Paul B. Preciado

 

Paul B. Preciado : Je suis un monstre qui vous parle

Le titre de ce livre de Paul Preciado expose le paradoxe et le point de vue critique qui structurent l’ensemble de son discours. Le monstre est celui qui ne parle pas mais qui est fait monstre par ceux qui parlent à sa place, qui parlent de lui, qui « le parlent » et, faisant ceci, le constituent en objet monstrueux. Preciado, ici, inverse ce rapport discursif, cette domination dans et par le discours, en s’émancipant du destin habituel du « monstre », en se mettant à parler, et à parler face à ceux qui le constituent en tant que monstre.

Le texte de ce livre est celui d’une intervention de l’auteur devant des psychanalystes de l’Ecole de la Cause freudienne. Preciado ne se contente pas de parler devant ceux qui, par leur pratique, ont un certain type de rapport à la parole de l’autre, rapport supposé impliquer l’écoute. Preciado met en avant que ceux qui, lors de cette conférence, sont réunis devant lui, possèdent d’habitude la parole, possèdent dans le discours la place du sujet et, par leur parole, construisent l’identité monstrueuse de ceux et celles qui, enfermé.e.s dans la catégorie de l’« autre », sont non seulement réduit.e.s au silence mais se voient condamné.e.s, dominé.e.s, assujetti.e.s dans le double sens du terme : objets d’un rapport de soumission et subjectivités se pensant comme les maîtres les conduisent à se penser (des monstres, des anormaux, etc.).

Les discours psychanalytiques, autant dans le contexte de la séance que dans leur dimension publique et sociale, n’impliqueraient pas réellement l’écoute mais un cadre du discours, des conditions, un contenu qui fonctionnent telle une grille s’appliquant à ce qui est dit et produisant l’objet dont on parle. Il s’agirait de discours prescriptifs, performatifs, producteurs de « l’autre » en tant qu’objet. La catégorie de « l’autre » est ambiguë et complexe : l’autre est-il réellement autre si ce qu’il est en tant qu’autre, si son altérité, est le produit de ce que j’en dis (et des relais institutionnels de mon discours) ? Et cette catégorie de l’autre n’est-elle pas d’autant plus problématique si cet autre se voit attribuer les caractéristiques d’un monstre, à savoir un non humain, un autre qu’humain ? Le discours psychanalytique se révèle ici comme un discours de pouvoir discriminatoire.

Sans doute peut-on penser que ce point de vue développé par Paul Preciado est réducteur, omettant l’existence d’une certaine conscience dans le champ psychanalytique de la dimension problématique de son discours et de ses catégories ou encore la connaissance critique de son histoire, de ses impasses, de ses points aveugles qu’il s’agirait de mettre au jour et de dépasser. L’histoire de la psychanalyse est aussi faite de retours critiques sur elle-même, sur ses concepts et préjugés, autant que d’efforts plus ou moins réussis pour s’extraire de leur emprise (« Je pense qu’il est possible de dire que Lacan essaie (…) de dénaturaliser la différence sexuelle, mais que (…) il finit par produire un méta-système presque plus rigide que les notions modernes de sexe et de différence anatomique »).

Mais si le point de vue de Preciado ne s’attarde pas sur cette dimension autocritique de la psychanalyse, c’est parce que celui-ci s’appuie d’abord sur l’expérience de la psychanalyse vécue par Preciado lui-même, le « Je » du titre soulignant que celui qui parle ici, parle d’abord à partir de lui-même, de son point de vue situé dans une expérience, un corps, une vie. Selon Freud, la psychanalyse a pour finalité l’accès à la place de sujet dans le discours : il s’agit de parvenir à parler en disant enfin Je, et c’est cette finalité que, selon Preciado, la théorie et la pratique psychanalytiques empêchent pourtant. C’est la place du Je qui est ici conquise par Preciado mais en dehors du dispositif discursif de la psychanalyse, contre ce dispositif, face à celui-ci et en le dénonçant, et cette place ne peut être occupée que si « Je » parle de lui et à partir de lui – sa propre existence, sa propre pensée faisant office de sabot dans la machine psychanalytique.

Si le récit singulier autobiographique peut avoir une force critique, c’est bien sûr à condition de s’appuyer sur un effort de singularisation, s’il entreprend de ne pas reproduire, à propos de soi, les normes et exigences de la pensée et du discours au contraire imposées par les institutions, par l’histoire, par la culture, par les sciences humaines, etc. C’est cet effort que réalise Paul Preciado, développant un récit qui se revendique subjectif, construit à partir de sa propre expérience, de sa propre histoire, discours qui mine la prétention à l’universalité du discours psychanalytique, cette universalité étant surtout un masque, un élément stratégique en vue d’une domination des corps et des esprits (il ne s’agit pas ici d’opposer un discours situé et un discours universel : tout discours, y compris celui de l’objectivité psychanalytique, est un discours situé).

C’est à partir de son existence, de son histoire, de son corps, de sa subjectivité d’homme trans que Preciado développe un discours à l’intérieur duquel il peut dire Je et avec lequel il peut réaliser une critique de la psychanalyse normative dominante – celle qui ne cesse de produire des monstres, des « autres », des êtres à redresser, à dévaloriser, à stigmatiser, à « soigner ». Ce qui signifie également que le discours théorique est toujours un discours politique, que le théoricien ou la théoricienne sont toujours des activistes politiques. Reste à choisir son camp…

Vivre en Espagne, en tant que fille, dans un environnement pesamment catholique, machiste, franquiste a déjà produit ses propres aliénations mais aussi une conscience de la domination, de l’omniprésence de normes mortifères – conscience que le fait de vivre ensuite, en tant qu’homme, dans un environnement tout aussi sexiste et normé n’a fait que renforcer et éclairer. Cette existence et son histoire singulière s’accompagnent d’une réflexion critique sur les normes mais aussi de l’évidence de leur caractère morbide, de leur artificialité, évidence que tout le système du binarisme du genre est en réalité un système de domination et d’oppression. Et cette conscience intègre d’une manière tout aussi évidente l’idée que le corps, le genre, sont des réalités relatives, susceptibles de variations selon le contexte et selon la subjectivité. Les normes ne sont pas des réalités absolues et universelles, pas plus que le corps ou la subjectivité. L’existence et l’histoire de la personne trans sont vues ici à la fois comme le révélateur d’une violence systémique et comme un élément par lequel cette violence perd de sa force, par lequel le système se fissure, commence à vaciller, la singularité de cette histoire montrant comment la violence s’exerce mais aussi comment elle rencontre ce qui lui résiste.

