Multimedia Collection
The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)
VHS
152 minutes
PT2613 .R338 B56 1985
In 1979 the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film was presented to a masterpiece of dazzling exuberance and originality: Volker Schlundorff's The Tin Drum.
Adapted from the internationally acclaimed novel by Gunter Grass, Germany's leading postwar writer, The Tin Drum is an intellectually challenging, visually stunning parable of modern society in violent transition - as narrated by Oskar Matzerath, one of the most unforgettably unique heroes of our time.
Oskar is born, clear-headed and open-eyed, into a world he never made - and he hates what he sees. At three, he's already had enough. "I decided," he narrates from the top of a long, dangerous flight of stairs,"to call a halt to it. To stop growing, then and there and remain a three-year-old, alone, once and for all." So Oskar plunges head first into the strange and surreal fate which awaits him - and for the next two terrible decades of feast and famine, fascism and slaughter, he remains frozen in size, suspended in the outraged innocence of childhood.
Oskar has two weapons to see him through the ordeal of modern history: his tin drum, which he bangs to drown out horror and hypocrisy, and his childish voice raised in a shriek piercing enough to break glass. These wonderful images of the power of the artist define Oskar's uneasy, defiant role in life.
Like Fellini's Amarcord, The Tin Drum magically evokes the viewpoint of childhood. For Fellini, the experience is nostalgic and mysterious. Schlondorff's vision is darker, funnier, angrier and ultimately more authentic - even to the selection of a child actor David Bennent to play his fascinating hero. "What upsets us," Schlondorff says, "is the absence of any shame shown by David as he portrays Oskar. The way he looks at the adult world is the way any child looks at the world. He leaves us literally speechless."
German with English subtitles.
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