Sasa Majuma
8 April 2008
Gaborone — Hope always dies last The Lives of Others (2005) a.k.a "Das Leben der Anderen" is being shown today only at 7 pm at the Maru a Pula School, A/V Centre (Gaborone Film Society).
It is the second of five films in the German Film Festival and presented as part of the Maitisong Festival because of its many themes relating to creativity. It will be preceded by an opening ceremony by Ulf Hanel, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Botswana beginning at 6:30 pm with refreshments.
The Lives of Others is a movie that you watch once and then you'll want to see it again. It richly deserved the Oscar for "Best Foreign-Language Film" in 2006. It has gone on to win many other awards including the Independent Spirit Award, Golden Globe and Satellite Awards. In Germany it swept their awards.
The Lives of Others is written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It is his debut film. He was born in West Germany in 1973. He spent five years on developing and writing the script and another year shooting. It is so carefully crafted that it is amazing, a supreme example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The Lives of Others evolves around its music, written especially for the movie by a French composer, Gabriel Yared. He created the masterful theme music called "Sonata for a Good Man".
There is also a love motive that is used at three important moments in the movie. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is an extraordinary craftsman and the strength of this movie lies in the actors he has assembled, both for the major parts and for the minor ones. It is they that in the end make this movie superlative. Many of them were victims of state repression, even the actor who plays the Minister responsible for the Stasi.
It is November 1984 in Berlin, East Germany, a year of many significances from George Orwell to the end of the cold Stalinist wind from the East. The two opening scenes set the pace and dynamic of the movie. In the first, Captain Gerd Wiesler (played by Ulrich MŸhe) of the Ministerium fŸr Staatssicherheit (Stasi) is interrogating a young man to find out who helped others flee to West Germany. Wiesler's craft, uprightness and commitment to his cause are clear-also his aloof loneliness. In the next scene at a State Security College his superior, Lt.-Col. Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), is using a tape of that 40-hour session to teach a group of aspiring Stasi staff.
Our hero is a playwright who believes the Stasi has never monitored him and that his love of his country and the quality of his writing has placed him above their surveillance. Georg Dreyman's (Sebastian Koch) latest play, Faces of Love, is opening and the star is his lover, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). She is committed to her profession and loves her good man Georg. Tragically the Minister of State Security, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) has taken a fancy to her. He invites Grubitz to arrange for heightened surveillance of Dreyman and Wiesler is selected to command it. The Stasi wire up Dreyman's flat with listening devices and in the attic of the apartment building Wiesler establishes his observation post. A resident who notices what they are doing is told her daughter will lose her university scholarship if she says a word to anyone.
At Dreyman's 40th birthday party a group of friends gather. His present from an older writer, Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), who has not created anything after being interrogated and incarcerated by the Stasi, is "Sonata for a Good Man". Another friend, Paul Hauser (Hans-Uwe Bauer) says to him, "If you don't take a stand you are not human". After Jerska's suicide, Georg realizes no one has exposed the high rate of suicide in the GDR (a direct result of the German Democratic Republic state repression).
Believing he is above suspicion, he writes an expose for Der Spiegel on a smuggled typewriter with only a red ribbon (so if the text is found it cannot be traced) and hides the machine under a floorboard. When the article comes out Wiesler is instructed to intensify his surveillance of Dreyman. Then an unusual thing happens - Wiesler's monitoring of Georg's and Christa-Maria's lives slowly brings out an inner spark of humanity that lurks under his cold exterior. How his transformation happens and what transpires in the lives of others is at the core of this movie. Unexpectedly it never ends when you expect it to end, having perhaps five conclusions, but the last in 1991 after the fall of the Wall, recognizing agent HGW-XX/7 is the most remarkable.
Any National Security System eats at the heart and soul of the people, undermining all vibrancy and creativity in a society as conformity to oppressive values is imposed from above. In the Stasi, we have just one example of such bureaucracies around the world. In East Germany there were t300, 000 people keeping track of 17 million citizens, monitoring what they are doing, creating and practically thinking.
Those who veer from the expected standards of conformity to the party and state are denied passports, removed from sensitive employment and incarcerated. As someone who had his right to travel terminated and who went to prison for protesting, I personally found this film relevant to our condition today in the world.
The Lives of Others is two hours and 12 minutes long. The writer and director is Florian Henckel von Do nnersmarck. The cinematographer is Hagen Bogdanski. The editor is Patricia Rommel. The music is by Gabriel Yared with additional score by Stephan Moucha, played by the Prague Symphony Orchestra. It was the first film made in the original Stasi headquarters.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