Ce sont les mêmes normes, le même système du genre, la même naturalisation de ce système que Preciado rencontre dans la psychanalyse, celle-ci « transformant en loi psychique les rituels sociaux de normalisation du genre ». Si la psychanalyse s’efforce de produire des théories, des pratiques, des discours objectifs indépendants de la doxa, de la tradition sociale et culturelle, elle en reproduit pourtant certains présupposés, apparaissant surtout comme un moyen d’institutionnaliser, d’objectiver et de légitimer ces présupposés. Ayant à faire, en tant qu’individu, à la psychanalyse, Paul Preciado rencontre moins une écoute qu’un discours qui le pense, en tant qu’homme trans, à partir d’une représentation binaire du genre, d’une naturalisation de ce binarisme et des corps (la fameuse « différence sexuelle ») – un discours qui ne parvient pas à intégrer la singularité de son histoire et qui pense cette histoire à partir de catégories qui ne peuvent que situer l’individu Paul Preciado à la place de celui qui a raté, qui est en échec, qui est défectueux : à la place du monstre social, biologique, mental.

C’est ainsi que le discours psychanalytique au lieu d’écouter, c’est-à-dire d’accueillir et de permettre à l’individu de parler à la première personne, parle en imposant une place, en construisant une identité par laquelle la domination institutionnelle et sociale va pouvoir s’exercer : là où l’on attend les conditions de possibilité de l’advenue du sujet, on se heurte en fait à une machine à produire des objets.

Nos corps sont politiques, nos psychés sont politiques, nos sexualités sont politiques : soit car ils reproduisent les normes et préjugés sociaux, culturels, historiques qui règlent, au sein d’une société, l’ordre des corps, des esprits, des relations entre les individus et les groupes ; soit parce qu’ils échappent aux cadres de cet ordre et les fissurent, les ouvrant à un dehors qui en sont la négation – les deux pouvant coexister, et coexistant sans doute dans la plupart des cas. S’il s’agit d’affirmer la singularité de nos corps, de nos psychés, de nos sexualités, ce n’est pas par goût de l’exhibitionnisme, par une volonté puérile de se démarquer, mais c’est parce que cela est un moyen par lequel exister en tant que sujet – sujet individuel, sujet collectif – autant qu’un moyen de résister à ce qui est pour nous politiquement, socialement, psychiquement destructeur.

Alors que certains collectifs féministes véhiculent actuellement un discours violemment transphobe, Paul Preciado démontre en quoi la « transidentité », en tant qu’affirmation de l’artificialité du binarisme du genre, en tant que pratique d’une certaine plasticité du genre, en tant que dénaturalisation des normes du genre, est profondément antisexiste, c’est-à-dire radicalement féministe (alors que le discours transphobe, y compris lorsqu’il est le fait de « féministes », revient à reproduire la logique binaire du genre, c’est-à-dire à reproduire la logique la plus primaire du sexisme systémique). Je suis un monstre qui vous parle est un livre qui développe une idée politique des corps, du psychisme, des sexualités autant qu’il insiste sur des pratiques politiques possibles à partir du corps, des psychés, des sexualités.

Ayant subi le système sexiste en tant que fille, Paul Preciado peut, par la suite, d’autant plus jouir des privilèges que possède le corps identifié comme masculin, les privilèges qui accompagnent l’identité masculine dans l’espace de la rue et des lieux publics. Or, s’il s’agit de fuir les normes qui oppriment, il s’agit tout autant de les fuir lorsqu’elles permettent, au sein du système oppressif, d’être à la place du maître. Il n’est pas question pour Preciado de changer simplement de place, il s’agit d’attaquer le système par lequel certaines places sont distribuées selon une certaine hiérarchisation des êtres et des rapports à la violence différents.

La prise de conscience qui suit cette expérience politique plurielle de la différence sexuelle est celle-ci : « les codes culturels de la masculinité et de la féminité sont anecdotiques comparés à l’infinie variation des modalités de l’existence ». Contre le binarisme du genre, le but n’est pas d’occuper telle place plutôt que telle autre, mais il est au contraire nécessaire – psychiquement et politiquement nécessaire – d’affirmer la variabilité des possibilités du corps, du sexe, du psychisme, de l’existence sociale, politique, de l’existence dans le monde.

Le pluriel plutôt que le binaire, la pluralité plutôt que la différence comprise comme simple opposition et complémentarité, l’exubérance de la vie plutôt que la fixité des normes lorsque celles-ci ont pour finalité et effet de tuer la vie, de massacrer les individus. L’objectif politique autant qu’existentiel et psychique est d’échapper au système du genre, de rendre possibles des modes d’existence et de pensée qui inventent d’autres systèmes enfin accueillants, ouverts à des vies non binaires, non déjà normées, ouverts à toutes les formes du vivant. Là encore, il faut choisir son camp : veut-on être un assassin ?

