Week 3

Thankfully over the past week we scrapped our original film idea. I think it was a great idea but we definitely bit off more than we could chew. I'm sure quite a few of the people that we planned on talking to would be wary in front of a camera and the language barrier would have been extremely difficult to overcome. Plus I'm not so sure how my parents would feel if that was what I had been filming for the past few months.

So instead we are doing a film about the phenomenon that is ping pong. I was quite surprised to hear that there are clubs with tons and tons of ping pong tables. I shouldn't have been that surprised seeing as there are two giant slab outdoor ping pong tables within a block of our apartment complex. This film should have a funner tone than our original idea which I think is good. Hopefully we can find the right mix of information and entertainment so we aren't bordering on boring but also not bordering on stupidity. We actually got some footage of some of us playing ping pong with a few kids in Koldenhof. We really need to start getting more footage of around the city and obviously more footage of ping pong.

Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt was the film for the week. Actually if I hadn't read the reading before watching this I wouldn't have known it was a communist propaganda film until the very end of the film. It clearly had a leftist lean which can easily be seen by the newspaper flashing the horribly rising unemployment. The scene with the bicycles racing to each job sight in search of work was pretty cool. The film was shot soon after the collapse of Creditanstalt which caused a series of banking crises across Germany so I'm sure that portayal is decently accurate. The poor in this film didn't seem like they were in actual poverty to me. It didn't seem like anyone was starving and the female lead is always fairly nicely dressed despite her living in a tent colony. That may be one reason why it didn't seem like propaganda to me until the end. It's like everyone in the film is showing mild amounts of struggle in their lives but not anywhere near what you would think would be in a propaganda film. I personally was expecting to see scenes that showed the horrible excesses or cold heartedness of capitalism but that only came out in the last scene on the train. Even that was pretty ridiculous when you think about it logically. Brazil burning coffee beans instead of putting them on the market would not hurt their profits. Them putting the beans on the market would cause the price to drop so much that they were maximizing their profits.

One thing that I really liked about the film is that several characters gave a wink to the audience to acknowledge they are there. I realize it's to send you a message but I've always liked when films/writings do that because it makes you feel as if you are part of the film.

For Thorsten's class our readings centered on Jewish exhibitions. It was really interesting to see the different ways that Jews portayed themselves. It seemed like in the early stages of the exhibitions Jews were eager to show off their best artwork to show others that they could be just as good. One monument at an exhibit late gave no clue to the fact that it was a Jewish sculpture but instead chose to focus on religious tolerance. This was in response to calls in America to proclaim that it was a Protestant nation. To me this seemed like a rallying call for all religious minorities to stick together. Later still Adler tied Judaism in with the beginnings of Christianity and with other Western cultures. That seemed to say that the Jewish people were one and the same as other Westerners.