Head Cold intimate diary of mental illness
In German/Hungarian co-production Head Cold, presented at Berlinale in the Forum section, German-Hungarian director Gamma Bak engages in a unique experience: she films, over almost 20 years, a self-anatomy of her psychosis. This debut feature, which is a life’s work, is a real bare-all – in the literal sense as well, in one of the more contemplative interludes that are windows onto her subjectivity.
Through self-interviews and accounts from her close friends and family, Bak methodically recounts (although the film alternates between images filmed at different times between 1992 and 2009) her recurrent breakdowns; her perception of the effects of the prescribed heavy medication; and above all, her constant fear of relapse, which means she can no longer tell the difference between normal and abnormal behaviour, and constantly fears, with every emotion, that it may be caused by her illness.
The film’s success is thus not therapeutic in nature, and the need to document oneself can easily be viewed as a symptom of psychosis. Its strength lies in its accurate description of the psychotic subject’s loss of contact with reality, as well as its admission that no recovery is really possible, which is difficult for non-psychotic people to understand, convinced as they are that willpower alone suffices to control one’s emotions.
The film also makes the devastating observation that such a mental illness clouds the subject’s perception of their own identity all the more since it robs them of several years of their life, thus preventing their identity from forming around normal aspirations such as starting a family. However, Bak notices, after a stay in the United States, that it is possible to have a more normalised view of mental disorders.
(Translated from French)
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