Word: grasse
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HERE IS The Tin Drum's failure, of course. Intimidated by Grass and by the novel itself, Schlondorff's film is hardly more than a moving picture show, Oskar's treasured photograph album (left out of the film) brought to life. The director has made little attempt to translate aspects of the novel into cinematic language. While Grass' imagination provides an exciting and titillating narrative, Scholondorff only steers his camera earnestly through each sequence, giving Oskar's war-time charades a warm, personal gloss. Schlondorff's Oskar is little Oskar, a cruel, manipulative Peter Pan who ultimately leaves his Never...
...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...
...Grass' novel is a perrennial best-seller in Germany, a volume of modern myths that has almost Biblical significance for those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength...
Movie-making is big business, however, and The Tin Drum was guaranteed of commercial success in Germany because of the novel's popularity. Grass resisted all offers for the film rights to his book for 15 years until he decided he had met, finally, the right man to direct Oskar's story. Schlondorff (whose past films include Young Torless and The Lost Honor of Katherin Blum) asked sharp questions, Grass noted, and made no plans to significantly alter his book for the screen...
...Grass' Oskar speaks of himself in both the first and third person and Schlondorff tries admirably to integrate subjective and objective camera angles. His camera prowls, mimicking Oskar's roving, steely eyes, cutting neatly between the three-year-old perspective and the view of an omniscient, unobtrusive lens. But he fails to remain consistent, breaking now and then to leave Oskar's field of vision, sneaking in a shot that is too objective. A cleverer director might have found a way to convey images, like Oskar's mother's adultery with his Uncle Jan, without abandoning his point of view...