Run Lola Run. Dir. Tom Tykwer. Sony Pictures (DVD), 2008 [1998].
Berlin Calling. Dir. Hannes Stöhr. AV Visionen (DVD), 2008.
University of Minnesota (US)
The representation of Berlin in music films has an extraordinary history, from the experimental depictions in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), to Hollywood's homage to Weimar-era Berlin in Cabaret (1972), to the queer-punk East Berlin in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). While soundtracks of Berlin urban life have often relied on classical, cabaret or punk-industrial scores, post-reunification Berlin has seen a new musical genre operate as the city's primary soundtrack – techno. This review examines two key Berlin techno films, Run Lola Run (1998) and Berlin Calling (2008), and addresses two intimately linked issues regarding these films: first, the nature of the film medium with respect to the now established subgenre of electronic dance music film (short: EDM film), and second, the representation in film of Berlin as a techno city.
The potential for theoretical analysis offered by both these EDM films points to a current lacuna in club culture scholarship – namely, the scarce critical-aesthetic engagement with filmic representations of EDM culture, whether in music videos, documentaries, or in this case, feature films. One exception has been Stan Beeler's Dance, Drugs and Escape: The Club Scene in Literature, Film and Television since the Late 1980s,1 a book which unfortunately tends toward brief, journalistic glosses on its objects of study. However, the book is impressive in its breadth, proving that a rich history of artworks that incorporate club culture already exists. This is exemplified in Run Lola Run and Berlin Calling, themselves separated by a period of ten years, a gap that points to the importance of the film medium as visual-historical material for study.
Run Lola Run has become an iconic film of 1990s Berlin, a status that was secured by its highly innovative plot and unique combination of pop cultural references. The protagonist, Lola, has a task – to collect 100,000 D-Marks and reach her boyfriend, Manni, on the other side of Berlin within 20 minutes. Manni will otherwise likely die in an attempt to rob a supermarket, because he lost the money needed to make a deal with some gangsters. The story is constructed around three alternative universes in a kind of classic Atari arcade game where Lola has three lives.2 The first two universes end in tragic "game over" scenarios (1. Lola dies, 2. Manni dies), but the final scenario completes the mission with bonus points. Lola succeeds in obtaining the 100,000 D-Marks by placing all her money on two consecutive bets at a roulette table. Manni also solves his debts so that not only is he saved, but together they walk away rich. Lola's constant running through the city in search of Manni and money is the basis for the film's combination of urban life, cyberspace, youth culture and video game narrative. These themes have been the focus of much of the extensive secondary literature on the film.3 What is of more interest from the point of view of techno researchers, however, is the EDM soundtrack, composed by director Tom Tykwer together with Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek and produced in the rather fateful year of 1998 during the height of Berlin's reputation as a techno city and EDM's popularity in Europe. Yet despite the centrality of music and techno culture to Run Lola Run's success, only one essay amidst the many publications on the film focuses on music: Caryl Flinn's "The Music That Lola Ran To".4
Similar to Run Lola Run, Berlin Calling has become an iconic film of 2000s Berlin, though primarily within the techno scene. It is not of the same artistic quality of Run Lola Run, and has had a markedly smaller international reception. However, it offers important insights into changes in Berlin techno since the 1990s. The film concerns the career and artistic creativity of the protagonist DJ Ickarus, played by the real-life Berlin DJ/producer Paul Kalkbrenner. The mythical figure, Icarus, concerns the dream of flying. Using the wings that his master-craftsman father, Daedelus, gives him, Icarus flies so close to the sun that his wings melt, and he plunges to his death. DJ Ickarus has similar problems of both recklessness and (psychedelic) flight in Berlin Calling. While his hedonist excesses are at their height, he nearly destroys his artistic and mental wings through the use of drugs. Suffering a creative block and having conflicts with the label manager, he avoids his problems by partying and ends up taking an "evil pill" that almost kills him. Though DJ Ickarus survives, the rest of the film is spent with him passing in and out of a psychiatric ward, wrestling with the symptoms of insanity in a rather unimaginative homage to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. However, Ickarus's creative energies are released, and a new album takes shape in the psychiatric ward. Both an artistic triumph of insanity and a means of psychological therapy, his new tracks are produced through the inspirational media of illegal drugs and prescribed antidepressants. And the resulting album, itself titled Berlin Calling, achieves high critical praise and the trappings of genius within the film's narrative. Yet Berlin Calling is also the real electro-trance soundtrack to the film by Paul Kalkbrenner. Musical success is thus sealed, both in the film and in real life. Ickarus heads off on another, presumably successful, world tour in the closing scene of the film. And at the moment this review is being written, Kalkbrenner is on his "Berlin Calling Tour 2010", performing during March and April at massive concert venues in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The stark differences of these films at the level of plot highlight the diverse forms that EDM film can take, making it debatable whether EDM film is even a clearly definable genre. These differences elicit two initial questions. Regarding Run Lola Run, what can we learn about rave and club culture from a story in which no raves or clubs are present in the diegesis? Regarding Berlin Calling, what is the state of discourses of authenticity and realism in a film that combines the success of a fictional character and an actual Berlin DJ/Producer to such an intimate degree?
