Berlin‘s club and underground culture has been the subject of many a curious, breathless investigation, from morning-after breakfast conversations at Berghain club to PhD theses on bouncers, the latest stars.
At the Berlinale 2019, as Germany is looking back on 30 post-Wall years, the scene is getting double treatment in two documentary world premieres, BERLIN BOUNCER and BEAUTY & DECAY, as the clubbers of the early 90s are entering late middle-age, their lifestyle becoming fodder for the history books.
Enter Sven Marquardt, Smiley Baldwin, and Frank Künster, the three most famous gatekeepers in the German capital.
Director David Dietl (King Ordinary) followed them around town, reminiscing about Obst & Gemüse grocery-store-turned-club across from squatted punk castle Tacheles and the famous Cookies club's numerous incarnations, in a classic intercut three-protagonist documentary shot over a few years. We are lucky that the three could not be more different, the if not reluctant then cagey bouncer behind his “armour” (Marquardt's words) of leather, piercings and tattoos; the American G.I. nicknamed for his sunny disposition; and the West German college dropout who likes the attention of very young women.
Between enlightening self-reflection (“I try to paint a picture with people every night.”) and preposterous megalomania (“I accompany people through their excess.”), we hear and see the story of (one type of) Berlin from a divided city to party metropolis. Sven Marquardt, who guards the Berghain club famous for its free-spirited environment, thoughtfully adds that he tries to “create a safe space.” Opening up with a hilarious dream/nightmare anecdote, he admits imagining getting bounced out of hell when his time comes. We get a lot of straight-forwarded door interaction from Smiley and Frank, and, yes, some pointers to everyone's most urgent question: How do I get in? (hint: Don’t argue. Become a regular. No guys without girls.). It’s a socially busy but lonely job. All three men have left the orbits they were born into; there’s a brilliant scene where Künster returns to small-town West Germany for a class reunion, pontificating about the “simple” rural lifestyle vs. his glamorous life — to two school mates who could not be less impressed or interested.
Dietl doesn’t probe much on-screen although we can tell he has to work hardest behind the scenes with Marquardt, but he shows and lets the bouncers talk as much or as little as they want, either in itself revealing. Smiley, the black man in East Berlin (not a problem, he laughs, having been warned of racism) takes the most pragmatic if-life-gives-you-lemons approach, opening up his own security company. He has a happy family he shields from the attention. In one meta-scene, met with appreciative laughter at the sold-out Berlinale screening, we see him and a staffer discuss their Berlinale security contract.
Smiley is also the one who most openly and fearlessly addresses the elephant in the room: the power that comes with the job description, and its environmental side effects from vanity to superficiality to sycophancy. In front of his former barracks, he self-deprecatingly talks about the moment the wall came down, which lost him his job as a US military police officer naturally obeyed as soon as he opened his mouth. The other two men are more ambivalent towards, but not less aware of, their externally assigned status and internally crafted image. Sven Marquardt, on one of his short, quiet escapes to the Baltic coast, his Louis Vuitton camera bag in tow, ponders the price you pay for individuality.
The half-time of fame and admiration can be fleeting, as Künster finds out when he loses the club and his job and with it his daily routine -- getting ready for the nightshift with lots of Nutella sandwiches (interestingly, he pops up in a small acting gig in another Berlinale film, Xaver Böhm’s O BEAUTIFUL NIGHT). There is a lot to read between the lines, with some details I only noticed upon second viewing, such as the incidental but ironic juxtaposition of a Berlin-Mitte naked billboard photo of also-porn-actor Künster next to a cartoonish public health advisory about sexually transmitted diseases.
Dietl, who comes at the scene as an outsider, has a noticeably different relationship with his protagonists than Annekatrin Hendel, who comes out of the East Berlin subculture she portrays in all of her films and now in BEAUTY & DECAY. This alters their positions within the stories, oscillating between distance and intimacy with all the respective advantages and disadvantages. Distance can keep the director on the outside but also leave more room for criticality or a bird’s eye perspective; intimacy can make for a more organic flow and open up opportunities to zoom in and probe, but also keep the audience on the outside of a tight, exclusive clique.
Both films together paint a picture of massive social and personal change in the heart of Europe over the past three decades. Where I wished for deeper insights on the power question in Dietl’s film, with Hendel I wished for more on the decay part of the title equation. Perhaps that film has to wait another 10 years. In both films, we are left with questions about these five characters and East and West German biographies of rebels approaching 60. But lingering mystery of course is not a bad thing --and an integral part of the ongoing underground myth-making.
by
Jutta Brendemühl
promo image courtesy Flare Film
