The Tin Drum (film)

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Movie
Original title The Tin Drum
Country of production Federal Republic of Germany , France
original language German , Polish , Russian , Italian
Publishing year 1979
length 142 minutes
BD Director's Cut: 163
DVD Director's Cut: 156 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Volker Schlöndorff
script Volker Schlöndorff
Jean-Claude Carrière
Franz Seitz junior
production Anatole Dauman
Franz Seitz junior
music Maurice Jarre
camera Igor Luther
cut Suzanne Baron
occupation

The Tin Drum is the film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Günter Grass by Volker Schlöndorff from 1979. It is the first of the meanwhile three German films that have been awarded an Oscar for best foreign language film . In addition to other film awards, he also received the Palme d'Or in Cannes .

content

Summary

Danzig, 1924. A child is born in the Matzerath family. From the moment he was born, little Oskar was a very precocious, clairaudient boy. Even in the arms of its mother, the baby begins to view its surroundings with great skepticism. For his third birthday, Oskar receives a tin drum as a present. On this day, out of a fundamental refusal, he decides to stop his growth by throwing himself down the cellar stairs. Spiritually and masculine, he is developing very well, but his physical appearance automatically creates a certain distance between Oskar and the world of "adults" from this day on. On his pounding tin drum and with his ability to sing glass to pieces, he articulates his protest against the mendacious, scheming world of adults, which is revealed to him on the one hand in the terror of the Nazis and on the other in various sex affairs among his family members. In 1945, after the end of the war, Oskar decides that he wants to grow again.

action

In October 1899 Anna Bronski was sitting on the edge of a potato field. Under her skirt she hides the arsonist Joseph Koljaiczek from the military policemen who are persecuting him. Nine months later she gives birth to a daughter, whom she baptizes Agnes. Agnes later falls in love with her cousin Jan Bronski, only to finally marry Alfred Matzerath without ending her relationship with Bronski. In September 1927, her son Oskar was given a tin drum for his third birthday. He decides that he no longer wants to grow and seals this with a fall in the basement. Try to take the drum from him, Oskar replies with a loud scream that shatters the glass.

Oskar stays away from other children. When some of the neighborhood children throw frogs living in the backyard into boiling water, he stands to one side and is forced to eat a few spoons of the brew. Every Thursday, Agnes Matzerath goes shopping in town and always meets with Bronski in a guesthouse. Meanwhile, Oskar is handed over to the Jewish toy dealer Sigismund Markus, from whom he regularly receives a new drum. Oskar vented his displeasure and climbed the top of the tower, from where he let the windows of the city theater burst. Markus asks Agnes to go to London with him, but she does not respond.

During a circus visit in 1936, twelve-year-old Oskar, who is still 94 centimeters tall, befriends the 40-year-old midget Bebra. He invites Oskar to move with them, but Oskar prefers to stay in Danzig.

When Oskar's father Alfred joins the NSDAP, Oskar hides under the lectern at a mass event. He begins to drum a waltz time to which the band finally joins, whereupon the people begin to dance. On Good Friday 1939, Alfred, Agnes, Bronski and Oskar took the tram to Brösen. There they watch a stevedore pulling a horse's head out of the water in which some eels have collected. Full of disgust and disgust, Agnes turns away and vomits several times, supported by Bronski. Alfred, however, seems completely unimpressed; he buys a bunch of eels and uses them to make green eel at home . At the sight of the court, Agnes runs into the bedroom and throws herself sobbing on the double bed. Bronski goes to her to comfort her, but grabs the crying Agnes under the skirt, whereupon she begins to moan. The whole scene is observed unnoticed by Oskar, who was hiding in the bedroom's wardrobe. After Bronski and Agnes come back into the dining room, she quietly sits down at the table with her husband Alfred and devours the previously spurned eel dish with a defiant expression on her face. In the background, Bronski wipes the hand with which he was under Agnes' skirt before.

