by Susan Sontag
FASSBINDER SUCCEEDS WHERE Stroheim was thwarted—he has filmed virtually all of a novel. More: he has made a great film of, and one faithful to, a great novel—although if in some Platonic heaven, or haven, of judgments there is a list of the, say, ten greatest novels of the twentieth century, probably the least familiar title on it is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (1878-1957). Stroheim was not allowed to make a film of ten hours. Fassbinder, thanks to the possibility of showing a film in parts, on television, was allowed to make a film of fifteen hours and twenty-one minutes. Inordinate length could hardly assure the successful transposition of a great novel into a great film. But though not a sufficient condition, it is probably a necessary one.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is Fassbinder’s Greed not only in the sense that Fassbinder succeeded in making the long film, the great film of a novel, but also because of the many striking parallels between the plot of Berlin Alexanderplatz and the plot of Greed. For, indeed, the American novel, published in 1899, tells a primitive version of the story related in the German novel, published thirty years later, which has a much thicker texture and greater range. Writing in San Francisco at the end of the last century, the youthful Frank Norris had Zola as a model of a dispassionate “naturalism.” The far more sophisticated Döblin, already in midcareer (he was fifty-one when Berlin Alexanderplatz was published) and writing in the century’s single most creative decade in the arts, had the inspiration (it is said) of Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as the expressive hypernaturalist tendencies in German theatre, film, painting, and photography with which he was familiar. (In 1929, the same year that Berlin Alexanderplatz appeared, Döblin wrote an elegant essay on photography as the preface to a volume of work by the great August Sander.)
A burly, sentimental, naïve, violent man, both innocent and brute, is the protagonist of both novels. Franz Biberkopf is already a murderer when Berlin Alexanderplatz starts—he has just finished serving a sentence of four years for killing the prostitute with whom he lived, Ida. The protagonist of McTeague eventually kills a woman, his wife, Trina. Both novels are anatomies of a city, or part of it: San Francisco’s shoddy Polk Street in Norris’s novel and the Berlin district of workers, whores, and petty criminals in Döblin’s novel are far more than mere background to the hero’s misfortunes. Both novels open with a depiction of the unmated hero afoot and alone in the city—McTeague following his Sunday routine of solitary walk, dinner, and beer; Biberkopf, just discharged from prison, wandering in a daze about the Alexanderplatz. A former car boy in a mine, McTeague has managed to set himself up in San Francisco as a dentist; by the middle of the novel he is forbidden to practice. The ex-pimp Biberkopf tries to earn his living honestly in a series of menial jobs, but when he can no longer work (he loses his right arm), the woman he loves goes on the street to support them.
In both novels, the downfall of the protagonist is not just bad luck or circumstantial, but is engineered by his former best friend—Marcus in McTeague, Reinhold in Berlin Alexanderplatz. And both pairs of friends are studies in contrasts. McTeague is inarticulate; Marcus is hyperverbal—a budding political boss, spouting the clichés of reactionary populism. Biberkopf, who has vowed, on coming out of prison, to go straight, is not inarticulate; Reinhold belongs to a gang of thieves and is a stutterer. The gullible hero is obtusely devoted to the secretly malevolent friend. In Norris’s novel, McTeague inherits—with Marcus’s permission—the girl Marcus has been courting and marries her just as she wins a large sum of money in a lottery; Marcus vows revenge. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Biberkopf inherits—on Reinhold’s urging—a number of Reinhold’s women, and it is when he refuses to discard one ex-girl of Reinhold’s as the next is ready to be passed on to him that Reinhold turns treacherous. It is Marcus who has McTeague deprived of his livelihood and fragile respectability: he reports him to the city authorities for practicing dentistry without having a diploma, and the result is not only destitution but the ruin of his relationship with his already deranged, pathetic wife. It is Reinhold who puts an atrocious end to Biberkopf’s valiant efforts to stay honest, first tricking him into taking part in a burglary and then, during the getaway, pushing him out of the van into the path of a car—but Biberkopf, after the amputation of his arm, is strangely without desire for revenge. When his protector and former lover Eva brings the crippled Biberkopf out of his despair by finding him a woman, Mieze, with whom he falls in love, Reinhold, unable to endure Biberkopf’s happiness, seduces and murders Mieze. Marcus is motivated by envy; Reinhold by an ultimately motiveless malignity. (Fassbinder calls Biberkopf’s forbearance toward Reinhold a kind of “pure,” that is, motiveless, love.)
