The State of Criterion’s Art
Mar 4, 2010Our own Eric Skillman, who has crafted the covers for numerous releases over the years (including Red Beard, Yi Yi, The . . .
Germany
1980
940 minutes
Color
1.33:1
German
411
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s controversial, fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin’s great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made forty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic, restored in 2006 and now available on DVD in this country for the first time, follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.
| Franz Biberkopf | Günter Lamprecht |
| Reinhold Hoffmann | Gottfried John |
| Emilie "Mieze" Karsunke | Barbara Sukowa |
| Eva | Hanna Schygulla |
| Minna | Karin Baal |
| Cilly | Annemarie Düringer |
| Lina | Elisabeth Trissenaar |
| Fränze | Helen Vita |
| Ida | Barbara Valentin |
| Frau Bast | Brigitte Mira |
| Director | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
| Written and directed by | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
| Music | Peer Raben |
| Costumes | Barbara Baum |
| Editing | Juliane Lorenz and "Franz Walsh" (Fassbinder) |
| Producer | Peter Märthesheimer |
| From the novel by | Alfred Döblin |
| Cinematography | Xaver Schwarzenberger |
SPECIAL EDITION SEVEN-DISC SET:
Our own Eric Skillman, who has crafted the covers for numerous releases over the years (including Red Beard, Yi Yi, The . . .
Appropriately for Fassbinder’s fifteen-hour masterpiece, the process of coming up with a design for Berlin Alexanderplatz was epic. With a monumental film like this, there’s obviously no shortage of possible concepts, but the biggest challenge is finding a design that can speak not just . . .
I The Anti–Television Film “To listen to this, and to meditate on it, will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin, and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and butter.” —Alfred Döblin, from the preface to
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