Berlin Alexanderplatz (6 DVDs)

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fifteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Doblin's great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made over thirty films. Fassbinder's immersive epic follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht) as he attempts to become an honest soul amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.