In McTeague the fatal bond that unites McTeague and Marcus is depicted more summarily. Toward the end of the novel Norris removes his characters from San Francisco: the two men find each other in the desert, the landscape that is the city’s opposite. The last paragraph has McTeague accidentally handcuffed to Marcus (whom he has just killed, in self-defense), in the middle of Death Valley, “stupidly looking around him,” doomed to await death beside the corpse of his enemy/friend. The ending of McTeague is merely dramatic, though wonderfully so. Berlin Alexanderplatz ends as a series of arias on grief, pain, death, and survival. Biberkopf does not kill Reinhold, nor does he die himself. He goes mad after the murder of his beloved Mieze (the most lacerating description of grief I know in literature), is confined to a mental hospital, and when released, a burnt-out case, finally lands his respectable job, as night watchman in a factory. When Reinhold is eventually brought to trial for Mieze’s murder, Biberkopf refuses to testify against him.
Both McTeague and Biberkopf go on savage, character-altering alcoholic binges—McTeague because he feels too little, Biberkopf because he feels too much (remorse, grief, dread). The naïve, virile Biberkopf, not stupid but oddly docile, is capable of tenderness and generosity toward, as well as real love for, Mieze; in contrast to what McTeague can feel for Trina: abject fascination, succeeded by the stupor of habit. Norris denies hulking, pitiable, semi-retarded McTeague a soul; he is repeatedly described as animal-like or primitive. Döblin does not condescend to his hero—who is part Woyzeck, part Job. Biberkopf has a rich, convulsive inner life; indeed, in the course of the novel he acquires more and more understanding, although this is never adequate to events, to the depth or the gruesome specificity of suffering. Döblin’s novel is an educational novel, and a modern Inferno.
In McTeague there is one point of view, one dispassionate voice—selective, summarizing, compressive, photographic. Filming Greed, Stroheim is said to have followed Norris’s novel paragraph by paragraph—one can see how. Berlin Alexanderplatz is as much (or more) for the ear as for the eye. It has a complex method of narration: free-form, encyclopedic, with many layers of narrative, anecdote, and commentary. Döblin cuts from one kind of material to another, often within the same paragraph: documentary evidence, myths, moral tales, literary allusions—in the same way that he shifts between slang and a stylized lyrical language. The principal voice, that of the all-knowing author, is exalted, urgent, anything but dispassionate.
The style of Greed is anti-artificial. Stroheim refused to shoot anything in the studio, insisting on making all of Greed in “natural” locations. More than a half century later, Fassbinder has no need to make a point about realism or about veracity. And it would hardly have been possible to film in the Alexanderplatz, which was annihilated in the bombing of Berlin during World War II. Most of Berlin Alexanderplatz looks as if it were shot in a studio. Fassbinder chooses a broad, familiar stylization: illuminating the principal location, Biberkopf’s room, by a flashing neon sign on the street; shooting often through windows and in mirrors. The extreme of artificiality, or theatricality, is reached in the sequences in the circus-like street of whores, and in most of the two-hour epilogue.
