Even if director Thomas Arslan’s Berlin trilogy came about more or less coincidentally and there was never a master plan for a coherent narrative, it can nevertheless be read as a three-part bildungsroman. The story begins with teenage siblings; in GESCHWISTER – KARDESLER (1997) they live in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. In the second part, DEALER (1999), the main characters have left childhood behind but have not quite come of age yet. They move back and forth between the world of small-time crime and the underworld proper.
Restless movement, bye-bye roots
The main character in DER SCHÖNE TAG (A Fine Day, 2001), the third part of the trilogy, is an actor and voice-over artist who breezes confidently through urban spaces, relationships and jobs. Her background is of no importance, her identity post-ethnic. This is not the case for the characters in the earlier instalments of the trilogy, the first in particular, who are still largely defined by a neighbourhood (the migrant stronghold of West Berlin) and, in a certain sense, by their background. At the end of GESCHWISTER – KARDESLER, the elder of the two brothers moves back to Turkey in order to complete his military service.
In all three parts the characters are constantly on the move, always out and about on the streets of Berlin—it is on this level and in this mode that the three-part bildungsroman negotiates the complex relationship between self and world. Not Berlin’s symbols, its so-called landmarks, but atmospheres, light frequencies and colours constitute the world as comprehensible, recognizable space.
Time to say goodbye to a Berlin that is nothing more than picture postcards and city marketing clichés. The trilogy invites us to enter a city that remains to be discovered, mapped, and filled with stories. In this respect, the films are as fresh as they were on the first day.
The images are very concentrated, but never strained. The camera never focuses on anything that it doesn’t absolutely want to see and show. Through the eyes of the characters, we see a city freed from the smog of the everyday. If we were to speak of a residual “essence” here, i.e., that which remains when all is said and done, when Arslan relinquishes all that isn’t essential, then it can be found in the beauty of the documentary material: the undisguised image, things that are simply what they are.
Smog, background noise, and jeans
Analogously, the films have a sound that is as crisp, as dynamic, and as polyphonic as only a large city can generate. The soundtrack of the films, which amplifies the city as a sound box, filters out the smog of the everyday and so carves out space for background noise. This only seems like a contradiction: in fact it is this background noise that brings clarity into the relationship between the self and the world—the clarity we so often long for in everyday life, the background noise we so often try to block out because it seems like interference.
And so it is no accident that the poetic power of the Berlin trilogy comes into its own in a seemingly trivial sound detail. The flapping of the main characters’ jeans is, as Veronika Rall already observed, a sonic motif that combines all three parts of the bildungsroman. The young people are pretty much always on the move, almost always in the streets, and produce this sound with their flared jeans, a sound that merges with the urban noise, which in turn merges with the global ether.
The noise produced by all humans, which makes “being in common” audible (Jean-Luc Nancy) is this noise that, with the rustling of the jeans, is broken down into a sound signature equal parts banal and significant. Rarely was the relationship between self and world as clear as it is here. Rarely has it been presented in such an undisguised way, as overtly. The supposed essence: a subtle noise. We’re all ears.
Krystian Woznicki works as a critic, photographer and is co-publisher of “Berliner Gazette”.
Translation: Millay Hyatt
