Historiophoty and postmodernist cinema. Approaches to Berlin Alexanderplatz’s modernism

Abstract

From some discussions on postmodern historiography, the article presents the perspective of the philosopher of history Hayden White. The text tries to extrapolate what in his later works he calls modernist event –characteristics of the twentieth century, i.e., events that only modernism made possible– and tries to examine the notion of “historiophoty” to think Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film series, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), as a modernist film exploration that make us return to the relationship between history and fiction. Some declarative elements of audiovisual narrative are explored to analyze the potential of modernist film discourse to question the realistic depiction of history.