A heroin film with a Bowie soundtrack that doubles, almost by accident, as the best filmed record of the West Berlin the archive files as a scene.
Christiane F. is filed for its setting more than its story. Uli Edel's 1981 film adapts the Stern interviews collected as Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, following a teenager's descent into heroin and prostitution in the streets around Bahnhof Zoo, and it was shot on location in the grey, walled West Berlin of the late 1970s. The city is the point. Zoo Station, the SOUND club, a string of desolate industrial spaces: the film moves through the same environment that produced the city's experimental and industrial music, and records it with a directness no music documentary of the period managed.
The soundtrack makes the connection audible. It is drawn almost entirely from David Bowie's 1977–79 Berlin-period albums, the records he made in the city alongside the krautrock and proto-industrial currents around him, and Bowie appears as himself in a concert sequence the real Christiane attended. The music is not decoration; it is the same Berlin, heard rather than seen.
The tie becomes literal afterwards. Christiane Felscherinow, the film's real subject, moved into that music world directly, partnering with Einstürzende Neubauten's Alexander Hacke and making her own recordings. The teenager filmed in the ruins ended up inside the scene the ruins produced, which is as neat a justification for filing the film here as the Bureau could ask for.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene