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94

Anna Sinofzik

LIVING THE “GUT” LIFE The Uckermark Region as the Rural Setting for the Series “GUT”

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

When Gudrun Gut’s second solo album, “Wildlife,” was released around 10 years ago, Gut told a Berlin newspaper how important rural spaces were for her musical work. Anna Sinofzik explains how Gut’s adopted home in the Uckermark, like other regions near Berlin, has long promised city dwellers an open field in which to experiment with social forms of life situated outside the logic of capitalist exploitation. Her review’s focus is the current documentary series on Gut’s (more or less) wild life in the Uckermark, which Sinofzik examines from a media-theoretical perspective and against a backdrop of (sub)cultural narratives.

There are more mosquitoes in the countryside than in the city, and even the founding members of Malaria! – who these days prefer to go by the name “Mücken” (Mosquitoes) – have long since fled the city. Bettina Köster lives in southern Italy. Gudrun Gut, like so many creatives and cultural workers, commutes between Berlin and the Uckermark, a rural region in Brandenburg. In the late 2000s, along with her partner Thomas Fehlmann (formerly of Palais Schaumburg), Gut bought a lakeside property, the “Sternhagen Gut” (Sternhagen Estate), which they then had extensively renovated. Last year, it was the shooting location for the first season of GUT, a miniseries that follows the “Grande Dame of the Berlin Underground” (Deutschlandfunk, Die Tageszeitung, Groove), portrayed as a lovable and rebellious alien in a pastoral setting.

In three short episodes, we see Gut gardening, sitting on a swing in fading evening light, pottering about in the on-site recording studio, making small talk with residents of nearby villages, enjoying a barbecue with visitors from Berlin. And repeatedly, we see her wading through meadows, tall grass, and cornfields. In some scenes, they have been rendered pink in postproduction, and Gut picks her way across the vividly colored vegetation with a tottering, sleepwalking gait, as she no doubt once sauntered through the Dschungel on Nürnberger Strasse. [1]

GUT dispenses with classic dramaturgical form, instead relying on methods drawn from ­poetic documentary film, making use of color, mood, sound, and visual effects, including the crossfades and vignettes typical of dream sequences. After all, the series is meant to be about dreams as much as music, life, or quotidian reality. We are promised as much by the tagline [2] but also by Gut herself: in a hint of the show’s self-reflective mood, at the beginning of the first episode, we see her hunched over a mood board, pondering the show’s overall concept. Pieces of paper with sketches and key words are spread on the floor. A black cat purrs, ambling across the papers. “What do you reckon, is it going to be a good series?” Gut asks the furry minor character, who appears in every episode. We hear Malaria!’s biggest hit, “Kaltes Klares Wasser.” Gut gets herself a cold beer.

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

The production of the series itself, as well as Gut’s role within it, remains a recurring theme; she discusses, among other things that normally stay behind the scenes, her choice of outfit (dungarees) and the possibility of a sequel. [3] The protagonist also repeatedly breaks the fourth wall – which is fairly permeable in documentaries in any case – directly addressing the audience and the production team. This creates a framing that – in keeping with her musical practice – emphasizes independent production, positioning the series as a collaborative project and an alternative to other, market-oriented formats.

The basic idea was to make an anti-documentary, Gut explains toward the end of the first episode. This was the concept that ultimately “got” her, she says, when she heard it pitched by Heiko Lange, the director of the series, whose previous work includes the essay film B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West Berlin 1979–1989 (2015), in which Gut appears, alongside other figures from the Berlin scene of the time. But anyone expecting a vigorous challenge to genre conventions will be disappointed. Unlike avant-garde anti-films, GUT is an extremely easy and entertaining watch. Moreover, the great majority of images are familiar from various documentary genres: drone shots and panoramas of idyllic landscapes alternate with close-ups of animals and plants. There are scenic long takes with lens flare and talking heads (mainly Gut’s own) in medium shots with evocative backgrounds, such as the garden, the studio, the mansion’s spacious hallway, its kitchen. The familiar pattern is, however, broken in an early scene where Gut has the camera drone race around in circles until it eventually crashes into the reeds. This image epitomizes an attitude that is also repeatedly expressed on the audio track: Gudrun Gut is not afraid. Not of making mistakes, not of aging, not of dying.

