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| B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989 featured band Malaria! (Manon P Duursma, Bettina Köster, Gudrun Gut, Christine Hahn, Susanne Kuhnke), photographed at Studio 54 for their 1981 Peppermint Lounge show |
In the first instalment with Gudrun Gut (creative director and star of the new playful and engrossing miniseries GUT; founding member of Mania D; Malaria!; Matador), Heiko Lange (director of GUT), plus music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, we start out by discussing how B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989 (co-directed by Lange with Jörg A. Hoppe and Klaus Maeck) got off the ground and Gudrun gives a shout-out to 99 recording artists (99-04EP, 1981; 99-10EP, 1982; 99-003LP, 1983) from the early Eighties, the ever impressive ESG.
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| Gudrun Gut with Heiko Lange, Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman, on Mark Reeder: “Mark was always looking from outside and he’s a very good storyteller. |
The memorable documentary has Mark Reeder (who also scored the film with Micha Adam) as our witty, inquisitive, and entrepreneurial tour guide with whom we encounter Malaria!; Mania D (Beate Bartel, Gudrun Gut, Bettina Köster); Blixa Bargeld (solo) and with Einstürzende Neubauten; Tilda Swinton (bicycling along The Berlin Wall); Keith Haring (doing an artwork on The Wall); The Loft’s Monika Döring (promoting The Fall show); Martin Kippenberger; Christiane F. (Christiane Felscherinow); Jan Vetter (aka Farin Urlaub of Die Ärzte); Annette Humpe (of Ideal); Nick Cave (after The Birthday Party broke up); Die Toten Hosen; Nena and her manager Jim Rakete; New Order (Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, manager Rob Gretton); WestBam; Die tödliche Doris; Mark’s The Tube co-host Muriel Gray and his band Shark Vegas, among many others.
A bit like Rip van Winkle or Herbert Achternbusch’s soldier character who wakes up decades after the war in the Hofgarten, or maybe early Anselm Kiefer works (in which the artist donned his father’s Wehrmacht uniform), in B-Movie: Lust & Sound In West-Berlin 1979-1989, Mark Reeder, dressed in varying military garb, makes for an exquisite time travel persona. West Berlin in the Eighties becomes a permanent present, that is always already lost, maybe because it was a memory in the first place already. Magical hollow spaces under highway bridges, cafés where old ladies in cardigans are having cheesecake ceaselessly since the 1920s, nighttime spots with names like The Jungle or Far Out (the rather tacky Bhagwan disco) gathered those for whom life was a riddle that could only be solved by creating new riddles. B-Movie folds time and space into a dream once surrounded by The Wall …
From Berlin, Heiko Lange and from outside Berlin, Gudrun Gut joined us on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Nice to see you! You are in the same place where we spoke before [on GUT for Tribeca Now]?
Gudrun Gut: Yes, in the Uckermark. I was in Berlin before but came back two days ago.
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| Mark Reeder, our witty, inquisitive and entrepreneurial tour guide, cycling through West Berlin Photo: courtesy of Heiko Lange |
Heiko Lange: I’m in Berlin, in the editing suite right now, helping a friend.
AKT: How did the B-Movie project begin? It was 2015 that it premiered in Berlin, right?
HL: 2012 I was just sitting with a friend, Jessica, and we were talking about the bands from the Eighties and stuff like that. 2012 everybody worldwide came to Berlin for what it was in the Eighties. We were so inspired by that time, so let’s try and do a film. Not a normal documentary because you get bored with those normal talking-head documentaries.
So we decided to try and do a film that just stays within the time. That was when the idea was born. Then we thought about who could be the producer. You need some strong, well-known producers because the music rights, the footage rights, it’s quite expensive. So we went to Jörg Hoppe, manager of Extrabreit, the band in the Eighties.
GG: Yes, and he had this publishing company Kartell. And he started doing movies on Tele 5. I worked for Jörg Hoppe before at the publishing company, but I was not a very good secretary. But he was great, he just wanted me to be there. With him we started this video company. Then he founded a big production company for films and TV productions. Not anymore?
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| Malaria!’s Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster being recorded by Mark Reeder Photo: courtesy of Heiko Lange |
HL: No, not anymore.
GG: He asked me years before, I guess when you had the idea. We had lunch and he asked me if I wanted to be the presenter of this and I said no f…ing way! I was really super busy with other stuff. I think Mark [Reeder] is perfect! I couldn’t do that!
HL: To close the story how we started, so Jörg Hoppe was like, wow, let’s do this. And if he’s in it, he’s in it. That means like every week he brought another suitcase of old tapes from some friend and stuff and we started watching all these old VHS tapes or Super 8 stuff. It wasn’t financed. We were still looking for a story to tell. Maybe a groupie that was connected to everyone and then Jörg put Mark Reeder on the table. Mark Reeder has a lot of footage and we watched it and someone said, Mark is always in the picture, let’s take him!
