Good Bye Lenin ! Film Analysis

Mary P. Wood’s assessment of how European films need to be understood and analysed is indicative of not only contemporary European film scholarship trends but also the sheer importance of the role as financier/exhibitor that E.U. media programmes have played in recent decades. Supporting European filmmaking is a crucial undertaking for these E.U. organisations, serving to preserve and to produce a sense of European culture to varying degrees, while also stimulating its economy, much like national film boards and state funding throughout the E.U. tend to do. In the ‘Principles and Criteria’ section on the Irish Film Board website, Irish employment and money being spent in Ireland during production are both listen as considerations for granting financial aid. However the E.U.’s undertaking is also a distinct one. Not only do these …show more content…
it is important to examine one scene in particular that occurs early on in the film: the prison scene. Many viewers of the film may not even remember a ‘prison scene,’ such is the brevity of its screen presence. It occurs in the aftermath of the protagonist Alex meeting future girlfriend Lara at an anti-government protest and his mother Christiane’s ensuing heart attack at the sight of his involvement and arrest. The audience is shown a prison hall containing arrestees of the protest, standing to uniformed attention under the threat of further physical abuse from the guards. Due to his mother’s health, Alex is allowed to leave the prison; and so is the audience of the film. This scene seems minor with regards to its importance to the narrative, yet in fact by choosing to pursue Alex’s familial story rather than that of anti-government protestors as a social group, this scene tells viewers that the setting in which the political themes will play out in the film will be on a domestic and a personal level, rather than an institutional