Cinema
The Tin Drum
Die Blechtrommel
Volker Schlöndorff · 1979
Synopsis
In Danzig, Oskar Matzerath is born in 1924 to Agnes, who has married the German cook Alfred Matzerath without breaking with her Polish cousin Jan Bronski. On his third birthday he receives a tin drum and, disgusted by adults, decides to stop growing: he throws himself down the cellar stairs and ceases to grow. He never parts with his drum, discovers that he can shatter glass with a scream, and watches his family and his city slide towards Nazism.
Context
The film is based on the novel by Günter Grass published in 1959; Schlöndorff wrote the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière and Franz Seitz. Co-produced by West Germany, France and Yugoslavia, it brings together Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, Katharina Thalbach, Daniel Olbrychski and Charles Aznavour around David Bennent, who plays Oskar. A great success in West Germany, it was more debated abroad, where it ran into censorship in Ireland, Canada and the United States. It adapts only the first two of the novel's three books and stops in 1945.
Who it is for
A 142-minute colour feature film, between war drama and fantasy; the long version wanted by the director runs about twenty minutes longer.
Prizes and reception
Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1979, shared with Apocalypse Now, and Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980, the first won by a German film.