Documentary li(v)es: writing falsehoods, righting wrongs in von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen/ The Lives of Others (2006) is anchored in two politically and aesthetically opposed acts of writing emerging from two comparably opposed authors. As the film identifies and then tracks the incremental erosion of this opposition, the suspicions that attach to author figures in the literarily censorious GDR before 1989 come under scrutiny. The self-preserving imperative to anonymise a dissenting piece of work is here shown to be matched by the institutional imperative to deanonymise such a work. And the series of counterposed quests to discover the author of a work – the Stasi operative’s desire to know the playwright, the state’s desire to know the dissident writer, the playwright’s desire to know the writer of his surveillance report – illustrate, in hyperbolised form, a psycho-social ‘desire’ for the author that arguably informs every act of reading.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Writer on Film
Subtitle of host publicationScreening Literary Authorship
EditorsJudith Buchanan
Place of PublicationBasingstoke
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages218 - 235
Number of pages18
ISBN (Print)0230313841, 978-0230313842
Publication statusPublished - 15 May 2013

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