Film and Film

"The Tin drum" Volker Schlondorff, 1979

The director, with this film, became world-famous. In the mid-1950s he was a student of high school who lived in Paris, there was delivered to the knowledge and study of cinema, being Assistant Director of some renowned directors of the then famous "French new wave". At the same time he attends the Cinematheque in Paris where heavy and heated discussions on the cinema took place among different trends that made up the "Nouvelle Vague". In these circumstances and under very direct influence in his conception of the film, Schlondorff returns to his country in 1965 at the precise moment that initiated the so-called new German cinema. It has been said with ample reason that the beginning of this German movement began under the tutelage of the French new wave; but that it was for many of these directors the knowledge of French cinema only through its films, it was in a much more direct way to him, because he had been formed just there in Paris.

After returning to his country, "The young Torless", his first feature film based on the work of Robert Musil was performed in 1966 and from that film until today have passed twelve years; During this time he has shot equal number of films, most of them literary adaptations among which should be noted "Michael Kohlhaas" Heinrich von Kleist, "Baal" by Bertolt Brecht, "The lost honor of Katharina Blum" Heinrich Boll and "Coup de grace" of Marguerite Yourcenar. The first thing you can see of that young influenced by the French new wave from his first film to today, it is the great experience in the film and knowledge of resources and secrets of the cinema and on the other hand, the special handling of the image, renewed conception of his early accomplishments.

The film, winner in 1979 of the Oscar for best foreign language film, was made working with the author of the novel Gunter Grass, which allowed a better approach to the general idea of its creator, as well as to various nuances that takes the narrative and its respective staging. The background of the pre-Nazi Germany and the central character Oskar, as critical observer of the environment and the human beings who operate there, constitute the main elements of this production, to which the director gives a special drama with the images that achieves.

The foreground of the faces, and the looks as such, which cover the entire screen, is one of the many points that it should be noted. As well as the ingenuity achieved for certain subjective approaches, as the birth of Oskar, those are moments of special creativity that the spectator should not be overlooked. And elsewhere the management of the extras in the military parade with large panoramic, sequence of great bill that becomes a parody is point of reference in the variety of shots and approaches that are displayed by the director. Aside for the work carried out with Angela Winkler taking maximum advantage of a certain halo of sensuality that surrounds her, one of the main German actresses of that time and that three years earlier had been the central character of another of his films "The lost honor of Katharina Blum", one of his many literary adaptations.