Word: schlondorffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...even when he drops the subjective/objective technique, Schlondorff can be playfully brilliant. Following a sepia-toned clip of a Nazi rally comes a sequence in which Oskar's drumming turns the propaganda gathering into a waltzing Danube of Hitler Youth. As Oskar drums, the Nazi band picks up his waltz, a goose-stepping Nazi commandant adds a back-skip to his gait and a crowd of arms extended in "Seig Heils" begins to sway to the music. Aryan youths pair off to dance, leaving the SS confused and helpless...
...However, Schlondorff fails to give a similar sense of irony to a Beckettian sequence with an eel fisherman on a stark beach. While Oskar keeps a cold, dark view on life, the film changes tone: now it is bleak and blue, now it is warm and red. Does Schlondorff misunderstand his little hero or has he simply made only token efforts at linking each sequence to the whole? He manages to reduce the most profound chapter of Grass' novel, a discussion about art and life between a midget magician and a soliderly artist to a frolicking picnic atop a cement...
...OSKAR, Schlondorff discovered David Bennent, a ten-year-old, blue-eyed, frozen-faced lad who himself stopped growing at age six. Surrounded by a superb supporting cast, Bennent's Oskar watches the world with angry insolence, determined to drum, to examine the world of adults with studied innocence. His voice has a contemptible condescending tone that nonetheless seduces us. His high-pitched screams that break glass--art as a destructive protest--ring with the desperate tremor of a genius creating a master-piece. Bennent is terrifying in a Nazi uniform yet his cherubic smile is almost Christ-like...
...Schlondorff feels he must play with Grass' symbols and he has included many of them: Oskar's red and white drums, the smashed glass, the eels, the death of Oskar's mother by over-consumption of fish, Oskar's valiant attempts at sex, cemetaries, the death-dealing Nazi-party pin. Yet unlike Grass' novel, Schlondorff's film refuses to tie these ugly images together; time has strange dimensions and the laudably meticulous attention to detail--violent and spectacular--leaves us empty. The Tin Drum is full of disturbing moments: Oskar is forced to drink a stone and urine soup; eels...