Christiane F. – We Children from Bahnhof Zoo

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Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
Christiane F Poster.jpg
Directed by Uli Edel
Produced by Bernd Eichinger
Hans H. Kaden
Hans Weth
Written by Herman Weigel
Kai Hermann
Horst Rieck
Starring Natja Brunckhorst
Thomas Haustein
Narrated byNatja Brunckhorst
Music by Jürgen Knieper
David Bowie
CinematographyJürgen Jürges
Justus Pankau
Edited by Jane Seitz
Release date
1981
Running time
138 minutes
CountryWest Germany
LanguageGerman
Budget$2.7 million

Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo is a 1981 German junkie drama film directed by Uli Edel that portrays the drug scene in West Berlin in the 1970s, based on the non-fiction book of the same name written following tape recordings of teenage girl Christiane F. The film immediately acquired cult status (which it still retains today) and features David Bowie as both himself and the soundtrack composer, which gave the film a commercial boost.

Uli Edel is a German film and television director, best known for his work on films such as Last Exit to Brooklyn and Body of Evidence.

West Berlin political enclave that existed between 1949 and 1990

West Berlin was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. There was no specific date on which the sectors of Berlin occupied by the Western Allies became "West Berlin", but 1949 is widely accepted as the year in which the name was adopted. West Berlin aligned itself politically with the Federal Republic of Germany and was directly or indirectly represented in its federal institutions.

Christiane Vera Felscherinow is a German actress and musician who is best known for her contribution to the 1978 autobiographical book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo [We Children of Bahnhof Zoo], and the film based on the book, in which her teenage drug use is documented.

Contents

Plot

13-year-old Christiane Felscherinow lives with her mother, little sister, and pet cat in a small apartment in a multi-story, concrete social-housing building in a dull neighbourhood in the outskirts of West Berlin. She's sick of living there and has a passion for rockstar David Bowie. She hears of Sound, a new nightclub in the city's center. Although she's not old enough to get in, she dresses up in high heels and makeup, and asks a school friend, Kessi, who hangs out there regularly, to take her. Kessi also provides her with pills. At the club, she meets a boy named Detlef, who is a little older and in a clique where everybody experiments with various drugs.

David Bowie British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

David Robert Jones, known professionally as David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter and actor. He was a leading figure in the music industry and is considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, with his music and stagecraft having a significant impact on popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million albums worldwide, made him one of the world's best-selling music artists. In the UK, he was awarded ten platinum album certifications, eleven gold and eight silver, and released eleven number-one albums. In the US, he received five platinum and nine gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

Christiane starts taking LSD in addition to abusing pills; after befriending a girl named Babsi at a David Bowie concert, she tries heroin for the first time. As Christiane falls in love with Detlef, she begins using heroin on a regular basis in order to be close to him, gradually becoming more and more dependent on the drug until she is a full-blown addict. After her 14th birthday, Christiane stops going home and spends more and more time at her cohorts' unkempt apartment; she is also drawn to Bahnhof Zoo, a large train and subway station notorious for the drug trafficking and prostitution that takes place in its underpasses and back alleys. Christiane also starts to prostitute herself, imitating Detlef, who sells sex to male clients on a regular basis.

After being discovered unconscious on the bathroom floor at home, Christiane tries going cold turkey with Detlef, an excruciating experience for both of them. However, they relapse the moment they revisit Bahnhof. To fuel her addiction, Christiane steals from home, sells all her possessions, and sinks to abysmal levels. After Christiane and Detlef find their best friend and roommate, Axel, dead due to an overdose in the apartment, they run away, ending up in the apartment of one of Detlef's male clients. When Christiane walks in on the two having very loud anal intercourse, she has a breakdown and flees. She goes back to the station to find Babsi, only to discover leaving there that she is dead of an overdose at barely 14 years old. In despair over her friends' deaths and her inability to break free from heroin, Christiane tries to overdose as well, but the film abruptly breaks to an off-camera voiceover that says eventually Christiane recovered, but most of her cohorts either died or are still addicts.

Cold turkey abrupt cessation of a substance dependence

"Cold turkey" refers to the abrupt cessation of a substance dependence and the resulting unpleasant experience, as opposed to gradually easing the process through reduction over time or by using replacement medication. The term comes from the piloerection or "goose bumps" that occurs with abrupt withdrawal from opioids, which resembles the skin of a plucked refrigerated turkey.

Cast and roles

Natja Brunckhorst German actress and screenwriter

Natja Brunckhorst is a German actress, screenwriter, and director. Brunckhorst was 13 years old when she was selected by director Uli Edel for the leading role as Christiane F. in the critically acclaimed 1981 dramatisation of the biographical work Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo on Christiane Vera Felscherinow written following tape recordings of teenage girl Christiane F. The film immediately acquired cult status and features David Bowie as both himself and the soundtrack composer, which gave the film a commercial boost. A year later Brunckhorst appeared in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982). After the unexpected success of Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, in order to avoid public attention she retreated from public life and went to school in England. After a short time in Paris she returned to Germany in 1987 to study at the Schauspielschule Bochum.Since then she has acted on film and television, for example in The Princess and the Warrior, as well as the German TV series Dr. Sommerfeld - Neues vom Bülowbogen.

