Lou Reed’s Berlin

Colour, 35 mm
USA, 2007, 85 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

It took Lou Reed thirty-three years to work up the nerve to go live with his most ambitious solo project – a Brecht-esque cycle of songs that tells of the withering of a couple’s love under a bombardment of ever-stronger doses of drugs and violence. Julian Schnabel first proposed the scene for the December 2006 show in Brooklyn and then filmed it. He succeeded in creating a congenial visual impression of the legendary album. Lou Reed’s Berlin is based on an omnipresent contrast of ecstasy and narration. Just as the stories that Lou Reed sings about constantly shatter against the deafening riffs of electric guitars, the musicians on stage are perpetually drenched in a melange of abstract images and clips from short films that the director projects on the screen above their heads. This combination of brilliantly coloured images and rock and roll has the strength of a crashing wave – both overwhelming and cleansing.

About the director

Julian Schnabel (b. 1951, New York) made his name in the 1980s with his neo-expressionistic paintings and became one of the most highly acclaimed figures of the New York art scene. He began working with film in the 1990s, debuting in 1996 with Basquiat, a biopic about another artistic icon of the 1980s. The year 2000 saw the creation of an adaptation of the memoirs of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, which introduced Spanish actor Javier Bardem to an international public and won Schnabel a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. His last film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon, 2007) won the prize for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. All of these films have been screened at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.