Berlin Alexanderplatz1980

Director
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Actors

Guenter Lamprecht (Franz Biberkopf)
Hanna Schygulla (Eva)
Franz Buchrieser (Gottfried Meck)
Barbara Sukowa (Mieze)
Gottfried John (Reinhold Hoffmann)
Claus Holm (Wirt)

In late-1920s Berlin, Franz Biberkopf is released from prison and vows to go straight. However, he soon finds himself embroiled in the city’s criminal underworld.

When it was published in 1929, Alfred Doeblin’s novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was already recognized as one of the most important novels of its time. In a masterful mixture of realistic, expressionistically alienated and mythological elements, Doeblin describes the seething, crazy Berlin of the late twenties: the crowds, the unemployed, the hungry lumpenproletariat, the mendacious petty bourgeois. Berlin as Sodom before the fall, as a city in which the fascists would take power a few years later. Out of the anonymous masses, the little man Franz Biberkopf is the center of attention: he was in prison for manslaughter, now he wants to live “decently”, and like a pure fool he staggers through the confusing big city. He meets Reinhold, a pimp and unscrupulous criminal, and is once again drawn into crime. When Reinhold kills Biberkopf’s girlfriend, he takes away the only thing that kept him alive.

“In ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ Fassbinder has created a huge, magnificent melodrama that has the effective shape of a film of conventional length. There’s never before been anything quite like it.” – New York Times

“The work of a genuine master with nothing left to lose or hide.” – Time Out

“One of the most fascinating and best-accomplished projects in recent film history.” – La Jornada