I have now watched seven episodes--this thing is intense, one a day is just right for me! Standing on its own, it's certainly gripping. But I agree with you about the only partial success of the adaptation of the collage effect to the film. (The most Döblinesque thing in that regard is the wonderful visual and aural montage of the opening credits.) Some early reviewers commented critically that Fassbinder had psychologized this modernist novel, THE German modernist novel, and made it into a melodrama. Of course, melodrama was what Fassbinder wanted in film, and it gives the story of Franz Biberkopf a rather different character. The changes he makes in the story are interesting for what they reveal about Fassbinder and what matters to him in the story and, more generally, as a filmmaker.Lemmy Caution wrote:Fassbinder tries a number of techniques in an attempt to convey the collage style of the Doblin novel, but for me these were only partially successful. More often they feel like intrusions or interruptions.
Would be interested to know what others are getting out of Berlin Alexanderplatz and from Franz Biberkopf.
While the collage aspect is, inevitably, reduced, Fassbinder often takes a few lines from Döblin's novel and makes an extended episode of it, or even invents something. One example is Cilly going back to Reinhold after Franz disappears. It is clear in the novel that she is still attracted to Reinhold, and he tells her he has a girl now but will be available next month, but nothing comes of it and she doesn't move in with him, as she does in the film. And she doesn't later see Franz and discover he is alive while she is singing in a cabaret, and then angrily confront Reinhold. She just disappears from the story.
Probably the biggest difference so far is how Fassbinder condenses Book Six of the novel, which deals with the immediate aftermath of the 'accident'. In the book Franz goes through a weeks-long period of despondency. After spending two weeks in a hospital two hours away in Magdeburg, where he is taken by Eva and Herbert so that the Berlin police don't get wind of the incident, he is moved to their place. They don't understand what happened. He tells them nothing. They persist in trying to get to the bottom of the story. Franz is in despair, he weeps a lot: he is a cripple, Herbert describes him as a 'half-corpse'. Only when Eva and Herbert go to his old apartment to get his things, do they learn of his involvement with Pums; the landlady (who is nameless, a cipher in the novel; RWF fleshes her out into a character) tells them that Pums's people have been inquiring about Franz every couple of days--since they have no idea whether he is dead or alive and they have something to fear. It's only then that Herbert and Eva realize that Franz's 'accident' had something to do with Pums. This whole thing is telescoped by Fassbinder. When we see Franz for the first time after the accident he seems in good spirits, reconciled to his condition as an amputee, cheerfully reflecting on his time in prison, and how easy it was to live without women, and then talking nostalgically about his old girlfriend Ida, whom, let us not forget, he beat to death! In Fassbinder's film, Franz's recovery appears to have been painless, a non-event. It is a central episode in the novel.
I find the performance by Günther Lamprecht extraordinary, even more so when you consider that there were only a couple of takes for most of the scenes. The scene in episode seven, where he conducts a conversation with his three glasses of beer and his schnaps is brilliantly done. Gottfried John as Reinhold is no less impressive--surely one of the creepiest characters in cinema!
so a question: Does the book end at the conclusion of Fassbinder's Episode 13 or does it tell what happened to Franz and Reinhold afterwards like Jutzi's film and the end of Fassbinder's Epilogue?
