Before the tremendous originality of Fassbinder’s epochal film, the only honest response—still—is to gape and stammer. Small wonder that this admirable Criterion edition, albeit packed with supplements, lacks a commentary; the smooth-talking voice normally appointed to signify, with easy-going anecdotes and platitudinous background information, that a classic has been “classified”—sorted, digested, intellectually as well as digitally mastered—must have been struck dumb. Journalists have evinced a similar embarrassment around the film; though never allowed to be at a loss for words, they have channeled their facility elsewhere, into Wiki-dissertations on Alfred Döblin’s homonymous 1927 source novel, or familiar evocations of Weimar Germany, with its brownshirts and cabarets. One may suspect that the diffidence is being carried a bit too far when Dave Kehr, in the New York Times, dismisses Fassbinder’s film in favor of Phil Jutzi’s mawkish ninety-minute 1931 adaptation; or when Ian Buruma, in the New York Review of Books, reduces it to an occasion on which to plead for a new English translation of Döblin’s Dos Passos pastiche, “brilliant and inventive enough to do justice to the text”! But even such aesthetic purblindness may be taken to prove the same point: Berlin Alexanderplatz is a film we don’t yet know how to look at; in this respect, there might be something unpleasant and indeed repellent about the persistent demands it makes on our senses.
The inordinate length of the film (thirteen hour-long episodes with a two-hour epilogue) may suggest that we need the overviews provided by historical context or plot summary to guide us through it, but in fact nothing is less helpful than to superimpose upon the film’s stylistic complexity—which is, after all, the thing to be looked at—the master narratives of History or the Novel. This is not because a historically situated narrative is lacking in Berlin Alexanderplatz—where, on the contrary, it takes the most legible generic form possible, that of melodrama—but because Fassbinder’s cinematic style characteristically works at an off-angle to it. In virtually every image, there appears some perverse element—distracting, irrelevant, boringly emphatic—that refuses to serve the needs of the story, insists instead on leading, however inefficient or even counter-productive, a vehement life of its own. We need, then, less to “place” the film, than to grasp its capacity for unsettling us, and it is by paying attention to these often-annoying interferences that we best do so.
Let me begin with a frequent such interference, the garish neon light that flashes on and off in scene after scene (especially those in Franz’s apartment, where the source of the pink radiance spasmodically bursting through the windows is never clarified). No doubt, this rather crude device produces a visual richness that remains broadly perceptible even on the small television screen for which Berlin Alexanderplatz was made. But it is hard not also to feel that its rapid, regular, mechanical rhythm overwhelms the subtler nuances, slower pace, and more varied actions of the human drama. Under different guises, such literally vibrant pulsation obtrudes nearly everywhere in the film. When we are not seeing it in a rotating fan or a teetering seesaw, fluttering leaves, flickering candles, or flashing lightning, then we are hearing it in sounds of ticking, dripping, buzzing, hammering, tweeting, or typing. Sometimes it is blatant, with each and every episode beginning under the aegis, visual and acoustic, of the chugging wheels of a train. And sometimes it is latent, a figure in the carpet: on the periphery of one scene, we may pick out a beggar’s hand trembling up and down, up and down; in the background of another, we will discern a bird flying back and forth in its cage as if on a timer.
All this can hardly help getting on our nerves, rather as if, while we were trying to read or ruminate, we had developed a throbbing headache, or someone near us wouldn’t stop mindlessly tapping his foot, or clicking a ballpoint. Much as, in episode 7, Franz becomes so disturbed by the ticking of a grandfather clock that he has to stop the pendulum, so we may often find ourselves wishing for an end to the stylistic tics that such ticking typifies. For underneath the full-bodied melodrama of the Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder seems to have set going a strange sort of metronome that makes us experience the film’s length not as a richly novelistic accretion of characters and incidents, but as unalleviated duration, measured by a bare unmelodic beat without end. Detaching us from the narrative, this metronome, for all its quick drumming, is what makes the film feel so unnervingly slow. It dissolves the twists and turns of the plot into a suspense so sheer—because undefined (totally unlike Hitchcock’s)—that we can hardly decide whether it heralds a deadly fate to come, or is itself that fate already at hand.
