Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz at P.S.1

If, say, 3:10 to Yuma, based on a 25-page story by Elmore Leonard, lasts just over two hours, how long, then, should be the film adaptation of a 410-page novel? Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, from the 1929 Alfred Doblin novel, constitutes one answer, at an epic 15 1/2 hours. The work was first broadcast in December 1980 in hour-long episodes on German television; it had its American theatrical debut in 1983, shown over two days. A restored print from 2006 was recently shown at MOMA, as well as in this multimedia installation at P.S.1.

The novel relates the tale of ex-pimp Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht), described by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, reviewing the MOMA screening, as "a stout, shambling Weimar Everyman with large appetites and small ambitions." After he reluctantly leaves prison, having served a four-year sentence (!) for beating his prostitute girlfriend to death, his hopes to go straight are frustrated by the disastrous economy and by the treachery of those around him.

Fassbinder explains in a 1980 essay (reprinted in the P.S.1 catalogue along with Susan Sontag's 1983 essay on the film) that the book, despite its dime-novel plot, deeply informed his life and filmmaking. Having dreamed for years of adapting it, he brought to the project all his passion for lighting effects, pacing and emotional intensity, resulting in what is widely held to be a great work. The haunting epilogue, "My Dream of Franz Biberkopf's Dream by Alfred Doblin," includes harrowing scenes of human slaughterhouses that evoke the Holocaust, and features Franz's crucifixion against a backdrop of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, which gives way to a nuclear explosion to the tune of Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity."

How to exhibit a film of such length? For this exhibition, which originated at Berlin's Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, curator Klaus Biesenbach designed a structure with 14 booths arranged around a central courtyardlike space that is meant to echo the Berlin backyards in which parts of the film are set. Each booth seated four and was outfitted with a television that screened an individual episode. In the central space, all the videos could be seen at once in mirror image. This approach had the merit of allowing visitors to view the film in whatever number of visits they liked, since one ticket allowed repeated entry. (Sontag suggests that best would be to see it over the shortest time possible, "exactly as one reads a long novel with maximum pleasure and intensity.") Unfortunately there was considerable sound bleed between the cramped and unaccommodating booths, so that a single screen was effectively accompanied by 14 soundtracks. If this were an installation piece, it would rank as an elephantine and slightly cracked homage to the filmmaker; as an accommodation of museum-goers it's a mixed success.

A larger screen elsewhere in the show allowed a more theater-like viewing on a comfortable couch. Dozens of set photographs and film stills hung at eye level throughout several galleries, accompanied by several monitors on which were looped key scenes (with surprisingly poor sound synchronization), along with Fassbinder's storyboard, an original copy of the novel and audio recordings of Fassbinder dictating the script. The 664-page catalogue includes a whopping 400+ pages of film stills.

Incidentally, the restored version is also now available on DVD from the Criterion Collection, allowing fans to consume the product in something like the way it was originally viewed, which Scott suggests is "arguably the more authentic viewing experience."

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