American Views Abroad

 
This site reviewed the German film, Das Leben der Anderen when it was released in 2006 www.americanviewsabroad.org/2006/03/german-movie-released-this-past-week.html. This film, under its English title The Life of Others, has been released in New York City and according to Hamburg radio reports it is sold out even in its earliest showings and audiences have given it rave reviews. Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported today that it has touched a raw nerve among American viewers. Americans who as citizens never used to question their democracy seem to view the film as a prophecy of things to come in these times of the Patriot Act. Its director, Donnersmarck, expressed surprise at the many open outbursts of displeasure directed at Bush from viewers in the US.

Anthony Lane reviewed it in The New Yorker this month. 'If there is any justice, this year's Academy Award for best foreign-language film will go to The Life of Others, a movie about a world in which there is no justice.' Further, he writes: '..... being German, he has an overwhelming subject: the postwar sundering of his country. For us, the idea of freedom, however heartfelt, is doomed to abstraction, waved by politicians as if they were shaking a flag. To Germans, even those of Donnersmarck's generation, freedom is all too concrete, defined by its brute opposite: the gray slabs raised in Berlin to keep free souls at bay.'

Lane expressed initial shock that the action doesn't end in 1984 but in 1993 and past the fall of the Berlin Wall. 'You might think that The Lives of Others is aimed solely at modern Germans...... A movie this strong, however, is never parochial, nor is it period drama. Es ist fuer uns. It's for us.'
www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/070212crci_cinema_lane
- posted by Gloria @ 5:49 PM