AKT: I haven’t met him yet but will soon. He seems to be the perfect person for time travel.
GG: Absolutely!
AKT: Because of his military fetish and the clothes that her wears, it feels a bit like Rip Van Winkle who wakes up and twenty years went by. Mark has a bit of a Kriegsheimkehrer [war returnee] feel to him.
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| Gudrun Gut with the clapboard in her new miniseries GUT Photo: courtesy of Gudrun Gut |
HL: I mean, Mark is still wearing military stuff. He looks somehow the same.
GG: What he does what really helps the movie - the Eighties, they really were not kind of funny, but pretty heavy, and he brings a lightness to it with the English humour he has. It’s fun to watch, I really like it.
AKT: It’s both a portrait of a time and a place and simultaneously the person guiding us through is from another place and, because of what he’s wearing, evokes another time as well. It’s that alien quality that you wouldn’t have, Gudrun.
GG: No way! When I watched a little bit - I haven’t seen it in years - when Blixa says, how do you want to describe Berlin, häh? Nobody can! That’s when you are too involved. And Mark was always looking from outside and he’s a very good storyteller.
HL: And he came from Manchester!
GG: I especially like that it has this original footage. Seeing it now again, Berlin changed so much. The houses were really rotten then, grey and damaged. Everything now is gentrified and nicely painted.
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| Blixa Bargeld on West Berlin: “I like to live in a city where I haven’t seen the other half.” Photo: courtesy of Heiko Lange |
AKT: I was always struck by the bullet holes in the houses.
GG: No more bullet holes! They were all over the place because nobody really believed in Berlin, nobody invested in the city. But then you had lots of freedom.
AKT: It was also a city of ashes for me, a pervasive grayness.
GG: The coal industry!
HL: And it was a Cold War scenery. You had that on every corner. In the middle of the Cold War, walled in. You somehow recognised that this place will not stay forever.
GG: What is forever? I couldn’t even imagine to get to be 30 in those days. My passport was filled with stamps because you needed the passport to go to West Germany and each time you got two stamps. When you went to East Germany for a visit, stamp. So when I went to other countries with my passport they had only two pages left. It was filled with GDR stamps. For me that was normal but sometimes at the border they said, what happened here? What’s with this passport?
AKT: Do you still have it?
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| Beate Bartel with Gudrun Gut outside The Jungle Photo: courtesy of Heiko Lange |
GG: I still have it, I hope, in one drawer with all the old stuff. All my friends had passports like that.
AKT: I loved the ending of the film, how the comments that are obviously about some other movie, are actually also a comment about this one. The last comment [by Farin Urlaub] uses a word that I haven’t heard in decades: “Geilomat”!
GG: Ha, geilomat! It’s not in use anymore.
HL: It’s pretty good!
GG: Maybe we should bring it back!
AKT: Did B-Movie ever play in the US?
HL: Unfortunately not. It was actually too expensive. We have all the German rights for music and footage but we couldn’t afford to get the European or US rights.
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| Monika Döring promoting The Fall show at The Loft |
AKT: That’s a pity.
HL: It’s sad. It would find its audience there. It has some key selling points, from Tilda Swinton to Nick Cave and the atmosphere, all is of unique making but we couldn’t afford it.
GG: Maybe one day Netflix says, okay we take over and we get the international rights and we take care of it. Because I think it would be great. I’ve been to screenings in other countries for the Goethe-Institut and people absolutely went wild, they loved it.
AKT: Originally we saw it on a DVD from Goethe.
HL: Oh really? In New York? My friend is the director in New York, Dr. Jörg Schumacher.
GG: It’s much easier sometimes to get people from other countries to like an idea and put money in it, but then Germans are very conservative. With our Gut mini-series, it’s super unusual that we got this to happen. This is not normal in Germany. That’s why most of the films are so boring, sorry.
AKT: Here is Ed joining us!
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| Gudrun Gut on Monika Döring: “She’s still going out. She’s fantastic.” Photo: courtesy of Heiko Lange |
Ed Bahlman: Hi! I like when Blixa [Bargeld] says: “I like to live in a city where I haven’t seen the other half.”
HL: That’s so like him!
EB: So ironic, sardonic Blixa!
HL: I like that too! It nails down everything.
EB: When we got the DVD from the Goethe-Institut library years ago, I was amazed how good it was.
HL: Oh thank you so much!
EB: Because I know that time and went to West Berlin many times. I brought Liquid Liquid for The Loft. We drove from Zurich through East Germany. The passport person asked, are they AWOL soldiers?
GG: How was ESG, by the way?
EB: They were great. The audience was crazy good and quite mixed, really intergenerational. People who thought they recognised me, giving me looks before everything happened. A very young crowd, too, about 750 people [Sold-out concert and film screening of Are You Serious? The ESG Story at Elsewhere on January 27, 2024].
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| Muriel Gray interviewing Farin Urlaub from Die Ärzte Photo: courtesy of Heiko Lange |
GG: I love them.
