Yeah, but you don’t like movies. How did you do it exactly?[/quote]
Me? I lied! Fake interest.[/quote]
See now, I don’t think that is the most effective approach. I could tell everybody what the most effective approach actually is, but then they’d have to pay me.
I can’t believe a girl would be fakin’ it like that.
LOW-END ART?! SPIELBERG?! You’ve gone too far now! I was actually in a Spielberg film. I had a small part . . . very small . . . tiny . . . minute, miniscule, infinitesimal . . .
Actually, “extras” are very important to a film. (I find the term demeaning) Without all those thousands of people walking around in the background, a film would really suffer.
I met a guru in India who kept going on and on about how you had to have a clean colon if you had any hope of becoming self-aware. I guess those Greeks had some clean colons.
Not being full of shit it always a good start point.
You can see Night and Fog here, on YouTube.
The YouTube version is broken up into 4 segments of 8 minutes each. Somebody’s edited all 4 segments together, back to back. That’s the file I’ve linked to.
I can’t remember where or when I first saw this. I remember that my ex-wife had to get up and leave the room when the bulldozers were pushing around corpses, though. That wasn’t the first time I had seen the movie. I think that was in the late 1980s. I had forgotten how powerful some of the images are. It’s narrated in French, and I had also forgotten how powerful that narration is. This version has English subtitles.
On American television it sometimes plays on IFC or Sundance. It’s not available on Netflix.
[quote=“Buttercup”]Films aren’t real guys. 99% of films are boring shit which manipulates you to get your money. ‘Intelligent’ films just use a different tactic. Humans like to watch rape, murder, torture, etc. It validates their self image as ‘good people’ and provides a safe framework in which to explore their feelings. We enjoy ‘Holocaust films’ because they are extreme and allow us to dabble without getting our hands dirty. Sneaky ones add a little frisson of ‘humanity’ so we can question our motives in a safe way (‘What would I have done?’) and then throw our hands up at ‘the banality of evil’ before going home to our nice lives.
Mass murder is part of being human. These kind of films are a safe way to explore it: we like to explore the difference of Nazi-ism; the dispassionate efficiency, because it helps us to frame genocide as an aberration. We can only deal with murder as an anomaly: ‘evil’, ‘not like us’, which is why we are drawn to the camps as a backdrop for low-end art.
At least the Greek tragedians were self-aware.[/quote]
Absolutely. Which is why I recommend the 1973 documentary series The World at War. I don’t know where you would find it. I’ve seen it three times and I still feel sick after the Genocide episode. When the gas chambers were turned on there was a fighting panic to climb on top of other people to escape death. Children and old people at the bottom of the pile, strong men at the top.
Real footage.
[quote=“Thelonlieste”]
Absolutely. Which is why I recommend the 1973 documentary series The World at War. [/quote]
That’s a superb documentary. They don’t make them like that these days. (And you can find it, if you look).
[quote=“Bu Lai En”][quote=“Thelonlieste”]
Absolutely. Which is why I recommend the 1973 documentary series The World at War. [/quote]
That’s a superb documentary. They don’t make them like that these days. (And you can find it, if you look).[/quote]
Agreed. That was an awesome series. :bravo:
I think we’re moving away from the Holocaust with the World at War series, but in a similar, albeit with a understandably American focus, Ken Burn’s The War has given the treatment to WWII that his deeply researched best did in that American Civil War series.
As for the earlier arguments about focusing on the Jews, well yeah, they were certainly holocausted, but so were so many others. Gypsies, gays, Slavs, the Russians, etc, people deemed “untermensch” to the Nazis. They started with the retarded and mentally ill and it all snowballed from there. I would deeply distrust any attempt to focus this entirely on the Jews. That to me just feeds the multi-million dollar anti-Semite watching industry, and Israel’s claims it can to do all it brutally wishes to maintain a state it stole from another peoples, who they had been living side by side with for cenruries . that last bit of course would make for a decent point of conversation after the WWII history has all been explained.
HG
Thanks for all the good suggestions. For my purposes, the film must accomplish a few things: it has to be thought provoking, it has to be contextually accurate, Chinese subtitles would be convenient, and it can’t be too graphic. (The students are tenth graders, after all.) I don’t care if it’s high art or a Hollywood blockbuster, but the advantage of the Hollywood blockbuster (say, Schindler’s List) is that the movie would have Chinese subtitles. The movie is for the last two or three classes of the semester, it’s a supplemental feature of the class, not something I’d be “teaching” per se. I liked “Life is Beautiful”, but Italian is a bit of a deal breaker. I’ll probably go with Schindler’s List if I can’t find anything better.
“Life Is Beautiful” is supposed to be available in an english dubbed version as well.
Yep, I was going to suggest this one, called “Hitlerjunge Salomon” in the German version I saw.
It’s the true story of young jew from Poland, who survives by posing as a “aryan” German and being adopted by German soldiers. He experiences a lot of things: Kristallnacht, German invasions of Poland and Russia, he gets “adopted” by German troops, is sent to a nazi elite school, fights in the last days of ww2 as Volkssturm, and finally sees the horror of concentration camps. It’s probably not the best holocaust movie ever done, but it gives a very interesting inside perspective to some of the pivotal events around the holocaust. This might make it a good choice for younger audiences, who might be overwhelmed by the really serious documentations. But then, for such a topic a bit of overwhelming might not be the worst thing…
Another (even stranger) idea would be the movie “Fatherland” (“Vaterland”). It is set in a fictional future, some decades after Germany won ww2. As the first visit of a US president after the end of ww2 approaches, a series of old nazis being murdered is being investigated. In the investigation, a lot of “forgotten” (or rather, covered up) details about the Wannsee Conference, where the plans for the holocaust were discussed, are uncovered.