Run Lola Run and Berlin Calling arguably represent contrasting approaches to EDM film. The first can be termed a techno culture film. It focuses on EDM soundtracks as acoustic settings for narratives that do not directly explore EDM party life in a mimetic-sociological fashion. The legacy of cyberpunk and gamer aesthetics obviously plays a major role in this tradition. Important filmic examples are Blade Runner (1982), Blade (1998), and The Matrix (1999). Since virtual reality and fantasy take precedence, these films are free from anxious debates regarding the authentic representation of club culture. In this respect, Berlin Calling represents a contrasting tradition of techno scene film, attempting a direct representation of EDM life in terms of club and rave events, as well as musical production. This type thus acts like a sociological study of club scenes in film form. Important works in this tradition are Human Traffic (1999), Groove (2000),and It's All Gone Pete Tong (2004), though Trainspotting (1996) stands as a defining influence on the genre.5 These scene films are often caught between the limits of the film medium, narrative form and the desire to represent club culture "as it really is". They further struggle with reaffirming the idealistic self-presentation of club culture and questioning these ideals as ideology. These tensions often result in satire and an experimental play with form in techno scene films themselves.
Berlin Calling takes these challenges seriously – in fact, it answers with seriousness and not satire. Kalkbrenner's performance and that of the other main actors are admirable. Hannes Stöhr's directing is likewise a quite subtle and impressive study in social interaction. However, Stöhr's script is only partially successful.6 The result is a bad mix between documentary realism, mythical references and a crisis-comeback narrative that occasionally approximates a VH1 "Behind the Music" biography. The clinical story, supposedly deadly serious, turns into comical pop-psychology that ends with an absurd visit of prostitutes to the ward during Ickarus's farewell party. As a result, the film lacks an appropriate exploration of techno music production or Berlin and becomes primarily a production of Kalkbrenner as a Berlin star. Human Traffic and It's All Gone Pete Tong offer in this respect more thought-provoking, satirical examples of the techno scene film and star power. Similarly, Tom Tykwer produces a more interesting film by exploiting the freedoms offered by the techno culture film to the fullest. The playful plot is reflected in a kaleidoscope of film techniques and media from time-lapse photography to cartoons. In short, Berlin Calling's goal is art, and what comes out is kitsch; Run Lola Run's goal is pop, and what comes out is pop. And great pop: so successful was Tom Tykwer's EDM film, like Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, it was a springboard for launching a successful career as a Hollywood film director.
Nevertheless, Berlin Calling offers some interesting points for reflection on the state of EDM film. As the story of an artist, the film explores the relation of techno culture to the legacy of German Romantic associations of genius and melancholy. DJ Ickarus's tension with but also rootedness in German high art plays out in scenes with his conservative pastor father, who performs works by Johann Sebastian Bach. The high art themes are coupled with claims to authenticity in the merging of protagonist and DJ-star, soundtrack and album. The relation of film/album/star has echoes in rock opera films like Ken Russell's Tommy (1975) and Alan Parker's Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), though the possibilities of narrative form certainly differ for rock-vocal versus EDM-instrumental soundtracks. As a techno opera, Berlin Calling represents the full shift from the anonymous rave-DJ culture to the DJ-producer as artist. Yet it also explores economic problems in a far more direct way than Run Lola Run. The film highlights the pressures and suffering of a young East German DJ in capitalist, reunited Berlin, which still has the highest poverty rate in Germany. Only through the successful album is he able to overcome his economic plight and make his comeback as artistic hero.
