Format: DVD

Release date: 22 October 2007

Distributor: Second Sight

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Based on novel by Alfred Döblin

Cast: Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, Gottfried John, Barbara Sukowa

Germany 1980
910 mins

Ever wondered how Homer Simpson would have fared in the economically ruined and morally compromising world of Weimar Republic Berlin? Franz Biberkopf is a dopey big oaf, sensual and mediocre, but with some sort of basic decency. The precise nature of this decency is not always easy to locate: he has after all done time for killing his girlfriend in a rage. This violent scene is replayed countless times in flashback throughout the series, which begins with Franz leaving Tegel prison. He hesitates on the threshold, deafened by the roar of the city, before trying to dive back into the relative security of incarceration. As he stands with his hands over his ears in close-up, the first chapter heading appears: ‘the punishment begins’. This is in line with Alfred Döblin’s novel, which from the word go makes no secret that Franz is its plaything, and that he will be allowed a little fun before being squashed like a fly. Fassbinder’s adaptation is likewise punctuated by storyboard intervals of pointedly didactic narration brutally denying any idea of free will, and forestalling any possibility of a happy ending. Its indulgence towards Franz’s wife-beating rages may say as much about the 1970s as anything, but it is certainly not out of keeping with the novel’s vision of a harsh world that poisons the sweetest sentiments and the best intentions. In other words, Berlin Alexanderplatz is not everyone’s idea of fun. It has an enormous reputation as a pioneering piece of television, and as Fassbinder’s masterpiece, but has barely been seen since its early 1980s release. Digitally restored, thanks to recent technological advances fascinatingly detailed on the bonus disc, it stands as a reminder of time when art was ‘grimly compelling’.

The fact that Alexanderplatz offers considerably more than historical interest has a lot to do with the intensity of many of the performances. Günter Lamprecht brilliantly conveys Biberkopf’s insane swings from puppyish optimism to baffled rage as he lurches from one dead-end job to another, flirts cluelessly with Nazism, and struggles to go straight in a pervasively criminal economy. The hysterical edge to his gaping smile is caught by the golden glow of the cinematography, which at once produces the idea of an idyll and perversely highlights the grubbiness and tattiness of the surfaces it covers. And we are periodically reminded that this is only light after all: when things go really wrong, there is darkness broken by the lurid pulse of neon from the street. Then things turn really hysterical. Hysteria, of course, is what Fassbinder does: in all times and in all places, Fassbinder’s creations just are hysterical, because that’s the way he likes them. To a certain extent this is something his films reflect on as well as act out: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) in particular is a study in hysteria. To maintain control over the script of her life, Petra needs someone like the pliant, essentially indifferent, Karin. Her theatre is unsustainably brittle from the start, but when Karin’s indifference becomes active it shatters utterly. The only Petra von Kant figure in Berlin Alexanderplatz is Fassbinder himself, and you can see why he was drawn to Dí¶blin’s novel: in its Weimar Republic, everyone is a marionette. In desperate times, we are driven on all the more uncomprehendingly by our own obscure compulsions, just because satisfying them is such a brutal struggle. The aesthetic upshot of this in novel and screen adaptation alike is directorial tyranny tinged with pity.

In the Fassbinder series, this also manifests itself in a noticeably theatrical mise en scène. Alexanderplatz is sometimes puffed as an extremely long film about the bustle of the modern city and so forth, and so is written up into the pantheon of late twentieth-century art cinema. It is questionable how accurate this is. Firstly, though it has been screened as a film, Alexanderplatz is shot on 16mm, is over 15 hours long, and breaks down neatly into episodes. In other words, it’s a TV series! Perhaps even more critically, the vaunted scenes of city life are surprisingly few, and are vastly outnumbered by quite stagey scenes in a fairly small number of interior sets. The (excellent) making-of film on the bonus disc makes a great deal out of the city street set as exemplifying scale and ambition. This is partly a matter of money: such scenes graphically advertise the budget of the project (though the set itself was economically filched from Bergman). But they also stage the film director as heroic commander of a vast technical effort. When Fassbinder is being, rather than playing, the director, he is much more given to theatrical blocking in claustrophobic settings. Dialogue in Alexanderplatz is routinely conducted, not face to face, but with both characters staring into ‘the audience’, one mid-stage, the other with their nose pressed against the fourth wall. To a certain extent, this is about alienation: what determines the characters is not so much their relationship with each other, as the inscrutable force of a whole situation that engulfs them all. But the technique comes, as does Fassbinder himself, and indeed many of his actors, out of the theatre, and the effect can be a little dated.

