Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Berlin Alexanderplatz / Chapter 2: How Is One To Live If One Doesn’t Want To Die? / Germany / 1980

“…looking at pictures is no good. It ruins a man. It screws him up. It starts with looking at pictures, and later, when you want to, it doesn’t come natural any more.”

So opines Franz Biberkopf at the start of Chapter 2 of Berlin Alexanderplatz, while weighing the pros and cons of entering into the pornography (or “sexual education”) business. He sensibly decides against it and joins up with the National Socialists instead, peddling anti-Semitic newspapers to the disgust of his old Communist friends. Party politics rush into Fassbinder’s film with a vengeance after their total exclusion from the first chapter; Franz is swept up by the rhetoric and promises of the Nazis with a speed that presumably reflects some of the actual disorientation of the late 1920s in Germany. The pyrotechnic style of the introduction is traded here for a cooler Brechtian dramaturgy, suited to an essay in economic determinism (“I’m not going to sing,” Franz says when his friends ask him to join them in “The Internationale,” “I’d rather eat”). Though there are some choice aesthetic moments, including a spectacular 360-degree pan around a still tableau in the middle of a subway station, anticipating The Matrix by almost twenty years.

by Evan Kindley | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
11 Mar 2008 10:28 PM | Comments (2)

Comments / 2 total / Submit Comment

1. Tyler W / 15 March 2008 / 8:38 AM / URL

   The Matrix, eh? INTEREST PIQUED. But seriously, we’re all pulling for you on this one. YOU CAN DO IT. As Fassbinder would no doubt say, “Never give up!” At least that’s the lesson I’ve learned from his films. Never give up.

2. leo / 15 March 2008 / 9:36 AM / URL

   Never give up … until you’re 37.