Also, this definitely is not the best movie ever done about this topic, but since it is an more suspenseful movie than, say, a documentary, this might be a way to get (and keep) young people interested.
[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]
I would deeply distrust any attempt to focus this entirely on the Jews. That to me just feeds the multi-million dollar anti-Semite watching industry…
HG[/quote]
Yeah, I’d be worried about them too, if I were you…
One of the best movies I’ve seen on the Holocaust is an HBO movie called Conspiracy.
[quote]On January 20, 1942, with the tide of war turning in favor of the Allies, a small group of SS officers, government ministers, and Nazi officials met near Berlin to decide the fate of Europe’s Jews. Based on the only surviving record of that meeting, Conspiracy is a powerful combination of historical reconstruction and speculation that attempts to offer new insights into a pivotal moment in history.
The cast does a marvelous job of fleshing out the documentary evidence to create convincing characters. Kenneth Branagh is especially chilling as SS Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich, who uses a combination of charm and ruthless power-mongering to gain support for his plans. Colin Firth is fascinating as Wilhelm Stuckart, a lawyer who sees the brutal tactics of the SS as a threat to his own intellectualized anti-Semitism, and Stanley Tucci gives a wonderfully understated performance as Adolf Eichmann.[/quote](from Amazon)
The movie is indeed very powerful because of its understatement. It certainly raises some very important questions such as “What’s the coolest Nazi uniform?”
How about Emotional Arithmetic? Its quite new and its even Canookian. Has Susan Sarandon, Max Von Sydow, Gabriel Byrne, Christopher Plummer. Rented it the other night but haven’t watched it yet, as I needed to watch Hellboy II twice.
Or not. Great location, kind of a lousy movie actually. More about the effects of trauma than the war anyway.
So THAT’S what you ended up namin’ yer kid!
:no-no:
[quote=“bob”]
See now, I don’t think that is the most effective approach. I could tell everybody what the most effective approach actually is, but then they’d have to pay me.[/quote]
How much?
IIRC “Playing for Time” (1980), about the Auschwitz orchestra, with Vanessa Redgrave, was pretty good, but its a made for TV, probably impossible to find unless you can torrent it, and it won’t have CHINESE subtitles.
FFS! Thats nearly 30 YEARS AGO, how time flies when you’re dying.
[quote=“Ducked”][quote=“bob”]
See now, I don’t think that is the most effective approach. I could tell everybody what the most effective approach actually is, but then they’d have to pay me.[/quote]
How much?[/quote]
Oh alright.
Movies contain waaaay too much language (much of it colloquial, idiomatic etc.) for even the brightest students to deal with, even with repeated viewings so the first thing you have to make clear is that a lot of the film will likley remain unclear. The next thing to do is present them with a synopsis that contains the language from the film that is actually within their reach. Read the synopsis aloud and perform it all with great dramatic gestures and frequent comprehension checks. Make sure they know the characters, their relationship to one another, the basic plot line and the theme of the film “before” they see the movie. Try to speed everything up so they are listening to natural speech and not the robo talk they were taught in school. Draw attention to the soundtrack if it contributes significantly to whatever the film is trying to say. Understand that if you do a good job they should be able to “get” alot of what the film is about with the first viewing, with no subtitle. Encourage them to pay attention to body language, gesture, tone of voice, overall context and how that relates to what the characters really mean. You’ll have to bring attention to sarcasm and innuendo. Your students should have a good understanding of how metaphor works so that explanations can be quick and painless. They should watch the film on their own time (I spend 5% of class time tops actually watching movies) and come back with questions. Try to answer the questions and send them back to watch it again with the English substitle (using the pause button this time and writing vocab down) and come back with questions again. If they want to watch again with the chinese subtitle or no subtitle that’s OK.
That’s it essentially (in a perfect world). I could expand on this and in fact did expand on it in the form of a book I wrote which I am too chickenshit to show anybody, as per usual.
Susan super-angst Sarandon wringing her hands. Goddamn! What a waste of time. Beautiful scenery though, there’s no denying.
I disagree with the choices of “Schindler’s List” and “Life is Beautiful”. I think the first is a great film, but the second one bothers me because it’s a screwball comedy in a death camp.
But: the OP wants to show the horror of the Holocaust. He wants his high school students to understand it. Both of these movies make the Holocaust look much less horrible than it was. “Life is Beautiful” for obvious reasons. “Schindler’s List” as well, though. We (people from Western countries) have the context to see that Schindler’s story is just one facet of the Holocaust. Asians, especially young ones, often do not. Schindler was basically a good guy. He helped people. The people he helped did not suffer as much as others. Therefore people who see it as the only example of Holocaust story that they know (for eg., the OP’s students) will get the ‘wrong’ impression of the Holocaust - that it wasn’t that bad.
I had students in Korea tell me that, yes, the Germans treated the Jews badly, citing “Schindler’s List” as an example, but that the Japanese were far worse. This is a legitimate opinion, but only if it is an informed opinion. The only experience with the Holocaust these students had was this movie, and I think it minimized it.