User Reviews

This instalment of Fassbinder's self-proclaimed 15 hour "film" of Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz contains a scene that is breath-taking in its stupidity, blasphemy and cruelty. A man dressed as God manhandles a clearly distressed sheep upside down and then calmly murders her. "They Kill Animals And They Call It Art" to quote T. E. D Klein's withering and accurate expose of arthouse cinema's propensity to end lives to shock audiences and to ape profundity.

Aside from the wilful cruelty of one scene, this particular episode stands out as being quite hard to take, gloomy and full of longueur with hardly any action or involving content, the spectator simply views protagonist Hans Biberkopf feeling sorry for himself and pickling his insides.

Some of the episodes are very interesting and stimulating, but this one and the epilogue particularly are complete messes. Part IV: A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence deserves to be condemned. I condemn it.

As episode four starts, Franz lives in a new apartment. The lady who owns the beer store informs him in great detail about the people who live in the neighborhood. This gives the chance for some nice shots, for example when he looks out the window and sees the rest of them, such as the lawyer and his secretary. The main point, though, is that he is all alone, he even passes on the opportunity to get involved with another woman who somehow is attracted to him, he doesn't have a job, he consumes tons of alcohol and digs deeper in the rabbit hole, losing touch with reality, as he has abandoned all hope, he thinks he has no future and there is no one to help him. That's when a neighbor's role, Baumann, proves to be crucial. Eventually Franz decides it's time to return to his former life and he reunites with his old friend Meck.