Dans ce livre, Preciado se réclame explicitement d’un vitalisme somme toute classique qui définit la vie comme pluralité, invention, métamorphisme, variation, non identitaire (le vitalisme n’étant pas seulement un anti-naturalisme mais aussi, et en tant qu’il est un anti-naturalisme, une philosophie de la contingence). C’est ce vitalisme – la vie de la vie – qui est nié par le système de la différence sexuelle, par le binarisme du genre, par les normes sociales actuelles façonnant les corps, les sexes, les sexualités, les psychés – et c’est ce vitalisme qui est épistémologiquement rejeté et combattu par, entre autres, la psychanalyse. Il s’agit alors d’inventer d’autres paradigmes épistémologiques et de produire d’autres savoirs – la théorie, encore une fois, n’étant pas séparable du politique. Ces autres savoirs, ces paradigmes nouveaux ne peuvent être créés sans les récits à la première personne des « subalternes sexuels et de genre », c’est-à-dire sans l’introduction, dans la pensée, de la pluralité des modes de vie et des modes de la vie.

L’entreprise est colossale puisqu’il s’agit de la « constitution d’un savoir dissident face aux langages hégémoniques de la psychologie, de la psychanalyse et des neurosciences », un savoir impliquant la création d’un « nouveau cadre cognitif, une nouvelle carte du vivant ». Ce savoir n’est possible que s’il se débarrasse des présupposés mortifères qui aujourd’hui plombent la pensée autant que les corps et s’il est produit à partir des « subalternes » eux/elles-mêmes, ce qui implique un rapport politique, scientifique, philosophique radicalement différent aux vies aujourd’hui étouffées. La production d’un tel savoir est une entreprise énorme mais qui a déjà commencé, qui continuera car désormais nous parlons – nous parlons et nous parlerons, nous parlons et nous continuerons à parler.

Paul B. Preciado, Je suis un monstre qui vous parle, éditions Grasset, 2020, 128 pages, 9 € — Lire un extrait  

 

 

DIACRITIK

Jean-Philippe Cazier 7 septembre 2020 Livres, Philosophie

Jean-Philippe Cazier 7 septembre 2020 Livres, Philosophie

Berlin Alexanderplatz

03 septembre 2020

Berlin Alexanderplatz : a "perpetuum mobile" of the human dance of love and death, par Tom Tykwer

