In several posts I read about those required to view this film at school.
Several posts and threads appear to develop as if they are watching actual documentary footage.
While not very surprising, I feel this could be a potentially dangerous misunderstanding of the range, extent and nuance of both the holocaust specifically and WWII generally.
Does anyone else feel that dramatic film being received as historical reality is a disturbing phenomenon?
Stone's JFK comes to mind.
shareI get the point but I don't think this film belongs in the same class as JFK - there is no significant dispute about any of the key elements of the subject being dealt with.
I appreciate the movie is over 20 years old. Moving as so many of the featured dramatic elements are, the movie employs many disappointing stereotypes (as well as some very marginal dialogue and acting). However, we must give it some latitude given it is a 1987 telemovie.
Obviously, I wasn't there. The movie gives no inkling of the economic and socio-political environment that allowed the rise of the Nazi state as well as contemporaneous world events and attitudes. In their own minds, the Nazis had a coherent, and to many Europeans, a plausible but deeply flawed ideology. Just look anywhere from Vichy France to those "liberated" from Communism by the Nazi's in the Baltic states and other areas of the then Soviet Union. We could extend this to the attitudes underlying the immigration policies put in place in Great Britain and even the United States.
While the facts and sentiments are indisputable, I feel this movie has aged significantly and betrays a significant shallowness. Is it appropriate for use as a teaching aid regarding the holocaust as so many posters (admittedly, many seem quite youthful) in other threads have mentioned?
I don't think so, as this stayed pretty much accurate and close to the truth.
Supermodels...spoiled stupid little stick figures mit poofy lips who sink only about zemselves.
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As does U-571.
shareI don't think the film is being presented as a historical documentary in schools? You'd have to be pretty stupid to think so.
I have no problem with it being shown in schools as a dramatic representation, along with genuine documentary footage taken by American, British and Russian troops liberating the camps which indicates that the horrors of this film are the tip of the iceberg.