4 - Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Symphony of an Invisible City

Summary

WHEREAS THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS tackled the intermedial nature of montage before large-scale theories of montage took hold, in this chapter I turn to the adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz that appeared not only after Theodor Adorno's and Peter Bürger's work already started exercising significant influence but also after the postwar scholarship on Döblin's novel identified montage in a range of devices other than the perceptually disruptive use of ready-mades. This does not mean that here I undertake no analysis of the contemporary reception of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, but only that this type of analysis can no longer serve as an as powerful a tool for identifying montage segments as it was in the case of the novel and Piel Jutzi's adaptation. Specifically, contemporary reviews now point mostly to the soundtrack as the privileged site for montage in Fassbinder, but understand it primarily in terms of simultaneity of different sounds rather than in terms of the relationship the sounds have to the image. In other words, the discussion of the perceptual experience of disruption as the key trait of montage across the arts has taken a backseat to the celebration of superimposition and cacophony under the sway of broadly conceived theories of montage.

This, however, does not mean that we are left without tools for pinpointing instances of montage understood narrowly in Fassbinder's adaptation. Chapter 3 has provided us with a robust account of film montage as norm-breaking spatiotemporal dislocation. Put differently, I have explained the perceptual experience of disruption of montage in film in terms of spatiotemporal organization. Formal analysis, therefore, allows us to spell out the intersubjectively verifiable basis for subjective perceptual experiences. Although formal analysis cannot vouch that a particular cut will be experienced as a “hacking of impressions painful for the eyes” by all audiences, it can explain what the basis for such an effect is when the impression does occur. Crucially, its results are easily verifiable by looking at the film in question.