Not as dated, however, as Fassbinder’s ostentatiously art-cinema epilogue. Here Biberkopf wanders through a sort of underworld fugue on the themes of the series. Accompanied by two ‘angels’ outfitted in the manner of Wagnerian hard rock of the period, Franz meets dead characters who comment helpfully on their roles. Swastikaed brown shirts march past and tussle with communist workers. There’s a Nativity with Franz’s head pasted onto the body of the infant Christ. An atom bomb explodes, providing the obligatory mushroom cloud. Anyone who has come to cultural consciousness in the late 70s and early 80s will recognise the iconic status of such images, and understand the signal that politically-informed film is taking place. What is striking at this distance is how gestural all this was, and how little it adds up to a thought-out critical portrait of the threat of totalitarianism and so forth. With the current blossoming of German cinema dealing with WWII and its fallout, it might seem there has never been a better time to revisit Alexanderplatz. And this is true, but its take on the politics of the 1920s is rather more oblique than one might be led to expect. On the bonus disc, the generally thoughtful Hanna Schygulla suggests that Mieze’s plan for Eva to have a child by Franz shows the threesome briefly and idyllically putting aside the scrabble for possessions in favour of a sort of 1968 idealism. But again this seems rather a plausible appeal to a reflex notion of leftism rather than a reflection on the complexities of the series.

Fassbinder’s artistic and political interests, leftist or not, lie elsewhere. One of the most compelling characters and performances is Gottfried John’s Reinhold. He embodies someone for whom the moral compromises of a chaotic and desperate social milieu present no problem. He initially hooks up with Franz as someone who can take his girlfriends off his hands when he grows bored with them, which routinely happens after a month or so. Franz’s willingness to oblige, while it does not exactly make him a moral figure, is not condemned and seems to reflect the same sort of dim and misdirected generosity of spirit that sees him briefly don a swastika armband in the cause of order, whilst having nothing personal against Jews. Heartiness and a good appetite, it seems, are ultimately good, even if they lead to some dubious choices. John’s Reinhold, who is in fact one of these dubious choices, is all the more menacing and repugnant because he is spineless, stammering and effete. He represents a notion of evil not as strength, but as resentful weakness with opportunity. He is indebted to Franz for a capacity for pleasure he does not himself possess, and thus also hates him for it, and happily betrays him at every turn. Yet, even when Franz realises this, it is Reinhold, rather than the fundamentally decent working-man-turned-criminal Meck, that he considers his friend. Franz’s bewildering trust precipitates the final catastrophe when Reinhold tries to carry on their old triangular arrangement with Franz’s own girlfriend Mieze. The epilogue somewhat spells out a thesis on this in a scene where Reinhold finds true love with his cellmate in prison. In the series proper, scenes between Franz and Reinhold crackle with obscure and unspoken motivation. The final showdown between Reinhold and Mieze in an artificially lit nightmare fairy-tale wood is one of the most brilliant and shocking things in the whole series.

Overall, watching Berlin Alexanderplatz is a queasy experience. That its hero is at all sympathetic is a tribute to Lamprecht’s performance, but also to the sheer nastiness of the world Biberkopf inhabits. Its strength lies in its ability to make us care about grubby lives doomed from the start. It has a far more uneasy conscience than most cinema or TV today. This can make it hard going, but in a time of well-meaning but simplistic tales such as Sophie Scholl, it is fascinating to peer into a less affluent, less attractive time when moral choices did not seem so clear-cut. And I don’t just mean the 1970s.

Stephen Thomson

In an effort to be seasonal we take a look at ten different approaches to gluttony from the stuffing-centric Taxidermia to Oldboy‘s infamous live-octopus-devouring scene via the heroic overeating of Cool Hand Luke before finishing with Luis Buñuel’s inverted view of eating and defecating in The Phantom of Liberty.