Run Lola Run is also concerned with the relation between heroes, myth production and economic pressure. Just as DJ Ickarus is the stuff of myth, Lola is an iconic name in German cultural life, recalling Marlene Dietrich's character Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (1930) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola (1982). If DJ Ickarus is the hero as artist, Lola is the hero as raver. As Annegret Mahler-Bungers puts it rather humorously: Lola is "a postmodern – or rather a post-postmodern – Walkyrie" (2003: 91). The supermachine drive of Lola, her inhuman ability to run, reflects the endurance of techno clubbers during their 48-hour pill-popping party weekends. Yet Lola does not take drugs. Her strength seems to derive purely from her heart and will. We imagine, however, that the vitality represented by her fiery red hair has its basis in the amphetamines of generation chemical. But economic realism interrupts the fun of this hero world in the following form: she is not dancing at night but running in midday. Lola and Manni are twenty-something party-kids caught in adolescent pop dreams, and they are now confronted with the hard consequences of prosaic, everyday life. Presumably having been able to brush off deadlines and appointments before, Lola is suddenly confronted with a deadline she can't ignore. Literally, the time of her run is between 11:40am and noon; the terror that approaches should she fail in her mission is the terror of the ultimately prosaic afternoon. In this respect, when Flinn remarks that Berlin's "streets are curiously depopulated" (2004: 208), I would argue the reason lies in that the rest of Berlin is presumably at work, slaving away to save money legally. Indeed, as a cyberpunk film, Run Lola Run's is realistic in a unique way – there are no flashy city lights or fancy pieces of technology. That techno music functions like a sonic walkman to her run invites the question whether the endurance, fitness, and discipline ravers have achieve in partying at night can also overcome the reality principle of the day. But what type of techno music is this exactly?
For both films, electronic music is the soundtrack to the myth of Berlin as a techno city. However, neither film chooses to musically represent rave culture through a compilation of rave hits as Human Traffic does. Rather, both soundtracks are studies in different types of auteur, respectively featuring music by only one man or group: as previously noted, by Tom Tykwer as director, writer, vocalist, and composer with his team of Heil and Klimek (Run Lola Run) and by Paul Kalkbrenner as the quintessential Berlin techno star on the BPitch Control label (Berlin Calling). Despite the gap in ten years, both soundtracks bear resemblances in the use of trance music.7 The compositions from Run Lola Run are techno-trance pieces. Johnny Klimek worked as producer on a number of projects by Berlin trance star Paul Van Dyk, and the soundtrack bears resemblances in its timbres and sleek production quality. The music is also schooled in the speech-rap of Underworld's "Born Slippy", Trainspotting's most memorable track – this is especially clear in Tom Tykwer's rapping in "Running Two".8 Likewise, Paul Kalkbrenner's soundtrack has echoes of trance, perhaps surprisingly so, given Berlin's reputation today as a city that has banished trance and rave music for the sleek club culture of minimal techno and microhouse. Yet, the tracks in Berlin Calling are best described as a kind of electro-trance, much slower and more melancholic than Lola's "run" music and reflecting the general trend in the 2000s away from the speed of the 1990s.
Trance anchors the various religious and romantic themes of the films. Both are structured around heterosexual narratives and the possibility of heroic triumph through magic and inspiration. Flinn insightfully remarks that Run Lola Run positions music "as a form of emotional and economic Esperanto or universal language, a romantic, heterosexual affair stamped with the imprint of humanism. That this is achieved through techno, usually considered an antihumanist form of music, makes the accomplishment all the more intriguing" (2004: 197). Both soundtracks do sonic battle in the name of romanticism against economic exploitation and suffering – acknowledging the problem only in the end to deny its ultimate influence. DJ Ickarus triumphs through creativity and artistic discipline. Recalling his father's performance of Bach, the slow and reserved themes in Ickarus's music are Lutheran techno-hymns to help him persevere in his struggle. Lola beats the modern world by relying on shamanic powers to win at the roulette table, reflected in her primal scream and the tribal-primitivist techno of the track "Casino".
