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ACF #17: The Lives of Others
The best movie podcast devised by the mind of man is back! Our own Flagg Taylor and our common friend Carl Eric Scott join me for a discussion of the great movie The Lives of Others, which won the Oscar for foreign film in 2006. It’s about late Communism in East Germany, the secret police invading a playwright’s life, and the consequences thereof. Flagg and Carl of course are the authors of the best book on the movie, Totalitarianism on Screen.
Well, they co-edited and authored essays for the book — there are other authors from academia, including the great literature professor Paul Cantor (the best Shakespearean in our times), and former German president Joachim Gauck (also a theologian), who gave an extensive interview. So I’m honored and grateful to have them join me for this conversation and I hope you’ll enjoy it as well. Please share it online so that more people discover the movie!
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Published in Podcasts
Love movies, Ricochetti? Then you’ve got to be proud of our very own Titus Techera! Great post, Titus.
I love The Lives of Others. It’s one of my favorite movies from the 2000s.
This is a phenomenal movie. Find it and watch it at your soonest convenience. If you are put off by subtitles, the only person you are hurting is yourself.
We rarely pay rental fees for movies as we record more than we care to watch on air but we did rent this one from Amazon. It is well worth the small fee. Rarely does any movie take such pains to show reality in such stark relief. Everyone is well served by having viewed it at least once.
Agree one of the best and among the few that show the Soviet system with some honesty but also show that some souls survived.
Folks, great testimonials all, glad to see some of the fans of the movie on Ricochet!
Morning Titus,
WFB said that it may have been the best movie he had ever seen. Of course since there is no singing and no dancing in it, I have yet to see it. Cheers Titus, hope you saw the Manzu doors at the Sistine Chapel, my favorite reliefs.
Hello, Jim! Yes, I have. I did not know they were your favorite relief! Do a Ricochet post, will you!
It was good, but I made the mistake of watching it three times and then watching the director’s notes, too (or whatever you call them). I would have liked it better if I had stuck with 2 watchings.
The main jarring note to me was the idea that a Stasi agent at even such a high level could have operated without a lot of cross-checking from other agents.
It should be on everybody’s list of films about totalitarianism, but there are some Russian films on the subject that go deeper into the subject of how people are broken down to cooperate with the regime as well as the cost of resistance.
Morning Reticulator,
What are the films you are referring to?
I’m ok with stretching plausibility, not least because the notion that rules worked always, without exception, in totalitarian regimes cannot quite fit in my brains. The movie sets fairly strict rules to bring out the relationship between politics & poetry. Both the STASI agent & the playwright are unusual men; otherwise their encounter would not reveal anything.
From the point of view of political philosophy, this makes a lot of sense–you want to see men who embody, as much as possible, the two most important views about defending the regime or reforming it–to examine the character of the regime through the kinds of men it needs & produces. &, in this case, must also destroy.
Yeah, I’ve mellowed a little bit on that since then, but I’ll still point out that it shows the regime in a somewhat too-gentle light. Keep that in mind while watching.
Vladimir Bukovsky’s autobiography is one that shows how little “flaws” in a totalitarian system can be exploited in real life.
I think enough of the horror & humiliation is on screen to make things clear. But you have to consider what part of the regime is on display to introduce you to the question. There really were such apolitical celebrities-intellectuals. They really did have it easier. Not sure it ever lasted…
Indeed; also, how crazy heroism can be. He’s kind of humorous at times. A writer I read when I was a kid talked of him as, going into the bowels of the KGB like a tank.
Mark Zacharov’s films (written by Grigori Gorin) are the first that come to mind. They were produced during the late Soviet period, so he had to set them as fantasies, in far away places and long ago times. That Very Munchausen is one of the great films of all time, IMO. I must have watched it ten times, and haven’t liked it any the less for it. To Kill a Dragon is another good one. Neither is a comprehensive treatment of the topic of totalitarianism, but they cover important aspects of it. I have not watched the latter with English subtitles, and my ability to understand Russian is pretty sparse, but the idea that it is not enough for a hero to kill the dragon, that each of us needs to kill the dragon within ourselves, seems to get to an important point. The main flaw of this film, I suppose, is that it’s not very subtle. It was produced shortly before the end of the Soviet Empire, when subtlety was no longer needed.
