The Tin Drum
In Danzig between the wars, a boy so repelled by the adult world wills himself to stop growing at three, protesting through his tin drum and a glass-shattering scream.
A vibrant chronicle of an Oedipal revolt, The Tin Drum aligns itself with the marginal perspective of a delinquent who is also an artist.
In Danzig between the wars, Oskar Matzerath recoils from the adult world and, on his third birthday, wills himself to stop growing. He keeps a tin drum at his side and lets out a scream that shatters glass, refusing the roles his family and his city would hand him as Europe slides toward fascism.
Adapted from Gunter Grass, the film drew praise for David Bennent's unnerving central performance and for Schlondorff's handling of grotesque comedy against documentary history. Critics read the stunted child as a figure for a nation refusing moral adulthood, though some found the picaresque sprawl and its provocations uneven. It shared the top prize at Cannes and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
For clinicians, the film offers a vivid study of refusal to grow as protest, of a body kept deliberately small against forces too large to meet. It stages the uses of the grotesque, the pull of regression, and the way a child registers war and the failures of parents. The screaming drum reads as a symptom that is also a voice.
Director
Volker Schlondorff
Volker Schlondorff is a German film director, born in 1939 and a central figure of New German Cinema. Much of his work adapts novels and plays, often tracing how one person is caught inside larger political and historical forces. The Tin Drum (1979), drawn from the Gunter Grass novel, follows a boy who refuses to grow up in Nazi-era Germany; it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for best foreign film. Childhood, memory, and conscience recur throughout his films.
Details
- 1979
- 142 min
- Germany
- German
- Film
- Cannes Palme d'Or 1979 won (shared with Apocalypse Now); Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film 1980 won