how should i watch it?


I just got it, but there's something I'm scared of... the running time.

Since it's in one-hour episodes, how should I group them together over the periof of a few nights of watching?

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Yes the running time really put me off at first.

What I chose to do is watch an episode every week or couple of days, like a TV broadcast.
One you've got past the pilot - each episode is just 60 minutes long - and quite manageable into a busy schedule.

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Channel 4 showed this in the UK when it was first made, and that's the policy they adopted. It was shown at the British Film Institute over a two-day period, but it's too much to take in like that. I think your way works best - it gives you plenty to think about, and time to digest it.

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If you're in DC, the Goethe Institute is showing the whole piece in a two day span Sept 20-21, 2008. It seems daunting, so this thread really helped make my decision to go or not.

But if you feel like you could take it in all at once like that, this would be a great opportunity:
http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/was/en3555989v.htm

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Watch it all the way through, otherwise you're a p***y who likes Two and a Half Men! (snark).

Seriously, when I watched it the first time (and for many years the ONLY time), it was broadcast on PBS (specifically, WTTW in Chicago) in its original miniseries format, meaning one episode per week.

Watch one episode a day. The first part and the epilogue are 90 minutes and 112 minutes respectively, but the other episodes are one hour a piece (or close to it).

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If you have never seen it before, it might be best to view it as originally broadcast: one segment/chapter per week.

I've seen it a number of times, and now prefer to immerse myself in it entirely, and do a 2 or three day marathon [including plenty of cheap beer and schnapps].
I find the whole vibe more encompassing when done this way - you are just totally consumed by it for a couple days - in a good way.

...just my 2 cents [and probably not even worth that much]

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Susan Sontag famously said it should be watched in as condensed a time period as possible (two or three days), but I've watched it both ways (marathon sessions of four hours per day) and one episode a week, and I think the latter works best.

It's funny. Film people like to claim this as a FILM, suggesting that Fassbinder only made it for TV because he had to, but there's been no evidence of this that I know of. In Europe, there hasn't been the negative connotation associated with television like there was in the US, at least until recently, when people like Glenn Close and Holly Hunter started doing interesting stuff on TV.

I say it's best to treat it like a limited run TV series (like, say, the UK's "The Prisoner") and get through it in two or three months.

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I even had to stop for close to a month during my one episode a week schedule, and it still worked well, though admittedly that was on my second viewing. I think one could actually develop a negative reaction to BA if one had to watch it all in say two days. It takes place over several months; why not watch it over a few months?

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Just go with the flow. If one episode has you so hyped up you want to immediately watch another, do it. Otherwise...

Let us know what you think. :)

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Susan Sontag famously said it should be watched in as condensed a time period as possible (two or three days),

I watched it in two weeks averaging an episode a day. Some days I watched two and I saw the last three hours in a single sitting.

Film people like to claim this as a FILM,...

Aesthetically and formally, this is pure cinema.

...suggesting that Fassbinder only made it for TV because he had to,...

If Fassbinder had the choice, he would certainly insist on exhibiting it in theatres rather than TV screens. In the silent period you had long-form serials of similar length and they played in theatres. The evidence for this is the fact that Berlin Alexanderplatz isn't TV at all. The narrative is complex and never simplified, the performances are wonderfully constructed and played without the artificiality of TV and the lighting and the editing belongs wholly to the cinema.

In any case, it aired in movie theatres in MoMA in the 80s, a year after he died.

I say it's best to treat it like a limited run TV series (like, say, the UK's "The Prisoner") and get through it in two or three months.

The thing is Berlin Alexaderplatz is a character driven story that depends on the audience's involvement with their ambiguity rather than some TV show with a silly gimmick.

This is adapted from a German novel, a Modernist classic. It's not your day time stuff.




"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes

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damn, you're good ;)

TV show with a silly gimmick? aesthetically and formally, this is pure cinema? The narrative is complex and never simplified, the performances are wonderfully constructed and played without the artificiality of TV and the lighting and the editing belongs wholly to the cinema? a bit of a penchant for over-generalization?

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I think of it as a film because television might be the only way it could have been made. Had it been released in theaters piece by piece like, say, Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition, I think the momentum on the world market Fassbinder had gotten with the success of The Marriage Of Maria Braun might have been killed.

Plus, it's more of a single piece than the other TV miniseries masterpiece of the 1980s, Kieslowski's Dekalog.

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I watched it in three days. I don't watch TV series at all, but since I watched a few 5 hours films without problems in the past, that's how I worked it out, 5 hours a day in a three days long week-end.

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