Ce texte de Tom Tykwer (remarquable, essentiel) fut publié initialement dans le Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daté du 8 février 2007. Tykwer l’avait rédigé à l’occasion de la première berlinoise de Berlin Alexanderplatz (qui venait d’être restauré). Il affirma qu’il s’agissait d’un hommage au film et d’« une déclaration d’amour au cinéma expérimental ». La traduction anglaise que voici a été réalisée par Stephen Locke pour Criterion Collection, qui offrit au public américain une superbe édition du film en coffret de DVD/BD.
[Merci au FAZ et à Criterion. Mais je n’ai pas trouvé de version française, désolé, Ch.T.]

~~~

I The Anti-Television Film

« To listen to this, and to meditate on it, will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin, and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and butter. » Alfred Döblin, from the preface to Berlin Alexanderplatz

It is once again time to think, to speak, and to write about this fifteen-hour film, which, at the onset of the eighties (that decade that would later bring with it an end to the cold war and a comeback for capital), enraged the national spirit and occasioned assaults by the yellow press and (in the wake of this) protests from "millions of television viewers" who felt themselves "robbed of their subscription fees" (Bild newspaper).

The public protest against this work, which everyone who was in the vicinity of Germany at the time remembers – and many remember the outrage even better than the film itself – was directed against the television stations, the filmmakers, the ensemble, and naturally, above all, against the director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although the film’s alleged unacceptability in technical matters (it was accused of considerable flaws in image and sound quality) was thrust into the center of attention, these problems, it appeared, were hardly worthy of such a storm of indignation. The pain caused by the film somehow went deeper, and with each further episode, broadcast one week after the other, it seemed like a dirty thorn was boring itself deeper and deeper into the wound of this republic, a country that wasn’t very comfortable in its own skin anyway and, accordingly, was soon thereafter to fall into a cultural and political stupor (Fassbinder died in 1982; Kohl became chancellor). At the time, Germany had no desire at all for the celebrated excesses of this film, its prancing obscenity and unshrinking crassness, a kind of German swan song, and all the more so since all these elements meandered – freely floating and without commentary, always asking but never answering, in other words completely ignoring the brief for public edification vested in public television – over a period of thirteen long television weeks.

If you take into account the almost unlimited freedom – despite, for that time, the considerable expense of the production – with which Fassbinder was able to realize this extremely introspective, almost inaccessible film concept, it sheds light on the exceptional position he enjoyed as a filmmaker then. Just having turned thirty-four years of age, he already had some forty films under his belt, including his latest and greatest box-office triumph, The Marriage of Maria Braun. Nowhere in Berlin Alexanderplatz does one get the feeling that he is holding back or censoring himself; it is one of those films, perhaps like only Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, that completely turns its back on traditional, economical narrative conventions – and that at the same time, seemingly paradoxically, feels bound to the narrative, coming back to it time and time again, sometimes even in a compulsively conservative way, only to undermine it right away for the sheer delight of it. It is a film that plunges directly into its topic, a story straight out of everyday life, tears it piece by piece away from its concrete, reality-oriented style, and, with an extremely intimate, almost private view, dissects it, stretches it, and then, above all, spins it out into time, expands it, as it were, to such a degree that interim spaces are torn open in this drawn-out time; and Fassbinder wants to gaze down into the fissures in this vastly stretched-out time, to rip them even farther apart, to look even deeper, until time itself seems no longer expansible – and then splits completely asunder.

What follows this is merely an epilogue, a final chord in the midst of the Black Hole of this temporal rift.

In other words, Berlin Alexanderplatz, this thirteen-part film plus the said "epilogue", was never really a TV movie. It is a narrative experimental film that, juggling various theatrical principles, seeks a hideaway between the traditional and the avant-garde.

Concerning the visual aspect, Fassbinder and his cameraman, Xaver Schwarzenberger, appear to have been flouting the medium of television here as well: their joint disdain for the alarm signal on the camera’s light meter as it no doubt wildly lashed out seems otherwise too provocative. As a result, the night shots, which were obviously composed for the big screen and a sensitive film emulsion, were watered down into a faint, flat, gray-black blur on most of the German Telefunken TV sets available at the time.

From then on the film seemed ostracized as "unbroadcastable", even "unshowable", but resistance arose on the part of some festivals and individual movie theaters, and, long after Fassbinder’s death, a few increasingly scratched 16 mm prints began touring through the art houses and film museums of the world — until these prints, too, were no longer watchable.

Now, Juliane Lorenz, with her Fassbinder Foundation, has been able to convince a number of cultural and film subsidies, as well as technical film companies, to undertake, under Schwarzenberger’s direction, the painstaking restoration of the negative of the film – originally shot on 16 mm and blown up to 35 mm – and above all to dare to make a new optical and color correction, which, in view of the technology now available, appeared to be a very promising undertaking. And in fact the legendary "darkness problem" has more or less disappeared; except for a few shots, it was possible to bring out the contrasts in the monochrome night compositions to such a degree that there is always an intelligible picture and not just a picture puzzle. Never before have the filigree compositional stylistics of Berlin Alexanderplatz been seen – one could hardly even have imagined them – in this form. At the same time, Schwarzenberger has taken care not to lose the quality of this intimate night spectacle, precisely because the choking confinement evoked by the slightly soft-focused darkness of the images reflects the narrowness of a world that is constantly threatening to crush Franz Biberkopf.

II The Story

« You have to hear stories. It is pleasant and sometimes even makes one better. » From Mahabharata, an Indian epic

Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) is let out of prison after having served a four-year sentence for the manslaughter of his lover. He is spit out into the raw, increasingly impoverished city of Berlin in the late twenties and tries to get a foothold again, an ongoing effort at which he is seldom able to prevail. He gets to know a number of women with whom he spends a short time, or sometimes a bit longer, but it is only when he encounters Mieze (Barbara Sukowa) that he believes he has found the right one. He has a few close or looser friendships with various men, among them Reinhold (Gottfried John). The feelings between Franz and Reinhold are stronger than they are able to fathom, and thus this involvement develops a momentum of its own that finally leads to Franz’s undoing.

At the beginning of the story, Franz swears to "become an honest soul", but fate is not on his side, and he suffers setback after setback, until one finally gets to him with such force that it breaks his iron will, and in the end, robbed of all hope for a piece of happiness, he is left alone and broken.

III Not the Story