Berlin Alexanderplatz has the distension of a novel, but it is also very theatrical, as are most of Fassbinder’s best films. Fassbinder’s genius was in his ec
lecticism, his extraordinary freedom as an artist: he was not looking for the specifically cinematic, and borrowed freely from theatre. He began as the director of a theatre group in Munich; he directed almost as many plays as movies, and some of his best films are filmed plays, like his own The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Bremen Freedom, or take place mostly in one interior, such as Chinese Roulette and Satan’s Brew. In a 1974 interview Fassbinder described his first years of activity thus: “I produced theatre as if it were film, and directed film as if it were theatre, and did this quite stubbornly.” Where other directors, adapting a novel to a film, would have thought to abridge a scene because it went on too long, and thereby became (as they might fear) static, Fassbinder would persist, and insist. The theatrical-looking style that Fassbinder devised helps him stay close to Döblin’s book.
Apart from the invention of one new character—an all-forgiving mother figure, Biberkopf’s landlady Frau Bast—most of the changes Fassbinder has made in the story simply render the action more compact visually. In the novel Biberkopf does not always live in the same one-room apartment, as he does in the film, and Fassbinder sets events there that in the novel take place elsewhere. For example, in the novel Franz kills Ida at her sister’s place; in the film, the gruesome battering—which we see in repeated, hallucinatory flashback—takes place in Biberkopf’s room, witnessed by Frau Bast. In the novel, Biberkopf doesn’t live with all the women with whom he takes up; in the film each of them, one by one, moves into his place, reinforcing the film’s visual unity, but also making the relationships that precede Biberkopf’s union with Mieze perhaps a bit too cozy. The women seem more whores-with-hearts-of-gold than they do in the book. One last invention: it is hard not to suspect that the canary in a cage Mieze gives Biberkopf (such a gift is just mentioned, once, in Döblin’s novel), which we see Biberkopf doting on, and is often in the shot in scenes that take place in Biberkopf’s room, is a reincarnation of the canary that is McTeague’s most cherished possession, the only thing he salvages from his wrecked domestic felicity, and still by his side “in its little gilt prison” when his doom is sealed in the desert.
Fassbinder’s cinema is full of Biberkopfs—victims of false consciousness. And the material of Berlin Alexanderplatz is prefigured throughout his films, whose recurrent subject is damaged lives and marginal existences—petty criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, immigrant workers, depressed housewives, and overweight workers at the end of their tether. More specifically, the harrowing slaughterhouse scenes in Berlin Alexanderplatz are anticipated by the slaughterhouse sequence in Jail Bait and In a Year of 13 Moons. But Berlin Alexanderplatz is more than a compendium of his main themes. It was the fulfillment—and the origin.
In an article he wrote in March 1980, toward the end of the ten months it took to film Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder declared that he had first read Döblin’s novel when he was fourteen or fifteen, and had dreamed of making it into a film from the beginning of his career. It was the novel of his life—he described how his own fantasies had been impregnated by the novel—and its protagonist was Fassbinder’s elected alter ego. Several heroes of his films were called Franz; and he gave the name Franz Biberkopf to the protagonist of Fox and His Friends, a role he played himself. It is said that Fassbinder would have liked to play Biberkopf. He did not; but he did something equally appropriate. He became Döblin: his is the voice of the narrator. Döblin is omnipresent in his book, commenting and lamenting. And the film has a recurrent voiceover, the voice of the novel, so to speak—and Fassbinder’s. Thus we hear many of the parallel stories, such as the sacrifice of Isaac, related in the novel. Fassbinder preserves the novel’s extravagant ruminating energy without breaking the narrative stride. The ruminating voice is used not as an anti-narrative device, as in Godard’s films, but to intensify the narrative; not to distance us but to make us feel more. The story continues to evolve, in the most direct, affecting way.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is not a meta-film, like Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Hitler, Fassbinder has nothing of Syberberg’s aesthetic of the grandiose, for all the length of Berlin Alexanderplatz, or his reverence for high culture. It is a narrative film, but one that is that long: a film that tells a story, in decors of the period (the late 1920s), with more than a hundred actors (many roles are taken by actors from Fassbinder’s regular troupe) and thousands of extras. A fifty-three-year-old theatre actor who has had minor roles in a few of Fassbinder’s films, Günter Lamprecht, plays Franz Biberkopf. Splendid as are all the actors, particularly Barbara Sukowa as Mieze and Hanna Schygulla as Eva, Lamprecht’s Biberkopf overshadows the others—an intensely moving, expressive, brilliantly varied performance, as good as anything done by Emil Jannings or by Raimu.
