Two Days Till D-Day

Sure don't feel that I'm ready to go. However, the best thing about a definite deadline is that I'll have to be. At least, I'll have clean underwear.

The class is fully immersed in thinking about documentary film and before we leave for Italy will have had the chance to see portions of Shoah and The Sorrow and the Pity, with Night and Fog left for the last assignment in the term. It's interesting that Patricia Aufderheide, who wrote Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction, concludes her discussion with a list of One Hundred Great Documentaries. Even in a super short class, we will watch two of them (Triumph of the Will and Night and Fog) in their entirety and watch clips from two more.

And I finally decided that it's ok to show clips of very good movies. Yesterday in class, we watched about 45 minutes of The Pianist, which is remarkable in terms of both content and cinematography.

We also watched Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants in its entirety, and I was also struck once again with what a fine film it is as well. The children at the school struck me as being "real kids," and Malle does justice both to their comparative innocence (or lack of understanding) and to the equally troubled adults around them.

If it appears that the class is doing nothing but watching movies, it's not true. We are also reading quite a bit of history and film criticism as well. What's so interesting is to see how early representations of the Holocaust tended to be very black and white--with Evil Nazis and Good (Poles, Italians, Jews, French, everyone else) and how more recent films tend to be a bit more nuanced. And no I don't think it's because we as a culture have somehow become more intelligent or more sophisticated. We do, however, have access to more information.