The Lives of Others

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CROSS CULTURAL OUTLINE Film Pick

Das Leben der Anderen

Dieser gründlich recherchierte Film von Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck erzählt von der Verlorenheit des Individuums im erbarmungslosen System der Kontrolle und Überwachung. Ost-Berlin, November 1984, fünf Jahre vor der Öffnung der Berliner Mauer. Hier spielt das Drama über Verhörspezialist Stasi-Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), der im Verlauf seiner Spitzelei an sich selbst zu zweifeln beginnt. Dieser Zweifel an seinem Auftrag und an der Staatsmacht der DDR schlechthin wächst, bis er ihn letztendlich in hoch riskante Tat umsetzt.

Ein eindringliches, spannendes Drama um Liebe, Leidenschaft und Mut, und um die ewige Faszination der Freiheit, das in 2006 mit einem Oscar ausgezeichnet wurde.





Der Schauspieler Ulrich Mühe starb am 22. Juli 2007 in Walbeck, Sachsen-Anhalt, an Magenkrebs.

Sein letzter großer Erfolg war die Hauptrolle in dem Oscar-prämierten Film "Das Leben der Anderen".


The outstanding actor who portrayed the main character, Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler, in the oscar winning German thriller/drama "The Lives of Others" died in July from cancer of the stomach.

CROSS-CULTURAL OUTLINE featured film:

The Lives of Others

German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck debuts with his feature The Lives of Others, which earned an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.

The film is set in 1984 East Berlin five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It provides an exquisitely nuanced exposé of life in a totalitarian regime. The main character, Gerd Wiesler, played by Ulrich Mühe, is a secret police (Stasi) surveillance expert trained to perpetuate the oppressiveness and the lack of freedom in communist East Germany, the former GDR. His professional stoicism gradually melts as he becomes swept up in the lives of the artistic community he is spying on. Eventually, he secretly and heroically intervenes in the outcome of his investigation.

This role had particular resonance for Mühe, who was himself under surveillance by the Stasi at the time he was a star of East German theater.



[Read about Ulrich Mühe in Der Spiegel (in German)]

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Hollow Man

CROSS CULTURAL OUTLINE presents:

Ryan Larkin (1943-2007)

Ryan Larkin was a Canadian animator, famous for his 1969 Oscar-nominated short 'Walking' which influenced a generation of fledgling animators. He worked at the National Film Board of Canada from the early 1960s until 1978. He created countless storyboards, tracings, drawings and paintings for his unique and often surreal animations. Ryan was homosexual but had a long-term close relationship with a young woman named Felicity, the "love of his life".

Larkin's chronic abuse of drugs, cigarettes and alcohol eventually lead to homelessness and a dismal subsistence from panhandling on the streets of Montreal. He died on Valentine's Day, February 14, of this year at age 64 from lung and brain cancer.

"To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off."

- Charles Edward Montague (1867-1928), British Author, Journalist and critic

This is a video of Chris Landreth's 2004 CGI (Computer-generated imagery) film 'Ryan', a docu-mation, as CROSS-CULTURAL OUTLINE has dubbed it, which reveals and visualizes his character's personality and emotional scars.

In the Oscar winning animated short film 'Ryan', we hear actual recordings of the voice of Ryan Larkin in conversation with Landreth and with other people who knew him. These voices speak through hollow, twisted, broken and disembodied 3D-generated character images. Landreth, born in 1961, calls his style of bizarre, sometimes humorous and often disturbing animation "Psychorealism".



[See also: Ryan Larkin Dies (Video)]




[Related: A Greg Anderson quote]



[See Part Two of the video on AMALGAMATED PERSPECTIVES]


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