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In fact, in its combination of cinematic artistry, intellectual depth, and sheer entertainment value, The Lives of Others reminds me of the best work of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Donnersmarck has learned from Lang and Hitchcock the way that watching a movie is like spying on people, and he repeatedly plays with the parallels between the director's camera and the various espionage devices employed by the Stasi—building up vertiginous layers of complexity, as we the audience spy on people who are spying on people, and even spy on people who are spying on people who are spying on people. From Hitchcock, Donnersmarck takes the idea that spying easily passes over into voyeurism, and he draws deeply upon Lang's prophetic vision of a panoptical totalitarian order that spies into every corner of private life. Donnersmarck's Wiesler is Lang's supervillain Dr. Mabuse reduced to a petty functionary in a bureaucratic state—and is all the more frightening as a result of his ordinariness.
If you did not see The Lives of Others in a movie theater, by all means view it on DVD, and even if you did catch it at the theater, you now have a chance to study it and deepen your appreciation of its artistry. The movie works well on a television screen. Many of the shots seem carefully composed and framed to suggest the way people became trapped in and by the East German regime. Indeed, the reductive nature of the television image works to reinforce this sense of human diminishment under totalitarianism. The DVD has many special features, including a documentary about the making of the movie and several deleted scenes. (As often happens, the movie is actually better off without the deleted scenes, but it is still interesting to see them.) In his commentary accompanying the film, Donnersmarck comes across as charming and boyishly enthusiastic, and we can see how he talked so many famous people into participating in it. Unfortunately, he seems to be ad-libbing his comments, and they are not well synchronized with what is appearing on the screen. He repeatedly goes off on tangents and often ends up failing to say anything about some of the most extraordinary moments in the film. Still, overall his commentary is extremely informative and helped me to understand and appreciate the film better. Clearly Donnersmarck knew what he was doing in every scene, and he does not hesitate to explain what he had in mind.
In particular, Donnersmarck clarified for me the central sequence in the film, in which Wiesler learns to sympathize with the victims of his spying and turns into their protector. Wiesler has been assigned to bug the apartment of a prominent East German playwright, Georg Dreyman, and to monitor his activities with a leading actress, Christa-Maria Sieland, who is also Dreyman's lover. Donnersmarck contrasts the vitality and creativity of the playwright and the actress with the sterility of Wiesler, who creates nothing in his own life and can merely record the lives of others. At various points, we see Dreyman working at a typewriter, calling up words that can move audiences and perhaps alter the course of history. Donnersmarck counterpoints these moments with scenes of Wiesler sitting above Dreyman's apartment in his lonely observation post, also at a typewriter but merely taking down what amounts to dictation. Several scenes in Wiesler's starkly furnished apartment establish how devoid his own life is of any emotional content, but he gradually changes as a result of what he observes in Dreyman's home.
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