EB: And Renee [Scroggins], the singer has her two children in it, Nicole (on bass/vocals) and Nicholas (centerstage with energetic dance moves, percussion, and vocals). And Valerie, her sister, the drummer and Marie playing percussion.
GG: I knew that there were two children. The whole family. A family affair.
AKT: In B-Movie I thought it was very elegant how you got the time markers in. There’s Chernobyl, once we see a kiosk with the newspaper headline “Fassbinder died.” Was it difficult to balance the footage you wanted to highlight with these makers of time?
HL: Actually most of the time the filmmakers from the Eighties did it. They put the time in their framing actually. And with Jörg Hoppe we also got Klaus Maeck who also was working together with Fatih Akin and was the manager of [Einstürzende] Neubauten, so we had two people who could set these time stamps. And they were like, how can we make people aware what time we are, like the interview about AIDS and the guy says “Never heard about it” or as you said, Fassbinder. [Gudrun shows us her thumbs up Zoom function, by coincidence]
EB: The editing is brilliant. And Gudrun, having you say that everyone wants Joy Division!
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| ESG performing at Elsewhere on January 27, 2024 Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
GG: Remember those days? I mean, I like Joy Division but it was a little bit too much. Because we wanted to sell the other records, too.
EB: Who is Westphalia Bambaataa?
HL: That’s WestBam.
GG: It comes from Afrika Bambaataa, but he comes from Westphalia.
EB: Are you in touch with Monika Döring?
GG: Sometimes. She’s still going out. She’s fantastic.
EB: She’s a force. It was nice to see her postering and all of that great memory.
GG: I went to all the concerts she put on, I think.
EB: Every time I went to Europe in the early Eighties I went on Balair, through Swissair in New York. I landed in Zurich and then took the overnight train to West Berlin. I would arrive at 7 in the morning, take the train to the Zoo Bahnhof station and then go to the zoo because it was open that early. I’d call Monika up and then I’d have breakfast with her on the terrace.
GG: Nice! I tell her.
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| ESG producer Ed Bahlman at their Elsewhere film screening/concert Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
EB: It was beautiful, I would bring a hazelnut cake from the Zurich train station.
GG: Oh nice, good cake in Zurich!
AKT: Apropos, there’s a scene in B-Movie in a café with all the old ladies. Does that still exist? Or are they dying out? The cafés, I mean.
HL: Of course they are dying out, but this was Café Einstein, the old one. It’s still there.
GG: No, it closed!
HL: Let me google it. Yes! You’re right, they are dying out!
EB: Who is the guy from Die Ärzte who is in the café?
GG: That was Jan [Vetter]. They are very successful in Germany, Die Ärzte. Super successful. They stopped for a while and then they started again big time. Lots of fans. They just did three or four huge sold-out concerts in Berlin.
HL: His stage name that he is more famous for is not Jan but Farin Urlaub.
EB: Yes, that’s how he is identified.
AKT: It means “go on vacation”, I’ll explain to you later, Ed.
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| Joy Division’s Stephen Morris, Ian Curtis and Peter Hook with Mark Reeder while their manager Rob Gretton makes a phone call Photo: Hermann Vaske, courtesy of Mark Reeder |
GG: Monika Döring at The Loft, she had Sonic Youth playing there and there were five people in the audience. And The Swans the same, the first shows. I always went because I could get in for free. All the Berlin artists always could come for free.
EB: Somebody I didn’t see in the film was Elisabeth Recker.
GG: I think when the movie was made she was not in Berlin maybe. Mark Reeder knows her very well too.
EB: Yeah.
GG: I don’t know why she was not in there.
HL: Maybe we didn’t have footage. Rainer Fetting or some artists are also not in there. It’s 80 minutes and I have a bunch more footage at home.
EB: Today is Groundhog Day!
AKT: In German it’s Lichtmess, Candlemas. It’s when all the Christmas light decorations have to finally go. Do you know about Groundhog Day? A Groundhog is a kind of Murmeltier and if he sees his shadow winter will continue, if he doesn’t, we’ll have an early spring. And right before talking to you, neither Punxsutawney Phil, nor Staten Island Chuck saw their shadows. So we’ll have an early spring!
GG: Yeah!
HL: Congratulations to New York!
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| Matador (Gudrun Gut, Beate Bartel, Manon P Duursma) cassette tape, collection Ed Bahlman |
AKT: Great to meet you, Heiko! Lovely to speak to you again, Gudrun!
HL: Thank you so much!
EB: Hope to see you in New York!
GG: That would be perfect!
Coming up - More with Gudrun Gut and Heiko Lange on the timely and timeless B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989; the structure of the film and the editing by Alexander von Sturmfeder; Berlin when the Wall came down and a Buzzcocks concert on November 10, 1989 in New York City [at The New Ritz in the old Studio 54 location]; Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols miniseries Pistol; a possible fictional Malaria! film, and Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters.
