Chapter Seven. The Lives of Others: Screenplay as Literature and the Literary Film

Abstract

The German cinema has a long tradition of artists and performance films, more specifically of films focusing on writers. Classic poets such as Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin and Büchner have been favourite film protagonists almost since the beginnings of film production in Germany. 1 Literary bio-pics as well as films about fictional writers and the writing process have traditionally offered filmmakers pertinent characters, issues and situations for self-reflexive investigations and commentaries on their métier. While reviewers and scholars have variously characterized Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others as a thriller, spy film, historical drama, fairy tale, melodrama and psychodrama, and focused almost exclusively on the story's presentation of the systematic surveillance by the Stasi in the GDR, in this essay I consider it from the perspective of a fictional literary film. The filmmaker himself emphasizes in the distributor's official press booklet this context of the film being about the art of film making:Because, at the end of the day, although I spent much time researching this topic, my true passion is films, dramaturgy, actors, psychology, not the Stasi or communism. I am not a preacher, nor a historian or politician but a filmmaker, a storyteller. I enjoy thinking and talking most about how to help actors live their art to the fullest, I spend my free time philosophizing about colours, shapes and beauty. Of course, the Stasi is an interesting topic, but the story was there first. And that's what the film is really about. 2Taking this claim at face value most obviously focuses attention on the figures of Georg Dreyman, a successful dramatist, and his partner, the stage actress Christa-Maria Sieland, but it also allows us to consider the protagonist, Stasi agent Wiesler, in his role as performer (in the classroom) and performance spectator (surveillance operative) who himself becomes at a crucial turning point in the

Duration of hydrothermal activity at Steamboat Springs, Nevada, from ages of spatially associated volcanic rocks

“…The hydrothermal stage may overlap all others, but it becomes uniquely characteristic only after the major eruptions have ceased, when it constitutes the terminal phase of waning volcanic activity. The few available potassium-argon ages from epithermal ore deposits (table 2) show that hydrothermal alteration and mineralization start near but not quite a t the end stages of volcanic activity and generally continue for some time after the end of the volcanism (Silberman and others, 1972;Ashley and Silberman, 1976).…”

Geology and mineral resources of the Reno 1° by 2° quadrangle, Nevada and California

“…Active and fossil hot-springs systems are present at several localities in the Reno quadrangle. The Steamboat Springs system (tract 19, pl. 3) is the most well studied active hot-spring system in the quadrangle (for example, White and others, 1964;Thompson and White, 1964;White, 1968White, , 1981Silberman and others, 1979). Other active hot-springs systems in the Reno quadrangle include Brady's, Lee, Walley's, Wabuska, and Patua (also known as Hazen) hot springs (Garside and Schilling, 1979).…”

“…The geothermal system at Steamboat Springs has been active for about 3 m.y. (Silberman and others, 1979). Sinter at Steamboat Springs generally contains detectable amounts of gold and silver, and chemically precipitated muds in active spring vents contain highly anomalous concentrations of gold, silver, mercury, and antimony (White, 1981).…”