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August 15, 2008

I survived Berlin Alexanderplatz

When the Criterion Collection released German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz as an elaborate seven-disc boxed set last November, The New Yorker magazine wasted no time in declaring it “the DVD event of the year,” going on to suggest, “The thirteen richly textured episodes and their epilogue are best savored one at a time.”

Two friends and I took their suggestion, meeting each weekend to “savor” an episode of Fassbinder’s almost-16-hour magnum opus. Some have managed to stomach more than that in one sitting (some arthouse screenings have been known to divide all 940 minutes over two or three nights), but no matter how hard we tried, one-at-a-time was the only way to go. We simply couldn’t muster the stamina to endure two episodes of depressing German cinema in a row, and in some cases, we required several weeks to recover between sessions.

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Posted by Peter Debruge at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)