The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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I watched Das weiße Rauschen [IMDB, apparently called The White Sound in English, where White Noise seems more appropriate] at the student cinema on Wednesday. A German film from 2001 starring Daniel Brühl who may be better known from Good Bye Lenin as the main character, Lukas.
Lukas moves from the countryside to his sister in Köln an is overwhelmed by both the large city and the drugs they consume. A bit too overwhelmed, in fact, as he starts hallucinating – hearing voices that talk to him all the time – leaving him to look for places where there is enough noise so he doesn't hear them. The voices drive him to try killing himself, which he fails at and his struggle with recovering.
The film makes you feel quite stressed at the time when you hear all those voices as well – of course while still being in the comfortable situation of just watching a film rather than having them in your head talking to you and driving you into paranoia. It's also scary to see how it's hard for Lukas to communicate the problem he has to his sister and how people fail to understand what's going on.
Not the most cheerful film, I guess. But worth seeing.
December 18, 2003, 23:32
Tagged as
daniel brühl, film, hans weingartner, lang:de.
I really want to see this film— I am a big daniel bruhl fan and it looks very good, but, just my luck, tyhere arent many DVDs with english subtitles— and even if there were it wouldnt help, as there are no DVDs with a US region. Damn.
June 22, 2006, 17:52
It’s a really good film (particularly because it was made before people were famous or anything).
While a bit of the blame could be on the international markets for not liking/buying German films, I keep having the impression that German film studios just don’t care too much about promoting their films internationally. Many films take a long time to be published on DVD (meaning that you have to be lucky that it’ll run in a local arts cinema) and I’ve seen a number of DVDs which don’t even have English subtitles. Meaning that it’s really hard to let non-German friends see the film.
Read about my recent experiences with some other German films to get more of that frustration.
(While the DVD region stuff is a stupid nuisance, there seem to be enough cheap ‘region-free’ DVD players around to solve that – or just use your computer and VLC to play them.)
June 23, 2006, 2:09
yeah I am considering the option of buying a region-free dvd player. my laptop can lay other regions, but you have to officially change the region from 1 to whatever the DVD is, and there can only be 5 changes made before it is permanent.
June 26, 2006, 2:28
I’m not sure whether some DVD drives may be more restrictive, but using the DVD drives on my Macs and the VLC player instead of the ‘official’ DVD player software that came with the machine, the issue of region codes never came up and none of the limited changes was needed to play European and American DVDs on the same machine.
June 27, 2006, 12:11
