| Author |
Message |
|
| gromit |
 Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 2:18 am |
 |
|
Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
|
| I thought it did a nice job of giving a sense of place and presenting a locale. It gets a bit slow in places and doesn't seem to have much to say after a while. |
_________________
Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
|
| Back to top |
  
|
| Ghulam |
| Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 11:27 am |
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4742
Location: Upstate NY
|
gromit wrote: I thought it did a nice job of giving a sense of place and presenting a locale. It gets a bit slow in places and doesn't seem to have much to say after a while.
True. It is rich in National Geographic values. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Syd |
| Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 1:53 pm |
|
|
Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
|
The Holocaust documentary. Footage from the April 1945 liberation of concentration camps, with narration. This wasn't shown for decades because it was so explicit, but finally showed on Frontline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyLCcBCmAsU&feature=player_embedded#at=106
Finally. The narrator is Trevor Howard. Alfred Hitchcock was a treatment advisor on the film. |
_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Syd |
| Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 11:10 pm |
|
|
|
Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
|
One of the things that got me from the documentary is there were three hundred concentration camps (and considerably fewer, but deadlier, extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka). I knew about Buchenwald, Belsen, Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka, but I didn't know about all the others. There's no way the German civilians couldn't have known what was going on without being willfully blinding themselves. Dachau started operations in March of 1933, for Christ's sakes, and was publicized by the Nazis as a model concentration camp.
Treblinka's not in the documentary, and there's not that much about Auschwitz. Those camps were in Poland, and I suspect most of the footage is in the missing Russian reel. Treblinka was in the eastern part of modern-day Poland, so it's likely it was liberated a year before Buchenwald and Belsen.
What really haunt me aren't the dead, but the survivors. I can numb myself to thousands of dead bodies, but when I look into the face of someone who is nearly starved to death and is without hope even after being liberated (and may still have died anyway), I want to exterminate the monsters responsible.
One thing I never noticed before is that all the male victims are clean-shaven. Either they were given razor blades, which seems kind of dangerous for their captors, or they were shaved, which makes me wonder about their barbers. Someone is starving to death and you still shave them? |
_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
|
| Back to top |
|
| bartist |
| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 8:36 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
|
Quote: One thing I never noticed before is that all the male victims are clean-shaven. Either they were given razor blades, which seems kind of dangerous for their captors, or they were shaved, which makes me wonder about their barbers. Someone is starving to death and you still shave them?
If they were shaving heads for lice control, would they have gone ahead and got the face, too, to be thorough? |
_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Syd |
| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 10:36 am |
|
|
|
Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
|
| Someone explained it to me on Facebook. One of the consequences of extreme starvation is that hair becomes brittle due to lack of protein and eventually falls out. |
_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
|
| Back to top |
|
| bartist |
| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 11:59 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
|
| Makes grim sense. Like chemo. As for the German people ignoring what was happening, I would speculate that most citizens lived in some degree of terror of the government and, though they knew about the camps, feared what would happen to them (or their families) if they spoke up about it. |
_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| marantzo |
| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 1:30 pm |
|
|
|
Guest
|
We had couple from Germany staying with us in the early fifties. She was our maid and he worked at my father's wholesale. He had been a pilot in the Luftwaffe. I would have been 10-11 at the time. One time I asked them if they knew that Hitler had killed 6 million Jews. They asked me where I heard such a ridiculous thing. I asked them if they knew what happened to the Jews that they knew or lived near them. They said that the Jewish people in their neighbourhood were taken away to settlements so they wouldn't be involved in the war. I still remember being convinced that they really didn't know what happened. I told them that they didn't know what they were talking about and left it at that. When I was talking to the husband about Hitler and what a bad man he was, he said that it wasn't Hitler who was the problem but his Generals. Oh well.
