I met Stanley three days ago for the first time. Should I call him ‘Schtinter’? That’s how he signs his mails and since we met he calls me ‘Roth’. That might be a promotion after we had two beers (große) together.
Petit gave him my contacts because Schtinter was coming to Berlin to collect Fassbinder’s famous TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz––15 boxes of 35mm print––to bring back to London to screen at the ICA. Schtinter has co-programmed the 70×70 film season on the occasion of Iain Sinclair’s 70th birthday.
Fassbinder, Sinclair, Alexanderplatz. Nice.
Schtinter also announced he would film his journey and his time in Berlin. His plan was to go to Spandau (when Sinclair and Petit came to Berlin for the 2081-Walk we had to drive them to Spandau first thing. Where Albert Speer walked daily in circles around the prison yard, measuring the distance carefully. Speer was travelling in his imagination to Siberia, he crossed the Bering Strait, ending his sentence somewhere in Mexico––Speer then bought the Ro80. / Georg says, Sinclair did the same walk as Speer to undo the Walking Nazi,––not sure), Soviet ghost town Vogelsang was on Schtinter’s list and “jumping off that hotel” (meaning Park Inn Alexanderplatz Base flying?).
Schtinter wanted to see the famous towers in Lichtenberg and we arranged for Friday at 15:00, there. Knowing Sinclair I guessed Schtinter would be a walker. (Petit like Ballard is more of a driver) When texting at 15:20, that he was still walking and “almost there, right on Karl Marx” I knew something went wrong. It was the ‘t’. It is not Hertzbergstraße but Herzberstraße. I gave him one ‘t’ too many in the street’s name. (Schtinter sounds like it has a ‘t’ too much) Hertzbergstraße is near Sonnenallee in Neukölln, and there was Stanley. It took him almost two more hours to arrive in Lichtenberg, by foot. Stanley doesn’t trust Berlin’s public transport.
It might have been too dark when he filmed the towers with an old 16mm Bolex. We went to the Vietnamese place on the corner and had a pho soup with tofu and Warsteiner beers.
I told him that back in 1981, they had problems after showing Berlin Alexanderplatz on TV. People thought the image was much too dark.
Schtinter took a photo of me with his Fuji instant camera, ––a smaller Polaroid procedure. The photo was practically black, you couldn’t tell it was Roth. Schtinter liked it. He showed me the second photo he had taken with the Fuji in Berlin. It was a sign in the subway with ‘Alexanderplatz’ written on it. Very nice and very dark.
I’ll be in London on the weekend of November 16, and 17, when the Fassbinder film will be shown and look forward to it. 894 minutes.

(For the duration of 60Days, Stanley Schtinter is a spokesperson for the banner Purge, and The Liberated Film Store {which is a subsidiary purge})