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2007 Fall

Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz

Klaus Biesenbach

Rainer Werner Fassbinder during the Berlin Alexanderplatz shoot 1979/80

© Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation

Barbara Sukowa, Günter Lapmrecht

© Karl Reiter

Having completed its debut at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in March 2007, the exhibition Fassbinder: Ber­lin Alexanderplatz now appears at P.S.1. In an excerpt from the exhibition’s catalogue MoMA’s Chief Curator of Media, Klaus Bie­senbach reflects on the unique exhibition dis­play that simultaneously projects all fourteen episodes of the series and presents the epic work from numerous perspectives.

When Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz was first broadcast—in Decem­ber 1980, on the German state-funded TV chan­nel WDR—I watched the first episode as a four­teen-year-old in my parents’ living room. In those days televisions weren’t flat screen, plasma, or high-definition, but big plain boxes with their cathode-ray picture tube protruding convexly into the room. With some sequences in the ear­ly episodes of the series we could actually see little more than the reflection of our living room, lit by a floor lamp, because the dark picture had transformed the screen into a mirror. My parents thought some scenes were too violent for the early pre-Christmas period, and from the second episode on, I watched the series on an old, dis­carded black-and-white set in our basement. Be­cause of this, I have always remembered Berlin Alexanderplatz as a black-and-white film.

Twenty-seven years later, Berlin Alexan­derplatz is now available in a restored version. With the technology we now have at our dis­posal, it is possible to show in color the dark but detailed structure of the images and the nu­ances the way Fassbinder originally conceived them. Sequences whose resolution recalls the translucency of watercolors stand in contrast to opaque, almost impasto-like shots. Smooth col­or transitions, nearly bare of contours or sharp contrasts, alternate with scenes seemingly com­posed of individual “pixels.” But the extraordi­nary form Fassbinder has developed, especially in sequences where he gives free reign to his in­ventive pictorial concept, takes on a quality that suggests resolute artificiality and an alienated, almost caricaturing, comic strip- or fairytale-like, timeless world.

For financial reasons, Berlin Alexanderplatz was shot on customary 16mm film stock, and when the film material was scanned for televi­sion, they did not even use the negative, but rather a positive print. In those days TV tech­nology always altered the lighting to a greater or lesser degree, which made it almost impos­sible to broadcast the film in a way faithful to the original. Fassbinder’s aim of shaping this film down to the most minute artistic and visual de­tail should have been reason enough not to use 16mm film stock. In an interview with Juliane Lorenz, President of the Rainer Werner Fass­binder Foundation, Fassbinder’s cameraman Xaver Schwarzenberger mentions that most of the scenes in Berlin Alexanderplatz were filmed with a silk stocking covering the camera lens. A glance at still photographs taken before and dur­ing the shooting of Berlin Alexanderplatz reveals one of Fassbinder’s image-defining strategies: long stretches of the film do not look as if they have been photographed but look very artificial. There is an immense and significant difference between the frozen stills or photographs of the set and the images in the film. In the way he plays with light, contrast, and focus throughout the film, Fassbinder makes use of artistic ma­nipulations to create the characteristic heighten­ing of effects, especially in the treat­ment of light and spatial volumes.

As early as 1983, American film critic Vincent Canby wrote a paean of praise to the film in The New York Times, with a headline asking if Berlin Alexanderplatz was a “vi­sion of the movies’ future.” Accord­ing to Canby, the film was originally shown in two parts at The Museum of Modern Art and in a single block at Lincoln Center before a small, select audience. For its cinematic release in August 1983, however, he reported that the film had unfor­tunately been cut up into five parts, each lasting three hours, all shown on the same day of the week over five consecutive weeks—a real challenge for viewers. He wonders whether it would be possible for viewers to see Berlin Alexanderplatz in such a way that they would be able to process the film at their own pace and digest its complex contents. Ideally this should be projected in a cinema.

The exhibition Fassbinder: Berlin Alexan­derplatz, which originated in Berlin and traveled to New York, makes it possible for the audience to follow an episode in each of fourteen sepa­rate rooms and to move on to the next or take a break and visit the exhibition again. Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz tries to offer a new pre­sentation form for a unique work of art that is not easy to grasp due to its monumental length and precision of detail. The exhibition of the these dark images by Fassbinder confronts the fleeting, evasive, and ephemeral quality of the moving image with the continuing, simultane­ous presence of a moment in each episode, as well as in the epilogue.

Until recently Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz has been inaccessible to the broad audience due to destroyed and worn-away prints. After enormous financial and tech­nical efforts, largely in part by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, the restored version of the film is now available in its originally con­ceived form. It will be made publicly available on DVD in November 2007 by the Criterion Collec­tion.

The exhibition is accompanied by a cata­logue edited by Klaus Biesenbach, with essays by Susan Sontag and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as well as 570 color film stills, the complete screenplay, biography, bibliography, and filmog­raphy.

Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz is orga­nized for P.S. Contemporary Art Center by Klaus Biesenbach with the valuable assistance of Jenny Schlenzka. The original exhibition design was created by Biesenbach and the D.O.I. The exhibition architecture has been redesigned for P.S.1 by Antoine Guerrero.