Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

bunko-paniczny Easy! Or, it was for me. The first time I saw this film, was in New York, before the DVD was released. I was enchanted and mesmerized from the first reel! Admittedly, I am a Fassbinder fanatic, but I don't think the film requires the viewer to be one? However, in my opinion, it is a bit like watching a 16 hour amalgam of every Fassbinder film rolled into one gigantic series (there are bits reminiscent of his early work, Katzelmacher, etc. The mid period Sirk inspired "sturmdramas" The Merchant of Four Seasons, Fear Eats the Soul and even a hint at what his last film Querelle would be like. It's all there!). When they played the full series in Manhattan (I think you could watch two hours of it at a time?)...it played a few weeks w/other Fassbinder films...but I was there to watch THIS! I could have watched eight hours of it a day! The first day I went with my girlfriend at the time and a friend of mine. After the first part, my girlfriend dropped out (we broke up about a week after, I don't know if this filmic marathon (& my Fassbinder obsession) played a part? If it did?...Fassbinder won! and I'd do it again?). Naturally, she refused to go with me to the second part-but my friend hung in there-so we went. It was about an hour and a half into this viewing that my friend dropped out...people were dropping like flies, at the mercy of this magnum opus! I was still enchanted and could have watched another full eight hours! Well, my friends, I sat in that theater alone and watched the rest of the movie all by myself. I never found the film boring or dull, lagging or drab in any way. I simply watched, could not STOP watching; mesmerized and absorbed in the brilliance of this work. I even cried at the end...poor, poor Franz Biberkopf. I only mention the above because: this is clearly NOT a film for everyone. Hardly... I was elated when I heard Criterion was going to release this cinematic marvel to DVD. Like a sick junkie I was: shaking, sweating and fidgety while I anticipated the release of this new restoration of the original 16mm print(!), the drool fell and hung from my lips as I waited for "the day". Finally, it was released...it had a steep price tag, but like any junkie I was willing to rob and steal to get my 'fix'! Folks, it did NOT disappoint! Criterion did a brilliant, monumental...a miraculous job of restoring this film. In fact, I barely recognized it as the film I watched in the theater...it looked THAT much better! The one I saw was gray, washed out and kinda muddy looking. But this...wow! The colors actually pop...the focus is crystal clear...it's never TOO dark (as I remember parts were), it is miraculous what they have done! And you should ALL consider yourselves VERY lucky to have this re-shined gem to view and review. I highly doubt there will be a Fassbinder retrospective anytime soon? This is the next best thing! For those who like film and novels, this may be just the 'fix' you're looking for? Because, to me anyway, I always felt this the best combination of the two art forms. It is a film, a TV series, certainly and doesn't cheat you out of a cinematic experience and yet you can get just as absorbed and involved in the characters and their lives as you would a really fine novel. This is just plain brilliant film making! Not a wrong note or shot or performance in the whole thing: IN ALL 16 hours! That alone boggles the mind, but that Fassbinder (a mere man-?) was also able to create, construct and organize this masterpiece; on a television budget, at break-neck speed and on 16mm no less is enough to blow what's left of that mind! To me, there is no question: if there are geniuses of modern cinema? Fassbinder (or his 'spirit'anyway?) sits at the top of the pile! So...Do yourselves a favor and watch this film...whether you get as 'hooked' on it as I did. Gobbling the thing up, biting, ripping off and eating whole parts as you drool from your lips like some obese monster at Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas; or throw the whole thing into a tuna can like Billie Holiday, cook it up, suck it up in a giant syringe and inject the full series directly into your veins, like a sick slobbering junkie drooling over his fix in a shooting gallery; watching it in one sitting...or whether you slowly savor every nuance, brilliant shot,camera movement, Fassbinder's hypnotic narration, the spellbinding story and brilliant top notch acting: like a gourmet food critic or sniffing, swilling and looking at it through the sun like some high brow fine wine taster. No matter how you watch it...watch it! It's well worth the time and money... I'm telling you you're not gonna find anything this good on TV or the cinema these days...not a chance!

jazzy11 Watching Berlin Alexanderplatz was the pursuit of a week and a half, after which I read James Joyce's "Ulysses," all the Psalms, a selected portion of "War and Peace," and a biography of Robert Wiene (who directed "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"), all of which heavily inform this cinematic novel, a true German gem.While you may have been told that this is a love story, it is more apt to say that it is a "curiosity story," stressing the classic dichotomoy of Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in art. Fassbinder's narrative bristles with the dissonance of a Schoenberg composition, jumbling Franz and Reinhold's investigation of love with an undermentioned aspect of this film, its subtle portrayal of the roots of the German Brutalist ascetic.With almost 100 roles, "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is like a confession from Fassbinder to the world, showing us how many ways the human experience can unfold.

