Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ascheid, Antje

Titel

"The Lives of Others" and Contemporary German Film

Ist Teil von

• German Studies Review, 2015, Vol.38 (1), p.230-232

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: German Studies Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The book is divided into three sections: 1. Making the film, 2. Re-positioning the film, and 3. Beyond the film. The first section opens with [Florian Henckel] von Donnersmark's own perspective, a reprint of his talk given at the University of Cambridge in 2008. Von Donnersmarck's account of not just his creative journey but of his financing and marketing strategies provides an extremely useful basis for the volume's often widely differing ways of reading the film in various contexts. The director's initial remarks are followed by those of Manfred Wilke, head of the research committee on the SED regime at FU Berlin, who served as von Donnersmarck's advisor. Wilke provides additional historical context for the film and illuminates the research process that guided its production. Articles by Randall Halle, about production trends emerging in the Berlin Republic supporting new work, and Jaimey Fisher, on German stardom and its function in the film, round out this first section on the making of Lives. Section two opens up to a wider critical discussion of the film and its meanings. Andrea Rinke and David Bathrick both focus on generic paradigms. Rinke is interested in melodrama, particularly in respect to the film's tragic heroine and questions of gender, while Bathrick analyses the film through the frame of the spy thriller. Marc Silberman continues in this vein to investigate Lives by reading it as literature and relating the screenplay to German dramatic traditions. Ian Thomas Fleischman's essay on the postnational dimensions of the film in a globalized film market concludes the second part of the volume. Finally, part three engages in discussions that go beyond The Lives of Others. Lutz Koepnick relates the film's use of sound, in particular its depiction of auditory surveillance, to art film influences like Coppola's The Conversation and draws parallels to the Berlin School.