Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Barbaric, Mystical, bored," writes Grass of the 20th Century. Historians will one day recognize The Tin Drum as representative of a universal 20th Century experience, yet Grass' novel is above all a German work, addressing the provincial guilt and unease of post-war Germans, drawn to Hitler like adolescents to pornography and unable to cleanse themselves under the searchlight of vengeful, scrutinizing time...
Maybe it is impossible to build a film on three adjectives: barbaric, mystical, bored. But if Schlondorff had kept those words in mind as he guided his camera over the russet rooftops of Old Danzig, he might have crafted a film that captured the anguish of the 20th Century as well as Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum...
...them. At the abstract level, Levi (and his book's cinematic interpreters) seems to be saying that the simpler the life people lead, the more resistant it is to the forces of change, even when those forces are backed by coercive power. Forty-five years deeper into the 20th century, it would have been easy to romanticize the simple, patient people exemplifying that point. Rosi does not do it. He draws them with full dimensionality, verve and gentle irony. And with a sympathy that never veers into noble-peasant sentimentality. In this cut, Levi's story seems...
...INTRODUCED as the man of the 20th century, this very democratic leader who eliminated unemployment, who failed as an artist and so projected his fantasies onto the world of earth and people and blood, who knew "what every little man wanted--to be great." And after seven hours of mannequins and puppet Hitlers, Goerings, Goebbels and Speers and props from the attic of German history, Hitler becomes the common man, everyman, including ourselves--not an aberration in history, but an integral part and natural consequence of it--he is our progenitor, our mentor, as well as our innermost dread...
Early in the 20th century, Japan and Russia stood at approximately the same stage of economic development. Japan went the capitalist route and acquired Asia's highest living standard. Russia went the Communist path and has never produced consumer goods of quality or sufficient agricultural output...