When looking for ingenious enquiries into political and social philosophy, you do not normally think of taking in a movie. But The Lives of Others (2007), the recent foreign language Academy Award winner, makes a profound statement about how to live, with a bow to revolutionary thought.

Set in 1984, the story revolves around the abuses of the East German security police, the infamous Stasi. In order to satisfy the personal desire of the Minister of Culture to have sex with a great stage actress, around the clock surveillance is set up of her playwright live-in lover, so as to trump up some charges, and get him out of the way.

The turning point in the film comes when the playwright learns of the suicide of a stage director, banned from working for the previous ten years, and takes some sheet music, Sonata to a Good Man, a gift from the director, and plays it on the piano. The playwright asks his lover how anyone who hears such music, and had really heard it, could not be a good man. The loss of his friend pushes him to publish an article in West Germany, revealing new dimensions of the Stalinist tyranny undermining his society, and his socialist beliefs.

Listening in to the conversation is an until-then loyal Stasi agent, who is about to join the dissident ranks himself, and protect the playwright.The idea that art can inspire good is perfectly compatible with German romanticism, a movement that looks beyond the enlightenment principle that the truth will set us free, to the belief in beauty and artistic creation as saving graces for humanity. But, this film does not appear to be a work of tribute, done by a German romantic.

The Lives of Others is the first directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a six foot nine German national with a philosophy degree from Oxford, who will turn 34 on May 2, and who, as a child, lived in the U.S. and Belgium, as well as Berlin and Frankfurt.

The film has been widely understood in the U.S. (see Rotten Tomatoes) as a critique of the Eastern bloc, before the fall of the Berlin wall, a way of life that was both dreary and made scary by the secret police. In this optic, the film then deals with the predictable failure of communist society as inspired by Karl Marx, himself a misguided figure.

However, in another light, the main theme of the film is the corruption of present society, and it is particularly relevant to Americans, and Canadians for that matter.

Anyone who has worked in an organization where people misuse their authority to exploit others, not just for the so-called good of the organization, but to advance their own personal agendas, or out of mere spite, will understand that this film is about more than East Germany.

If you read Sartre, Camus or Marcuse, or the young Habermas, or were deeply impressed by the idea that not just those who gave the orders were guilty, but those who obeyed them were as well, then this film will resonate.If you knew the invasion of Vietnam was wrong, and that the draft resisters were right, or you saw that the current American president stole two elections in order to invade, and then occupy Iraq, on behalf of American oil interests centred in Houston, Texas you will see the point to this film.

The world will be a better place when people simply refuse to be coerced by authority into doing things they judge unacceptable.

Someday, nobody will do the news glorifying war the way Peter Mansbridge reads it for the CBC, and nobody will report it the way The Globe and Mail reports it, leaving out not just the other side of the government story, but everything that is missing from both sides of the story.

The expansion of the inner space of freedom against external forces is a great theme for a philosopher and, it turns out, for a filmmaker with a fine cinematic sense as well.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...