Two weeks later, Agnes begins devouring any fish. A few weeks later, she dies of fish poisoning. It turns out that she was three months pregnant.

At the end of August 1939, SA men ravaged Sigismund Markus' toy store. Markus is dead at his desk. It is now difficult for Oskar to get a replacement for his demolished drum and he takes the tram to Kobyella with Bronski. The caretaker of the Polish Post Office could repair the drum, but when Bronski and Oskar enter the building, Bronski is called up to defend the post office . Oskar finds a new tin drum lying on the top shelf of a shelf. When Kobyella tries to prevent him from getting the tin drum, he is hit by shrapnel. Due to the shock, the drum falls into Oskar's arms. The building is taken, Bronski and 31 other men are shot.

Because Oskar cannot serve the customers in Alfred's grocery store, Alfred hires Maria Truczinski, the daughter of a neighbor. In the summer of 1940 she went swimming with Oskar several times on the Baltic Sea. There Maria pours some fizzy powder into her hand and mixes it with Oscar's saliva. Then she licks up the foaming mixture. Since Alfred regularly goes to play Skat, Maria takes Oskar home with her every now and then. The two sleep in the same bed and repeat the process with the effervescent powder, which leads to sex between the two.

One day Oskar Maria surprises his father red-handed, jumps on him and thus prevents the intended coitus interruptus . When Maria then becomes pregnant, Oskar is nevertheless convinced that he is the child's father. Alfred marries Maria, who gives birth to their son Kurt in 1941. Oskar consoles himself sexually with the wife of the greengrocer Greff, an affair that her husband tacitly approves until his death.

Oskar meets Bebra again, who is now in the service of the Reich Propaganda Ministry with his group of artists. He introduces him to his also short companion Roswitha Raguna. This time he joins the two and goes to France with the circus. During an attack by the Allies, Roswitha is hit by a grenade and dies. Oskar separates from Bebra and travels back to Danzig. There they are preparing for the arrival of the Russians.

When the time comes, Lina Greff is raped one after the other by three Russians. Another soldier takes Oskar on his lap. He gives the party badge he got back to his father in order to have both hands free. Alfred reacts in panic and tries to swallow the badge, but the open safety pin gets stuck in his throat and when he starts to wiggle around in panic in pain, the Russians shoot him. During his father's funeral, 20-year-old Oskar decides to grow again and throws his drum into the open grave. At that moment he is hit by a stone in the back of the head by Kurt and falls himself into the grave. Although he is passed out, he is brought out alive again, but at the same moment Oskar begins to grow again. The film ends with this discovery and a vague prospect of Oskar's future.

background

Comparison with the novel

Schlöndorff only included the first and second of three books in the novel in the film, and the supporting stories by Oskar from the sanatorium are missing. This saved him a lot of flashbacks and jumps in the plot level, which would have made the narrative flow in the film suffer. However, as a result, film Oskar loses a lot of character diversity compared to Oskar from the book. In addition, numerous scenes were left out in the film. Schlöndorff opted for scenes that were often grotesque. Pictorial scenes, for which the novel is known, are portrayed accordingly in the film: how eels are caught with a horse's head and Agnes vomits when they see them, how Oskar speaks to a figure of Christ in the church or how Alfred Matzerath swallows and swallows the Nazi party badge indirectly dies from it. David Bennent declined to participate in a second part of the film.

controversy

In 1997 the film was the subject of a lawsuit in Oklahoma, United States . A judge, whose daughter brought the videotape from school, watched the film and accused him of " child pornography ". The plaintiff took offense at the scene in which Katharina Thalbach and David Bennent change clothes to swim in a changing room on the beach. Allegedly at this point an "11-year-old had oral sex with an adult actress". In the last instance, the ban on the film was lifted on the grounds that the laws would forbid material in which minors were sexually active, but would exclude those materials which, on the one hand, were "not primarily aimed at arousing sexual desires " and on the other, " real works of art ”. In Ontario, Canada, on the other hand, the film was banned on the grounds of "depicting underage sexuality".

