You'd Never Know That Guy Was a Spy...

The Internet's gone crazy today about a fascinating exhibition of photos from the archives of the notorious East German spy agency, the Stasi. There's a good slideshow at Yahoo! News displaying a number of pictures demonstrating disguise techniques, used in Stasi training. Seen today in this perspective, they're honestly pretty hilarious. Somehow the guy in the pictures manages to look like a stereotypical spy in every single shot, whether he's posing as a tourist, a businessman or a proto-hipster. But Simon Menner, the artist who compiled these images, cautions against that reaction: "Many of these images might appear absurd or even funny," he writes in comments accompanying a wider assortment of the collection on the photo blog Conscientious Extended. "But it is very important to understand the intention behind them. It was a extremely repressive system that caused terror through its secret service. There is also something in these images that really frightens me." It's true. When you start putting yourself in Alec Leamas' shoes and imagining life in East Germany under constant surveillance, these silly photos suddenly take on new, harrowing dimensions. According to the MSNBC PhotoBlog, the photographs are currently on display at  the Morgen Contemporary in Berlin through August 20. If you can't get to Germany at the moment, however, you can check out the disguise pictures at Yahoo! and others, including some very interesting blurry surveillance photos of suspected Western agents taking their own photos (thus representing spies spying on spies who spy on spies, recalling the tagline of that Peter Fleming novel, The Sixth Column), at Conscientous Extended.

New Spy DVDs: Beyond The Curtain

Here's one I missed that came out in England a few weeks ago, but Camps at the Eurospy Forum provided the heads-up: the long sought-after 1960 British Cold War thriller Beyond the Curtain has been released on PAL Region 2 DVD in the UK.  When German-born stewardess Eva Bartok's plane is forced down over East Germany, she is trapped behind the Iron Curtain due to her alien status. British flight officer Richard Greene decides to bypass the red tape and bureaucratic hurdles and get her across the border himself... putting them both in peril of the dreaded East German secret police, the Stasi.  The no-frills DVD from Simply Media is available from Amazon.co.uk for £12.99.

Lives Of Others Remake News

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck recently appeared on NPR and gave some details about the upcoming American remake of his Foreign Language Oscar-winning Iron Curtain spy opus The Lives of Others. The original German film was set in 1980s East Germany when the Stasi (the East German secret police) were spying on everyone, particularly artists and writers suspected of promoting dangerous, pro-Western ideas. The director revealed that the Hollywood version (which he has nothing to do with) will change the setting to the near-future United States, where, apparently, the same thing happens. To me, that is one of those awful, awful, "only in Hollywood" ideas that gives the American film industry a bad name. By changing the setting to a speculative future, the politics will automatically take center stage. In the original movie, the very particular political landscape of the time serves as the background against which a very human story unfolds. It could already be read as a subtle allegory for our ever more security-conscious times if one were so inclined, but changing the setting will hit viewers over the head with that notion, turning subtext into text, and most likely drowning out the amazing, moving human drama at the movie's core.

Or maybe Hollywood will do a great job with it despite a lousy premise, but I somehow doubt it.

In the meantime, I encourage curious American viewers who have not yet done so to check out the amazing original film (which just came out on DVD), and not wait for the remake.

Review: The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's deserving Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner,* is as good a movie about spying as you’re ever likely to come across. Note that I called it a movie about spying, and not a movie about spies. There are far fewer movies actually about the voyeuristic act of spying, and not all of those are even about spies, per se, but several of them are quite excellent, like Coppola’s The Conversation or Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The Lives of Others fits easily in that auspicious company. And it actually is about a spy, as well as spying.

Hauptmann Gerd Weisler (Ulrich Muhe) is a high-ranking officer in the Stasi, East Germany’s dreaded secret police. Unlike some of his comrades and superiors, he appears to actually believe in what he does, and to believe firmly in the Communist Party. And he’s so good at his job that he even teaches classes on interrogation at the Stasi Academy. (The one class we witness, by the way, is fascinating, and revealing with regards to the interrogation techniques the Stasi used, which I can’t imagine are much different from what goes on today at Guantanamo Bay.) Weisler is a model agent, cold, reserved, and most importantly, far removed from his subjects. (He shows no compassion whatsoever for a family man who claims not to know how his neighbor escaped to the West, and doesn’t hesitate to threaten a woman’s daughter’s future if she refuses to cooperate.)

