BROADCAST DATE Sun., 22.09.24 | 23:30 | Das Erste
Charly Hübner has made a film about the Berlin band “Element of Crime”. The band asked him. And he said yes. A mini-tour through five Berlin nights and concert venues. And through the band’s almost 40-year history. The film “When it gets dark and cold in Berlin” tells the story and present of a very special German band, which with its mixture of jazz, blues and folk still has a unique selling point in German rock and pop music.
A film about the band “Element of Crime”
His film characters could also be the song heroes of “Element of Crime”: actors on a losing battle, daredevils of melancholy – Charly Hübner – actor, director, heavy metal fan. Now he has made a film about “Element of Crime”. About a band whose music is the opposite of heavy metal. But even back then in Mecklenburg, when he was just 17, this quartet burst into the listening habits of his youth clique. “We always gave each other these audio cassettes, copied from the West or brought back by Grandma. And one of them brought a cassette with four guys on it, which reminded me of ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ and it said over it: ‘Element of Crime, The Ballad of Jimmy and Johnny.’ Then I put it on the Walkman and then this whistling sound came. That’s how it started. And it’s stayed that way to this day,” says Charly Hübner.
A mini-tour through five Berlin nights
“Element of Crime” asked Charly Hübner if he would make a film about the band. And he immediately agreed, something he never does when asked. The answer is the film. A mini-tour through five Berlin nights and concert venues. “It was clear to me that I would just go in and try to find out how things work here. That immediately made things a lot more relaxed because the cameramen didn’t always have to make sure that I wasn’t in the picture. I just wanted to make the film very open, in a gentle, floating narrative, not a hectic documentary,” says Hübner.
This is how “Element of Crime” is created
West Berlin in the 80s. Sven Regener on trumpet and guitarist Jakob Ilja meet in the band “Neue Liebe”. They play post-punk – weird and wild. “And WOM, all the people up, always give him, always beat him, that’s great!”, says Sven Regener in the film. “They met in this strange, historically unique moment in this West Berlin front city, where there was so much going on creatively. And they looked for each other out of these experiences and found each other,” says Charly Hübner. Sven Regener no longer wants to play weird songs, but rather write beautiful songs. This is how “Element of Crime” comes about. The band finds its unmistakable style between jazz, blues and folk. English is still the language of lost loves. “The crazy thing about Berlin is that if you look at the city through the lens of ‘Element of Crime’, what really happened was the New German Wave, then there was the cold avant-garde in the second half of the 80s. Then the Wall fell,” says Charly Hübner.
The music becomes the soundtrack of a city
And Sven Regener is now singing in German. “Little bird fly, blue lights and twilight. And a little bit of war. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. I love you,” an excerpt from the song “Blue lights and twilight” by “Element of Crime.” For Charly Hübner, who has just moved from Mecklenburg to Berlin, the albums become the soundtrack of his acting studies and this city. “After decades of being this cold, black and white city, Berlin was suddenly so warm and soft. That’s what ‘Element of Crime’ dealt with in ‘Psycho’ with ‘Young and Beautiful’,” says the filmmaker and actor. “The light of the gas lamps makes us dizzy. And the nights in Berlin are warm. We stagger through the streets as if we were young and beautiful,” from the song “Young and Beautiful.”
A journey through time through Berlin
The film about the band’s history is also a journey through time in Berlin. Wastelands become high-rises, dreams become city traffic. The songs of “Element of Crime” come from this city and are created from this life. “In Sven’s lyrics I also hear a society. How does a society act, how do people get around,” Jakob Ilja tells us in the film. As in the lyrics of “Unscharf mit Katze”: “We go under, we come up. Sound and smoke come out of our mouths. We have no solution, we have songs.” “They don’t sit in buses all the time, organize marches or write pamphlets or have a barbecue on one of their farms every weekend, but they meet up and make music in a totally introverted, casual way,” says Charly Hübner.
Songs from the school of life
They have no messages. They have images, songs from the school of life. “And that has a lot to do with freedom. In times when a Cold War is ending, when there is a first Iran war, when there is a rave revolution, when there is a second Iraq war, when 9/11 is taking place in New York, when there is now a Ukraine war, a global economic crisis in between, a refugee crisis is ongoing, three men say: We give relaxation. Salvation of the soul,” says filmmaker Charly Hübner. “Try to be human” is the name of one of their early albums. That is still what it is about. And that is what this film is about. Unagitated, cheerful, delighted and sad. The music plays life and life, the music. Excerpt from the song “When it gets dark and cold in Berlin”: “Where this path ends, an angel lies in wait, where the wall once stood.” “So, when it gets dark and cold in Berlin, listen to an ‘Element of Crime’ record and you’ll feel warm and colorful,” says Hübner. Lyrics of “Element of Crime”: “In heaven and on earth, no one can see into the future. When it gets dark and cold in Berlin.”
(Author: Lutz Pehnert)
Status: 22.09.2024 18:28