Though made possible by television—it is a co-production of German and Italian TV—Berlin Alexanderplatz is not a TV series. A TV series is constructed in “episodes,” which are designed to be seen at an interval—one week being the convention, like the old Saturday afternoon movie serials (Fantômas, The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon). The parts of Berlin Alexanderplatz are not really episodes, strictly speaking, since the film is diminished when seen in this way, spaced out over fourteen weeks (as I saw it for the first time, on Italian TV). Presentation in a movie theatre—five segments of approximately three hours each, over five consecutive weeks—is certainly a better way to see it. Seeing it over three or four days would be far better. The more one can watch over the shortest time works best, exactly as one reads a long novel with maximum pleasure and intensity. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, cinema, that hybrid art, has at last achieved some of the dilatory, open form and accumulative power of the novel by being longer than any film has dared to be—and by being theatrical.
[1983]
A Note on Bunraku
Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal … it is unreal, and yet it is not unreal; it is real, and yet it is not real.
—CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON (1653 - 1725)
IN BUNRAKU THE PLAY is identified, first of all, as a physical object: a text. And the text is sacred—that is, generative. Hence, the grave ceremony that opens each performance: the chief reader holds out the text and bows to it, before setting it down on the low lectern and beginning to read. Bunraku is a theatre that transcends the actor, by multiplying and displacing the sources of dramatic pathos.
The play is acted; that is to say, recited; that is, read. The text (declaimed, sung, chanted, wailed) is punctuated or italicized by music produced by a string instrument, the shamisen. It is also, simultaneously, enacted by piercingly expressive large puppets, half or two-thirds life-size. The enacting of the drama occupies the stage proper, in front of the audience: the wide rectangular space where figures—the puppets and their handlers—move. But the source of the words and the music—the one or more reciters and musicians who sit to the right of the stage on a rostrum—constitutes a parallel performance. The dialogue is not “off,” as in a certain kind of narrative film, but off-center—displaced, given its own expressive and corporeal autonomy.
The drama has a double displacement of emotion, a double scale, a double physical and emotional gait. On the stage proper the leading principle is a kind of anti-hysteria. There is the muteness of the protagonists—who, instead of being living actors, are puppets; there is the impassivity and omnipresence of the humans who make them move. To the joruri reciter, who is not only off-center (from the audience’s point of view) but physically immobile, is given the task of maximal expressiveness. Most of the texts, which consist of narrative and commentary as well as dialogue, are floridly emotional, and the narration may modulate into a lengthy crescendo of sobs and gasps. The figure of the reciter, who acts, as it were, by proxy, on behalf of the puppets, is just one of the devices whereby Bunraku isolates—decomposes, illustrates, transcends, intensifies—what acting is.
The puppet is, in prototype, a supple doll operated by a single person. The invention, in 1734, of a puppet
to be operated by three persons brought the puppet’s emotional and gestural potency to a point never equaled before or since. The Japanese puppet can roll its eyes, raise its eyebrows, smile, clench its fists; it can languish, dress itself, run, convincingly take its own life. No string puppet or hand puppet can perform such complex and detailed actions; and the Bunraku puppets have an ability to move audiences, move them to tears, unmatched in any other puppet tradition.
But apart from widening the emotional range and expressiveness of the puppet (a gain we may or may not choose to identify with “realism”), the fact of multiplying the operators—and, of necessity, putting them onstage with the puppets—decisively shapes and transforms the emotional register of puppet drama. The puppet is literally outnumbered, beleaguered, surrounded. The presence of three outsized handlers endows the puppet’s movements and efforts with a sheen of pathos. The puppets seem helpless, childlike, vulnerable. Yet they also seem sovereign, imperious, in their very smallness and precision and elegance.