Kopfstand (Headstand) – 1981

I give Kopfstand 2 1/2, maybe 3 stars, out of 5

First, the German (with a longer discussion in English to follow):

Kopfstand: oder wie einer zufällig mit dem leben davonkam  ist viel besser als Parole Chicago. Das ist einfach, dumm Fernsehen. Diese ist ein Film ernst und Christoph ist der Stern.

Er ist Markus Dorn – nicht ein Junge, noch nicht ein Mann. Er verbirgt sein Seele hinten eine Wand. Sein Mutter denkt er ist schlechter als er ist. Er geht zu ein psychiatrische Klinik und trefft Stinker – ein Freund neu. In ein klein weg, Markus beginnt, im Stich gelassen seine Wand.

Es ist Winter in Wien in 1980 (neunzehn achtzig). Der Film ist in schwarz auf weiss. Es fühlt ein klein kahl.

Der Film hat Defekts aber erzählt eine gute Geschichte.

In a 2012 interview Christoph said:

I don’t talk about the characters I play… I want you to see what it is you see… I claim that when we go to the movies we go to see ourselves.

Recently he paraphrased a quote from Harrison Ford saying:

My job as an actor is not to show you how close I am to the character. My job as an actor is to show you how close you are to the character.

It was with these ideas in mind that I watched Kopfstand, a black and white, 1981, low-budget, arty, Austrian drama. It has flaws: the story is a little disjointed and the acting stumbles here and there. There is, however, an honest story, reasonably well told, at its heart.

I am quite grateful for having found the whole film on-line and with English subtitles. I would have been very lost without them.

Christoph plays Markus Dorn. Markus reminds me of people I knew when I was his age: not quite sullen, but he wears his ennui – shown as a dismissive shrug – as a protective cloak. It serves as a barrier between his sensitive teenaged soul and the world of human relationships he wants to be part of but doesn’t know how to enter. He is no longer a boy but not yet a man.

It is perhaps a trait of the age (the cusp of adulthood) or of the times (that era when the punk ethos was taken up by black-clad kids in depressed cities like Manchester) but, even though this was shot in 1980 Vienna, it did remind me strongly of my city of Chicago, and my circle of friends there, in the mid to late 1980s.

We were smart kids, following new and misunderstood cultural trends; these were trends we were happy to have seen as harder, darker and more dangerous than we knew them to be. Kids who often lived on a constant edge of conflict with their parents and authorities. Adults often assumed worse was going on than was the case. For some, worse really was going on … hard drugs, suicidal thoughts, but they were the exception, not the norm.

If Markus had turned up at Evanston Township High School in the mid-1980s by his clothes and his attitude we would have spotted him as one of our own (these photos, by the way, were all shot in black and white).

Charlie at 19 or 20 (1988 or so)

Grey at 15 or 16 (1985 maybe)

Markus Dorn – that Austrian exchange student we nearly forgot about

 

Me at 19 or so.

 

Markus works in as a hairdresser, pines after the cashier at a games parlour and mopes about wintry Vienna in his leather jacket and long hair.

Vienna itself is a character in Kopfstand. It is not-quite bleak but at the hard end of the spectrum. It’s winter throughout the film – edging toward spring but still cold at the end – it’s snow covered, with leafless trees, and bundled figures in clouds of breath.

Markus accepts a worse reputation than he’s earned; a reputation which mostly lives in the mind of his mother. She doesn’t understand what is going on with her son and presumes the worst – that he’s on drugs, that he’s crazy.

The energy of his inner struggle and the passion he tampers with cool bursts into the spaces of friction with his mother and her boyfriend. A verbal conflict becomes physical and the police are called. Markus is roused from bed and taken to the station. He doesn’t think the situation very serious but his mother signs the papers to have him committed and so he finds himself in a mental asylum.