Rafael Salin "BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ" (Fassbinder, Germany,1980). "We are too miserable for be unhappy".Charles Bukowsky The first thing is that person, that comes out from about four years prison: He is Franz Biberkopf (A Superb!!! Günter Lamprecht). He has now to continue in the outside word jail, but now alone. He holds in the chest a guilty wound which seeks to cover with alcohol, prostitutes and disposable women from another main character Reinhold Hoffman (Gottfried John) a psychopath guy with a tin layer of lamb. Fassbinder was fascinated with this two characters, Franz and Reinhold, form Alfred Döbling's novel about the same name, manly because by their latent homosexuality, which was clearly the only explanation of a friendship highly unlikely in other circumstances. Franz Biberkopf murdered his woman, almost without notice, at least the first blow. She cried; face him, hoping that he could do something, in the positive side of a couple mood. But Franz is far away of the emotional side of the brain, and cannot continue shaving himself, with one of those blades that seemed swords of cavalry, and as in a reflex movement, he cut a pit what it cannot handle, like a dermal bump. That act of despicable impulsively, transforms him into a paralyzed being by the possibility of the evil within. Germany is just through an economical crisis after of the First World War. There is a great economic depression, and a lonely man is only under his skin. It is an animal sentimental, but at the same time explosives. In his life stop by different women, but remains, as an angel love, Eva (Hanna Schygulla), which appear like a friend that is in love with him, but is living with a wealthy man. The other woman the he is love with is Mieze (Emilie "Mieze" Karsunke, by a young Barbara Sukowa, that was directed to act like Gelsomina, a Giulieta Massina's character in "La Strada" – 1956. F. Fellini). After all, Franz Biberkof is without job, a pimp sometimes, because he loose one of his arms after to be betrayed by Reinhold, once. Subsequent to being released from jail, he strides, slips, falls from one stretch of his life to the next. He wants to be honest, but circumstances, "bar friends", enroll him again in merchandise robbery, and is betrayed by his companions, not one but several times. He is not allowed to have nothing not even love. Men like Biberkopf are everywhere, are the "Nowhere Man" of The Beatles song. They are just like floating corpses going in the current direction, the flood is their highway, doesn't matter were heading to. The editing and restoration of this film of 15 and a half hours, it was possible thanks to The Criterion Collection. The film was divided into six DVDs with 13 chapters, an epilogue to 2 hours and disk extras. The film, by extension, was shown on television, breaking record of viewers and inaugurated with much and inadvertently, the phenomenon of serial tale. That repeated after with Twin Picks of David Lynch, with decorum. Thanks Reine W. Fassbinder by "Berlin Alexanderplatz" and by all the other wonderful and master pieces that you created!!

hasosch The most unique contribution of film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Alfred Döblin's novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz. The story of Franz Biberkopf" (1929) was his interpretation of the relationship between Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold as a love story. Therefore, in Fassbinder's interpretation, Franz Biberkopf's accident is seen as self-mutilation. In Fassbinder's last movie, Querelle (1982), we will hear the confession: "To kiss a man is like the confrontation with one's own face in the mirror". As different as Döblin's "Alexanderplatz" and Genet's "Querelle" may be, the two novels are alike because they meet one another like an object and its mirror image: the first novel deals with the good-guy Franz Biberkopf who is ruined by his love to humankind, and the other novel with the immoral murderer Querelle by which those who love him, perish.Like many of Fassbinder's movies, "Berlin Alexanderplatz", too, shows clear autobiographical traces. Fassbinder said about the three protagonists Franz, Reinhold and Mieze: "All three together supply my chance to survive". As Fassbinder pointed out in his article "The cities of the human and his soul", unlike Döblin in his original novel, Fassbinder is not so much interested in the discovery of the outer reality of Berlin, but concentrates on their inhabitants. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is a journey into the souls of different people under the conviction that the reign of subjectivity of the inner realities is much bigger than the reign of the objective reality outside. As a matter of fact (as has been pointed out by several commentators), "Berlin Alexanderplatz" with its almost 100 roles gave Fassbinder the possibility to let appear in his movie practically every person who had been crucial in his own life. That he split himself over three persons (Franz, Reinhold, Mieze) is very typical in Fassbinder's work in which many persons have their Alter Egos (e.g., "Despair", 1977). As Fassbinder had pointed out in an interview: "Despair is the only condition of life that I can accept". Consistently, the movie shows the systematic destruction of Franz, since "he is an anarchical figure in a crowd of social beings, and in the end, he perishes because of that". In fifteen and half an hour, we can analyze "the constellations, how a human spoils his life by a certain incapability which he developed by his upbringing" (Fassbinder). The movie shows the shaping of Franz Biberkopf to a mentally destroyed but therefore useful member of society. Every connoisseur of Fassbinder's work will be remembered to the final scene of "Fear of Fear" (1975) in which Margot, after having been "cured" in a psychiatric clinic, types addresses on envelopes like a trained monkey. When Karli brings her the information that their neighbor, the depressive Mr. Bauer, has killed himself, she hardly recognizes this fact anymore telling to Karli that she is feeling fine.