Released in theaters in 2009, “The Wave” relates an absolutely chilling and, above all, perfectly authentic experience. His words remain more relevant than ever. Watch on Prime Video.
In Germany today. As part of a workshop, a high school teacher offers his students an experiment aimed at explaining to them how a totalitarian regime works. Then begins a life-size role-playing game, the consequences of which will prove tragic…
“Strength through discipline, Strength through action”
Do you believe that a new dictatorship is not possible? So wait until you see The Wave, available on Prime Video. Released in theaters in 2009, the film recounts an absolutely chilling and, above all, perfectly authentic experience. Originally, it was an American teacher, Ron Jones, who set up this role-playing game at the end of the 60s, in his class.
Faced with the disbelief of his contemporary history class students in understanding the enslavement of the German population in the face of the horrors of the Nazis, he decided to prove it through practice and carried out “the Third Wave”, an experiment on the functioning of dictatorship and manipulation of crowds.
He convinces his students of the importance of eliminating democracy because it can stimulate individual actions. Individualism is a defect of the democratic spirit, which goes against the general interest summarized in these words: “Strength through discipline, Strength through community, Strength through action, Strength through pride.”
“Individualism and the atomization of our societies cannot function forever”
Inspired by real events, The wave is also a novel by Todd Strasser and a classic of children’s literature, on the curriculum of many German schools for more than twenty years. Dennis Gansel’s adaptation was very successful across the Rhine.
While knowing to what extent the Nazi question was seen and revisited in German schools, the screenwriters of The wave wanted to talk about it, locating the danger in the weariness that is created when we begin to think that the speech has already been largely assimilated through repeated repetition.
Bac Films
For the director, it is the lack of ideals in today’s world that will lead to his downfall: “Individualism and the atomization of our societies cannot function forever. Such a context inevitably creates a vacuum, and the danger is that a new “ism” shows up to fill it” he confided at the time of the film’s release.
Relentless demonstration of totalitarian mechanisms, where an exceptional Jurgen Vogel shines in the role of the professor, the point made by The wave has lost none of its strength 15 years after its release, quite the contrary.
With a Europe which sees increasingly authoritarian regimes engaging in ever more worrying surveillance of the masses, to the detriment of individual and sometimes even fundamental freedoms.