In class on Tuesday, we watched the film World of Glory. Set during the Holocaust, it depicted a man speaking directly into the camera in short sequences in between cuts to a black screen and then cutting back in to the next scene. As each sequence passed by, the man's mental state continued to deteriorate as he kept shouting and hearing things. The way I saw the film, I interpreted the man to be a Jewish man who is currently being kept prisoner in one of the internment camps. I felt as though the man was imagining what life is like outside the camp. But the reality of his situation anchored his imagination down.
For example, in the second sequence, he is kneeling beside his dying mother, who is lying on a hospital bed. While that is the image he chooses to see, the reality is that his mother is lying on the ground in the confinement compound, dying. That is why when he abruptly shouts to his mother, the people behind him in the "hospital" all turn to face him because in reality there are multiple Jewish people all living in the same compound, thus not allowing them any privacy.
As the film progresses, so does the linear state of time in the reality the man is living. As we all know, the Jews were forced to work with all their strength each and every day in these camps so as time goes on, their state of minds continued to decrease as well, due to both the physical labor they had to endure and also the psychological effects that the Nazis brought upon them. So, in effect, as time progresses in the film, so does the deterioration of the man's mind, which is why the scenes become more dramatic.
There is a scene where the man's son is receiving some sort of tattoo on his forehead. The man is comforting the child through the experience and when it is over he shouts a promise to the boy that they will remove the operation in ten years. Of course, in reality, the "operation" is the identification badge that the Nazis would attach to the clothes of Jewish prisoners in order to distinguish the severity of their crimes. Although, the badge is not permanently embedded into them, while inside the camps, the badge seems permanent to the prisoners, which is why the man imagines it as his son receiving a tattoo. His promise to his son is an attempt to give the boy hope that they will endure through the experience long enough to remove the "permanent" symbol of shame.
In a following scene, the man is lying under a table with his jacket pulled over his face and he is shouting that he cannot see until some sort of authority figure pulls him out and untangles him from his jacket. The reality is that the man is going crazy in this camp so any sort of darkness may frighten him, even the darkness at night when he sleeps in the compound. The confusion in this scene that isn't present in previous scenes (the man has always been in full view at the center of the frame throughout the film) clearly shows how his imagined world and his reality have begun to blend.
When he is inside the church, the priest is passing the blood of Christ around for everyone to partake. On his turn, the man seizes the drink and starts pouring it all down his throat and only stops when a church official forcefully pulls him away from the cup. Here, the man is imagining himself inside a church, when in actuality the guards are passing out the food and drink rations for the day to all the Jewish prisoners. The man grabs hold of the drink and tries to drink as much as he can before the guards take away his source of strength for the day. Again, despite his imagination, reality still ties him down.
Lastly, the last scene of the film shows the man standing in his bedroom, covering and uncovering his ears as he hears screams somewhere in the distance. His wife sleeps in the bed in the background and he wakes her up and asks her if she hears the screaming. Her response is to tell him to get some sleep or "tomorrow will be too hard for you". This last bit of dialogue is the heaviest weight of the real world that pulls him back to what's really going on. In the compound, the man lies awake with his wife asleep next to him. He cannot sleep as he hears the desperate cries of the newest victims as they are being dragged to their death. He is asking himself is he is really hearing such terrible noises, probably unaware that he is shouting the question out loud instead of within his mind. His wife awakes to his shouts, seemingly unaffected by the distant screaming and her husband's shouting (she more than likely has awakened to this before on several occasions and is now used to it). She very groggily tells her husband to sleep or he will not have the strength to do the work they are required to do tomorrow. However, the man's mind is too far gone to distinguish between what is real and what is not. And he no longer has the mental strength to block his reality out in order to imagine a better life for himself and his family.
Well, that is what I got out of the video, anyway. I'm sure all of us have different opinions and interpretations of the video. Who's to say that any one of us is correct? Hope you enjoyed my essay of a blog post (those of you who stuck around till the end).
Aaron Mattson
Link to World of Glory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bM4fMHptuc