In the asylum he is drugged and given electric-shock therapy. But importantly he meets Stinker (so called for having shat at the head doctor’s doorway). Stinker is a middle-aged man who yearns for the wife who left him and, while clearly troubled, he doesn’t seem much more worthy of forcible commitment than Markus. He becomes Markus’s friend and a bit of a father-figure. It is in this relationship it seems Markus begins to lay-down his cloak, or at least open it, connecting with Stinker and, to a lesser degree, other men on the ward.

I will refrain from telling all, since this film is readily available on-line and if you’ve read this far you may be interested enough to watch it. But Markus is eventually released and while there is a thaw in the relationship with his mother it remains strained and distant.

Markus finds a new safe-space in taking on an assignment “from the welfare” to look in on an elderly recluse, Frau Mohn. Markus, who in his own way had been a recluse – hiding himself behind his cloak, refraining from close relationships – helps to draw Frau Mohn out of her shell.

As the film ends Markus has experienced closeness and loss. He is still figuring it out and remains a melancholy young man but he is much closer to a healthy adulthood than he was when the story began.

CONTEXT – 1981

In 1981 I was 12 years old. Presumably Kopfstand was shot in the winter of 1980/1981 – when I was still 11 and in 6^th grade at Oscar M. Chute Middle School. Whenever I think of middle school I think of what truly shit years those were. I think it’s a difficult age for everyone – 11, 12, 13 – terrible, I wouldn’t repeat them for a million dollars and a private German lesson from Christoph.

This photo is undated but I look 11 and given the jumper there’s a good chance this was the winter of 1980/81.

The biggest, most memorable, news story of 1981 for me was the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. They kept the news of the shooting from us until final period. I was in a math class taught by a regular substitute teacher – an Indian woman who wore a sari. Just before the final bell she told us the president had been shot. At that point he was in surgery and his prognosis unknown.

I remember there being a certain frisson of excitement … not pleasure or joy but curiosity and wonder. The assassinations of the 1960s pre-dated us but the shadow of them stretched into our lifetimes. At 11 we may not have grasped the sadness of those events but we were well aware of the ground-shifting monumentalness of them. We all wondered what would happen if Reagan died and if we would be talking years later about where we were when we heard the news, as our parents did about the Kennedy and King assassinations.

(This is the raw video footage without commentary – which I’d never seen before. Its remarkable how chaotic it is and how long it takes for an ambulance to arrive.)

Other news from 1981:

• The Americans held hostage in Iran were released
• Walter Cronkite retired
• Pope John Paul II survived an assassination attempt
• The first recognized cases of AIDS were recorded by the Centers for Disease Control
• Prince Charles and Lady Diana married
• MTV was launched
• In Australia, the State of Victoria decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults

 Births and Deaths:

• Elijah Wood, Justin Timberlake, Natalie Portman, Beyonce and Serena Williams were born – and, in Australia, Lleyton Hewitt, Michael Clarke, Lauren Jackson and Guy Sebastian.
• Bill Haley, Joe Louis, Natalie Wood and Bob Marley died

 A FEW ODD ITEMS I DISCOVERED WHILE RESEARCHING 1981

Strangely, Vienna, Ultravox’s biggest-ever single, was released in 1981. The vibe of the song and video, inspired by the film The Third Man, fit Kopfstand pretty well.

 

Notable Austrian set designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen worked on a production of Richard Wagner’s Tannäuser at the Vienna State Opera in 1980. This is a painting from that design work which I liked and also sort of feels right for the vibe of Kopfstand

Tannhauser – Vienna State Opera, 1980

THE BIG MOVIES OF THE YEAR:

The Best Picture Oscar was awarded to Chariots of Fire which beat out Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Reds.

Henry Fonda won the Best Actor award (On Golden Pond) beating: Warren Beatty (Reds), Burt Lancaster (Atlantic City), Dudley Moore (Arthur) and Paul Newman (Absence of Malice).

As this blog is sort of about Christoph Waltz … Best Supporting Actor went to John Gielgud (Arthur) over James Coco (Only When I Laugh), Ian Holm (Chariots of Fire), Jack Nicholson (Reds) and Howard E. Rollins Jr (Ragtime).