Of interest: Fassbinder at P.S. 1

The exhibit discussed here ends on January 21st, so if you can, you should really rush to Queens and catch it.

I recently went to P.S. 1 with Christine to poke around see what was up. Their whole third floor gallery is currently occupied by an exhibit dedicated to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic Berlin Alexanderplatz. The exhibit is remarkable both for its content and for its curatorial decisions. Berlin Alexanderplatz, conceived as a television serial, is emotionally harrowing–we follow unsympathetic characters through a bleak German post-World War II landscape and visually arresting–in the middle of a damp grey and green and brown forest, a pink dress flutters on our disconsolate heroine, your eyes cannot resist it. It's equally demanding in its length: 15 hours.
The manner in which P.S. 1 is showing the series is equally interesting and raises many questions for me about how their presentation of the pieces affects your viewing of the film. In one room, the museum has built a giant complex of interconnected viewing consoles where you can watch each of the fourteen episodes individually. You can also stand in the middle of the circular complex and watch all th episodes playing all at once without sound. See here for images: http://www.ps1.org/ps1_site/content/view/281/63/. In another room you also have the option of watching the episodes playing back to back on a regular one-dimensional screen. I've never watched the film in its 15-hour entirety before, but I would bet that watching it at P.S. 1 more closely replicates the experience of watching it on television more than a straightforward continuous screening of the film would. Watching Berlin at P.S. 1, you get the noise of the gallery-goers, the interruptions of people going in and out of the booths, the inability to stay in the museum for fifteen continuous hours, which turns out to be surprisingly useful in this context.
On display are also Fassbinder's story boards for the films, his copy of the Doblin novel from which he adapted Berlin Alexanderplatz, and extensive restored and non-restored stills.