Merely annoying when it is extrinsic to the drama, the pulsing becomes more unsettling when we find it insinuated into the bodies, gestures, and voices of the persons of the drama, whom it seems, like an alien implant, to robotize from within. Our first shot of Franz introduces him, the very protagonist, less as a character with thoughts and feelings than as a pace. After a cursory head-on close-up, the shot does nothing but track him in profile as he walks—and walks and walks—along the prison courtyard, through accidents of light and shadow against a barely changing brick background. Over a minute long, it is an almost insanely extensive elaboration of a narrative action so minor that it is not even included in the source novel (whose first sentence already presupposes its accomplishment: “He stood in front of the Tegel Prison gate and was free now”). Franz’s long, long walk is no journey to freedom, but rather, it already seems, the start of his subjugation by an enforced, inalterable, inhuman, and deadening repetition.
Franz’s long walk.
That stupefying prospect gets realized often enough in the Alexanderplatz, collapsing it into the kind of film in which “nothing happens.” Betrayed by a fellow peddler, Franz goes on a monumental drinking binge during which he sets about emptying, one after another, crate after crate, an endless supply of identical beer bottles (episode 4). Later, after his girlfriend Mieze disappears, he sits in his apartment in front of a phonograph, playing his favorite song to death (episode 13). Even the ostensibly picaresque variety of jobs he takes in his sworn effort to go straight—selling tie-holders, pornography, the Nazi newspaper, shoelaces—proves balefully monotonous; these quasi-con jobs are not much different from the petty crime and pimping into which they prepare his inevitable relapse. In all his dubious touting, one is particularly struck by the declamatory quality of his speech, whose sing-song cadences give his utterances, from sales pitch to political rant to biblical quotation, the pumping rhythm of nursery rhymes—which he also sometimes declaims. It is as though, by embracing this rhythm, he were trying to comfort himself against the compulsive repetition of which it is, however, another index. (Similarly, during his drinking binge, he rocks himself back and forth in his bed.) Franz’s drone finds an openly noxious counterpart in Reinhold’s stutter, the impediment that the villain of the piece, for his part, desperately seeks to overcome with his machinations. That is what “plot” generally amounts to in Berlin Alexanderplatz (Franz going straight or getting together with Mieze, Reinhold changing girlfriends): a doomed attempt to mute the beat that is at the heart of everything here, destroying sense and soul alike.
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The most disquieting vocal pulsation is Mieze’s scream in episode 11 (“Two Surprises”). Berlin Alexanderplatz does not want for calamities, but this ululation troubles us more than any of them, Mieze’s own murder included. And yet, in the very exorbitance of its intensity, it bears so vague a relation to the story that, though a supremely memorable moment, it is quite naturally forgotten in every précis. Its rather absurd narrative setting, in any case, may remind us more of commedia all’italiana than high tragedy. Smug, simple-minded Franz wishes to give Reinhold, incapable of staying with any woman for long, an object lesson in the value and art of loving relationships. He takes him home and hides him in his bed, where he may secretly observe the enviable picture of domestic happiness to unfold when Mieze returns. But Mieze returns with news Franz has not foreseen: she has met a young man—yes, she’s in love with him! Ferocious with hurt and shame, Franz beats her and throws Reinhold, sheepishly emerging from the covers, out the door. And now, standing alone in the room, Mieze commences her great, harrowing aria: an uncontrollable oscillating shriek that, renewed with every breath she takes, perseveres to what feels like the span of an entire cantata. (It lasts a full minute, an unprecedented length in cinema.) Though the pink neon persists in flashing through the windows, and a birdcage swings violently overhead, there is for once no danger that the background interference will distract from the dramatic action, which simply consists in intensifying such interference exponentially, to the point that it no longer makes sense even to speak of action: the scream has arrested it altogether.
