Saturday, May 01, 2010
Die Welle
Just saw this film and found it really good, reminiscent of Lord of the Flies a tad. Though thinking about it, certain aspects are weird - many of the changes that the teacher Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) makes in his classroom, changes that slowly form the students into a quasi fascist group, are normal school practices here in India. We all wear uniforms to school, raise our hand when we want to say something and stand to give the answer, we never call our teachers by their first name and the desks always face the front of the class. That doesn't make us fascists, only disciplined. The students in the German school in the film are clearly shown as lacking this particular quality and when discipline is introduced through the Project Week experiment, they turn into a group that excludes the other and embraces violence. Komisch!
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Hey I just watched this film last week as well! I wore a uniform to school as well and we also called our teachers "sir" and "miss" and it just seemed normal to us. I think the point here is that only a small, select group within the school undergoes this experiment, so it doesn't seem "normal". It makes them feel, different and - specifically - better and stronger. It creates a group identity by exclusion of the other. The group itself is pretty heterogeneous, you probably noticed, which reinforces the idea that in fact anyone can be the other as long as the group identity is strong. Here the students are not united by the same race, culture, gender, religion (?), but they begin to look the same with their white shirts and salute and that separates them from the larger group. I wouldn't say they lacked discipline at the start. It just seemed like a normal German high school to me.
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