The Tin Drum
To be shown: 29 April 2002
West Germany/France/Yugoslavia/Poland 1979 (subtitles)
142 minutes
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff
Leading players - Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, David Bennent.
Synopsis
Based on Günther Grass's Nobel prize-winning allegorical novel, The Tin Drum tells the story of a boy, Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent), growing up in Eastern Germany before and during the Second World War.Oskar, the son of a middle-class Danzig dealer, is a gifted boy who, overwhelmed by the cruel adult world around him, throws himself down a staircase on his third birthday. This deliberate and thought-out protest stunts his growth, leaving him to become an adult in a child's body. The deformed boy acts as the film's narrator, commenting with vicious cynicism and amazing eloquence on the insanity engulfing the world and human cruelty in general.
Armed with a tin drum, which he bangs incessantly, and possessing a glass-shattering scream, Oskar faces the horrors of fascism and the awful events that engulf his family. His misery is compounded when his protests fall on deaf ears.
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Described as one of the stellar achievements of German cinema since the Second World War, The Tin Drum won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980 and shared the Palme D'Or in Cannes with Apocalypse Now.However, it was not so well received in some quarters. In June 1997 its content so upset Christian fundamentalists in Oklahoma City that the local police seized copies from the public library, several video stores and private homes on the grounds that it was obscene under the state's child pornography laws. In October 1998 a court ruled that the seizure had been unconstitutional and ordered the copies to be returned to their rightful owners.
