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Circle of Deceit After the success of The Tin Drum and the change of pace of The Candidate, Schlöndorff planned to direct another film written by Günter Grass. The general subject of Kopfgeburten (Headbirth) was to have been the relationship between developed nations, such as West Germany, and the Third World. Grass and Schlöndorff planned to have the script grow out of a trip they took to Egypt, India, and Indonesia, but Schlöndorff was dissatisfied with what Grass finally wrote because of its lack of character or story. It was, in Schlöndorff’s words, “a scenario in the form of an essay which would have made, under other circumstances, a very good Godard film” (“Le faussaire” 41). Grass published this script in 1980 as the novel Headbirth or The Germans Are Dying Out (Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus), which he dedicated to Nicolas Born, a German writer who had just died. On reading Born’s Die Fälschung (translated in English as The Deception), a novel published in 1979 and set against the ongoing war in Lebanon, Schlöndorff found in Born’s novel many of the themes and preoccupations present in the Headbirth project. Both works presented prosperous but anxious West Germans faced with economically poor but confident and decisive members of the Third World. The filmmaker determined to adapt Born’s work instead of film Grass’s screenplay (Schlöndorff, “Le faussaire” 41). The film version of Die Fälschung, called Circle of Deceit in English-speaking countries, might at first glance be called one of Schlöndorff’s most commercial projects up to that time. It makes superficial concessions to popular taste, providing for a scenario that contains elements of adventure and romance in exotic settings. On second glance, however, one sees that Circle of Deceit is a film containing specific discourses about both politics and philosophy. As a political film, it is a critique of journalistic sensationalism, an exposition of the complexities of the Lebanese political situation, and an examination of the gap between developed nations and the Third World. As a philosophical essay, it 17 194 brings into question three adjacent issues: the complex relations among words, images, and the realities they can portray; the moral problem of the responsibility of a bystander toward the events he observes; the tension within the reflective individual between drives toward personal pleasure and those involving political commitment and responsibility. Circle of Deceit’s twin discourses, political and philosophical, permeate the movie. We keep both in mind as we consider the production history of the film and the aesthetic decisions the filmmakers made, the content of the film itself, and the mixed critical reaction it received. We include in our analysis in particular a discussion of the climactic scene in the film in which the German hero kills an anonymous Moslem, for it is in this scene that the multiple themes of the work converge. Finally, we see that beneath the film’s political and philosophical discourses is a psychoanalytic subtext, one that may or may not consciously be put there by Schlöndorff, about voyeurism and masochism. ATopical Film Circle of Deceit takes place during January 1976, a period of significant escalation of the conflicts between the Moslem-Palestinian and Christian forces in Lebanon. On January 13, Moslem and Palestinian fighters laid siege to Damur, a Christian stronghold some twelve miles south of Beirut. In response to these leftist assaults on Damur, the Lebanese air force bombed gunmen who had attacked a government military convoy on its way to the town. The air attack was made despite directives against it from the country’s prime minister, Rashid Karami, the only strong Moslem representative within the government, who resigned later that week. The attack was the first instance of air fighting since the previous April, and the fighting that ensued resulted in the closing of the Beirut airport and temporary suspension of international telephone and Telex communication (Markham, “Lebanese Planes”). In retaliation against leftist successes in the Damur struggle, rightists claimed to be “liberating” the Karantina and Maslakh slum sections of Beirut by transporting hundreds of Moslem families to more solidly Moslem areas in the city. Finally on January 20, Damur fell to the Moslem and Palestinian forces. An estimated two hundred combatants and civilians were killed in the last day of the struggle, and about six thousand refugees evacuated the city (Markham, “Beirut Ex-Premier”; Markham, “Strife in Lebanon”). The struggles for...

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