The Lives of Others with John Anzalone

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A WATCH AT HOME EVENT (AVAILABLE ON AMAZON PRIME AND YOUTUBE) PRIOR TO MEETING

Join John Anzalone Film Professor/History Buff and Raconteur Extraordinaire for scene analysis and Q&A of this Best Foreign Language Academy Award Winning FIlm

The first film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others is a cunning piece of construction—a Kafkaesque tearjerker, a tragic farce. Set in the mid-eighties, before Gorby and glasnost, the movie centers on Wiesler’s surveillance of a pair of national celebrities, the playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch)—the only “nonsubversive [GDR] writer still read in the West,” we’re told—and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). It’s Wiesler who proposes that surveillance—he doesn’t like Dreyman’s haughty expression at the opening of his latest play. But when this loyal Stasi officer discovers that the operation was fast-tracked because the odious minister of Culture (Thomas Thieme) wants sole possession of the comely Christa-Maria, his moral compass begins to wander. As he eavesdrops in the dark attic above the couple’s apartment, he’s slowly drawn out of himself and into the lives of others.

Movies can appeal to our best and worst instincts—it’s when they appeal to both at once that they get really interesting. We fear for the freedom of the vulnerable couple, yet on some level it’s a kick to spy on them along with Wiesler—to listen in on mundane conversations in a culture in which there’s no sphere of privacy, and to think, What stray complaint can be used as proof of disloyalty? There are so many from which to choose! We root for Wiesler’s conscience to thaw, yet the movie’s cruelest irony is that whenever he manages to do something decent, it always rebounds on the people he seeks to protect. In a system that perverts the most ordinary interactions, few good deeds go unpunished.

BACKSTORY
When East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was estimated that one in 50 citizens worked for the Stasi in some way—the secret police employed about 300,000 informants and 102,000 full-time employees. In 1991, Germany passed the Stasi Records Law, which declassified files, and Germans were dismayed to discover some spies in unlikely places. Heinrich Fink, vice-chancellor at East Berlin’s Humboldt University, was found to have been an informant since 1968, and respected churchman Hans-Joachim Rotch, director of Leipzig’s Thomas Church choir, was also a longtime informer. (Davie Edelstein)

The Lives of Others
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Sony pictures classics. R.

Zoom link will be emailed and posted below morning of event.