Classic nature documentaries – including early examples of UFA Kulturfilme, which were shot in rural Brandenburg about a century ago – have tended to narrate the difficulties and hardships of the stag beetle, that sort of thing. [4] This series also shows Gut in her (temporary) natural habitat, going about her daily, comparatively trouble-free routine. There are a few excursions into her past life in Berlin, but that aside, Gut appears to live entirely in the present, which the series emphasizes by repeatedly showing her on a garden swing. As a dramaturgical motif, the latter invokes the carefree experience of flying, but it also – since at least Fontane’s Effi Briest – brings with it an additional hint of reckless frivolity.

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

On-screen, Gut’s nonchalance comes across as pleasant enough, but the website she and Fehlmann set up for holiday guests at Sternhagen Gut could have done with some more editorial diligence. Seeking to sum up the “eclectic” history of the idyllic country property, the site ploughs rather carelessly – to put it mildly – across wide fields of history. Did Sternhagen Gut really ­become more “cosmopolitan” under the ownership of Ludwig Klitzsch, who was appointed managing director of UFA, the German film conglomerate, in 1927? Should the comings and goings of UFA’s stars, such as Zarah Leander, be used for advertising purposes without even briefly going into the historical role of these “acclaimed stars of the silver screen” in cultural and political contexts of the time? [5] In terms of her role(s) during National Socialism, Leander may now be generally regarded as rehabilitated, in the wake of biographical revision and homages like the Nina Hagen cover of her signature hit “Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n” (I know someday a miracle will happen). Nonetheless, it seems unfortunate and ill-considered to leap abruptly from 1930s culture to one’s own cultural involvement in the Uckermark region, as Gut and Fehlmann do on their website. But to come back to the series GUT: apart from the clarity of some of its shots, it is of course as different from an UFA film as Gut herself is from a stag beetle.

Heiko Lange originally had a remarkable model in mind for GUT: the 1991 series Fishing with John, in which the musician and actor John Lurie – known for his band the Lounge Lizards and roles in films like Down by Law and Stranger than Paradise – goes fishing with a different famous colleague in every episode, complete with classic nature documentary voice-over and shaky handheld camerawork. [6] Whether because of Gut’s input or the broadcaster’s requirements, the end result has clearly strayed quite far from this early reference and is also quite different from Lange’s earlier production. It does not come across as a home movie, nor like his previous B-Movie. In place of shaky camera angles, there are scenic shots and effectively saturated colors. Rather than the poor sound quality of outdoor or vintage recordings, we are given a perfectly produced soundtrack, juxtaposing a new edit of Gut’s single “Garten” with more experimental pieces such as “Freischneider” (Trimmer), which uses the noise of the eponymous garden appliance along with other rural sounds.

If one zooms out mentally from the details of the series to its overall impression, one perceives a general oscillation in key, an interplay between “downkeying” and “upkeying” (to loosely use E­rving Goffman’s terms). In other words, there is interplay between a movement toward reality and a contrary movement going distinctly away from real events. On the one hand, the production situation is made palpably present, in a way that occasionally drifts toward the performative but nonetheless manages to suggest authenticity. On the other hand, naturalness is often interrupted with deliberately artificial scenes, technical gimmicks, and calculated glitches. Yet these remain logical in their absurdity. Dadaesque disruptions – like the scene where a country road miraculously wraps around a sort of globe (made possible by a graphic effect known as sphere mapping), or where the moonlit lake where Gut and Fehlmann are floating in a two-person kayak mutates into some kind of jelly parfait – may be surprising. But to viewers familiar with the duo’s previous work, they will also feel somewhat coherent.

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

Heiko Lange with Gudrun Gut, “GUT,” 2023

What Fishing with John and GUT do share is their meandering conversational style. In the case of Lurie’s show, the dialogues are eccentric and existential, taking place between male “explorers.” With GUT, it is mostly monologues, and they are not free of cliché (“You gotta be tough to make it”; “I’ve never been one to flirt with the mainstream”), and sometimes blather along a bit too smoothly, but they do have a certain refreshing honesty. Something else these otherwise very different series have in common is how their urban protagonists, transplanted into nature, insist that they feel entirely at home but end up seeming like fish out of water. Unsurprisingly, Gudrun Gut seems more at home programming a drum machine than fishing for rainbow trout. (Yes, at one point, we even go Fishing with Gudrun.) The all-too-familiar is cultivated in GUT, but so is the fascination with nearby yet far-flung territory.

