Hacker Cinema
The Tin Drum
Die Blechtrommel
1979 · Film · 162 min
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff
In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Ok, here are some good German movies just from the top of my head:
- The Lives of Others
- The Tin Drum
- Goodbye Lenin!
- Downfall
- The Edukators
- Berlin Calling
- Benny’s Video
I won't pretend to offer literary or historical criticism - all I can tell you is that when The Tin Drum movie arrived stateside, it traumatized a lot of people, myself included.
Movies generally do little justice to the books upon which they are based, and probably in the case of The Tin Drum, that might have been a plus.
Nevertheless, when I have a chance to watch a German language movie - and to be fair, it's stuff you find on Netflix - The Tin Drum sets the standard.
If you haven't heard of Günter Grass, this is a great movie based on his book 'Die Blechtrommel':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Drum_(film)
This is a large category.
There are tricky cases of defensible portrayals of sex involving children, e.g. Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum (which was banned in Canada as child pornography), and narratives that document the child sex industry, but they are rare by comparison. With artistically and morally defensible portrayals of rape, the range is huge. sspiff mentions A Clockwork Orange; even Jeffrey Archer (former senior Tory politician) wrote a novel with a rape scene. I also recall that when Virginia Bottomley (another former senior Tory politician) was asked to name her favourite film, she named Hitchcock's Rear Window, which is quite voyeuristic, and Hitchcock has filmed what I would class as morally indefensible rape scenes. The idea that moral guardians go about forbidding various classes of transgressive art forms that they themselves admit to enjoying is quite ironic.
For the sake of having some sort of a list: Bandit Queen, Deliverance, and Leaving Las Vegas all have hard-to-watch, defensible, and narratively necessary rape scenes. The victim in Bandit Queen I think was supposed to be prepubescent. And didn't Slumdog Millionaire have a child rape scene?