1- La Grande bouffe (1973)
A fate worse than death by chocolate: for La Grande bouffe (1973) Marco Ferreri corralled Europe’s leading fatuous males – Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi – alongside the ineffectual Philippe Noiret, as a group of successful but jaded gastronomes taking their food obsession to its ultimate conclusion. Each wraps up his daily business surrounded by admiring female subordinates before heading off, like podgy avatars of Huysmans’ Des Esseintes, to Noiret’s secluded mansion to await the arrival of van-loads of flesh, and a gaggle of apparently obligatory but ultimately supernumerary hookers. Into a whirl of lounging, vintage porn slide-shows and cake art, wanders Andréa Ferréol’s primly fleshy schoolteacher. As the hookers are eclipsed by their hosts’ cuisine-bonding, and possibly disgusted by Piccoli’s heroic struggle with flatulence, only Andréa remains. Ferreri’s always impressive misogyny never came closer to seeing its preposterous logic. Poor Marcello and Michel: they can only declare their love in the language of cake. Skinny pink turtlenecks over seventies waistlines abound. Sadly for our heroes it was probably the additives that did it for them before the calorific. STEPHEN THOMSON

2- Se7en (1995)
The image of gluttony in Se7en is a memorably grotesque one – a massive, sauce-spattered figure lies face down in a plate of spaghetti and vomit, flies buzzing around his swollen head. The first victim of Kevin Spacey’s biblical psycho, poor Gluttony has been force-fed to death, his wrists and ankles bound with barbed wire, made to eat until his intestines ruptured, a human foie gras. To be honest, it seems somehow unfair to lump this poor sap in with the more intentionally greedy monsters on this list, but we are assured by the coroner that he was already quite rotund and therefore, presumably, deserved it. Perhaps there are worse ways to die than shovelling spaghetti sauce until your guts burst, but offhand I can’t think of any. TOM HUDDLESTON

3- The Meaning of Life (1983)
The most obvious movie glutton is of course Mr Creosote – Terry Jones in perhaps the world’s largest fat suit projectile vomiting in a chic French restaurant. Carefully perusing the menu (once John Cleese’s head waiter has wiped off the vomit) before grumpily announcing, ‘I’ll have the lot’. However, watching it nowadays, I realise I may have misunderstood the punch line. I’d always assumed the ‘waffer-thin mint’ to be the straw that made the camel’s guts explode. But having recently discovered the cinematic delights of YouTube I now understand the science behind it all: it is the combination of mint confectionary and fizzy drinks (mixing six crates of brown ale and a Jeroboam of champagne with an After Eight). PAUL HUCKERBY

4- Cool Hand Luke (1967)
One of the more bizarre but ultimately winning displays of gluttony in cinema appears in this 1967 prison camp classic, as Paul Newman’s eponymous inmate (jailed, in a similar display of wilful recklessness, for cutting the heads off parking meters while drunk) forces himself to down fifty hardboiled eggs for a bet. The sight of our hero forcefully cramming yet another slippery white oval into his already overstuffed maw is at first amusing, then worrying, then horrifying, then depressing, and finally sort of heroic. This is gluttony as rebellion against the system, even if the system doesn’t really notice, or care. TOM HUDDLESTON

5- Taxidermia (2006)
While many American films look outward at ‘the other’ to disturb audiences, Taxidermia finds horror in looking inwards by telling the tale of three generations of Hungarians who like stuffing themselves. The first character likes stuffing his favourite appendage into whatever he can, his son likes stuffing his face and his grandson likes stuffing dead animals. The first two, more comedic, acts of the film contain horrific scenes (a pig being graphically slaughtered and an eating contest where the massively obese gorge themselves and then regurgitate) that will elicit gasps and laughter in equal proportion; but it’s the third act, concentrating on the life of the taxidermist that slips over into full-blown horror. I’d like to think I’ve got a strong stomach, but this is one of the few films that has made me feel somewhat faint and genuinely nauseous, so be warned! ALEX FITCH

6- The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
In British cinema rough working-class types have no place in fine dining restaurants. Mr Creosote and East-End gangster Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover are no exceptions to this rule. Usual social faux-pas, such as using the wrong cutlery, don’t even register. You wouldn’t wish customers like these on Gordon Ramsay. Both share a similar bullying way with restaurant staff (beating them or puking on them) and they can be disturbing to fellow diners (stabbing forks into their cheeks or drenching them in semi-digested food). They are both unimpressed by the restaurant’s pretentiousness – ‘Give it some more parlez-vous Franí§ais’, Spica advises a hapless waiter. And they feed on delicacies in a most indelicate manner – Creosote orders foie gras, caviar, truffles and quails’ eggs all mixed together in a bucket (with the eggs on top). But of course gluttony is a deadly sin and both Creosote and Spica get their come-uppance in memorable fashion. PAUL HUCKERBY

