Tatsachenphantasie. Il montaggio epico in Berlin Alexanderplatz di R. W. Fassbinder

Tatsachenphantasie. The Epic Editing in Berlin Alexanderplatz by R. W. Fassbinder · This article examines Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) as one of the most successful cases of literarische Verfilmung, arguing that the achievement of this fourteen-episode television epic lies not in narrative fidelity but in a strictly methodological adherence to Alfred Döblin’s montage technique and to his ideal of an unobstructed language capable of letting things speak (Tatsachenphantasie). Whereas, as already noted by Siegfried Kracauer, Phil Jutzi’s 1931 adaptation reduced montage to a merely decorative function and suppressed the novel’s polyphonic dimension, Fassbinder’s explicit engagement with Döblin’s writing results, on the one hand, in a deep understanding of the logic underlying montage itself and, on the other, in a restrained film direction that preserves a critical distance between spectator and characters. Through close readings of key sequences from the first episode – focusing on sound montage, the visual rendering of linguistic associations, and voice-over strategies – the paper shows how Fassbinder’s audiovisual translation preserves, almost philologically, the perceptual and metaphysical layers of the novel’s associative design, while working its way through it.