#411: FASSBINDER, Rainer Werner: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

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FASSBINDER, Rainer Werner (Germany)
Berlin Alexanderplatz [1980]
Spine #411
DVD


Rainer Werner Fassbinder's controversial, fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin's great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made forty films. Fassbinder's immersive epic, restored in 2006 and available on DVD in this country for the first time, follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to "become an honest soul" amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.

940 minutes
Color
Monaural
in German
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2007
Director/Writers


From the novel by Alfred Döblin.

Film Rating (0-60):

60

The Extras

The Booklet

Seventy-six page booklet featuring essays by Tom Tykwer, Fassbinder, Thomas Steinfeld, and DP Xaver Schwarzenberger.

Commentary

None.

Documentaries

By Fassbinder Foundation president Juliane Lorenz; one featuring interviews with the cast and crew (on disc six), the other on the restoration.
Documentary

From 1980 Notes on the Making of “Berlin Alexanderplatz.”
Film

Phil Jutzi’s 1931, ninety-minute film of Döblin’s novel, from a screenplay co-written by Döblin himself.
Video interview

With Peter Jelavich, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture.
Extras Rating (0-40):

39

60 + 39 =

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