Beauty & Decay

Jimmu4.0

I am LARPing as Sven Marquardt with a fake accent in my office, pretending that I am way more edgier than I am.Good times.Going to crank some Berghain style beats in my hatchback as I drive home. 😎

Mike Kennedy3.0

The second documentary on Saturday’s program was much more in keeping with the program’s “punk” label than the first film, Pamela Meyer-Arendt’s Rebels (2022) , and I found it less interesting. Writer/director Annekatrin Hendel tells the story of three artists in the GDR in the ‘80s - photographers Sven Marquardt and Robert Paris and their muse and model Dominique Hollerstein (“Dome”).Marquardt is better known following the fall of the Berlin Wall as door-bitch at the legendary gay (now morphed into queer) club Berghain which is located in an old thermal power plant near the old E-W border. Marquardt is picking up his cameras after a break of several years and is seen shooting a photo series with Dome in the cavernous Berghain, some of which replicate some of their photoshoots from the ‘80s.Dome is the core of the documentary. She acknowledges that she has never had a traditional job (and does not want one) and is happy to be a cat lady in her brightly decorated apartment, getting by on money from modelling and the leather roses she makes and sells at markets across Berlin. Editor Gudrun Steinbrück cuts in photographs that Marquardt and Paris took of the GDR punk scene in the ‘80s, although I wanted to hear more about the reaction of the Stasi to mohawks, ripped clothing, studs and leather.What I found fascinating was how different the experiences of these six teenagers were. Schleime, Stözer and Bara were photographers living, initially at least, outside Berlin and developing a feminist outlook and body of work. Marquardt, Dome and Paris were inner-city Berliners who were very consciously documenting a lifestyle and an era as participant observers. Paris is the one of the six whose current life has gone in a completely different direction. After reunification, the old decaying East German buildings that he was documenting were either refurbished or demolished and he arrived at a point where he believed that “his Berlin” had disappeared. He moved to Kerala, converted to Islam to marry an Indian woman, and now spends his time photographing Southern Indian architecture and landscapes with an annual trip back to Berlin. The film screened with Pamela Meyer-Arndt’s Rebels (2022) in a program tagged Six Young Punks: GDR documentary double feature, jointly presented by RMIT Culture and the Melbourne Goethe-Institut.

Christopher Velasco3.5

"The true measure of life is memory." -Walter Benjamin.