Word: scholondorff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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-never land. He is not Grass' Oskar: a mad, visionary historian vaging a wide, wild...
Gunter Grass filled his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), with symbols that are not symbols, with allegories that are not allegories, with messages that are not messages. Volker Scholondorff has turned this sprawling, self-conscious novel of post-war Germany into a beautiful and disturbing film that recreates Danzig of the '30s and '40s without adequately illuminating Grass' novel. His film is both a magnificent success--well-acted, unblinkingly photographed, crisply edited--and a huge failure, an adaptation that dismally dissipates the epic power of the novel...
...Scholondorff is best at Oskar's birth, a womb-view of human re-entry. We stare with Oskar out of his mother's heaving port-hole, hurtle down the bloody, mucus-filled chute, and then, too soon, out the door into the glaring bulb-light of modern German, Western Middle-class civilization. "When little Oskar is three, he will have a toy drum," says Mama and his umbilical cord...
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