Abstract
At the heart of the 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen (hereafter The Lives of Others), written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, are two prominently displayed, and tonally distinct, writing implements: one a pen, the other a typewriter. These sit upon two equally cinematically conspicuous and starkly differentiated desks. The visual scheme of the film depends for much of its aesthetic energy upon the comparison between the writing styles and writing spaces of its two principal characters — spaces which are also, inevitably, invited to act as synecdochic signpost to the writers themselves, the written work they produce and the worlds they occupy.
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Notes
E. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 116–19.
Director von Donnersmarck was strategic about the colours and overall desired aesthetic through which to represent the GDR: ‘I tried to analyze what the visual tendencies were in East Germany. One thing I discovered is that they had different types of colors. I once talked to a chemist why that was and apparently in the Western world there are certain patented color chemicals that allow you to go for those bright, saturated colors that they didn’t have in the East … So the production designer and I spent six months devising the visual world of this film. We saw there were more greens than blues, more orangey-brown colors than actual red. We decided to completely eliminate red and blue and just go with all the greens, grays, and browns and not do it in postproduction. We did not want to do anything digitally. Many people in the East felt the film was a complete resurrection of the GDR.’ J. Esther, ‘Between Principle and Feeling: An Interview with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’ Cineaste 32(2) (22 March 2007): 40.
M. Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 46, 50.
Funder asserts that in the forty years of its existence (1949–1989), the Stasi and its informants accumulated more written records than had previously been amassed ‘in all of German history since the Middle Ages’. A. Funder, ‘Eyes without a Face’ Sight and Sound 7(5) (1 May 2007): 16–20 (18).
P. Cooke, Representing East Germany Since Unification (Oxford: Berg, 2005), p. 65.
T. Garton Ash, The File (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
For a psychoanalytic reading of the precise psychological processes (curiosity, passion, mortification, jealousy, projection, introjection, eroticism, vengefulness, emulation, embodied simulation, identification, mentalisation, articulation, empathy) Wiesler undergoes as he learns to empathize and identify with the subjects of his investigation, see Diana Diamond, ‘Empathy and Identification in von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56 (2008): 811–32.
G. Bornstein, ‘Introduction’, in G. Bornstein and R.G. Williams (eds.), Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 1–6 (4).
P. Mariani, ‘Reassembling the Dust: Notes on the Art of the Biographer’, in S.B. Oates (ed.), Biography as High Adventure (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 104–23 (109).
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© 2013 Judith Buchanan
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Buchanan, J. (2013). Documentary li(v)es: writing falsehoods, righting wrongs in von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006). In: Buchanan, J. (eds) The Writer on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317230_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317230_15
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