|
January 12, 2008
The Lives of Others is an excellent film about the East German state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel engaged in surveillance of its citizens in a Kafkaesque atmosphere. The plot is absurd but the narrative holds up: lives and talents wasted by a state with no good reason to exist apart from the maintenance of its own power.
This is a world of a Stalinist state before the Berlin wall fell in 1989---the real daily horror of the communist secret-police state with the deceit and fear that fuelled the system. Fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll - so we have a network of fear and shame along the lines of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I cannot write much more because the DVD from Qiuickflix was damaged and so we only saw half of the film.
|
