NOVEL INTO FILM

Susan Sontag

We take it for granted that film directors are, if they so wish, in the game of recycling. Adapting novels is one of the most venerable types of movie projects, although a book that calls itself the “novelization” of a film seems— rightly—barbarous. Being a hybrid art as well as a late one, film has always been in a dialogue with other narrative genres. Movies were first seen as an exceptionally potent kind of illusionist theater, the rectangle of the screen corresponding to the proscenium of a stage, on which appear—actors. Starting in the early silent period, plays were regularly “turned into’’ films. But filming plays did not encourage the evolution of what truly was distinctive about a movie: the intervention of the camera—its mobility of vision. As a source of plot, character and dialogue, the novel, being a form of narrative art that (like movies) ranges freely in time and space, seemed more suitable. Many early successes of cinema (The Birth of a Nation, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ramona, Stella Dallas, It) were adaptations of popular novels. The 1930s and 1940s, when movies attained their largest.audeice and had an unprecedented monopoly on entertainment, were probably the heyday of novel-into-film projects—the sleek Hollywood classic-comics of the novels by the Bronte sisters or Tolstoy being no more or less ambitious, as films, than those adapted from such bestsellers as Gone With the Wind, Lost Horizon, Rebecca, The Good Earth, Gentleman's Agreement. The presumption was that it was the destiny of a novel to “become” a film.

Since the film that is a transcription of a novel is riding piggyback on the reputation and interest of the novel, comparisons are inevitable. And now that movies have ceased to have a monopoly on entertainment, standards have risen. Who can see the films made from Lolita or Oblomov or The Trial without asking if the film is adequate to the novel—the making of invariably invidious comparisons depending on whether or not the novel belongs to literature. Even a merely very interesting novel, like Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, turns out to be far richer, more complex than the film. It seems almost in the nature of film—regardless of the film’s quality—to abridge, dilute and simplify any good novel which it adapts. In fact, far more good movies have been made from good plays than from good novels—despite the view that such films tend to be static and thereby go against the grain of what is distinctively cinematic.

certain directors of the 1930s and 1940s like William Wyler, George Stevens, David Lean and Claude AuUtant-Lara were particularly drawn to good-novel-intomovie projects—as have been, more recently, Luchino Visconti, Joseph Losey and Volker Schlondorff. But the failure rate has been so spectacular that since the 1960s the venture has been considered suspect in certain quarters. Godard, Resnais and Truffaut declared their preference for subliterary genres... crime and adventure novels, science fiction. Classics seemed cursed: it became a dictum that cinema was better nourished by pulp fiction than by literature. A minor novel could serve as a pretext, a repertoire of themes with which the director is free to play. With a good novel, there is the problem of being “faithful” to it. Visconti’s marvelous first .film, Ossessione—adapted from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice—is a far nobler achievement than his handsome, respectful transcriptions of The Leopard or his stiff, rather absent version of Camus’s The Stranger. Cain’s melodrama did not have to be “followed.”

There is also the obstacle posed by the length of the work of fiction, not just by its quality as literature. Until this past winter I had seen only one film adaptation of a literary work I thought entirely admirable: a Russian film, The Lady with the Little Dog, made from a short story of Chekhov’s. The standard, and arbitrary, length of feature films is about the time in which one can render a short story. (Or a play.) But not a novel—whose nature is expansiveness. To do justice to a novel requires a film that is not just somewhat longer than an hour and a half to two hours (a length that has, anyway, been stretching in the last two decades) but a radically long film—one that breaks with the conventions set by theatergoing. This was surely the conviction of Erich von Stroheim when he attempted his legendary, aborted adaptation of McTeague, called Greed. Stroheim, who wanted to film all of Frank Norris’s novel, had made a film of ten hours, which the studio had reedited and eventually reduced to two hours and forty-five minutes (ten reels out of Stroheim’s forty-two); the negative of the thirty-two reels of discarded footage was destroyed. The version of Greed that survived this butchery is one of the most admired films ever made. But movie lovers will be forever in mourning for the loss of the ten-hour Greed that Stroheim edited.