« So the crucial part of Berlin Alexanderplatz isn’t the story; this is something the novel has in common with some other great novels in world literature; its structure is, if possible, even more ludicrous than that of Goethe’s Elective Affinities — the essential part is simply the way in which this incredibly banal and unbelievable plot is narrated. And the attitude toward the characters, whom the author exposes in all their dreariness to the reader, while on the other hand he teaches the reader to see these characters, reduced to mediocrity, with the greatest tenderness, and to love them in the end. » R.W. Fassbinder, 1980

The story, in other words – normally the Holy Grail of every screenwriter and filmmaker – is not the point. With this Fassbinder establishes a method that marks Berlin Alexanderplatz to a greater degree than any of his other works. While almost stoically ignoring all the demands of a plot, he sets out to circle around singular human conditions, to penetrate them, and to bring forth a reflexive (referring back to the subject) truthfulness that shows that nothing is more foreign to a person than himself and that he is therefore constantly in search of himself. And therefore the voice-over commentaries, spoken by Fassbinder, never serve as parentheses or interlinkings of plot elements; they lack, in fact, all narrative-binding impulse. Rather, they draw closer attention to moments in which something entirely individual comes to the fore or in which a thought or a feeling by or about a person is brought to a halt, prolonged, or protracted. What Fassbinder recounts are passages from the novel that reveal that it, too, is strewn with unconventional, prosaic digressions that constantly, by means of facts, associations, and rebounding fragments of an idea, demonstrate the disjunction of the narration.

The gist of the identificatory conception of Berlin Alexanderplatz is that in the beginning the protagonist appears as a rather simpleminded, coarse soul; but as the narrative progresses we soon recognize that our assessment is in no way adequate to account for the complex, deep sensibilities with which Franz Biberkopf comes to grapple. Which doesn’t mean that Biberkopf is not, in fact, simpleminded and coarse – but rather that we must nevertheless concede to him "such a differentiated subconscious, combined with an almost unbelievable imagination and capacity for suffering, that one would have to look long and hard for [its] equal in world literature" (Fassbinder).

IV Repetition and Expansion

« Cinema is there to show us what we would not see without cinema. To expand the word and the image. To make visible what is normally invisible. » Jean-Claude Carrière, in The Secret Language of Film

By repeating, prolonging, or stretching out events, Fassbinder is seeking something that he assumes is to be found in the ritualistic gestures of human behavior, in our tendency to make a rule out of things, to repeat them, to find the way to an inner order through outward order, creating an organized course of events, until these finally strike us as compulsory.

Seen in this light, Fassbinder is an epigone of Pina Bausch and a precursor of Christoph Marthaler, two theater people who through the repetition and prolongation of social gestures reveal people’s addictive potential for self-destruction, culminating in the ritualistic.

One of the strange things about the experience one has viewing Berlin Alexanderplatz is that the stretched-out temporality does not leave the impression of making the story more precise, but rather creates an elliptical sensation. For a while your concentration is so completely distracted from the narrative chain of cause and effect that you almost lose your orientation and ask yourself, in view of such a total standstill, whether the story will ever get moving again. In the fascinating part 4, above all, it plods along like almost no other film has, except perhaps Bruno Dumont’s recent Twentynine Palms. Or maybe like in the first act of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal.

V Structural Folk Theater

« What we once again appreciate in Young Werther, even though it sometimes almost makes us mad [...] is precisely the inappropriate, even exotic alliance of the natural with the artificial, which brings to light a truth that is not too far away from that of theater. » Thierry Jousse on Jacques Doillon, in Autorenkino und Filmschauspiel, by Anja Streiter

Jacques Doillon, the director of such films as Young Werther and The Pirate, is another next of kin of Fassbinder’s, an auteur who rips situations out of their so-called authenticity in order to search for their meaning on an alternative, artificial field of play. For Fassbinder it is extremely important that with all his prolongings and repetitions he is not only working through some formal experiment but is at the same time exploring the figures themselves as soon as they climb onto the hamster wheel and satisfy truly human needs, both sublime and primitive. But for all the choreography, his characters are not just at the mercy of some directorial tick, not just puppetlike shells as with Robert Wilson, for example, but rather they act out and live through these sequences as psychological beings, as three-dimensional individuals.

In the ritualized romantic rondel that unfolds between Mieze and Franz, for example, the desire for the infantile, brotherly-sisterly, escapist pleasure of togetherness formulates itself for both characters to an exaggerated degree that only naively innocent lovers are capable of celebrating – which, actually, should be familiar to everyone, since after all, every love is innocent. To cite another example of a different nature: the seemingly infinitely repeated, traumatic murder of Ida by Biberkopf expresses the accidentalness with which vehement rage can suddenly turn into bloody madness, and feels at the same time somehow unreal, like a remote-controlled danse macabre.

At least this is the way the actors play it. And they don’t play it with even the slightest bit of detached nuance. On the contrary, the acting style that marks Berlin Alexanderplatz is (not always, but often) earthy, extroverted, sometimes even declamatory—and thus obviously indebted to folk theater, alternating by choice between burlesque and dramatic sketch. That kind of folk-theatrical gesture, which already suggests itself in the dialect from the novel, was used by Fassbinder in many of his works as an instrument of stylization. Folk theater, historically defined through its distinction from court theater, had stamped its mark on the director just as much as had the avant-garde stages of the late sixties, and his very own personal style, which grew out of a fusion of these two influences, was taken to the extreme and to perfection in Berlin Alexanderplatz.

VI Biberkopf and Other Men

« As director it could also be possible, of course, to show particular consideration to the leading actor, in so far as the director shouldn’t drive him crazy with other things, since he has such a difficult task to perform [....] In fact, the only source of disturbance I had was my director, who continually interfered in my work. » Günter Lamprecht, 1981

Nonetheless, or maybe because of it, Günter Lamprecht as Franz Biberkopf – and this can be stated unconditionally – was perfect casting for this film. And even if Lamprecht might have quarreled with Fassbinder so much, he did in fact delve down deeply into Fassbinder’s cosmos, adapt himself congenially to the elegiac fragment of a screenplay, and give just as much energy and variation to each subtle individual moment as to the blaring pamphleteering. Lamprecht’s Biberkopf is (probably like the director as well) a fragile berserker for whom the world has proved too narrow, the heart too big, the passion too oppressive, and the intellect too weak, and who lets himself fall, eyes wide open, but with limited knowledge, into the shredding machine of human fate.

With a tour de force performance as varied as it is graphic, as loud as it is gentle, Lamprecht is a huge, violent child in the body of a man – and thus all of the thematic threads of the film logically come together in his character.

