to be one in spite of the loss of his arm is a running theme. He considers all kinds of thing but rejects them because they won’t make his arm grow back. Besides, his bad luck is the world’s way of giving someone else a break. The important thing is to be free.

Free Man or No Man At All

What caught my eye in this episode is how Reinhold and Scilly are filmed behind bars and in shadows before eventually coming to light in the end.

The appearance of Udo Kier as a queer billiards player.

Biberkopf decides to go out

The voice-over narration read by Fassbinder about Biberkopf’s need to face the outside world.

The extraordinary red-light-district/ Whore of Baby long sequence (see above). What  could be shown on German television in 1980 remains startling.

The tour de force of acting that is the sequence of Biberkop talking to his beer, filmed mainly in long take. Lamprecht is extraordinary:

José Arroyo

 

 

 

 

EPISODE SIX OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: LOVE HAS ITS PRICE

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The opening scene startles with its use of blue, a colour that pierces the amber/brown colour scheme of the whole series and announces something important. Reinhold wants to offload Trude, his new girlfriend, onto Franz. But Franz refuses. He’s happy with Scilly. Besides which, ‘even broads are human beings and have feelings’. Reinhold will have to learn how to end his own love affairs, which by the end, he does, brutally. But not before betraying Franz.

Cursed be the man

Franz gets lured into a robbery. He’s so nice, easy-going and trusting that he doesn’t have a clue until he’s in the middle of it.  By then, it’s too late, and his attempts at resistance annoy Reinhold to the point that Reinhold throws him out of the getaway car, and Biberkopf gets run over. ‘Cursed be the man who trusted in man, saith Jeremiah, For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall inhabit the parched places, in a salt land, not inhabited. The heart is deceitful and wicked. Who can know it?’

The Fassbinder Stock Company

What caught my eye in this episode was the preponderance of the Fassbinder stock company (Karl Scheydt, Irm Hermann, Lilot Pompey, Ivan Desnay, Volker Spengler, Gunther Kaufmann) and the way lights are reflected in the actors eyes.

There is no cause for despair

Fassbinders’ narrational voice-over, all seemingly taken from Döblin’s novel, are very allegorical and poetic, and read by Fassbinder with a real world-wearyness even though the last line in the episode is , ‘There is no cause for despair’

Lights reflected

José Arroyo

EPISODE FIVE OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: A REAPER WITH THE POWER OF OUR LORD

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Meck (Franz Buchrieser) introduces Biberkopf (Günther Lamprecht) to Pums (Ivan Desny) and there’s the fateful meeting with Reinhold (Gottfried John), stuttering, thin, avoiding alcohol, obsessed with women, and visiting the Salvation Army to try and save himself from what he knows is a compulsion.

The women

This episode has two axes, the unfolding relationship with Reinhold, and then the inter-related trade in women he subtly seduces Biberkopf into. As the episode begins Eva (Hanna Schygulla), his old flame, whom he used to pimp, has been paying his room for him whilst he’s been away. It’s the same room where he stuck down Ida (Barbara Valentin) , where he lived with Lina (Elizabeth Tissenaar), where Reinhold will send him Fränze (Helen Vita) and Cilly (Annemarie Düringer), and where he will offload Fränze onto the newsagent (Klaus Höhne). He no longer wants to be a pimp but he seems to have no trouble trading in women, and gaining some advantage from him, that whilst not monetary, is still material (shoes, furs, services), and where doing a friend a favour begins to thin the line between using women, increasingly oblivious to their feelings, and living off their earnings. Cilly accuses Franz of being a pimp and worse than Reinhold, which he insists he’s not.

First fateful meeting with Reinhold

 

What I found particularly compelling in this episode was the rhyming of the initial meeting with Reinhold to the later meeting just before they go into the Salvation Army, here Fassbinder as narrator, intones: ‘There is a reaper whose name is Death, with power from Almighty God. He now whets the knife all the better to slice. He’ll soon shear his path, then we’ll feel his wrath.’ The viewer knows something about Reinhold that Biberkopf can’t yet even begin to intuit,  and the discrepancy between who Reinhold is and who Reinhold takes him to be, will develop into tragedy

Fassbinder’s narrational interjection

José Arroyo

EPISODE FOUR OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE IN THE DEPTHS OF SILENCE

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Biberkopf (Günther Lamprecht) is drinking himself into a stupor in a new boarding house. He walks around the streets in an alcoholic delirium mistaking a delivery man for a pastor.  In his easy way he makes friends with the caretakers, the Greniers, who tell him all about the other tenants, their jobs and their plights. Baumann (Gerhard Swerenz), another neighbour, and via the wonderful parable of Job, dramatized via a card game, tells Biberkopf that the angels and the devil all want to help Biberkpof, each for their own reasons, but nothing will change until he helps himself. Eva arrives to help him out, tells him she still loves him and will always look out for him, but he doesn’t want to be a pimp and tells her he needs to find his own way out of his plight, which by the end of the episode, he does.

