Marching to the beat of a different drummer

"The Tin Drum" proved to be a challenging movie intellectually, but one filled with surprises and interesting discoveries, as well as fascinating images. Here are our group discussion insights, in a nutshell:

WHAT SURPRISED YOU ABOUT THIS FILM?

• Its tone varies: it can be funny, dark, disturbing, erotic, political and epic.
• It’s creepy and unsettling in that it’s using a child actor in some very adult scenes.
• It employs various cinematic techniques, including silent cinema conventions, to tell its story visually.
• The story and characters are varied and unpredictable: this tale and central character is loosely based upon the original author’s experiences growing up before, during and after WWII.

WHAT THEMES ARE EXAMINED IN TIN DRUM?

• Rebellion and resistance to a hostile, unfair world
• Refusal to mature and develop; arrested development. Oscar remains in a child’s body because he doesn’t want to see things from an adult’s point of view and he protests the political and social state of affairs around him.
• The inevitability and necessity of physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual growth
• The horrors and brutality of warfare
• A human being’s innate need for acceptance and love

WHAT SYMBOLS AND MOTIFS CAN YOU IDENTIFY IN THE TIN DRUM

·       Rapid political, social and technological change in the 20^th century, as represented by scenes that progress from the agricultural to the industrial, from traditional to contemporary, from feudal to postmodern, as one critic put it.

·       Oscar himself stands for the country of Germany itself, and its refusal to “grow up” amidst the chaos and turmoil around him/it; he also represents a diminutive Hitler like figure who, though small in stature, has immense power (via his drum and his screaming voice)

·       Seeking shelter under the skirt symbolizes Oscar’s desire to return to the safety of the womb and leave the scary adult world

·       Many shot framings feature groups of 3, as if to suggest a trinity of sorts: the 3 ethnic groups depicted in the film (Germans, Poles and Kashubians), the love triangle between Agnes, Alfred and Jan, and the trinity of faith, hope and charity

·       The drum itself symbolizes rebellion, anti-establishment and resistance; it serves as a wakeup call to those around Oscar who are forced to listen to his dissent.

·       Oscar’s mother’s sudden consumption of whole fish could be a grotesque representation of the German people’s complicity to tolerate Hitler’s penchant for human atrocities.

·       Oscar is strange and unnatural, just like the Nazi political ideology and party is unnatural.

·       The filmmakers portray epic landscapes in many large, sweeping shots.

THIS MOVIE IS REPLETE WITH DICHOTOMIES, IRONIES AND DUALITIES. CAN YOU CITE ANY EXAMPLES?

·       Oscar is the narrator, but he is an unreliable one, and his point of view (or our point of view supposedly through his eyes), switches abruptly from first to third person

·       The film’s tone can suddenly switch between black humor, absurdity and slapstick to disturbing reality, dark surreality and twisted eroticism; this alternation in tone creates an unsettling, unnerving disquiet in the viewer, as if to remind us that these were the experiences of Germans before and during the war.
·       The movie is a bouillabaisse of images, styles and techniques: silent film techniques (like cranked up camera speeds and use of irises) contrast with epic shots; music comes on jarringly
·       Oscar is a child, yet he often engages in adult acts of sexuality and political resistance; he’s depicted as innocent yet experienced, idealistic like a child yet depraved like an adult. As one writer put it, he is both a “detached observer and a naughty prankster.”
·       Another writer states that The Tin Drum “offers us a Fellini-esque exploration of the rise of Nazism where the central character is ambivalent, destructive, grotesque, and immoral, yet…is both the perfect Aryan and the monster eliminated by the Nazis.”

OTHER DIRECTORS CONSIDERED PART OF THE NEW GERMAN CINEMA MOVEMENT

·       Werner Herzog

·       Rainer Werner Fassbinder

·       Wim Wenders

·       Alexander Kluge