These economic crises represent a threat to Berlin as a techno club city and a place of youth and freedom. Adam Krims' Music and Urban Geography9 has highlighted the key role that both music and music films play in representing cities, from realistic depictions to the "abstract city of fantasy" (2007: 18). Berlin also presents a variety of musical representations in film, though it is important here to recognize some commonalities within the larger history of the Berlin music film, particularly in representing Berlin as a city of dynamic change. Indeed, change forms the basis for associated themes of youthful transgression, pop culture, and sexual liberation. Berlin has long advertised itself as the "city always in change", so much that it can become a self-fulfilling cliché. In musical terms, precisely by maintaining techno as a stable soundtrack of the city over the last twenty years, Berlin has continually reinvented itself as the city of youth and pop transgression. Both films offer interesting perspectives regarding this tradition, and urban geography plays an important element in this tradition.
Located primarily within the confines of the clinic, the melancholic slowness of Berlin Calling surprisingly challenges this reputation of change. In the film's closing, DJ Ickarus returns to Berlin's airport for a world tour, but he does not look exactly joyful. One wonders whether he wishes to return to the sanctuary of the psychiatric clinic. However, the speed of techno city Berlin is reinforced with shots of the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz, techno's preferred counter-monument of modern Berlin against the Brandenburg Gate. Club scenes are shot at real locations on Berlin's new club mile – Club Maria, Bar 25, and others – although Berlin as advertisement and fantasy retains priority. During one party, youthful transgression is reinforced to utter cliché when Mathilde, Ickarus's manager and bisexual girlfriend (what other sexuality could a Berlin girlfriend possibly be?), while searching for Ickarus, opens up a number of club doors – in the first she finds two circuit boys having anal sex and in the second a group of clubbers snorting some lines. Alternative lifestyles remain spectacles to be seen rather than lives that are lived.
More interesting is the presentation of Berlin as a place dominated by women in business roles, which is alternatively threatening and nurturing for DJ Ickarus. After all, he comes from patriarchal, Lutheran Germany, and lacks a mother. Mathilde leaves Ickarus when he fails as a boyfriend and artist, returning to her ex-girlfriend Corinna, a club bouncer who is problematically the token "ethnic" character in the film. Corinna threatens Ickarus's masculinity to the point of throwing him out of her apartment when he tries to speak with Mathilde, though they resolve their conflict in the end. Mathilde never stops caring for Ickarus and finally returns as his manager, though apparently not as his girlfriend. Ickarus must also negotiate conflicts with the label owner, Alice (an analogous figure to Ellen Allien, the head of Kalkbrenner's BPitch Control Label), and the head of the psychiatric ward, Dr. Petra Paul.
Regarding Run Lola Run, the secondary literature has pointed out repeatedly that the scenery of both East and West Berlin is non-descript. Manni's and Lola's adventure represents the dream that a reunited Germany will reflect neither the failed socialist state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) nor the prosaic Wirtschaftswunder of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Lola's fantastic run reflects the hopes of Generations X and Y for the harmonious combination of East and West at the end of history (will there be a Generation Z, and if so, what would follow?). The histories and cultural differences of Berlin thus remain veiled. However, many of the shots of the city – especially the intersection where Manni waits – look much more like dull suburban Germany than Berlin's impressive monuments and nightlife. Caryl Flinn emphasizes this geographic dialectic: "Berlin becomes a somewhat nonessential, generic urban place, a reading Tykwer encouraged from foreign audiences. Is this Berlin, or is this Anywhere?" (2004: 208). Tykwer refuses to allow Lola to run by any Berlin icons such as the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, and even the techno TV Tower. What is recognizable in all the runs is the U-Bahn, reinforcing Berlin's reputation as a city of change and movement. With the Berlin Wall having fallen in 1989, travel is a key marker of freedom in a Berlin film of the 1990s. Lola's running through the open and past the U-Bahn is a distinct display of this new freedom. In a way distinct from Berlin Calling, her run marks Berlin as a feminized space – the image of the free Western woman whose freedom is defined as a freedom of movement and public display.10 Finally and crucially, what is also recognizable are the sites of construction. Lola charges across a causeway in both the first and second run, surrounded by a vast construction site near the German Reichstag. No such sites are present in Berlin Calling, and for viewers who experienced the reconstruction of Berlin in the 1990s, these sites might suddenly call up an odd nostalgic recognition that some forms of change are not permanent.
