On Wednesday, as part of the university-wide effort to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2016, Magdalen Film Society will be showing contrasting and thought-provoking films on the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Admission to the screenings is free and there will be wine served during the interval.
As always, you can join for £3 on the door at the Magdalen Auditorium on Longwall Street, Oxford. Or, you can purchase a membership to see all MFS films for free (£10 for the term, £20 for the calendar year and £45 for life.)
Die Welle (1969) - at 6pm
‘What our generation lacks is a common goal that holds us together.’
Dennis Gansel, the director of The Wave says that modern German students, the third generation after the Third Reich, have grown bored with the teaching of that moment in the country’s history. He says that he himself only grew an emotional connection to these events in history after having watched Schindler’s List and it was the motivation to create a film for German audiences that would have a similar effect.
The Wave is a fictionalised account of an experiment carried out in Palo Alto by an American high school teacher, Ron Jones. Finding that his students were failing to comprehend how a regime like that of the Nazis could have risen to power, Jones decided to create an imitation of a fascist state within the classroom, naming it the ‘Third Wave’. Organised around a central authority figure with an ideology expressed through graphic iconography, the movement was enormously successful, resulting in higher grades and a greater sense of community. Though it ended peacefully with Jones deflating the students’ fervour by showing them a film about the atrocities committed by the Nazis, Gansel’s film goes further, pushing the experiment to its logical end point. This is an important film at a time when the popularity of extreme right groups such as the Front National in France, Pegida in Germany, as well as that of apparently fringe figures in mainstream parties like Donald Trump needs to be understood, so that events like the Holocaust, committed under the aegis of strength and unity for the group, can never happen again.
Mathis Clément