Berlin Alexanderplatz

Film Info

Germany
1980
940 minutes
Color
1.33:1
German
Spine #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.

Cast

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
Herbert	Roger Fritz
Pums	Ivan Desny
Gottfried Meck	Franz Buchresier
Otto Lüders	Hark Bohm
Baumann	Gerhard Zwerenz
Nachum	Peter Kollek
Bruno	Volker Schlöndorff

Credits

Director	Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Written by	Rainer Werner Fassbinder
From the novel by	Alfred Döblin
Cinematography	Xaver Schwarzenberger
Music	Peer Raben
Costumes	Barbara Baum
Edited by	Juliane Lorenz and Franz Walsh (Fassbinder)
Produced by	Peter Märthesheimer

Disc Features

SPECIAL EDITION SEVEN-DISC SET:

New high-definition digital transfer from the 2006 restoration by the Fassbinder Foundation and Bavaria Media, supervised and approved by director of photography Xaver Schwarzenberger
Two new documentaries by Fassbinder Foundation president Juliane Lorenz: one featuring interviews with the cast and crew, the other on the restoration
Hans-Dieter Hartl’s 1980 documentary Notes on the Making of “Berlin Alexanderplatz”
Phil Jutzi’s 1931, ninety-minute film of Alfred Döblin’s novel, from a screenplay co-written by Döblin himself
New video interview with Peter Jelavich, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A book featuring an essay by filmmaker Tom Tykwer, reflections from Fassbinder, an interview with Schwarzenberger, and German author Thomas Steinfeld on the novel