Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s controversial, fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin’s great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made forty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic, restored in 2006 and now available on DVD in this country for the first time, follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.

SPECIAL EDITION SEVEN-DISC SET:

-New high-definition digital transfer from the 2006 restoration by the Fassbinder Foundation and Bavaria Media, supervised and approved by director of photography Xaver Schwarzenberger
-Two new documentaries by Fassbinder Foundation president Juliane Lorenz: one featuring interviews with the cast and crew, the other on the restoration
-Hans-Dieter Hartl’s 1980 documentary Notes on the Making of “Berlin Alexanderplatz”
-Phil Jutzi’s 1931, ninety-minute film of Alfred Döblin’s novel, from a screenplay co-written by Döblin himself
-New video interview with Peter Jelavich, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture
-New and improved English subtitle translation
-PLUS: A book featuring an essay by filmmaker Tom Tykwer, reflections from Fassbinder, an interview with Schwarzenberger, and German author Thomas Steinfeld on the novel

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1980
940 Minutes
Color
Region 1/NTSC Format 
Monaural in German with optional English subtitles
The Criterion Collection
ISBN B000VARC2S