In fact, Gut and Fehlmann are well connected in the area. Among other things, they are founding members of Friends of the Uckermark, a local association that since 2007 has sponsored the UM Festival. Gut curates the festival’s music ­program. The main organizer is Dimitri Hegemann, founder of the Berlin techno club Tresor. Neither the association nor the festival are mentioned directly in GUT, but they are a subtext to the ­series, as is the general attraction of the Uckermark for many Berliners. [7] GUT contains plenty of ideas and ideals that regularly crop up in accounts of the “Uckermark good life.” [8] In this, too, the series is aptly titled (“Gut” also simply means “good”). Nature itself is one theme, as a supplier of both energy and food. Pleasure is another, recurring as a slower-paced daily life or in the form of regionally produced food. (The third and final episode combines both in its title: “Sourdough”.)

It is no coincidence that figures from the music scene like Gut and Fehlmann are among those who have positively influenced the image of the Uckermark for many city dwellers. The trajectory of Gut’s own life ensures that the ­Uckermark phenomenon indirectly becomes a theme of the series, but it can hardly be seen in isolation from broader narratives of (sub)cultural history. “Even if, within subcultural tradition, the city and nature represent two dichotomous modes of projection […], hippy-style flocking out into nature makes total sense within that logic,” wrote Anja Schwanhäußer in her 2010 ethnography of Berlin’s techno scene. Some of her observations equally apply to Gut’s generation, which experimented with electropunk, industrial, noise, and visual arts in West Berlin before the Wall fell: “Nature offers a projection screen and concrete location for tendencies already inherent in cultural practices in urban space, inscribed within the scene’s own style.” In this context, Schwanhäußer mentions the transformation of wastelands into temporary locations, the valorization of the sensual (food, drinks, drugs, etc.), and the longing for modes of social life beyond capitalist logics of exploitation. [9] Decades before the UM Festival existed, festivals like Fusion invited people from urban subcultures to celebrate left-wing utopias and the promise of freedom against an expansive countryside backdrop.

Mara von Kummer, Gudrun Gut in her studio, 2023

Mara von Kummer, Gudrun Gut in her studio, 2023

What is just as prevalent in GUT as in partying is an attitude of distraction, one that goes against many unwritten rules of television, where productions rarely come without a punch line, moral lesson, or other kind of payoff. Although the distraction in GUT may at times seem elitist or escapist, it is still possible to read it as a counterproposal, which points beyond the dichotomies of community and society, center and periphery. Without making a big deal of it, the series nonetheless pokes away at the cliché that life in the provinces is a hotbed of regression and populist resentment. When Gut seems wary of small talk at the garden fence or the meat counter – as no doubt many long-established Uckermarkers are wary of her – the program neither conceals nor discusses it; it does not deny reality, or difference. The world of the Sternhagen Gut may appear harmonious, but Gut makes no secret of her privilege and does not create a false image of social harmony.

Almost inevitably, GUT portrays its protagonist as a brand as well as an individual. It rightly highlights the fact that, from the very start, she has built it all up on her own, on an independent label, and stresses her commitment to the scene, above all to its female figures. In the second episode, Gut reflects on her career with her bandmates from Malaria! aka Mücken. In the third, she is visited by musicians from her collective, Monika Werkstatt, which promotes the visibility of women in the music industry. These moments make clear that the show’s setting is actually quite secondary. If the lyrics to Gut’s track “Garten” (Garden) are to be believed, the latter lives inside of her.

Translation: Brían Hanrahan

Anna Sinofzik is a writer and senior editor at TEXTE ZUR KUNST.

Image credits: 1.-4. Courtesy of Gudrun Gut and Heiko Lange; 5. Photo Mara von Kummer

Notes

[1]A legendary Berlin nightclub.
[2]The show’s title appears at the beginning of each episode, followed by the words “Music, Daily Life, Dream, Living.”
[3]Gut initially refers to herself as a director of the series, but the credits list her as “creative director.”
[4]See The Stag Beetle (1921) by Ulrich K. T. Schulz, an early UFA Kulturfilm, which was also shot in Brandenburg.
[5]See the Sternhagen Gut website.
[6]Boris Kurse, “Doku über Gudrun Gut: Avantgarde und Brotbacken in Potzlow – Miniserie über Musikerin,” Märkische Oderzeitung, March 5, 2024.
[7]A photo book portrays some of them, including Gut and Fehlmann; see Jonathan Teklu, York Christoph Riccius, and Alard Von Kittlitz, Uckermark Porträts (Berlin: Distanz, 2021).
[8]Claudia Stockinger, “The End of a Dream?,” in this issue, 82–92.
[9]Anja Schwanhäußer, Kosmonauten des Underground (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010), 205.