MARK REEDER ARCHIVE
MARK REEDER TV

They never would have dreamt of going to the Metropol for a Saturday night. Everyone I met in the Risiko Bar, where Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld used to hang out, they would only stay in that scene and listen to a certain kind of music. That was a parallel scene to this new wave avant-garde scene I was involved in. I couldn’t be bothered lugging it around. People didn’t want to go dancing with their camera, so there’s no footage. The cameras were so heavy, it was like carrying three bags of sugar around with you. Nobody ever filmed in there for one reason or another. For example the Metropol, the gay disco at Nollendorfplatz. There are things I’d have loved to include but we didn’t have any footage. Was there anything else that you wish you could have included? The portrait of Berlin painted by the film centers primarily around the experimental music scene.

MARK REEDER ARCHIVE

They must have just gotten someone to troll through the archive and look in every single box. Finally after months they were able to find it. In the meantime they’d released a DVD box set of the best of The Tube, but unfortunately the Berlin special was never included because they didn’t know where the first reel was and couldn’t be bothered to track it down. So I went back to the cassettes and wrote down everything I had and sent it to Grenada. I had one, which we used for the rough cut, but there were all these film reel numbers and time codes. But after Jörg saw the tapes, he completely revamped his idea and asked if he could base the film around my life in Berlin. Even the television programs were aired only once.

So he took them home with him and two days later he phoned me up and said “What have you just given me? I’ve never seen any of this material.” And probably nobody else had either. I didn’t feel the need to re-watch them and embarrass myself.

MARK REEDER TV

It was mostly TV programs I’d made and general footage I accumulated over the years. Jörg approached me about mixing the sound and restoring the tracks for the film and when he told me more about the project, I offered to lend him my VHS tapes from the 80s in case there was something of use to them. Initially the idea was to be a traditional talking head style documentary, but there was no red thread to tie it all together.

He has a long history in music television, and was the manager of the Neue Deutsche Welle band Extrabreit in the 1980s. So Jörg had the idea of making a documentary about West Berlin. Heiko’s got kids and he was saying that they had no idea about what was going on in West Berlin before the fall of the wall. It started as a conversation between Jörg Hoppe and Heiko Lange, the directors. MARK REEDER: I wasn’t involved initially. 032c sat down with Reeder to discuss the film and his memories of the city.ĭARRYL NATALE: How did this film come about?

Making use of an extraordinary archive of rarely seen footage culled from Reeder’s own archives, the film is an intensely personal account of a city “in a state of emergency,” as Reeder puts it. Reeder’s adventures are now chronicled in B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin, a new documentary film which debuted at last year’s Berlinale and is now in theatrical release. With a penchant for wearing outdated German uniforms and a wide reaching group of friends and collaborators, Reeder became an immediately recognizable figure west of the wall and was instrumental in shaping the city’s music culture in the 1980s. When Manchester native MARK REEDER arrived in West Berlin in 1978, his first order of business was to make a unannounced visit to the pioneering German electronic musician Edgar Froese.įroese didn’t come to the door, but Reeder nevertheless managed to embed himself in Berlin’s underground music scene over the course of the next twenty years.

Mark reeder