The Tin Drum

Banned & Censored Cinema

The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)

Volker Schlöndorff, Germany, 1979, 142 min.

The Tin Drum received the 1979 Academy Award for best foreign language film and shared the Palme D'Or Award at the Cannes International Film Festival that same year. Based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Gunter Grass, the film has been described as a complex allegorical fantasy intended to symbolize the rise of Nazism and the corresponding decline of morality in Nazi Germany. The movie opens in Danzig in the 1930s when the main character, Oskar Matzerath, decides to stop growing at the age of three in order to "protest against the absurdities and obscenities of the adult world" during the rise of Nazism. Throughout the approximately eighteen years depicted in the film, Oskar remains diminutive in size and appears to be a very young boy, while those around him continue to age normally. Not until the end of the film and near the end of World War II, when Oskar is twenty-one years old, does he express a desire to resume growing again. The movie, which has been in public circulation around the world for over twenty years, has received critical acclaim and been discussed in several academic articles and books related to film studies. - Camfield v. Oklahoma City, US Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit (May 4, 2001)

Claims by an American fundamentalist religious group in Oklahoma that the film was "child pornography" led to civil abuses and the confiscation of the videotapes by police...Michael Camfield, the development director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Oklahoma, had heard of the impending censorship of the tape and had rented the tape that day to review it. As he noted in an ACLU press release dated July 3, 1997, "I tried to explain to the officers that they were trampling on constitutional rights and this serious film was protected by the First Amendment, but they confiscated it anyway." City officials tried to initimidate those who spoke in favor of the film and made subsequent threats to press criminal charges "against anyone in possession of the film," even though such threats constituted "unconstitutional prior restraint--which has been upheld by the courts to be one of the most egregious violations of free speech" (ACLU, July 3, 1997)...On October 20, 1998, a federal court ruled that The Tin Drum was not child pornography and was not, therefore, subject to criminal penalties imposed by the Oklahoma child pornography law.
--Dawn B. Sova, Forbidden Films

REQUIRED READINGS & WEBSITES

• Dawn B. Sova, "The Tin Drum", Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures (NY: Checkmark Books, an imprint of Facts On File, Inc., 2001), course reader

• "Michael D. Camfield, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. City of Oklahoma City", United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit (May 4, 2001), course reader

• Jon Lewis, "Ch. 6: Movies and the First Amendment" and "Ch. 7: A Quick Look at Censorship in the New Hollywood", Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (NY: New York University Press, 2000)