Everything this man goes through in his tortured life turns his (erroneous and roundabout) fateful course into a kind of Passion, and as if this perfect fool were a preacher in disguise, apostles are hanging at his heels. They are called Nachum (Peter Kollek), Meck (Franz Buchrieser), Lüders (Hark Bohm), Baumann (Gerhard Zwerenz), and Reinhold – and they all use him, either as psychic membrane for their neuroses, as patient for their promises of salvation, or as willing victim for their exploitative intentions. For Biberkopf’s perfect foolishness is both a provocation and a promise for all the fallen angels around him: they hope for redemption at his side, as if his simplicity could heal their neuroses, their despair, and their impairments. But Biberkopf is not all that simple after all, and he has no desire to be membrane or patient or victim, and this makes the whole thing complicated.

VII Reinhold and Other Women

« [This is] by no means a question of something sexual between two people of the same gender; Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold are in no way homosexual [...] No, what exists between Franz and Reinhold is nothing more nor less than a pure love. » R.W. Fassbinder, 1980

The most important person in Biberkopf’s life is not called Mieze nor Eva (Hanna Schygulla) nor Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar) but rather Reinhold, and is in fact a man. A deadly radiant energy emanates from this friendship, a magnetism that has fatal consequences for both of them and that in the more than ten hours in which Reinhold is present in the film is never entirely understandable, but rather remains unexplained to the end. It is simply that Franz loves Reinhold, no matter how much Reinhold takes it out on him, and Reinhold no doubt loves Franz, too, and it’s too much for him. This therefore brings about a destructive downward spiral, at the end of which, in an endless single take, Reinhold’s attempt to seduce Mieze leads to her murder.

By contrast, the women in Biberkopf’s life rule his everyday routine, they are the signature figures (and bear the wounds) of the various periods of his life, they take each other’s place like relay runners and, with the exception of Eva, are easily seduced. But then love gets in their way. Biberkopf gives each of them his affection and protection but not his heart. This is first captured by Mieze, who seems almost related to him in her childlike, cheerful nature. Franz can mirror himself naively in Mieze, and the two of them soon behave together with confidential playfulness, like Cocteau’s "enfants terribles". And if it weren’t for Reinhold, Franz might have found happiness with Mieze.

VIII Rainer Werner Biberkopf

« My life would have turned out differently, certainly not as a whole, but in some respects, in many, perhaps more crucial respects than I can even say at this point, differently from the way it turned out with Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz embedded in my mind, my flesh, my body as a whole, and my soul – go ahead and smile. » R.W. Fassbinder, 1980

Certainly almost everyone who occasionally or more often reads a book can name their favorite hero or heroine, a literary figure onto which their identity-seeking projections are directed, prose characters to which they feel related or in which they even find themselves embodied, and their own insular life therefore seems less lonely and a bit protected.

That this literary character for Fassbinder was Franz Biberkopf is obvious; elements or direct quotations from Berlin Alexanderplatz show up time and again in his earlier films, and the Döblinesque view of destructive yet yearning, sensitive men appears like a blueprint for tragic heroes throughout Fassbinder’s oeuvre. It is, of course, at the same time a direct reflection of Fassbinder’s own emotionally chaotic life, with all its complicated polygamous bonding dynamics. The most conspicuous predrafts of a Biberkopf figure can probably be found in In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) and Fox and His Friends (his somewhat underrated masterpiece from 1975, where the figure played by Fassbinder himself is even called Franz Biberkopf).

« And indeed, what would a person raised just like us, or similarly, see in a love that doesn’t lead to any visible results, to anything that can be displayed, exploited, and thus made useful ? » R.W.Fassbinder, 1980

Franz’s love of Reinhold is a mystery not only to himself but also to us – and yet we know what he’s talking about. The film touches here on a collective secret knowledge that, rumbling in our subconscious, brings to mind on some strange evening of our life a confusing feeling of deepest tenderness for a person we never really thought played an important role in our life.

IX Legato/Staccato

« Good close-ups have a lyrical effect. They were ‘seen’ not by the good eye but by the good heart. » Béla Balázs

Berlin Alexanderplatz is for considerable stretches a film of long takes, uninterrupted sequence shots, sometimes for minutes without a cut, which means that the cut takes place in the camera, as it were, by moving the camera position with the dolly and changing the frame by zooming. The close-up, for example, is often used not as a response to a long shot or as a follow-up to a countershot but rather as something sought out by the camera, which glides silently up to the figures – above all Biberkopf – who dance toward their marked positions, as in slow motion, until finally lens and object come together.

The target reached is often an image of limitation, because Xaver Schwarzenberger’s camera again and again finds window frames, gratings, or wooden beams that narrow the framing of the picture like a passe-partout, a frame within a frame that clamps in and firmly holds the personnel like prisoners of an image. Or like the ever-present parakeet in the birdcage.

But at some point in every long take the cut has to come, and every time it must have been a great challenge to find the exact right moment for it, sometimes as a break, sometimes in a state of flux, and there are times when the image simply vanishes into a fade-out.

Then, time and again, especially in the epilogue, editor Juliane Lorenz counteracts this method with quick, aggressive stretches of associative montage, and out of the contrast of these dynamic poles arises the unnerving rhythm of the film, which, underscored ubiquitously and with evocative insistence by Peer Raben’s music, swings unpredictably and erratically to and fro between elegy and adrenaline – which is an attempt on the one hand to do justice to Biberkopf’s subjectively varying perception of time, and on the other to capture the delirious energy of Döblin’s prose.

X Laughter in the Dark

« Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. » Friedrich Nietzsche

And this Biberkopf does himself.

In the laughter that sometimes bursts forth out of Biberkopf like a machine-gun salvo and then seems never to stop, distorting his face into a grimace and revealing him as someone who overcomes his failure with the booming gesture of a winner – in this laughter that is never a pure light laugh but always a bellowed, demanded, longed-for burst – herein is Biberkopf’s fear laid bare. Laughter is Franz’s weapon to keep panic, doubt, and worry in check.

In the end, the laugh turns into a cry, the never-ending cry of a man whom life does not want to deliver from his guilt, his innocence, his offense.

Epilogue

We don’t understand him, this Biberkopf, and yet we know what he does, and we suspect why. That is the viewer’s dilemma in Berlin Alexanderplatz: we know what to make of it but then again we don’t, and we are sometimes angry to be left so alone by a film that doesn’t want to help us decipher Franz Biberkopf and his emotions but that succeeds at the same time by dispensing with all interpretative aids and instead insisting on observation in order to create a close rapport with the figure. A rapport that is exceptional even for Fassbinder’s cinema.

The way we see films and how they have an effect on us changes over the years, just as one changes as a person; this is an impression familiar to everyone. In the past I had no trouble at all sitting in the movies for days on end, watching one film after the other, with no qualms about jumping among genres, from Tarkovsky to Spielberg, from Bergman to Hitchcock. There was a seemingly endless reservoir of time and patience, and I felt an ever-playful openness; it was never too much for me. The emotions had their effect and then spread out rather diffusely and without reflection in the cosmos of memory.