At first we, the film’s audience–and Weisler’s–are kept that same distance from him as a character. We meet from the perspective of his unlucky interrogation subject, setting him up as an antagonist rather than protagonist, starting us off at arm’s length. It’s an uncomfortable way to meet the main character. From the (at first) more relatable position of his boss, Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur, later revealed to be the true antagonist), we’re treated to Weisler’s superior, judgmental stare. Everywhere that Weisler goes, he is an observer, a voyeur. Grubitz takes him to a play, which he watches from a box with opera glasses. We’re treated to a long shot of Weisler looking back at us (and at Grubitz and his superior, the Minister of Culture) through those glasses, still relating to the subjects more than to the voyeur. Then we meet the playwright Georg Dreyman and his lead actress-slash-girlfriend Christa-Maria, soon to be the objects of Weisler’s espionage, and our perspective shifts. We see them first from his perspective, as a voyeur, witnessing a private moment through a half-shut door, from afar.

Shots continue to be framed voyeuristically as we get to know the couple along with Weisler, who bugs their entire apartment and sets up a listening station in the attic above them. The Minister of Culture feels that Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) may not be the model citizen he makes himself out to be, and worries that he’ll soon write something more subversive. It’s Weisler’s job to get proof. But as he spies on this couple, he becomes caught up in their private lives, in their personal struggles as well as political ones. Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck, from The Good Shepherd) is not just an actor on stage, but in real life, putting on a show (along with Georg) for Weisler, even if she doesn’t realize it. But moved by the power of the theater he’s watching, Weisler chooses not to remain a passive observer, but to make the play interactive, literally scripting it himself by the end. The real-life drama Weisler takes in proves to be the purest example of revolutionary theater, moving its audience to the point of action.

When he meets Christa-Maria by chance in a nearby bar, he can’t help but attempt to sway her, to alter her character’s journey. Knowing she’s insecure about her art, and needs support, he offers that as a fan. "I’m your audience," he tells her when she asks who he is. Like any audience watching such powerful theater, he’s moved–and changed–by the experience.

The scenario reminded me of Bertolucci’s The Conformist, in which a facist agent assigned to infiltrate an anti-facist artistic circle finds the artists having a powerful effect on him. But here, the protagonist acts very differently from Bertolucci’s hero, resulting in very different consequences for himself and all involved. This isn’t a story about a nation selling its soul (as that was); this is about a wayward nation’s chance for redemption.

All of the artfulness in The Lives of Others is well-disguised, though, in a slick, fast-moving thriller filled with spying, political intrigue, love triangles, and ever-building suspense. The amazing shot composition and camera movement, the stunning use of color, and the suburb cinematography (courtesy of Hagen Bogdanski) all recall Hitchcock, as the lush, powerful score by Gabriel Yared and Stephane Moucha evokes the best of his frequent collaborator, Bernard Herrmann. All three leads turn in truly outstanding performances, and the whole movie creates a fantastic sense of time and place (to me, anyway, as someone who never lived in East Germany in 1984...). There’s a feeling of everyday dread, conveying well the constant fear that one is always being spied on.

The Lives of Others works on so many levels that it deserves to be seen by all fans of cinema, not just spy fans. It is a Cold War spy thriller, but it’s also so much more that even as an ardent fan of the genre, I tend to forget that. Like Rear Window and like The Conversation, it transcends its genre completely. It’s an involving, first-rate thriller, and a commentary on the power of visual storytelling. It’s one of the best movies of the decade.

*I loved Pan’s Labyrinth, and I think Guillermo del Toro crafted a fantastic, multi-layered, and very adult horror-fantasy. I was excited that Pan received as many accolades as it did, and thrilled that it was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Would we finally see a genius horror director recognized in his own time, when for decades highly-influential pioneers of the genre (like Mario Bava, for example) had tread in relative obscurity? Although I’d wanted to see The Lives of Others prior to the Academy Awards, I didn’t get around to it, and when it beat Pan’s Labyrinth, I wasn’t happy. I was sure that it was another example of the Academy being traditionally conservative, being old, being narrow-minded, and failing to bestow such a well-deserved honor upon a movie that happened to fall into such a wrongfully-derided genre as "horror." Now, having seen The Lives of Others, I’m a little pissed off because I can’t fault the Academy for their choice. There is no way you can say that von Donnersmarck’s movie wasn’t worthy of that recognition. So, while I can strongly suspect that the Academy blacklisted Pan’s Labyrinth for its genre, I still have no proof. Drat! Both movies are superior pieces of filmmaking, and it’s a shame they had to compete against each other.