“Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz”

Writing about Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1983 when Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s 14½-hour film epic was first shown in the US, the New York Times’s film critic, Vincent Canby, noted that the—at that time—recent appearance of home video rental offered a way to negotiate the film’s unfeasible length, and also possibly presaged the creation of a new art form. Canby was right about this, but in a way that he could not have anticipated. The idea that video rentals could democratize and decentralize artworks, putting control into viewers’ hands, has been borne out in spectacular fashion by the online video site, YouTube, which invented not only new conditions for viewing but an entire universe of viewer-created content.

The question of whether the short videos that can be seen on YouTube can be considered art is entirely germane to Klaus Bisenbeck’s presentation of Berlin Alexanderplatz at the Kunst Werke in Berlin. A major force at the KW since its inception, and now also a curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, Bisenbeck is a controversial figure in the Berlin art world. This exhibition will do nothing to alter that reputation. All credit should be given to him for the scale of vision he brings to the staging of Fassbinder’s film. Although revered internationally, the German attitude to the director continues to be ambivalent. As a friend of mine said, he was “too gay, too political and took too many drugs” to really be a welcome addition to the pantheon of great German artists. Recognition of Bisenbeck’s achievement, however, can’t be said without mention of the obvious caveat about the way the presentation reduces the conditions for viewing the work to the diminished scale of contemporary audiences’ You-Tube-like attention spans.

Originally made for German television in 1980, the film’s 13 episodes plus an epilogue, which have been remastered for 35 mm, are shown as loops in 14 separate viewing booths. The film is also screened in its entirety in a small adjacent room outfitted with cinema-style seating. Intended to provide a context for the liberties the KW takes in presenting the film as an art installation, it also makes the weaknesses of the latter strategy apparent. Perhaps this was intentional too? Certainly the exhibition is successful in staging a dialogue between the two formats of viewing. In contrast to the strong narrative pull one experiences when the fi lm is seen as a film, the installation caters to a more distracted form of reception. Temporarily constructed for the show, the 14 connected booths snake around the perimeter of the KW’s ground-floor exhibition space, the last booth functioning like an exit into a central atrium-like area where the obverse screen of all the projections can be seen simultaneously. The effect is spectacular, the coherence of Fassbinder’s vision being blown apart into competing disjunctive fragments.

The claim of the show’s press release is that presenting the film in this way allows the viewer to decide “how they want to approach it.” It’s an assertion that seems to ignore the fact that viewers have always been able to decide how they wanted to approach an art exhibition, but then the KW is only speaking in the art world’s contemporary parlance when it emphasizes the viewer’s ability to participate in an exhibition as one of its main attributes. As English literary theorist Terry Eagleton notes, in his book After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), the current culture’s preoccupation with audience interactivity originates in reception theory’s insight that “readers were quite as vital to the existence of writing as authors.”

Reception theory gave the world the idea that readers and viewers have an active role to play in the creation of meaning, but the question remains: What meaning can result from presenting Fassbinder’s film in this way? Fragmenting the German director’s massive cinematic accomplishment into bite-sized pieces would seem to play to our culture’s worst atomizing tendencies. Take the time to watch an episode from beginning to end, sitting in a viewing booth on one of the cushions provided, and your patience will be rewarded; Fassbinder’s greatness as a director ensures that. Presented with so much choice, however—and leaving aside the possibility of watching each episode in full, laboriously going from booth to booth in correct chronological order in a concerted effort to undermine the show’s premise—the urge is to flit around and sample the film, suggesting that the point is to experience its ambience rather than meaningfully engage with its content.

View the work as a momentary series of encounters, and the static quality of Fassbinder’s dramaturgy becomes apparent—but then, he never was a director interested in naturalism. Enter a random choice of rooms in quick succession and you get the impression that all of Berlin Alexanderplatz takes place while the characters sit around, talking to each other in one bar or another. Although this means that the work’s typological connections with the genre of the soap opera is made apparent, presenting the film in this way also manages to give it the fascinating quality of inhabiting a parallel universe. Each screen is like a window providing a figurative glimpse into Berlin’s past, a world that is comprised of the extraordinary history of the city and the artworks and literature that it has inspired.

The precedent for Bisenbeck’s show is Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 24 hour Psycho. The premise of that work was that presenting Hitchcock’s famous film as an installation—and, in Gordon’s case, drastically slowing the projection down to a speed of 24 frames per minute—would reveal the film’s unconscious, the ulterior world it created beyond any of the individual elements of the director’s intention. Considered from this angle, Bisenbeck’s installation works exceptionally well; he compounds the brilliance of Fassbinder’s work by abstracting it. In the process, the prismatic reality Fassbinder created is made apparent, not only in this film but in his body of work as a whole. ■

“Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz,” curated by Klaus Bisenbeck, was exhibited at Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin from March 18 to May 13, 2007.

Rosemary Heather is the editor of C magazine.