Tuesday, May 01, 2007
1984 Did Happen Somewhere
"The Lives Of Others," the thrilling German film about life in the mid-1980s under the totalitarian spy-ocracy that was East Germany, is subtle, poignant, and chilling. I've read that as much as one-fourth of that former country's population may have been involved in some way in spying on friends, neighbors, and colleagues for the ubiquitous and insidious Stasi, the East German version of the KGB.
The main character (top photo) is a hardened Stasi official who's asked to bug the apartment of well-respected theater director and his actress girlfriend (bottom photo) to find dirt on them. Listening to their conversations and their dilemmas, he starts to become emotionally invovled. Artists suffered the predicament of a government willing to black-list anyone who didn't toe the line, artistically and politically.
We see the sad fate of a writer whose entire life and identity are ripped away from him. We also see that this system was rife with abuses by officials seeking money, power, and even sexual favors. The sad victims could never know that in a few short years their communist prison would be consigned to the dustbin of history..The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe:
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