In last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Joe Queenan wrote that individuals who've persevered through "gigantic books" are part of a "very special group because at any given time there are no more than a few hundred such people in the world." I imagine he's correct, principally because I enjoy reading but my personal pagecount record stands at 682 (and that was achieved with a teen pulp omnibus called "The Forbidden Game"). Basically, what I'm saying is that length in literature has never been the standard by which I've measured its quality.

Though I don't think length makes a piece of art better or worse, size does matter-if only to the chosen few who plowed through it just to say they'd finished. Last week, I decided to up my status a bit and become a member of this self-selecting pool's cinematic branch by watching all 15 and a half hours of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz." The screening at the PFA began on May 30, but another one starts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art tonight at 6:30. So rest assured, you, too, can join the German-language, English-subtitled, weighty modernist fun.

I want to open my discussion of the film with the simple assertion that most things in life, aside from watching the entirety of "Berlin Alexanderplatz," will not take you 15 and a half hours. Even watching "Berlin Alexanderplatz" doesn't have to take you 15 and a half hours, because director Phil Jutzi made a 90-minute version of it in 1931. And Jutzi's screenplay was co-written by Alfred Doblin, the guy who came up the story of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" in the first place. This begs the following question: If Doblin could condense his own work–the 1929 novel of 400 hefty pages–to a relatively brief span of time, why couldn't Fassbinder? Because you could hop on a plane, disembark in Berlin, and see Alexanderplatz for yourself in the time it would take to complete Fassbinder's epic journey.

But my previous question leads to a secondary consideration: Critics tend to have a problem with films that are, perhaps, a few scenes past concise, but no one ever talks about the chaff that could have been separated from the wheat of "War and Peace." Luckily, Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" has been spared the ire of short-attention-spanned critics because it was made 28 years ago by an auteur. When I sat down to watch the film, this was all boding very well. I'd survived Fellini. I'd enjoyed Godard (even late Godard). I thought I'd love "Berlin Alexanderplatz."

But then the title of Part One was "The Punishment Begins" and I thought otherwise. I learned that Franz Biberkopf, played by Gunter Lamprecht, is an accidental criminal who gets out of prison at the film's opening, vows to live a clean life, and is undermined in various ways until the famous concluding epilogue. Oddly, though, Biberkopf's punishment isn't the time in jail but the reality of the Weimar era, a time of unemployment, decadence and criminal activity. It's contemporary America, but without the literary elites who can blow countless hours a week leisure-reading by the fire (or leisure-watching in the study).

And now I've revealed my true colors. I aspired to join the ranks of Queenan's filmic counterparts, but I couldn't quite do it. I tried, valiantly, like Biberkopf fighting the adversity of the underbelly. But both Biberkopf and I have had to work for a living, and unlike that dear, round man, I didn't have 900 minutes to spend with Fassbinder. Maybe I'll see you at the SF MoMA tonight and try again.