Another Good Class Discussion

Buon pomeriggio,

Georgia Tech students are always interesting, and today's discussion of The Boy in Striped Pajamas (one of the films that they chose) showed them at their best. In fact, they were visibly moved after the screening yesterday.

This morning at breakfast, a number of them seemed to want to discuss their response to the film, and the discussion continued a bit later when we went to class. It's a powerful film, and I personally disagree with much of the early criticism that objected to the focus on one small German boy (whose father happens to be an SS commandant in a concentration camp).

In fact, the film does a lot of different things: it explores what happens when families disagree (the mother and the eight-year old boy come to question the prevailing ideology while the father and daughter continue to accept the party line); it looks at history through the eyes of two naive characters (one a Jewish boy in the concentration camp, the other the German) neither of whom understand what is happening; and finally it reveals what happened to people during the Holocaust, demonstrated most clearly by clothing hung on hooks outside the gas chamber. Absence speaking louder in this case than presence.

I confess that I picked up a number of details when I saw it this time. The first time, when I saw the film in the theater, I was so taken with the children that I didn't notice the chimneys in the background. They are almost always there--at least in the scenes that take place outside. I also didn't notice how the film demonstrates that everyone seems to be "fenced in." It's most obvious in the case of the concentration camp, but the family is also behind a gated fence, and Bruno is discouraged from exploring beyond his own yard. In fact, almost everything seems to reinforce that people were encouraged to keep in their place.

One of the most interesting things about this particular DVD, which I shared with the students, were interviews with John Boyne, who wrote the novel on which the movie is based; Mark Herman, who adapted it and directed it; and most of the major actors all of whom had done their homework to try to understand the period. In addition, the video commentary was done while the movie was being filmed so viewers had a good chance to see exactly how some of the shots were set up. Very interesting for students who are making their own films (though with hand held cameras instead of lights and all the equipment that are available to major studios). While many DVDs now include extras, this is one of the most interesting I've encountered.

Ciao for now