Such a complex relation to the past returns me to the importance of film as a visual-historic, and indeed acoustic, medium of study. As works of art, these films demonstrate their important role as the explosive crossroads of ideological, aesthetic, political, social, and personal currents. Berlin Calling and Run Lola Run are not just EDM films and not just Berlin films – they are both of these and more. The rich material they offer demonstrates that a continued study of feature films, both within and without the EDM film genre, will be of great importance for grasping the challenges of representing EDM scenes from both the past and the future.
Ankum, Katharina von, ed. 1997. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Beeler, Stan. 2007. Dance, Drugs and Escape: The Club Scene in Literature, Film and Television since the Late 1980s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co Inc.
Flinn, Caryl. 2004. "The Music that Lola Ran To". In Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick (eds), Sound Matters: Essay on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture, pp. 197-213. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
Krims, Adam. 2007. Music and Urban Geography. New York and Oxon: Routledge.
Mahler-Bungers, Annegret. 2003. "A Post-Postmodern Walkyrie: Psychoanalytic Considerations on Tom Tykwer's Run, Lola, Run (1998)". In Andrea Sabbadini (ed), The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema, pp. 82-93. New York and Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge.
Mesch, Claudia. "Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run". M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php (accessed 23 January 2010)
Blade. Dir. Stephen Norrington. 1998. DVD. New Line Home Video, 1998.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1982. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2007.
Groove. Dir. Greg Harrison. 2000. DVD. Sony Pictures, 2000.
It's All Gone Pete Tong. Dir. Michael Dowse. 2004. DVD. Sony Pictures, 2005.
The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. 1999. Warner Home Video, 2009.
Trainspotting. Dir. Danny Boyle. 1996. DVD. Miramax Home Entertainment, 2004.
1. Stan Beeler, Dance, Drugs and Escape: The Club Scene in Literature, Film and Television since the Late 1980s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co Inc, 2007).
2. The pop-existentialist announcement at the beginning, by the security guard, clearly presents the game structure of the film. In fact, he combines the supposed antipodal game cultures of football and video games: "The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. So much is clear. Everything else is just theory. And we're off!"
3. Claudia Mesch, for example, describes Berlin as "a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with video and computer games". Claudia Mesch, "Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run", M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php (accessed January 23, 2010).
4. This essay offers an impressive analysis of the film's soundtrack. I strongly recommend it to club culture researchers. Caryl Flinn, "The Music that Lola Ran To", in Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture, ed. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 197-213.
5. While Trainspotting is certainly a pioneering film, it surprisingly cannot be defined as a proper techno scene film. Aside from Renton's short visit to a techno club, Trainspotting deals almost entirely with an earlier generation of the Scottish working class, crime, pub life, and heroine junkies. The film's reputation as an EDM film derives primarily from its electronic music selections, from Brian Eno to Underworld. The hybrid nature of such films and the complexity of the soundtracks would obviously require more exploration and nuances regarding the various sub-branches of EDM film than I have space to present here. Trainspotting points to the need for a third element of techno music itself in the structures of my genre divisions. To explain, the analysis of any EDM film could explore the tensions between techno culture, techno scene and techno music, or in other words, between cyber-aesthetics, club culture, and EDM (or non-EDM) soundtrack.
6. This is unfortunate since Stöhr's earlier film Berlin Is In Germany (2001) offered an interesting examination of Berlin life and the challenges of integration for an East German member of the working class.
7. It is important to keep in mind that there is other music present in both films besides the official soundtracks. In Run Lola Run, the techno tracks are complemented by the use of Dinah Washington's "What a Difference a Day Makes" and Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question; similarly, Berlin Calling includes pieces for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach. These musics allow for the dialogic relationship between techno and music from other historical periods.
8. Lola's "I Wish" and "I believe" monologues also deserve mention. The rhythms and repetition of the first two words in both monologues are comparable to Mark Renton's "Choose Life" monologue in Trainspotting.
9. Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2007).
10. There are limits to this freedom though. Expectations regarding the place of women and men in the city still differ strongly. Lola's run seems odd to passers-by in a way that would not be equivalent were a man running. For a critical study on the "Lolas" who came before her, specifically on modern women and the limits of urban public display and movement, see Ankum 1997.