criticism

“Schlöndorff's brilliantly staged, largely accurate film adaptation of Günter Grass' novel. An opulent bestseller film adaptation full of sensual power. "

“The film adaptation of the novel by Günter Grass, made with great effort and a star cast. (Rating: 3 out of 4 possible stars - very good) "

- Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz : Lexicon "Films on TV", 1990

Reception / performance ban in China 2013

In 2013, Die Blechtrommel could not be shown in public cinemas at the first German Film Festival in Beijing, but it was shown in a German school. This was not justified. The film has been banned in China since the early 1980s.

Awards

Frames

  • The theatrical version (24 fps ) from 1979 had a running time of approx. 142 minutes.
  • The Kinowelt DVD from 2001 offers a different cut than the version shown on German TV (ARD). The PAL DVD (25 fps) had a running time of 133 minutes 44 seconds (135 min. 47 sec. With closing credits) without credits, the ARD broadcast (25 fps) on April 2, 2006 had a running time of 137 minutes without credits 5 seconds (139 minutes 4 seconds with credits). It is not yet known where the ARD version comes from. The DVD is probably the theatrical version. For the master of the DVD, the original negative was scanned directly under the supervision of Volker Schlöndorff. A conversion of the DVD runtime (with credits) from 25 fps to the 24 fps of the cinema release results in a runtime of approx. 142 minutes.
  • On July 15, 2010, Kinowelt released a new, approx. 20 minutes longer “Director's Cut”. The DVD (25 fps) has a running time of 156 minutes, the Blu-ray (24 fps) of approx. 163 minutes. The additional material was dubbed.
  • In 1998 Arte created a television version with an acoustic description of the picture , spoken by Christel Körner.
  • For the 40th anniversary of the Oscar, the film was restored in 4K .

Others

The tin drum opened in theaters in the Federal Republic of Germany on May 3, 1979. The film was first shown on German television on May 1, 1984 on First German Television .

literature

  • Günter Grass : The tin drum . Novel . Unabridged edition. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag (dtv), Munich 1996, 706 pages, ISBN 3-423-11821-0 .
  • Volker Schlöndorff, Günter Grass: The tin drum as a film . Two thousand and one, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 978-0-00-003397-0 .
  • Hans-Edwin Friedrich: The tin drum (Günter Grass - Volker Schlöndorff) . In: Interpretations: literary film adaptations . Edited by Anne Bohnenkamp in conjunction with Tilman Lang. Reclam, Stuttgart 2005 (= RUB 17527). Pp. 255-263, ISBN 3-15-017527-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Release certificate for The Tin Drum (1979) . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry, June 2009 (PDF; test number: 50 675 V / DVD / UMD).
  2. Wolfram Siebeck : From the influence of literature on our kitchen list. In: The time . July 1, 1999, accessed May 4, 2020 .
  3. David Bennent: "Tin drum" was both a curse and a blessing ( Memento from September 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  4. The tin drum. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  5. ^ Adolf Heinzlmeier, Berndt Schulz: Lexicon "Films on Television" (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 94
  6. Tagesanzeiger Kultur of October 12, 2013: Beijing bans “The Tin Drum” (kle / sda) , accessed on October 19, 2013
  7. Schnittberichte.com - The Tin Drum: DVD - TV (ARD)
  8. Gemeinschaftforum.com: Blechtrommel → DVD vs. TV
  9. DVDuell.de: Volker Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel in June 2010 in the Director's Cut on DVD and Blu-ray
  10. Release certificate for the tin drum . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , April 2010 (PDF; test number: 50 675 V).
  11. Director's Cut: The Tin Drum reveals new secrets in: Der Tagesspiegel from July 9, 2010
  12. The Tin Drum in Hörfilm database of Hörfilm e. V.
  13. ^ Filmportal.de (All Credits) and TV programs from yesterday and the day before yesterday