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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
Hi, Zaqarbal (aka Remington)! 
Thank you for your comments! I wish I could offer you tea, cookies, and apple slices to welcome you to my MB thread-home.  |
Thank you very much for your warm welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. And yes, regarding cinema and TV I'm a kind of Remington Steele. I can't help it. It's like a "mnemonic spring". I always think of a movie, a series, a character or a scene which fits in with certain issues, situations, ideas, dilemmas, people, thoughts, etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
I will definitely try to find the 2004 movie "Downfall" about Hitler's last days in his bunker. The clip is thought provoking since it shows how the shooter finally imagines facing Adolf Hitler when Adolf was a baby. The shooter's human compassion prevents him from being able to kill that baby, even though he knows what the baby will grow up to do.
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I guess you refer to
Come and See (don't worry about the mistake
). The shooter is a young Soviet soldier who has seen how the nazis have commited terrible atrocities to his people (the Bielorussian civilians). That's why he's full of anger and hate, so he flies into a rage and starts shooting that Hitler's portrait at the puddle. But, as we have seen, at the end of that regressive visual sequence, he suddenly becomes shocked before that (mental) image showing Hitler as a little boy, and then starts to cry (in a bigger screen his tears are dramatically visible).
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
Zaqarbal, the videos of Hitler's compassion for the dog and the little children are painful to watch because they do show Hitler was a thinking, caring person, just like us, in much of his life. The face of a friendly dog pressed against his moved him. Little children's sweet personalities touched him. He was a "good man" in many ways.
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Yes, and if we think about it, that's terrifying. I mean, to think that there could be a demon inside every (apparently) common person like any of us. As Matt Dillon's character in
Crash says: "
You think you know who you are? You have no idea."
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
Another example of this ambivalence in judging people: German soldiers sometimes found it hard emotionally to kill women, men, and children at gunpoint, even though they believed it was the right thing to do in order to shape society based on eugenics concepts. This is one reason concentration camps were conceived...to protect German soldiers from the trauma of killing other people face to face, and also to make the killing faster, since the plan was to destroy all Jewish people throughout the world.
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True. And a movie has come to mind (as always
):
Stalingrad. Main characters are a group of soldiers; the higher ranks order them to kill prisoners and civilians, but they refuse to do it.
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
I realized early on that humans are like wolves and I am one among them. I love them, even as I am horrified by them. They kill so gracefully, so easily, and often the worst things they do stem from their great ability to love.
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I know what you mean. When I was a child, I used to watch a popular documentary-series about Iberian fauna. The chapter on the Iberian Wolf was titled
The Innocent Killers (title says it all). I've found an excerpt from it. That blood on the snow is shocking. Wolves are so implacable....
...but, at the same time, they are so beautiful...