There are a lot of Russian films, including popular comedies, that touch on the topic of the individual choices that each of us makes. I Am Twenty, directed by Marlen Khutsiev (now 92 years old) is not a comedy, and is at the end an ode to Lenin, partly due to criticism from Khrushchev about the first version, but inside the film is a young man dealing with the pressure at his workplace to cooperate with a denunciation. It’s a side story to the main topic, and doesn’t purport to be about totalitarianism. But IMO it is. (I may be the only person who has ever said that.) But totalitarianism is not exactly about totalitarianism. It’s about many of the individual choices that each of us makes, in every part of our life. There are a lot of Russian films about the difficulty of choosing, including one of the greatest films of all time, Autumn Marathon (directed by Georgiy Danielia).
A relatively recent television series whose title can be translated as The Case of Store #1, has a KGB agent wrestling with his conscience, and in the end walking away from his job, which I would guess would have been an action with huge consequences for his life afterwards, even in the Russia of 1982 in which the film was set. It’s one that makes me think of the parallels with The Lives of Others. It’s based on an actual event, but the names have been changed. Its theme is not totalitarianism — on one level it seems to have been influenced by Putin’s desire to rehabilitate the reputation of his old mentor, Yuri Andropov. But I can’t see how it would make anyone want to go back to those days of the KGB. Our hero (not exactly the main character) in an earlier scene decides to take matters into his own hands and neglects to report one of his underlings who had been caught taking a bribe. “What’s he going to do? Sell carrots in the marketplace?” My understanding is that’s about what would have been available as a career for someone who walked away from a KGB job.
Except for the Mark Zacharov films, these are not “about” totalitarianism. But two films about it are Repentance, directed by Tengiz Abuladze and Kin-Dza-Dza, directed by Georgiy Danielia. The spoken language of Repentance is Georgian, not Russian. Kin-Dza-Dza is a sci-fi comedy set on another planet. Both are great films. Your movie-watching life is not complete without having seen them.
I should point out that a lot of the names of high-level Soviet officials in this series have not been changed. But the main character’s name is changed, and the timeline of his trial and execution have been fudged, possibly to make the story more likable to Putin. I’m not sure – I haven’t deciphered those changes completely.
That’s true. I didn’t mean to argue against that point.
Afternoon Reticulator,
Thanks for the list. You might guess that I am not up to date on movie watching (or much else ask Titus), how does one locate the movies you have mentioned?
Great post Titus.
Thanks for the kind words-
The scene where Christa-Maria and Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler meet in a cafe near the apartment has to be one of the richest moments in recent cinema – maybe in cinema ever. Just riveting.
That’s true. Just the way the guy, with his secret knowledge, grasps at ways of appealing to the woman’s self-respect by way of her public fame…
It’s more difficult to find them now than it was ten years ago. Back then some were available on Netflix, but the last times I’ve looked the selection of Russian movies there has shrunk. I watch a lot on YouTube, and several years ago Mosfilm was even putting a lot of its films there, with English subtitles. But then it started taking its English subtitles away. It now offers a “premium” service. I haven’t tried it yet to see how it works or what’s there. (OK, I just now took a look, and don’t find more than a handful of movies there.)
Mosfilm was not the only film studio of the Soviet era, but it was the biggest, apparently best funded, and probably the most prolific. There was also Lenfilm, the Gorky film studio, one based in Odessa, and maybe others that I can’t think of right now or don’t know about. I’m not sure which of those others still exist, and what they’re doing.