When I watch a film today, however – even an admittedly exceptional one, like United 93 – or, for that matter, simply stick it out to the end, then it seems to me completely impossible, even physically, to move along without a break to the next cinematographic impression, to slip smoothly into another story, another rhythm, another atmosphere, and the realm of impressions that develop out of it. In other words, the half-life of an intensive filmic experience has slowed down appreciably, or else a film finds, potentially, a greater echo in one’s own history, in the personal zones of resonance in the memory.

So I sit there after an emotionally intensive film and vibrate. Then I need time, and also to talk about it, in order to digest what I have virtually experienced.

I saw the fifteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz Remastered – twenty-six years after the first time – in January 2007 over two days in a small, cozy theater. I was very excited and looked forward to the demanding and yet luxurious task of writing an exclusive text after attending an exclusive screening. And I must admit that for some stretch of the time it was surprisingly hard work.

The film is not only long but, above all, as was laid out earlier, is committed to a narrative method that on the one hand repulses the viewer, while on the other aims to swallow him up, drawing him into the decelerated, asthmatic environment of its story. I almost want to say that you are held down underwater and, gasping for breath, look at the shimmering reflections on the surface, but from below. They are beautiful, these reflections, but if you want to look at them more closely, the film pulls you down deeper underwater. The pressure increases, and you are afraid of suffocating. That might sound fascinating, and after all it is an amazing film that can generate this feeling – but I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t admit that the whole procedure demanded an enormous amount of patience, curiosity, perseverance, and density of feeling.

If one considers once again the importance Döblin’s novel had for Fassbinder’s development and his attempt to come to terms with Germany and the Germans, it seems almost inevitable that this mammoth film adaptation would rank as a key work in his oeuvre. And yet the film will not let itself be forced into the idea of the sum of all parts, will not be the coherent focal point among all the other parts of his life’s puzzle. Berlin Alexanderplatz is, still today, a visual, conceptual, and emotional megaquarry, a sometimes unfocused, often even chaotic, but also constantly fascinating excess consisting of violence, passion, contempt, desire, and, yes, somehow also love, a film in which people scream, laugh, cry, and screw outrageously and which never entirely comes together as a whole, never wants to come together, a film that has no desire at all to be packed away into a well-formulated crate in order to sit on the shelf as a key work, deciphered or not.

What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.

To examine and to listen to all this in its very impertinence and truthfulness and beauty and hideousness will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin and who share a feeling with the author of this text, namely the desire to ask more of cinema than merely a story.

Tom Tykwer, 2007

 

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  René Magritte. La femme soumise, 1928 [merci à Ph!l]

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg

Königsberg is undoubtedly one of the most famous cities in mathematics, in part due to its interesting geography. The city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, in Russia) was built on two sides of a river, near the site of two large islands. The four sectors of the city were connected by seven bridges, as shown in the following map. Carl Ehler, a mathematician, was puzzled by a question —

“Which route would allow someone to cross all 7 bridges, without crossing any of them more than once?”

The Map of Königsberg

Can you figure out such a route?

Leonhard Euler

No, you can’t! In 1736, while proving that it’s impossible to find such a route, Leonhard Euler laid the foundations for graph theory.

Before we dive right in, let’s talk about certain preliminaries on graph theory we’ll need, to better understand this historical problem.

So, what is a graph? A graph is just a collection of nodes and edges (very different from the graphs you’ve seen in calculus!). For the sake of simplicity, throughout this post, we’ll talk only about undirected graphs — i.e. graphs wherein there is no sense of direction associated with the edges. Also, the number of edges touching a particular vertex correspond to its degree.

Constructing the map’s equivalent graph

The map of the ancient city can be easily represented as the graph on the right (why?) — where the edges and nodes correspond to bridges and sectors of the city, respectively.

We’ve now developed sufficient weaponry to attack the problem, so let’s begin by formalizing what we’re looking for — an Euler walk. An Euler walk in an undirected graph is a walk (a sequence of alternating vertices and edges) that uses each edge exactly once. If such a walk exists, the graph is called traversable (which our graph is not!).

To get a bit more mathematical, let’s denote the start and end vertices with S and V respectively. Furthermore, consider the following minor yet critical observation — Every vertex that isn’t S or V, must have an even degree.

Why? Let’s give it some thought. The only way to pass a vertex that isn’t the start or the end vertex is by entering through an edge and exiting through another. Since we can’t use an edge more than once, this shows that the degree of all such vertices (not S or V) must be even. Note that there’s no restriction on how many times we visit a vertex, as long as we traverse all bridges (edges) exactly once.

The map of Königsberg (as a graph) has at least three vertices with odd degrees, indicating that it is impossible to find a route with the desired properties! We solved it!

On a practical note, all the seven bridges were destroyed by a bombing raid in 1944 and only five of them were rebuilt. Königsberg became part of the Soviet Union (now Russia) at the end of World War II and was renamed Kaliningrad.

Wolfram MathWorld

The bridges bb and dd were destroyed (and never rebuilt), and aa and cc are now a single bridge passing above A with a stairway in the middle leading down to A. Can you find an Euler walk in the map of modern-day Königsberg?

Written by

Rahul Sethi

As a college sophomore at IIT Kanpur, Rahul is passionate about AI and Math. He aims to create a positive, global impact on the society using technology.

Stamatics, IIT Kanpur

Stamatics is a society of IIT Kanpur under the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Throughout the year, Stamatics organises mathematical competitions, talks by various professors and students, workshops, and numerous other informal and formal sessions.

The Velocity Illusion. View the image with the centre covered. Then with the sides covered. Which perception of velocity is correct? Both? Neither?

The Unattainable Speed of Light

How does special relativity add velocities? Welcome to the world where 1 + 1 is not quite 2.

Adam Hrankowski

Aug 3 · 9 min read

A letter poured in

I received a letter with some questions about special relativity. Here is a part of that letter:

…let’s say we hypothetically were able to send a space ship across space at the speed of light minus 5 mph. Couldn’t a person run from the back of the space ship to the front at 10 mph? — Luke Copko

The implication is that the runner has now broken the light barrier. That’s a no-no in the world of special relativity.

An observer (call him Luke) is on Earth, witnessing this whole scenario. Let’s have another observer (call her Leia) sitting aboard the ship, monitoring the dilithium. Won’t the runner (call him Anakin) be moving at 5 mph above the speed of light?