7- Stand by Me (1986)
Heroic gluttony is a rare thing, but Davey ‘Lardass’ Hogan, like Cool Hand Luke before him, is a pioneer in the field. Appearing in a campfire yarn told by budding writer Wil Wheaton to his childhood compadres, Lardass’ story is one of pies, intrigue, humiliation, revenge, and more pies. Swearing vengeance on the town that spurned him, Lardass drinks a pint of castor oil, swallows a raw egg and enters the Tri-County Pie Eat, shovelling down five whole blueberry pies with both hands tied behind his back. Needless to say the results are deeply disturbing. Never have the words ‘when the smell hit the crowd’ brought on quite such a Technicolor display of human explosion. TOM HUDDLESTON

8- Super Size Me (2004)
Along with Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock is one of the most successful documentarians of his generation and like Moore, he picks obvious, albeit clearly guilty bad guys. With McDonalds he has one of the easiest targets on the planet, associated with obesity and the never-ending Americanisation of our culture. Shock value and tabloid paranoia make this a fascinating but repulsive film to watch. When Spurlock vomits his Supersize meal on what is only the second day of his experiment, it almost seems too soon and too predictable but as is often the way with modern documentaries, the points have to be made disturbingly loud and clear. For your average Guardian reader this is preaching to the converted – of course eating every meal at McDonalds for a month will make you ill – but this is a credible exaggeration of a lifestyle that doesn’t send enough people to the vomitorium. ALEX FITCH

9- Oldboy (2003)
Having just escaped from a mysterious prison where he was kept locked up for fifteen years without ever being told why, Oh Dae-su sits down in a sushi restaurant for his first meal as a free man. The waitress places a live octopus in front of him but before she can chop it up for him Oh Dae-su grabs the mollusc, stuffs its viscous grey head into his mouth, viciously tears it off and proceeds to masticate with frightful determination while the beast’s tentacles squirm and writhe in his hand. Most filmmakers would have shown Oh Dae-su’s thirst for revenge by having him gun down a roomful of villains but Park Chan-wook puts all of his character’s pent-up rage into this brief but intense display of primal gluttony. Almost unbearable to watch, it brilliantly conveys Oh Dae-su’s equally unbearable inner turmoil. VIRGINIE Sí‰LAVY

10- The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

Today there is going to be gold.

This micro-feature is supposed to be about gluttony but being the contrarian that I am I prefer to look at gluttony’s occult, shit.

A social gathering in a bourgeois house. Guests sit at a large dining table and chat and gossip banally about their hair-do’s, sex lives, politics, business; they do so sat astride rather fine porcelain toilets, trousers at their ankles, skirts hitched up to their hips. In Luis Buñuel’s 1974 portmanteau film The Phantom of Liberty the conviviality of a typical middle-class dinner party is inverted. It is the norm to defecate socially and collectively but to eat is another matter; to do this the guests cough lightly and ask to be excused from the niceties of group defecation in order to go off and eat in the illicit confines of a special cubicle that is reminiscent of nothing other than a lavatory. A true Freudian surrealist, Buñuel makes the process of eating appear to be a socially embarrassing act to indulge in and a grotesque thing to listen to too. Buñuel really exploits the mystifying echo-chamber-like acoustics of lavatories and the bestial chomp and slather of eating.

In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek talks about the toilet being a conduit between us and a primordial underworld and not just a conduit between us and the equally fascinating worlds of plumbing and sanitation. One only has to gaze briefly at the 1968 version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to see a connection between effluvia, greed, plumbing and terrifying nether worlds. The greedy Bavarian boy Augustus Gloop drinks from a faecal-looking chocolate river and is eventually sucked up a large colon-like pipe. But as the end of this featurette encroaches upon us, let’s move from Dahl to Dali, and close with a quote from a man more than au fait with excrement. In his diary (Diary of a Genius) entry for September 1st, 1958, he states: ‘At daybreak I dreamt that I was the author of several white turds, very clean and extremely agreeable to produce. When I woke up I said to Gala, “Today there is going to be gold”’. PHILIP WINTER