Only a short while before in the same scene, Mieze had wailed under Franz’s brutal blows; he paid no attention to those cries, which hardly could be thought to require an explanation. But this scream terrifies him with a violence all the more dreadful in that it appears to him to be without cause. Huddled with Reinhold at the door and wide-eyed with fright, he demands, “Why are you screaming like that?” We too might pose that question. For Mieze has not screamed like that when Franz was beating her, nor will she scream like that even when Reinhold is about to kill her. We see Mieze in a static long shot in which, like Franz at the beginning, she shows only an inscrutable, soul-concealing profile. The remote visual treatment—Haneke avant la lettre—only further heightens the floating quality of our immediate aural intimacy with the scream itself. In the very genre of transparent feeling that is melodrama, Fassbinder has produced a blatant psychic intensity with no equally obvious corresponding meaning. The film’s expressive high point is, in fact, a passionate reticence; in refusing to show its reasons, the scream multiplies the valences of its painful affectivity all over the place. At once under- and over-motivated, it becomes wildly enigmatic; because nothing directly accounts for it, everything obliquely might.
Mieze’s scream.
No doubt, the discovery of Reinhold in Franz’s bed has set Mieze off. That Franz beat her may only prove that he can’t bear losing her to another man, but that he beat her in front of Reinhold reveals a far more horrible state of affairs in which the real Couple is elsewhere, formed not by her and Franz, as even being battered by him she might still imagine, but by Franz and Reinhold, men who are using her in the no-longer-quite-unconscious gesturing of their love for one another. Does Mieze believe she was about to be swapped between them, the latest piece of goods in the female-trading that, Reinhold has told her earlier, the friends practice together? Would she be then bewailing the structural pain, physical and psychic, suffered by all women in the gender/sex system that subordinates them not only to men, but also to the affective bond between them? Though Mieze has only been introduced in episode 8, her scream has been “waiting to happen” almost from the beginning, as if it were the unthrottled version of a ubiquitous female scream, one previously silenced or curtailed by Franz when it rose to the lips of Ida (about to be beaten to death), Minna (about to be raped) or Cilly (about to be abandoned).
But in giving voice to the long line of his cruelly abused women, Mieze’s scream does something else besides. Agonized, it is also agonizing, inflicting no small part of the screamer’s pain on whoever finds it, as we say, painful to hear. There is no way of reckoning how many men have sobbed in unmanned sympathy with Mieze, finding their own pain revealed in hers, but there is at least one: Franz himself. “You’re screaming the whole house down,” he declares, as if she were realizing his earlier fear that “the roofs might begin to swing and shake … slip down like sand.” Mieze’s scream has brought home to him the pain of his own psychosocial doom—a doom that had been sufficiently indicated to him by the prison, the delinquent milieu, his Zolian alcoholism, and finally his missing limb, but that he had been attempting to elude by, among other stratagems, transposing it onto his women; in his violent or humiliating treatment of them, he could think of himself as the very agent of the pounding fate that cowed him in the rest of his social relations. But now, all of a sudden, he finds himself emitting antiphonal howls as he joins Mieze and the whole chorus of female figures behind her in that “shrieking of women” from which he once observed that a man liked to cut and run.
Franz’s howl.
To halt his own sobbing, he attempts to suffocate Mieze, as if he could silence her as he did the clock. But in the process, he becomes clockwork himself: “Ich! Bring’! Dich! Um!” (“I’ll kill you”), he intones while striking her, a stupid giant beating out his “Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!” There is no escaping the unstoppable pressure of that pulse of which Mieze’s scream offers not only an instance, but also a tragic recognition. The film ends with Franz unleashing a howl that, half manic laugh, half manic sob, is drawn out even longer than Mieze’s. His face, already blocked by the birdcage, gets covered with a succession of end credits in what amounts to a brazen act of tagging: “This image belongs to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.” If a deathly pulsation is at work in Franz’s world, then what has been meant by it, and what has been unmeant, is finally epitomized as the film’s own style, with its maddening flicker of impediments. In the presence of this unsparing style, it is no wonder, if we are not, like Franz, to howl back, that we still shrink from taking its measure.