Production

The film was shot with a low budget in 1980 and released in 1981, but set between 1975 and 1977 in West Berlin. It skips the beginning and the end of the book, and concentrates on the main story, starting when Christiane begins her nightlife in Berlin at around 13 years old, and stops rather abruptly after her suicide attempt by stating that she recovered. In real life, Christiane F. never fully recovered nor did her troubles end with going to Hamburg to begin withdrawal, but the film focuses on the portrayal of addiction.

Originally the film was going to be directed by Roland Klick, but after a long preparation he was fired only two weeks before shooting, after a fallout with Bernd Eichinger. Uli Edel came in to direct the film. Cinematography is bleak and dreary, depicting a dilapidated, working-class Berlin with rundown structures and dirty, blighted backdrops. Modern Berlin is very different and most of the landmarks from the film (the station, the Bülow street stalls, the Sound discothèque) have either been demolished or completely remodeled.

The cast is composed mainly of first-time actors, most of whom were still in school at the time and have not pursued acting careers. Natja Brunckhorst is the only cast member who continued to act in German films and television, starting with 1982's Querelle by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, another exploitation film. Most of the extras at the railway station and at the Sound club were actual junkies, prostitutes and low-lifes rounded up by producers just for the crowd scenes. In the scene where Christiane runs through the alleys of the station to find Babsi, the camera lingers on several terminal junkies leaning against the walls of the underpass. In a 2011 interview, Thomas Haustein, who plays Detlev and was still in school at the time, recalls how terrified he felt being surrounded by all those real-life addicts, but that he was able to successfully copy their behaviour for his character. It would be illegal to have minors act in the film's graphic shootup, nudity and sex scenes today; at the time, however, all the production needed was a written letter of consent from the parents to proceed with filming. [1]

The Bowie concert featured in the film actually took place in New York City, with only some of the crew and cast attending, because at the time David Bowie was performing on Broadway several nights a week and could not shoot in Berlin. The mass concert scenes were actually from an AC/DC concert in Germany.

Reception

Both the film and the book acquired cult status in Europe immediately after release, raising awareness of heroin addiction. The popularity of the film was greatly boosted by David Bowie's participation as both himself (portrayed giving a concert early in the film) and as the main contributor to the soundtrack. Bowie's music from his albums made in Berlin during 1976-77 is heavily featured throughout the picture, and as he was at the very peak of his popularity during the late 1970s-early 1980s, his presence helped boost the film's commercial success.

The film shocked European audiences. The heroin plague that swept Western Europe between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s was not yet public knowledge so the film's release was the first many knew of the epidemic; it then became widely known that heroin was killing a large number of European teenagers. The film depicted all the details of heroin addiction in very realistic detail: hustling and scoring, shooting up, the effects of heavy drug withdrawal and heavy drug usage, being too high to stay conscious and dropping onto the floor in a stupor, the scars caused by "shooting up" and the extreme weight loss due to not having money leftover to buy nutritious food, socialising in rundown neighbourhoods such as peripheral train stations, back alleys, all too familiar to urban citizens in West Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and France in those years.

Christiane and her cohorts are seen losing consciousness in decrepit lavatory cubicles amidst urine, vomit and blood, injecting in close-ups, cleaning and re-filling syringes directly from the toilet bowl, vomiting all over themselves and falling asleep right on top of it. The depiction of young addicts from seemingly normal families was particularly alarming: at the time junkies were still perceived in popular culture as much older, wilder characters, such as those depicted in Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider or in Lou Reed's songs. Christiane turns 14 halfway through the film, the same age as her friend Babsi, who fatally overdoses. Christiane's boyfriend in the film is 15, portrayed by a 14-year-old actor. None of their companions, two of whom also fatally overdose, are older than 16, as reported by end titles recalling the birth and death dates of the real-life individuals portrayed in the film. The fact that the characters prostitute themselves to obtain drugs, both hetero- and homosexually, at such a young age, revolted audiences. [1]

Soundtrack

All songs written by David Bowie except "Heroes/Helden" written by Bowie/Eno/Maas, "Boys Keep Swinging" and "Look Back In Anger", both written by Bowie/Eno. According to the book, the real Christiane F. had had her first experience with heroin at a David Bowie concert some years earlier; this is told in the film with David Bowie starring as himself. The concert scene was filmed in October 1980 at New York's Hurrah Club, which was redressed to resemble a Berlin nightclub (Bowie was appearing nightly on Broadway at the time so director Ulrich Edel had to shoot the sequence in New York). [2]

  1. "V-2 Schneider"
  2. "TVC 15"
  3. "Heroes/Helden"
  4. "Boys Keep Swinging"
  5. "Sense of Doubt"
  6. "Station to Station" (Live)
  7. "Look Back in Anger"
  8. "Stay"
  9. "Warszawa"

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 Allen, Mark (2 June 2010). "Detlev Lives!". Vice . Retrieved 21 November 2016.
  2. ↑ Pegg, Nicholas (2002). The Complete David Bowie. Reynolds & Hearn. p. 461. ISBN   1-903111-40-4.
  3. ↑ Miller, Alice (2002) [1980]. "The Search for the Self and Self-destruction through Drugs: The life of Christiane F.". For Your Own Good (4th ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN   0-374-52269-3.
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