assbinder has succeeded where Stroheim was thwarted—he has filmed virtually all of a novel. More: he has made a great film of, and one faithful to, a great novel ...although, if in some Platonic heaven, or haven, of judgments, there is a list of the, say, ten greatest novels of the twentieth century, probably the least familiar title on it is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin (1878-1957). Stroheim was not allowed to make a film of ten hours. Fassbinder, thanks to the possibility of showing a film in pieces, on television, was allowed to make a film of fifteen hours and twenty-one minutes. Inordinate length could hardly assure the successful transposition of a great novel into a great film. But though not a sufficient condition, it is probably a necessary one.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is Fassbinder’s Greed not only in the sense that Fassbinder succeeded in making the long film, the great film of a novel, but also because of the many striking parallels between the plot of Berlin Alexanderplatz and the plot of Greed. For, indeed, the American novel, published in 1899, tells a primitive version of the story related in the German novel, published thirty years later, which has a much thicker texture and greater range. Writing in San Francisco at the end of the last century, the youthful Frank Norris had Zola as a model of a dispassionate “naturalism.” The far more sophisticated Doblin, already in mid-career (he was fifty-one when Berlin Alexanderplatz was published) and writing in the century’s single most creative decade in the arts, had the inspiration (it is said) of Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as the expressive hypernaturalist tendencies in German theater, film, painting and photography with which he was familiar. (In 1929, the same year that Berlin Alexanderplatz appeared, Doblin wrote an elegant essay on photography as the preface to a volume of work by August Sander.)

“In Berlin Alexanderplatz, cinema has at last achieved some of the accumulative power of the novel by being as long as it is—and by being theatrical”

A burly, sentimental, naive, violent man, both innocent and brute, is the protagonist of both novels. Franz Biberkopf is already a murderer when Berlin Alexanderplatz starts—he has just finished serving a sentence of four years for killing the prostitute with whom he lived, Ida. The protagonist of McTeague eventually kills a woman, his wife Trina. Both novels are anatomies of a city, or part of it: San Francisco’s shoddy Polk Street in Norris’s novel and the Berlin district of workers, whores, and petty criminals in Doblin’s novel are far more than the background of the hero’s misfortunes. Both novels open with a depiction of the unmated hero afoot and alone in the city—McTeague following his Sunday routine of solitary walk, dinner and beer; Biberkopf, just discharged from prison, wandering in a daze about the Alexanderplatz. A former car boy in a mine, McTeague has managed to set himself up in San Francisco as a dentist; by the middle of the novel he is forbidden to practice. The ex-pimp Biberkopf tries to earn his living honestly in a series of menial jobs, but when he can no longer work (he loses his right arm), the woman he loves goes on the street to support them.

In both novels, the downfall of the protagonist is not just bad luck or circumstantial, but is engineered by his former best friend—Marcus in McTeague, Reinhold in Berlin Alexanderplatz. And both pairs of friends are studies in contrasts. McTeague is inarticulate; Marcus is hyperverbal—a budding political boss, spouting the cliches of reactionary populism. Biberkopf, who has vowed on coming out of prison to go straight, is not inarticulate; Reinhold belongs to a gang of thieves and is a stutterer. The gullible hero is obtusely devoted to the secretly malevolent friend. In Norris’s novel, McTeague inherits— with Marcus’s permission—the girl Marcus has been courting and marries her, just as she wins a large sum of money in a lottery; Marcus vows revenge. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Biberkopf inherits—on Reinhold’s urging—a number of Reinhold’s women; and it is when he refuses to discard one ex-girl of Reinhold’s as the next is ready to be passed on to him that Reinhold turns treacherous. It is Marcus who has McTeague deprived of his livelihood and fragile respectability: he reports him to the city authorities for practicing dentistry without having a diploma, and the result is not only destitution but the ruin of his relation with his already deranged, pathetic wife. It is Reinhold who puts an atrocious end to Biberkopf s valiant efforts to stay honest, first tricking him into taking part in a burglary and then, during the getaway, pushing him out of the van into the path of a car.. .but Biberkopf, after the amputation of his arm, is strangely without desire for revenge. When his protector and former lover Eva brings the crippled Biberkopf out of his despair by finding him a woman, Mieze, with whom he falls in love, Reinhold, unable to endure Biberkopf s happiness, seduces and murders Mieze. Marcus is motivated by envy; Reinhold by an ultimately motiveless malignity. (Fassbinder calls Biberkopfs forbearance toward Reinhold a kind of “pure”—that is, motiveless—love.)

