Element of Crime documentary in the cinema: The calm after the storm

When the East was still the GDR and Charly Hübner was growing up in Mecklenburg, he came across a cassette from the West. It was “The Ballad of Jimmy & Johnny” by Element of Crime, and one of the first sentences Hübner heard from the album on his Walkman was: “Life is a pain in the ass.” Young Charly could do something with this, it corresponded with him and his life, this sentence stayed with him. And the band too, now for more than three and a half decades, although Hübner himself later moved into much harder sound worlds, purely musically. Now Hübner, who has long been a national cultural asset as an actor, has made a film about Element of Crime. The band asked him. And this much in advance: it was a really good idea.

A night storage heater for the soul

“When it gets dark and cold in Berlin” is the name of the hour and a half that Hübner produced, of course based on a song by Element of Crime, a very typical one. The title alone: ​​This band could only emerge and become big in Berlin in the 1980s, and yes, their music has a strangely dark coloring, somehow it always feels like the end of November on all EoC albums. The singer, lyricist, trumpeter and songwriter Sven Regener himself says that there is always a “weird coldness” in the gnarly, rough music.

But then he throws his lyrics onto the songs and gives them these melancholic, cryptic, beautiful sentences that no one else can do in this country. They heat up the pieces and the soul like a rumbling night storage heater. And suddenly you lose yourself in this poetry, which is sometimes about life in Berlin and mostly about love and why it is so beautiful and so complicated.

Charly Hübner’s first achievement is to have captured this element of crime feeling. He accompanies the band in a way Sentimental journey: Five concerts in five nights, at places in Berlin that were important for the band’s history. The Lido, the SO36, the private club and the Admiralty Palace, at the end the Spandau Citadel – cult places of pop culture, some of which the band has long since outgrown.

Richard Pappik from Element of Crime: “Without music I would be a damn sick guy”

But it also shows images from the past. Blurry, grainy recordings of very young men, Element of Crime found themselves in 1985, when Sven Regener was 24. He had already played in other bands like Zatopek, Tote Pilots or Erste Liebe, “No Wave, no Jazz. Rehearsals were forbidden,” he says in the film. “But I already realized: I really want to sing beautiful songs.”

He found the right people for it. Jakob Ilja, for example, is actually a Krautrocker, with whom he already played together on Erste Liebe. And later Richard Pappik, who came from punk, says of himself: “Without music I would be a damn sick guy.” Together, says Pappik, they experienced five “magical years” between 1985 and 1990, with records in English produced by the Velvet Underground legend John Cale were produced in London and still sounded like Kreuzberg. It had to be that way.

And that’s why it’s not just a film about almost 40 years of band history. There is also one about the city in which it took place. West Berlin was a walled-in frontline city in the 1980s, a creative island without intellectual boundaries. And when everything, everything changed after 1989, Element of Crime also made one crucial change: Sven Regener stopped understanding and singing the lyrics in English. “Back then behind the moon” was amazing, different, fantastic. The film doesn’t make much of this fact, which it deserves because it opened the band up to a different kind of listener. But that would also be strange.

Because Charly Hübner made a completely calm film, it doesn’t make any noise. Um, nothing at all. There are people who claim that Element of Crime have been doing the same stuff for 30 years. If anything, then the founding fathers Regener, Ilja and Pappik have been doing stuff for 30 years that didn’t exist and won’t exist again, the sound, the poetry: everything about this band is unique.

But what is true: There is a calmness in the music, a reliable calmness that is incredibly good in a world that is somehow drifting away due to wars and the slide to the right. And that’s exactly how you can, and must, watch “When it gets dark and cold in Berlin”: in peace and with the comfort of a world that rotates a little slower for 90 minutes.