Dorothy Feaver explores a recent surge of documentaries on Berlin’s electronic music scene…

Hedonism in Berlin has heritage. The city has accrued layers of sedimentary crust, and new releases “Berlinized – Sexy an Eis” (Lucian Busse, 2012) and “Bar25 – Der Film” (Britta Mischer/Nana Yuriko, 2012) promise to bore holes into recent strata.

Crews from the 1990s and 2000s respectively attempt to document their own stories; in so doing, they are swelling a peculiar heritage industry. Of course film is a time-based medium, and with the subject of hedonism – where time dissolves in pursuit of pleasure – it would be a shame for the slippage between medium and subject not to be explored.

Honey Suckle Company started out as a youth movement, growing from a list of dead-ends: they were 15 years late for punk, 20 years after hippies, and techno was just too “unsexy”. “Berlin Super 80” (2005) serves as a prelude. This mixtape-cum-reader in 1980s subculture compiles mainly black-and-white grainy shorts. It’s a glimpse, totally un-narrated, into pre-Fall Berlin.

Out of such shadows, “Berlinized” opens with a rock cosmonaut walking out into a sandy wasteland and playing his guitar to an audience of building sites. Honey Suckle Company’s crazy-gadfly aesthetic premiered at an anti-fashion catwalk show in the Suicide Club (1995), all knitted caps with ears and duct tape over mouths and eyebrows. The kitschy-sexy-random vibe is a constant through the documentary, leading up to the teeny Bügelbar on Augustrasse, which served the eponymous Sexy an Eis drink (key ingredients undisclosed).

Bügelbar spawned galerie berlintokyo (1996 – 99), which hosted rotating shows for Berliner or Japanese artists – the latter, faked. Members of the then reigning crews look back on their moment from homes and studios. Jim Avignon, of the nomadic U-Kunst group and Radio Bar (U is for Unterhaltung, or “entertainment”), says the art-bar tour was a ruse to get access to unusual places; by then they were through with empty shells, and sought prestigious locations: the botanical gardens, a takeover of Tresor, the French Embassy, the Fernsehturm restaurant, Documenta in Kassel. “All that mattered was the moment, the experience of the night, a single evening, and the next morning was a new deal.”

New Yorker Howard Goldkrand takes a loftier view. Unlike the UK Summer of Love of 1989, their experience was less about hedonism, or even music, and more to do with “thinking about how to live your life in an artistic way.” And so the film cranes its neck towards a more worthy vista, where art and nightlife hold hands in the sunset, quite the beautiful couple. Jan Edler reminisces about the Kunst & Technik club from among tourist deckchairs by Museum Island (“this is where the DJ booth was!”). “It wasn’t a techno club or a house club or a jungle club,” he says. “It changed from night to night and we also had live performances.”