About ten years after they had worked for us they visited our wholesale where I was working one summer. They had a nice talk with my dad and me and I noticed that the husband had a very sheepish expression when he talked to me, which was very unusual for him. I was sure it was because he found out what really happened to the Jews in Europe. Living in Canada all that time had to have enlightened him about the reality of Hitler's regime. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| carrobin |
| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 1:39 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
|
| When my mother was sales manager of a hotel in Columbia, SC, in the late 1950s, the hotel accountant was a German "war bride" who was very attractive and friendly; she and her young daughter visited us several times. But my mother was a bit wary of her, and told me later that she was sure Katie had skimmed off some of the money coming in from business dinners and parties. She did ask her once about what her family knew about the camps during the war, but Katie said nobody knew about them then, they were all far away. Mom wasn't so sure of that either. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| marantzo |
| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 1:52 pm |
|
|
|
Guest
|
| Well the thing is that all the Germans heard all of Hitler's speeches and there is no doubt that they knew what Hitler's feelings about the Jews were, so the ones who didn't have the same attitude about the Jews would like to believe that the Jews were just sent away so they wouldn't be amongst the non-Jewish population. Guess they figured the same thing about the homosexuals and Gypsies. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| grace |
| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 2:30 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 11 Nov 2005
Posts: 3214
|
Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's last secretaries and author of the book/books on which Downfall is based, said at the end of the movie that many Germans, including herself, did not know what happened at the camps - but she also said something to the effect that they could have found out had they wanted to. So, there was likely a lot of denial going on all over the country, taking the idea of "I don't want to know" to a whole new level. I got one of her books for my birthday but haven't yet read it, and now will probably move it up past some Civil War books. (My bookshelf is quite bloody and violent.)
Exact quote, for the record:
[last lines]
Traudl Junge: All these horrors I've heard of during the Nurnberg process, these six million Jews, other thinking people or people of another race, who perished. That shocked me deeply. But I hadn't made the connection with my past. I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty. And that I didn't know anything about the enormous scale of it. But one day I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse. I saw that she was about my age and she was executed in the same year I came to Hitler. And at that moment I actually realised that a young age isn't an excuse. And that it might have been possible to get to know things. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| gromit |
| Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 12:42 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
|
There's a documentary which is a series of interviews with Traudl Junge when she's around 80.
Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary.
Interesting.
For the issue of knowledge, you have to remember that there was a lot of German propaganda and little or no competing information sources. Plus asking questions might make one seem to be unpatriotic or suspicious, especially once the war/takeover of territories began. And the Germans had been conditioned to believe that the Jews were harmful to Germany.
So while some might have been uncomfortable about the turn of events -- violence, deportations, etc -- it was certainly easier to either put it out of one's mind or keep quiet about it. And after the economic chaos of the 20's and the frequent political violence, many were thankful for the stability of the Nazi regime, even if it came at the expense of the Jews and other marginalized types.
There was no doubt that the Nazis were a rough lot and intolerant, but I doubt many ordinary Germans could imagine anything like industrialized death camps. Refugee camps, work camps, yes. At the time, if one thought about it at all, it probably seemed much more likely that they would run forced-labor camps in aid of the war effort. We've grown up knowing of extermination camps as a fact of history, but back then it would have been almost unimaginable -- especially to believe that it was your own people who were the monsters doing it. |
_________________
Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 7:26 am |
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
|
| I've wanted to see Hitler's Secretary for a long time. |
_________________
You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
-Topher |
|
| Back to top |
|
| billyweeds |
| Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 8:49 am |
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
|
| Everybody's Fine is a remake of an old Marcello Mastroianni movie about a widowed father reconnecting with his adult children. The American version stars Robert De Niro, who is excellent in the role (putting the lie to the widespread rumor that his good-acting days are over), and Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, and Sam Rockwell as the kids. It's a slightly melancholy, slightly amusing, slight tale, but worth seeing for the acting and the rather touching overall effect. Definitely one I'm glad I didn't head out to the theater to see, but just as definitely one I'm glad I caught. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Syd |
| Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 11:13 pm |
|
|
|
Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
|
The Haunting (1963): good haunted house story, with four people investigating the paranormal, including Julie Harris as Eleanor, a woman who's spent her entire adult life caring for her invalid mother, and longing for something to happen to her--and something WANTS her. Script is somewhat overwritten, with too many voice-overs. Acting is okay, sometimes veering into B-movie territory, sometimes very good (as in the early scenes when Eleanor is leaving home, and when Dr. Markway is setting up the whole experiment with the old lady who owns the house but has sense enough not to live here).
But the real triumph is Hill House itself, which the set designers had a field day with, getting everything just slightly off to make it spooky. The look of the statues, for instance, is priceless (and there are a lot more than you first realize; this is a movie where the pause feature is a blessing). Then there are building lines which should be parallel and aren't. In fact, in the initial view of Hill House, some of the towers are not quite vertical. I was reminded of Lovecraft's unspeakable buildings with non-Euclidean geometry. 7.5 for script and acting, but 9 for set design and cinematography. 8 overall. |
_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
