Tag Archives: Credit Sequence

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

May 12, 2023UncategorizedBerlin Alexanderplatz, Credit Sequence, Gunther Lamprecht, How is One to Live if One Doesn't Want to Die, Rainer Werner FassbinderNotesonFilm1

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

Saul Bass Opening Credits for Bunny Lake Is Missing (0tto Preminger, 1965)

November 22, 2020UncategorizedBunny Lake is Missing, Credit Sequence, Otto Preminger, Saul BassNotesonFilm1

The Significance of the Credits in Rope of Sand (William Dieterle, USA, 1949)

April 9, 2020UncategorizedCredit Sequence, Film Worlds, Rope of Sand, The Signficance of Burt Lancaster´s careerNotesonFilm1

The significance of the credits:

When I saw the above at the opening of Rope of Sand (1949), I immediately assumed I´d be watching a Warners film. That´s where the combination of Henreid, Rains and Lorre would normally be seen in a 40s films, as you might recognise from Casablanca. But it´s not: Rope of Sand is a Paramount film.

This led to two thoughts. The first is that in all the current talk of ‘world-building’ in cinema we should recognised that the studio system offered a short-cut to such worlds. Of course, in a sense, each film creates its own world, like but unlike hours. Yet there´s also a sense that an MGM world is very different in the 40s from a Paramount or Universal one. And it´s not just that they had their own set of distinctive designers, cameramen, processing etc. but also that they had a distinctive grouping of supporting players that peopled those sets, wore those customs, took the different types of light in different ways. Lorre in the 40s was Warners just as William Demarest was Paramount

The second thought is that Burt Lancaster´s career is key to an understanding of changes in Hollywood brought on by the 1948´s Paramount decree and the coming of television. He was under contract to Hall Wallis at Paramount from 1946, became a star in his first picture — The Killers –at the height of the studio system. Yet in the years from 1946 to 1951, he starred in Paramount Pictures through his Wallis Contract (Desert Fury, 1947; Variety Girl, 1947, I Walk Alone, 1947; Sorry Wrong Number, 1948; Rope of Sand, 1949) in Universal Pictures through his Mark Hellinger contract (The Killers,1946;, Brute Force, 1947;, All My Sons, 1948; Criss Cross, 1949). He also starred for Warner Brothers (The Flame and the Arrow, 1950; Twentieth Century Fox Films (Mister 880, 1950);MGM Vengeance Valley, 1951); Columbia (Ten Tall Men). And he´d already produced his own film, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948).

Thus in five short years, Burt Lancaster had inhabited the various world associated with most of the major studios and created his own production company, something unthinkable just a few years before. Starring for different studios would become the norm for stars in the following decades but by then, even as movies kept being produced, often by the stars themselves, studios slowly ceased to connote distinctive´worlds’ .

José Arroyo