“Christiane F.“Kult classic nightmare vision in 1981 about a teenage girl’s descent to heroin addiction in western Berlin, even makes” Panic in Nåstarpark “look like a walk in, yes, you know.
German filmmaker Uli Edele adapted a renovating book for nonfiction by Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck with testimonies from users who haunted the drug-resistant location at Berlin’s Zoo station, including from Christiane Felscherinow, who was 13 years old when she fell in the wrong club and started to shoot up among the underworld. For film Version, Edel Cast the then unknown actress Natja Brunckhorst (who would later write her own memoir about her experience of doing “Christiane F.”) as David Bowie-Sucing Teen Addict Experimenting with first love and drug abuse. Felscherinow eventually became an actress and musician himself.
Now, a new 4K restoration from Janus films by “Christiane F.” Opens Film at the Lincoln Center From June 20, with shows on the West Coast at Los Feliz Theater in Los Angeles. Edel takes a definite non-moral attitude to capturing the actual drug loss that populated Berlin in the 1970s; At one point, Christiane (Brunckhorst) stumbles into a blurry stupid through a tunnel lined with stemmed punks, needles hanging out of their arms and their eyes glazed over. It is one of many documentary -like moments in “Christiane F.”, which the filmmakers captured real users in the underpass. When it comes to the graphic nudity among minors seen in the film, it is now illegal, but the first time the actors’ parents consented at that time.
Justus Pankau and Jürgen Jürges Kinematography have probably not seen this shockingly alive since the film’s edition in 1981, when Roger Ebert called it “One of the most daunting movies I’ve ever seen.” Edel captures the jet-black streets at night and the bunker-like post-war underground in Berlin in a way that feels strange romantic and nostalgia-worthy of the shiny neon signage of the trendy disco-sound-un-romanticize a youth culture-culture.
“Christiane F.” Also distinguished for his soundtrack, delivered by David Bowie with songs from the albums “Heroes” (including the title track, which almost plays triumphantly when Christiane joins a Marauding Band with street children who do devastation in a shopping center), “station to station”, “Lodger” and “Low.” There is even an extended David Bowie concert, originally shot in New York, along with audience pictures from an AC/DC concert in West Germany. Bowie’s inclusion provides a cutting contrast between the Doomy Glamicure in the Berlin club scene from the late 70’s with the darkness that drums under it.
Edel, who works from Herman Weigel’s script, neither shakes away from the brutality in Christianes drop in minor sex work nor cold turkey hell she experiences with her boyfriend (Thomas Haustein), where they end up in advance because desperate is another fix. When Christiane is clean and with the help of her mother to become sober, she thinks she can handle another shot in her arm, but it turns out impossible when she is thrown into more tragic circumstances.
“Christiane F.” Features on their own terms as a piece of provocatively pure cinema, but it is also in a social dialogue with the emergence of precautionary stories that the controversial American “Memoaren” “Go Ask Alice” from 1971, which maps a 15-year-old girl’s self-destruction and later fiction was considered fiction. The book was used as an educational tool to warn the children of drug abuse, a tradition of agenda-driven anti-drug art that began with the American exploitation film “Reefer Madness” in the 1930s and of course continued with countless special offers. (Helen Hunt in “Desperate Lives”, Anyone?) “Christiane F.” Inadvertently may have served the same purpose, but Edel does not hunt moral instruction here. He captures for a moment, an environment, and it is one that the real Christiane eventually withdrew, unlike many of his friends.
Janus films‘4K Restoration of “Christiane F.” Opens on film at Lincoln Center Friday 20 June.