 

What caught my eye in this episode is the way Fassbinder dramatises:

 

  1. Visually the bottles and the sick
  2. He creates a whole world just through having Frau Grenier describe the other people in the building in some detail.

 

The limp-dick episode

3. The ‘limp-dick episode’ that plays out over the solicitor reading out his views on venereal disease resulting from male heterosexual adulterous sex.

4. The parable of job playing cards is brilliantly enacted.

The abbatoir

5.The parable of the slaughterhouse, poetically read by Fassbinder himself, with vintage pictures, is wonderful

The shepherd

6.The parable of the shepherd killing the sheep is a moment of dreamlike theatricality, very effective.

7. The dramatization of the Grenier’s dealings with the gangs, their double-crossings and their arrest. A major chapter in the Döblin novel, here told through others, almost as background, and wonderfully effective as social context and also as a critique of what seems respectable but is not.

8. The narrative tying to gether of seemingly loose ends begun with the poetic voice-over read by Fassbinder (see above). The encounter with with the news-seller where we get the beginning of the diatribe against marriage, and then the reunion with Meck (Franz Buchrieser), a step up towards criminality and a way of finding out what happened to Lina (Elizabeth Trissenaar), and a pessimistic and unsentimental view on relationships.

José Arroyo

EPISODE THREE OF BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: A HAMMER BLOW TO THE HEAD CAN INJURE THE SOUL.

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Franz Biberkopf (Günther Lamprecht) is trying to turn legit and the world won’t let him. He’s had to quit a job selling a Nazi paper because he has to wear the swastika and it’s turned former friends against him. His girlfriend Lina ( Elizabeth Trissenaar)is too religious to let him sell the sex-education booklets. There are ¾ of a million people in Berlin. How are they to live? Lina’s ‘uncle’ Otto (Marquard Bohm) advises them to join him selling shoe-laces door-to-door door-to-door. Franz meets a vulnerable widow. He looks like her husband. They have sex and she gives him money. Franz makes the mistake of telling Otto and sharing the money with him. But Otto betrays him and uses the knowledge Franz unwittingly provided to rob the widow. Betrayed by the people he trusted most, Otto runs away. His girlfriend goes in search of him in the dosshouse he’s staying in  but he doesn’t want to be found. There are some lessons he’d rather not have learned.

What caught my eye in this episode was

  1. The whole brown and amber of the film, even more pronounced in this episode.
  2. The way so many shots include a background separator –store-fronts, internal doors and windows, mirrors, that frames faces or cast shadows.
  3. The way Fassbinder adopts Döblin by including bible passages, songs into the narration itself.
  4. The way intertitles re-direct narration (see below).
  5. the beautiful passage where he goes buy flowers for the widow (see below).

 

Intertitles

Flowers for death

José Arroyo

Episode Two of Berlin Alexanderplatz: How Is One to Live If One Doesn’t Want to Die

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What caught my eye in the extraordinary second episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz is as follows:

The credit sequence. It’s most unusual in that the opening credits acknowledge the contributions of the main pillars of Fassbinder’s team, and this includes not just actors but also camera crew, sound people, production managers, editors etc. The end credits to each episode convey credits more conventionally (see above).

The denunciation of marriage as an institution, which is repeated twice (see above).

The heartfelt anger over Paragraph 175, first expressed by the newsagent then read in a beautifully expressive way by Gunther Lamprecht as the story of a man whose life was ruined because he met his sunshine, the boy who gave his life meaning and made it all worthwhile. Further proof, if needed, that who makes movies matters (see above).

The standoff with the communists in the tube, with the extraordinary shot where they all remain still, a tableau, as the camera circles around them 360 degrees, and Fassbinder in voice-over, speaks poetically, alliteratively in a way that comments on the action and reproduces some of what Döblin in the novel does with sounds, found poems, bits of the bible, songs etc (see above).

José Arroyo