"Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz".
Conner, Jill
"FASSBINDER: BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ" by JILL Conner P.S. 1
Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City NY October 21, 2007 * January
7, 2008
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As a wave of relative opulence continues to wash over artists and
intellectuals living in post-Cold War Berlin, P.S.1/MoMA chose to
highlight New York as a new, somewhat economically depressed cultural
destination when it launched Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1980). Since its theatrical release at the 1981 Venice
Film Festival, this 15-and-a-half-hour epic, originally aired as a TV
miniseries on Westdeutsche Rundfunk AG, has failed to make the mark it
so richly deserves, mainly due to its convoluted length. So, for P.S.1,
curator Klaus Biesenbach devised a wooden, horseshoe-shaped installation
of 14 separate viewing pods allowing visitors to watch the film in
either sequential or random stages, as well as in permanent loop on a
central big screen. Set in the late 1920s, Berlin Alexanderplatz
perfectly captures the expressionist tone of late Weimar melodrama
through Fassbinder's use of dramatic lighting and his wardrobe of
eccentric costumes, giving rise to a hyperreal picture of this forever
haunted historical moment that ultimately saw the rise of National
Socialism and the fall into WWII.
Alexanderplatz, a large open square and public transport hub in the
center of Berlin, initially began as a humble cattle market named in
honor of a visit by Tsar Alexander I in 1805, which by the late
nineteenth century gained further importance with the construction of
the station of the same name and a nearby public market. By the time of
the Weimar Republic (1919-33), Alexanderplatz had become the center of
the city's new, subversive nightlife. In Fassbinder's film,
sexual perversion not only speaks to the city's fractured identity
but also to the mood of a faltering democratic constitution. Ultimately,
however, this popular working class hangout ended up being snap-frozen
during the Cold War, as part of the Eastern Bloc, for nearly 45 years.
Remaining faithful to Alfred Doblin's 1929 novel, the director
constructs a through-composed narrative that voyeuristically follows the
main character, petty criminal Franz Biberkopf, as he struggles to
survive in the fast-paced Berlin underworld following his release from
jail, first by selling newspapers for the National Socialist Party, then
hawking shoelaces door-to-door, and ultimately getting mixed up with the
local mob. Given that Biberkopf had just spent four years in solitary
confinement for murdering his ex-girlfriend, the viewer tends to remain
ambivalent about this character's seeming bad luck and lack of
moral fortitude, living on instinct yet desperately trying to move
ahead. This originally small-screen representation of Biberkopf's
larger-than-life travails serves to pinpoint Germany's bowed,
muddled state of mind as it tried to move forward under a cloud of
defeat after WWI.
With the weight of history on Fassbinder's side, mainly his
experiences of the student revolutions that rocked West Germany in the
late 1960s, the opportunity to film Doblin's novel also triggered a
directorial urge to exorcise the ghosts of Weimar's past and
present, including, among other catastrophes, the popular election of
Hitler in 1933. Indeed, given the wake of Fassbinder's own history
(and demise), it's difficult to second-guess how he himself would
have behaved had he lived in those turbulent years. The real credit for
the pungency of this epic story in both film and book format belongs
entirely to Doblin, whose prophetic 400-page novel drew heavily on his
experiences first as a journalist and then as a practicing psychiatrist
in the Alexanderplatz area. Channeling his polarized narrative style by
way of Dos Passos and James Joyce, Doblin captured a series of negative
snapshots of changing social relations in the fast-paced industrial
economy of the Weimar Republic that inevitably brought about a rise in
unemployment due to new technology and its dampening effect on manpower.
Ironically, Doblin's account of working class misery and
depravation precisely echoed the tenor of his own terrifying situation
when he was forced to flee Germany as a blacklisted, Jewish author only
four years after the book's publication.
But one cannot help wondering if P.S.1/MoMA's attempt to
revive this former miniseries, then movie, then art installation is
little more than a Kafkaesque exercise in check, check, and double-check
inherent in German (and post-German) self-critique, which is itself a
very Weimarian exercise. As part of the larger two-week "Berlin in
Lights" festival held last November, Carnegie Hall also hosted a
panel involving artists like Thomas Demand, Tacita Dean, Julie Mehretu,
and Klaus Biesenbach. But all that they and moderator Michael Kimmelman
did was endlessly gripe about New York and how wonderful it was living
in this "beautiful failure," seeing it as a relatively cheap
city without the intellectual drawbacks. As Demand pointed out, Berlin
artists have no need to waste time competing with one another due to the
absence of overarching institutions. The oddest, Doblinian moment of the
seminar occurred when Mehretu claimed that the city's chief appeal
springs from its lack of social diversity, which would be funny if
Berlin wasn't the most diversified German city today. The picture
is fast arising that for all of Berlin's polarized past, the city
still casts a seductive pall over its many future victims.
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