I think all of the films I mentioned were available with English subtitles on YouTube at one time or another, but many were probably unauthorized and have been removed, especially if they had English subtitles. I can find a good quality version of That Very Munchausen now, but not with English subtitles. When re-watching it helps that I already know a lot of the dialog.
I Am Twenty is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiRq6qjBrvc
The Case of Gastroma-Store #1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NKfGCaOjDc&t=24s
But I can’t find even a poor-quality version of Repentance on YouTube just now. There is a version with Russian subtitles, and versions with subtitles in other languages, but not English.
Kin-Dza-Dza is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I47CNxwlt9U
I had said To Kill a Dragon is not available with English subtitles, but here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY7o8oFZl5I
I’ll have to re-watch it and see if I still think it’s a good one.
There is also another site that’s been around forever from which one can download a lot of Russian movies. You mostly have to find your own subtitles, for which I use subtitleseeker.com. I had thought it only had movies from the Soviet era there, before the Russians got into this newfangled notion of intellectual property rights. But I see there are now more recent movies for which I am almost positive the owners are trying to protect their intellectual property rights, so I’m not going to link to it.
Interesting discussion.
One small scene I particularly liked was at the end when the playwright asks to see his file. He then gives this surprised look at the pile of papers that gets carted out.
Yup. Carl & Flagg talk a bit about the emotional impact of this scene–as the guy learns he lived his life with this hostile audience spectating, we learn that the tragedy he was involved in is one file among hundreds of thousands!
Morning Reticulator,
I started watching Kin-Dza-Dza and it is like Waiting for Godot, if it were written by Eugene Ionesco. I am not able to read the sub-titles, generally what is the story. Thank you so much for you extensive suggestions, I knew of none of these movies.
I just listened to the podcast. There was something that I noticed but I didn’t hear it commented on. I can’t tell if it was because it was too obvious or too obscure. It was the sense that Wiesler himself, in the process of the story, becomes a playwright. In faking his surveillance reports, he is making up scenarios and dialogue. In that sense, he is a participant in the creation of art, though obviously not in the same way that Dreyman is.
You’re on to something big, I think, but I also think you’re running in trouble because of vague words like creation or art. Espionage is an art! Wiesler is good at it & proves that art is essential a stranger to loyalty–he starts in business for the STASI, but goes in business for Dreyman later, actually. But it’s not the same art as writing plays. Art in the abstract is a dangerous word to use…
Now, you’re using the similarity of writing to slip from the making up of dialogue & scenes to participation. The two are not really connected. Participation with Dreyman would be a positive act; the positive work Wiesler does, writing fake stories, however, is a negative act–preventing harm from coming to Dreyman, protecting him, sparing him to do his work & live his life.
The art of the spy & the art of the playwright remain different, whatever the analogy with writing. There are comparisons to be made, especially about their political understanding & action.
Finally, yes, there’s much to be said–we did our best with one podcast–there’s of course, far more in the book–but we could not get to most of the stuff we had to say…
Vague, I concede. It’s been a while since I have seen the movie so I didn’t want to overstate my claim. “Dangerous”…I think that’s a little hyperbolic.
I recall during the movie thinking, “Ah! Wiesler has now become the author of fiction too.”
There’s another problem–fiction. The danger I mean is to thought.
The claim of Dreyman is that he’s a truth-teller, if of a very specific kind. Talk of fiction is only useful to describe him in relation to that self-understanding as a political reformer. The relationship between his plays & his journalism, between fiction & fact, is between two ways of telling the truth with the purpose of helping improve life for people in a political community.
Now, in the case of Wiesler, the political meaning of truth & lies or fact & fiction–what is it? He starts an enforcer for the regime. He delivers certain facts that mutilate the truth about the people he is involved with. & destroy those people, of course. When he stops delivering facts, he spares a life. He may think of himself as still enforcing for the regime–but against corrupt people who use it for private ends…
That was a terrific discussion, intelligent, lucid, and even evocative–I felt the poignance of each scene as if I had been watching the movie. Thanks!