Word: oskar
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...Oskar's history is the history of Germany during The War. Oskar lived in Danzig where he watched the Nazis come and go, the Jews live and die, the city stand and fall, his family shrink and grow. His story is about the destruction of Germany by a force that had proposed to make the Germans the mightiest race on Earth and how the Germans and the world learned to accept that destruction and drum on. Oskar is a little bit mad and Oskar's history is a little...
HERE IS The Tin Drum's failure, of course. Intimidated by Grass and by the novel itself, Schlondorff's film is hardly more than a moving picture show, Oskar's treasured photograph album (left out of the film) brought to life. The director has made little attempt to translate aspects of the novel into cinematic language. While Grass' imagination provides an exciting and titillating narrative, Scholondorff only steers his camera earnestly through each sequence, giving Oskar's war-time charades a warm, personal gloss. Schlondorff's Oskar is little Oskar, a cruel, manipulative Peter Pan who ultimately leaves his Never...
...that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength and Gunter Grass' cheeky sense of post-modern myth--the eerie drumbeat of barbarism, mysticism, and boredom...
...Little Oskar's story makes a fine scenario and Tin Drum is marvelously entertaining, even engrossing at times. Yet a question persists: why make this film? Must every literary classic stumble shell-shocked onto the screen? Time and a host of bad adaptations have shown that literature and cinema are not compatible cousins, that by their very nature, good novels will not make good films, just as the exciting visual effects of film cannot be duplicated in print...
Movie-making is big business, however, and The Tin Drum was guaranteed of commercial success in Germany because of the novel's popularity. Grass resisted all offers for the film rights to his book for 15 years until he decided he had met, finally, the right man to direct Oskar's story. Schlondorff (whose past films include Young Torless and The Lost Honor of Katherin Blum) asked sharp questions, Grass noted, and made no plans to significantly alter his book for the screen...