“To do justice to a novel requires a radically long film—one that breaks with the conventions set by theatergoing”

In McTeague the fatal bond that unites McTeague and Marcus is depicted more summarily. Toward the end of the novel Norris removes his characters from San Francisco: the two men find each other in the desert, the landscape that is the city’s pure opposite. The last paragraph has McTeague accidentally handcuffed to Marcus (whom he has just killed, in self-defense), in the middle of Death Valley, “stupidly looking around him,” doomed to await death beside the corpse of his enemy/friend. The ending of McTeague is merely dramatic, though wonderfully so. Berlin Alexanderplatz ends as a series of arias on grief, pain, death and survival. Biberkopf does not kill Reinhold, nor does he die himself. He goes mad after the murder of his beloved Mieze (the most lacerating description of grief I know of in literature), is confined to a mental hospital; and when released, a burnt-out case, finally lands his respectable job, as night watchman in a factory. When Reinhold is eventually brought to trial for Mieze’s murder, Biberkopf refuses to testify against him.

Both McTeague and Biberkopf go on savage, character-altering alcoholic binges—McTeague because he feels too little, Biberkopf because he feels too much (remorse, grief, dread). The naive, virile Biberkopf, not stupid but oddly docile, is capable of tenderness and generosity, as well as real love, for Mieze; in contrast to what McTeague can feel for Trina: abject fascination, succeeded by the stupor of habit. Norris denies hulking, pitiable, semiretarded McTeague a soul; he is repeatedly described as animal-like or primitive. Doblin does not condescend to his hero—who is part Woyzeck but part Job. Biberkopf has a rich, convulsive inner life; indeed, in the course of the novel he acquires more and more understanding, although this is never adequate to events, to the depth or the gruesome specificity of suffering. Doblin’s novel is an education novel, and a modern “Inferno.”

n McTeague there is one point of view, one dispassionate voice—selective, summarizing, compressive, photographic. Filming Greed, Stroheim is said to have followed Norris’s novel paragraph by paragraph—one can see how. Berlin Alexanderplatz is as much or more for the ear than for the eye. It has a complex method of narration: free-form, encyclopedic; with many layers of narrative, anecdote and commentary. Doblin cuts from one kind of material to another, often within the same paragraph: documentary evidence, myths, moral tales, literary allusions—in the same way as he shifts between slang and a stylized lyrical language. The principal voice, that of the all-knowing author, is exalted, urgent, anything but dispassionate.

The style of Greed is anti-artificial. Stroheim refused to shoot anything in studio, insisting on making all of Greed in “natural” locations. More than a half-century later, Fassbinder has no need to make a point about realism or about veracity. And it would hardly have been possible to film in the Alexanderplatz, which was annihilated in the bombing of Berlin during World War II. (It would be in what is now East Berlin.) Most of Berlin Alexanderplatz looks as if it were shot in a studio. Fassbinder chooses a broad, familiar stylization: illuminating the principal location, Biberkopf's room, by a flashing neon sign on the street; shooting often through windows and in mirrors. The extreme of artificiality, or theatricality, is reached in the sequences in the circuslike street of whores, and in most of the two-hour Epilogue.

Berlin Alexanderplatz has the distension of a novel—but it is also very theatrical, as are most of Fassbinder’s best films. Fassbinder’s genius was in his eclecticism, his extraordinary freedom as an artist: he was not looking for the specifically cinematic, and borrowed freely from theater. He began as the director of a theater group in Munich, directed almost as many plays as movies, and some of his best films are filmed plays, like his own The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Bremen Freedom, or take place mostly in one interior, such as Chinese Roulette and Satan's Brew. In an interview of 1974 Fassbinder described his first years of activity thus: “I produced theater as if it were film, and directed film as if it were theater, and did this quite stubbornly.” Where other directors, adapting a novel to a film, would have thought to abridge a scene because it went on too long, and thereby became (as they might fear) static, Fassbinder would persist, and insist. The theatrical-looking style that Fassbinder devised helps him to stay close to Doblin’s book.

