Bouncer and photographer Sven Marquardt is the most attractive and uninteresting figure in Annekatrin Hendel's documentary "Beauty & Transience". For the story that the film wants to tell, the others are in charge: photographers colleague Robert Paris and the craftswoman Dominique Hollenstein, called Dome, the Marquardt model stands today.
All three combine socialization in a less political, than aesthetically influenced subculture in East Berlin in the eighties. A time of ruins, the open spaces were for home-made fashion shows and performances. A place for celebrations of non-industrially informed creativity was the Stadtbad on Oderberger Straße in Prenzlauer Berg. And if the film Robert Paris today slips through the bright, friendly, refurbished tranquility of the hotel, which has become of the bathroom, then this should be more than a cross-sectional image: where previously was dreamed, now doomed the prosperity to itself.
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"Beauty & Transience": global brand, local dissidence"Beauty and transience" is about a picture of the last generation of the GDR, to which the filmmaker Hendel also belongs - and therefore, what has become of her in the life after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which now takes longer than the previous one.
Marquardt, who became the doorman of the legendary Berghain Club and became synonymous with the Berlin nightlife of the noughties, acts like an advertising trick. He is pictured on the poster, the story starts from him as the most prominent of the three main characters. And when you see him, in the gallery, at photo shoots, in front of the Berghain (by day) or at the Ostkreuz-Fotoschule, you immediately understand the desire to approach him with the camera.
Marquardt is an object of desire, not only because of tattoos, piercings and rings, but also because of the gray-mottled hair, the tasteful glasses or a fashionable nonchalance, whose effect Marquardt is fully aware of. In other words: Marquardt is pure surface, he covers the title half "beauty" far more plausible than his old friend Robert Paris, who already in the choice of his shirts and pullovers corresponds more closely to the norms of clothing for a man in his late 50s.
But Marquardt reveals little about himself. When he speaks of "scars" and "the other life", then it remains in the open, what it is. And even if Hendel notes attentively that the photographer at the end of the shoot, the hair is no longer open to the rear, but as a bun, he does not want to say what change is indicated.
"Beauty & transience"
Germany 2019
Screenplay and direction: Annekatrin Hendel
Rental: Real Fiction
Length: 80 minutes
FSK: from 6 years
Start: 5th December 2019
While Marquardt circulates his Trademark refreshed by the Berghain Doorstep, Dome still earns her money on flea markets with self-made fashion accessories. She makes them in their enchanted designed, by the greenery in front of the window seemingly paradisiac apartment. These circumstances allow her a dissidence from bourgeois life, which she also lives on long night drives. If she became too old for that, Dome says, she runs children's workshops at home and "craft afternoons for rich people who are bored." From such sober sentences speaks the spirit of Subversion, which has been preserved over the years.
Helga Reidemeister had already made a documentary about Robert Paris in 1998 with "Lights from the Background", which was far less clear about where the great sense of freedom of the eighties can find its place in the reunited Germany. Paris has evaded, to India, where he has wife and daughter and houses, and into Islam.
In this figure, the most interesting for a documentary observation breaks indicate. The fact that "beauty and transience" does not sound out these, especially in the continuation of "lights from the background", has to do with narrative economics in the light of three protagonists. On the other hand, with Hendel's highly dynamic project, to throw a different view of the GDR, its history and especially their staff.
As with "Family Brasch" or "Five Stars" - the portrait of a subculture friend who had mastered the transition to the new age less well than Marquardt - it is not so much about conflicting complex personal stories. It is a kind of archive in which the material is first stored from another time, so that later it can be remembered.
In the video: The trailer for "Beauty & Transience"
ITWorks
In the words of Domes, who, looking at the photographs of those days, says: "Today she thinks that this is" as if I were on vacation in a completely different time, in a completely different world ".