Here’s what we might expect from Luke’s frame of reference.

Our intuition tells us to add velocities, meaning Anakin moves away from Luke at greater than light speed. Special relativity says no.

How do we explain this apparent breach of relativistic protocol?

Now consider Leia’s frame of reference. Wouldn’t she see Anakin moving one way at 10 mph, and Luke moving the other way at 5 mph short of the speed of light? That also totals 5 mph above the cosmological speed limit.

According to Leia, Luke and Anakin are separating faster than light speed. Why does special relativity allow this?

It turns out that this arrangement is legal. Why is one okay and the other forbidden? Why is special relativity so fickle?

The two commandments of relativity

The theory of special relativity has two rules:

1. All inertial reference frames are equivalent.

As long as that space ship is moving in a straight line at a constant speed, it is an inertial reference frame. Leia measures the Anakin’s speed to be 10 mph. That’s a valid measurement. Leia also measures Luke’s speed on Earth in the opposite direction: 5 mph short of the speed of light.

2. The speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames.

Suppose Anakin fires a pulse from a laser. He will measure the pulse leaving the laser at 186,000 miles per second. Won’t an Leia measure the pulse moving at an additional 10 mph? Won’t Luke measure it to be moving at twice light speed plus 5 mph? Nope. Everyone measures the speed of the laser pulse to 186,000 miles per second.

The second axiom may be the harder to swallow. Maxwell’s equations provide the theory behind Rule #2. Experiment provides the physical evidence. We won’t delve into it any further here. We will, however, examine the implications of Rule #2.

Let’s have the space ship travelling at ⅘ light speed. Within, Anakin clips along at ⅖ light speed. We’ll have V be his speed with respect to Luke. Here’s what we might expect:

We know from previous articles that motion messes with time and distance. What will it do to Anakin’s velocity?

To check V, we will define an event upon which both Luke (on the ground) and Leia (on the ship) can agree. The trouble begins when we compare two events separated by distance or time.

The instant Anakin begins his run, he fires a light pulse from his laser. The far end of the ship reflects the pulse back toward Anakin. When the pulse strikes him, he drops on the spot. (Don’t worry. He’ll be okay.)

Where is Anakin?

Leia’s frame of reference

The thick arrow shows Anakin’s motion. The thin arrows are the light beams. The light travels much further than does Anakin. How far does he get? Half way across the ship? A quarter of the way? Wherever he is, Luke and Leia will agree.

We’ll calculate this distance for both frames of reference. Then we’ll equate the two expressions and see what happens.

The speed of light is our standard. We can define the distance travelled by the light in Leia’s frame as our unit length. That is the total length of the two thin arrows. Anakin was running at ⅖ light speed so the length of the thick arrow is ⅖. How long is the ship? The three arrows together have a total length of 1⅖. The length of the ship is half that total:

What fraction of the ship’s length did Anakin travel? Take his distance and divide it by the length of the ship.

Anakin makes it just over halfway across the ship. If we marked the floor off in 7th’s, he’d collapse at mark #4. Neither Luke nor Leia will dispute this.

Luke’s frame of reference

How does this play out for Luke?

We need not assume anything about how the times, distances and velocities in Leia’s frame compare to Luke’s frame. But they will have to agree on two measurements:

• the speed of light, c
• the proportion of the ship's length travelled by Anakin (4/7 in our example)

Luke measures Anakin running at some speed, V, which intuition tells us must be 1⅕ light speed. He also measures a laser pulse travelling at — according to Rule #2 — the speed of light. Finally, he measures the ship’s speed to be ⅘ light speed.

First, the laser makes the trip to the far end of the ship. It has a little further than the length of the ship to travel because the ship is moving. Anakin has run ⅖ of that distance. Because the ship has also advanced, he is less than ⅖ of the way across.

At the end of the journey, Anakin has travelled a distance of V·tᵤ with respect to Luke. Here, tᵤ is some time as measured by Luke.

Although Anakin travels a distance of V·tᵤ, the ship has advanced a distance of u·tᵤ, where u is the speed of the ship. This is how far Anakin ends up from the rear of the ship:

In our example, the ship’s speed, u, is ⅘ light speed. The thing we want to find out is V, and the time variable, tᵤ, will eventually disappear. Once we have the length of the ship, we hope to show:

This is the distance along the ship divided by the length of the ship, as measured by Luke.

In the calculations below, it may help to print out the diagram of Luke’s reference frame. You can then refer to it as you follow each step of the argument.

Anakin’s position is the same in both frames

Recall how we worked this out for Leia’s frame of reference. She measures Anakin’s speed as ⅖ light speed. We can generalize the previous calculation by representing Anakin’s speed with the variable v.

We need an expression for the length of the ship in Luke’s frame. This is the distance the light travels to the end of the ship, less the distance the ship moves in that time.

The time, t₁, presents a problem. We need the times to eventually cancel, so we want only one time variable, tᵤ. First, we express in terms of tᵤ.

Next, we use the fact that tᵤ=t₁+ t₂ to find an expression for t₁.

We insert our t₁ into the above expression for Lᵤ and tidy it up a bit.

We divide the distance Anakin travels across the ship with the length of the ship. This gives us a distance in terms of ship length. What proportion of the ship did Anakin cross?

That proportion is frame independent.

How fast is Anakin moving away from Luke?

We are left with the tedium of isolating V. This will give us the sought-after expression for Anakin’s speed according to Luke.

Cross multiply numerators with denominators.

Expand.

Bring the V terms to the left, and cancel equivalent terms.

Isolate V.

Tidy up the result by dividing top and bottom by c².

If we are consistent about expressing velocities as fractions of light speed, c=1. We can eliminate c from the expression.

Plug in the values from our example and…

In Luke’s frame, Anakin chugs along at about 90% light speed.

We do add velocities. But then we apply an adjustment. That means dividing by 1 + uv. When u and v are small — which they usually are, uv is very close to 0. The adjustment is negligible.

We must be careful about mixing our reference frames. The distance between Luke and Anakin is increasing at 1⅕ light speed with respect to Leia, but not with respect to each other.

What about Luke and Anakin together from Leia’s point of view? Why no adjustment? In Leia’s frame, the distance between Luke and Anakin increases at 1⅕ light speed: Anakin at ⅖ to her right; Luke at ⅘ to her left.

We must be careful about mixing our reference frames. The distance between Luke and Anakin is increasing at 1⅕ light speed with respect to Leia, but not with respect to each other.

If Luke fires a light pulse at Anakin, we know it will overtake him. According to Luke, Anakin is moving away at about 90% light speed. Leia will see the pulse approach her at light speed, pass her, and overtake Anakin. Anakin will see it approach him at light speed also.

When we speak of the distance increasing at 1⅕ light speed, the distance isn’t a thing which can carry a signal at a super-luminous velocity. We must carefully select our frame of reference. Nobody is moving at greater than light speed in anyone’s frame.

All is well. God is in his curved space-time heaven.

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Written by

Adam Hrankowski

Adam Hrankowski is a maths and physics tutor in Prince George BC. His book, "When Am I Ever Gonna Use This Stuff?" is available at: https://amzn.to/3egZUib.

MathAdam

Maths is like finger-painting. Messy and beautiful.