Apart from the invention of one new character—an allforgiving mother figure, Biberkopfs landlady Frau Bast—most of the changes Fassbinder has made in the novel simply render the action more compact visually. In the novel Biberkopf does not always live in the same one-room apartment, as he does in the film, and Fassbinder sets events there that in the novel take place elsewhere. For example, in the novel Franz kills Ida at her sister’s place; in the film, the gruesome battering— which we see in repeated, hallucinatory flashback—takes place in Biberkopfs room, witnessed by Frau Bast. In the novel, Biberkopf doesn’t shack up with all the women with whom he takes up; in the film they each, one by one, move into his place, reinforcing the visual unity of the film but also making the relationships that precede Biberkopfs union with Mieze perhaps a bit too cozy. The women seem more whores-with-hearts-of-gold than they do in the book. One last invention: It is hard not to suspect that the canary in a cage Mieze gives Biberkopf (such a gift is just mentioned, once, in Doblin’s novel), which we see Biberkopf doting on, and is often in shot in the many scenes that take place in Biberkopf s room, is a reincarnation of the canary that is McTeague’s most cherished possession, the only thing he salvages from his wrecked domestic felicity, and still by his side “in its little gilt prison” when his doom is sealed in the desert.

rassbinder’s cinema is full of Biberkopfs—victims of Lfalse consciousness. And the material of Berlin I Alexanderplatz is prefigured throughout his films, whose recurrent subject is damaged lives and marginal existences—petty criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, immigrant workers, depressed housewives, and overweight workers at the end of their tether. More specifically, the harrowing slaughterhouse scenes in Berlin Alexanderplatz are anticipated by the slaughterhouse sequence in Jail Bait and In a Year of 13 Moons. But Berlin Alexanderplatz is more than a resume of his main themes. It was the fulfillment—and the origin.

“The principal voice of Berlin Alexanderplatz is exalted, urgent, anything but dispassionate”

In an article he wrote in March 1980, toward the end of the ten months it took to film Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder declared that he had first read Doblin’s novel when he was fourteen or fifteen, and had dreamed of making it into a film from the beginning of his career. It was the novel of his life—he described how his own fantasies had been impregnated by the novel—and its protagonist was Fassbinder’s elected alter ego. Several heroes of his films were called Franz; and he gave the name of Franz Biberkopf to the protagonist of Fox and His Friends, a role he played himself. It is said that Fassbinder would have liked to play Biberkopf. He did not; but he did something equally appropriate. He became Doblin: his is the voice of the narrator. Doblin is omnipresent in his book, commenting and lamenting. And the film has a recurrent voice-off, the voice of the novel, so to speak—and Fassbinder’s. Thus we hear many of the parallel stories, such as the sacrifice of Isaac, related in the novel. Fassbinder preserves the extravagant ruminating energy of the novel, but without breaking the narrative stride. The ruminating voice is not used as an antinarrative device, as in Godard’s films, but to intensify the narrative; not to distance us, but to make us feel more. The story continues to evolve, in the most direct affecting way.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is not outside the norms of film narratives, like the films of Godard’s. It is not a metafilm, like Syberberg’s Hitler, Fassbinder has nothing of Syberberg’s aesthetic of the grandiose, for all the length of Berlin Alexanderplatz, or his reverence for high culture. It is a narrative film.. .but one that is that long: a film that tells a story, in decors of the period (the late 1920s), with more than a hundred actors (many roles are taken by actors from Fassbinder’s regular troupe) and thousands of extras. A fifty-three-year-old theater actor who has had minor roles in a few of Fassbinder’s films, Gunter Lamprecht, plays Franz Biberkopf. Splendid as are all the actors, particularly Barbara Sukowa as Mieze and Hanna Schygulla as Eva, Lamprecht’s Biberkopf overshadows the others—an intensely moving, expressive, brilliantly varied performance, as good as or better than anything done by Emil Jannings or by Raimu.

hough made possible by television—it is a coproduction of German and Italian TV—Berlin Alexanderplatz is not a TV series. A TV series is constructed in “episodes,” which are designed to be seen at an interval—one week being the convention, like the old movie serials (Fantomas, The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon) which were shown every Saturday afternoon. The parts of Berlin Alexanderplatz are not really episodes, strictly speaking, since the film is diminished when seen in this way, spaced out over fourteen weeks (as I saw it for the first time, this winter, on Italian TV). The New York presentation in a movie theater—five segments of approximately three hours each, over five consecutive weeks—is certainly a better way to see it. Seeing it in, say, three or four consecutive days would be far better. The more one can watch over the shortest time works best.. .exactly as one reads a long novel with maximum pleasure and intensity. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, cinema, that hybrid art, has at last achieved some of the dilatory, open form and accumulative power of the novel by being as long as it is—and by being theatrical.