While Berlin's mythical club Berghain remains closed, you can use your dance floor downtime along their current "home alone together" slogan to dive deeper into their underground culture with this beautiful recent documentary streaming on MUBI.
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 photographer Sven Marquardt again, alongside photographer Robert Paris, and model Dominique “Dome" Hollenstein, in Annekatrin Hendel’s new documentary BEAUTY & DECAY (
trailer),
touching upon memory and memorialization with the last “wall” generation socialized in a communist dictatorship. The three are old mates from the late 80s East Berlin underground and fashion scene, "risen from ruins," as the GDR anthem went. We get to see the footage and photos from a lost world, the 1980s East Berlin counterculture, including its innovative music scene — another old mate, Robert Lippok (Ornament & Verbrechen, To Rococo Rot, Whitetree) has outdone himself with the music for this film. All of them are connected by the shared history of youth in an oppressive system, an experience that includes filmmaker Hendel, who is in the same Berlinale Kino International on Karl-Marx-Allee as five years ago with the dissident/Stasi documentary
ANDERSON. Seeing the new film, Dome calls it "a glittering déjà due” in the post-show Q&A.
Hendel set out to portray the portrayal of Dome by Marquardt. The filmmaker admits to having had no plan initially beyond the fashion shoot (while Dietl’s film is classically plotted and mapped out), wanting to capture the indeed lovely moment the duo would work together again after 35 years. »Whenever I look at these old pictures, it feels like I‘m on holiday in a different life, in a different country,” says Dome. The rest of the film just happened and turned into an homage.
Hendel is more invested and more involved than Dietl, not on-screen but clearly there as the protoagonists and the director circle each other in reminiscing where they come from and how they got here. Through her access, we get to see a different side of Sven Marquardt including smiling pictures of a teen punk on an East German tram, his dominance softened by the encounter with friends who also had to face the wrath of the regime for being different and individual in a hermetically closed and collective universe. Likeable Robert Paris, climbing around as he repairs Dome’s window, at first comes across as a petit bourgeois office worker. He has converted to Islam and moved to India to raise a family it turns out, a bit mournful about “pausing” his accomplished photography practice but clear about his life choices. Marquardt too recognizes “Berghain as my origin,” while successfully returning to his first love, the camera, and somehow juggling both (in neither film do we find out how).
The magnetic centre of the film and a sort of luminous seer is the literal flower girl Dome, a stunning, natural fairy beauty, eccentrically dressed, who now lives in a sort of hippie family commune and makes a living crafting decorative leather flowers that she sells on markets across Germany with her Volkswagen van. The only woman in these films, she is the most straight and straight-forward, most untouched by the passing of time and political and social change, the one most at ease and at peace. Naive or unchallenged she is not, but most insightful in surprisingly simple ways. “Beauty and decay,” Dome laconically comments a friend burning all her photos from the GDR times. Her light-hearted but resolute reply to "You can’t always fly high,” is “Yes, you can."
Hendel won the Heiner Carow Award handed out at the Berlinale by the DEFA, the former East German film studio: "A very affecting film," the jury found. "Hendel approaches her protagonists with levity, gives them room, observes them lovingly without being blinded. The title is programmatic yet the film holds surprises: We deal with aging and transience – themes that did not play a role in the hedonistic, burgeoning youth culture in 1980s East Berlin. They radically lived in the here and now, and they still do. They have stayed true to being different over the years – just like the film is staying true to itself as a love letter, full of hope and beauty, to a constantly changing city."
David Dietl, who comes at the scene as an outsider in BERLIN BOUNCER, 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. 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 Beauty & Decay
