Movies As Universities: The Case of So Ends Our Night

So Ends Our Night is a riveting and moving 1941 movie version of Erich Remarque’s classic novel Flotsam (English, GermanLiebe deinen Nächsten).

You may remember Remarque as the author of the international best-seller All Quiet on the Western Front, a big success in movie theatres of that time. Thomas Mann generally is considered the premier German writer of the twentieth century, and while that’s true in terms of prestige perhaps, Remarque is a more gripping German author.

Flotsam tells a great story about stateless refugees during the Nazi nightmare circa 1937. (One should immediately sense the resonance in our time with the millions of political and climate refugees, exiles, fugitives, and victim peoples like the Rohingya of Myanmar and the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China, experiencing cultural genocide. We might extend this list to the Tutsis of Rwanda in 1994, the European Jews of World War II, and the Armenians of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire massacres. One could add the Chinese in Indonesia who experienced a genocidal pogrom in 1965. (Think of the movie, The Year of Living Dangerously with Mel Gibson.)

The movie So Ends Our Night, based on Remarque’s great work Flotsam, shows Fredric March and Glenn Ford playing supremely harried stateless refugees, hounded all through Europe, in a nightmare of life “without a country,” passport, visa, citizenship.

Glenn Ford is only half-Aryan and is in danger of being murdered by the Nazi crazies. Fredric March is not racially endangered, but as an opponent of Hitler’s regime and a dissenter could be murdered for that treason. Both are in a “having no passport” hell.

Between minutes 23 and 24 of this movie, March explains to Glenn Ford’s 19-year-old on the run like he is:

“Individuals or nations, it’s all the same, as long as they’re safe and comfortable they don’t give a hoot about what happens to anybody else.

There’s the misery of the world.

That’s why progress is so slow and things slip back so fast.”

With some reflection, you’ll probably see the deep point March makes about global history and “the way of the world” plainly expressed without camouflaging the truth.

You can learn quite a bit if you ponder this movie conversation, with both refugees sitting under a tree, harried and distressed, in a nightmarish emergency.

Thus, So Ends Our Night can be a movie-as-university for you and feed your meta intelligence.

Is the Concept of “People-Class” Illuminating?

Abram Leon was a tragic Belgian/Polish Jewish sociologist who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944. He fused the concept of people (e.g., the French people, or the Japanese people) with the concept of class (e.g. “the working class”) to make a hybridized concept of peopleclass.

Can we say that the Rwandan genocide in 1994, say, was the murder of a peopleclass (i.e., the Tutsi)?

Were the Armenian victims in 1915 an analogous phenomenon for the Ottoman Empire?

One immediately thinks of the Jews of Europe in WWII and the Chinese in 1965 Indonesia. (Think of the movie, The Year of Living Dangerously with Mel Gibson, which gives some “atmospherics” for this time in Indonesia.)

Is the Abram Leon notion of a peopleclass helpful in understanding these modern genocidal phenomena as an ensemble?

Meta intelligence is defined as working towards a “Composite Understanding of Education,” as you see in the masthead for this site.

Is peopleclass such a composite?

Essay 99: Economics—Apple Card’s Fintech Problem; Improving AI-Based Recommendations; IBM & Nazi Germany

from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:

Gender Bias Complaints against Apple Card Signal a Dark Side to Fintech

The possibility that Apple Card applicants were subject to gender bias opens a new frontier for the financial services sector in which regulators are largely absent, argues Karen Mills.

It’s No Joke: AI Beats Humans at Making You Laugh

New research shows people don’t trust recommendations made by machines—and that’s a problem for marketers who increasingly rely on AI-based technology to persuade consumers. Michael H. Yeomans explains how businesses can overcome that bias.

Do TV Debates Sway Voters?

As Democratic presidential candidates prepare for another debate, Vincent Pons reports that TV forums don’t influence voters.

Lessons from IBM in Nazi Germany

Geoffrey Jones discusses his case study, “Thomas J. Watson, IBM and Nazi Germany,” exploring the options and responsibilities of multinationals with investments in politically reprehensible regimes.

For Better Ideas, Bring the Right People to the Brainstorm

Better ideas emerge when extroverts and people open to new experiences put their heads together, according to research by Rembrand M. Koning. But what about introverts?

Should Non-Compete Clauses Be Abolished?

Non-compete clauses prevent workers from bringing secrets with them to competitors. But increasingly NCCs are unnecessarily restricting job mobility for low-level employees. Should they be banned? asks James Heskett.

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations series

Working papers by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark explain how and why different types of technology design pose different opportunities and challenges for organizations and can become vital forces of innovation.

Essay 54: Movies as an Off-Campus “Open University:” Antonioni’s La Notte (The Night, 1961)

Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, painter, and short story author.  

Antonioni died on July 30, 2007 (aged 94) in Rome, the same day that another renowned film director, Ingmar Bergman, also died.

He is best known for his “trilogy on modernity and its discontents”—L’AvventuraLa Notte, and L’Eclisse from the early sixties.

One “hidden pillar” of the world Antonioni depicts in his movies is that “you are what you read.” This gives the viewer a “meta-intelligent” (latent overview signal) handle on the world being depicted:

In La Notte of 1961, Antonioni starts with an image of the Pirelli Tower in Milano, the most famous skyscraper of its time in Italy. In contrast to the impressiveness of the building, the characters in his movies are trying to “navigate” boredom and the enveloping sense of ennui.

One of the characters in the movie is said to be reading the masterpiece by Herman Broch, The Slkeepwalkers:

The Sleepwalkers (original title Die Schlafwandler), is a 1930s novel in three parts, by the Austrian novelist and essayist Hermann Broch

Opening in 1888, the first part is built around a young Prussian army officer; the second in 1903 around a Luxembourger bookkeeper; and the third in 1918 around an Alsatian wine dealer.  Each is in a sense a sleepwalker, living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and waking.  Together they present a panorama of German society and its progressive deterioration of values that culminated in defeat and collapse at the end of World War I.

Antonioni implies the characters he depicts are a new version of “sleepwalker.”

When the movie starts, the characters played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau visit a friend in the hospital who mentions his new work on Adorno.  Adorno (1903-1969) was a German-Jewish theoretician who wants to understand how the world has gone off the rails leading to WWII and the death factories of the Nazis.  He argues that this is connected (paradoxically) to the relentless rationality of “The Enlightenment” and works in a “dialectical” way (i.e., something becomes its opposite).

In the movie, there’s a scene where the author played by Mastroianni is at a book talk concerning his new book.

In other words, the world Antonioni is depicting, a kind of “odyssey” of ennui made confusing by gleaming architecture such as the Pirelli Tower of Nervi (built from 1955-1958) shown in the opening shot of the movie.

The books mentioned in the movie confirm the director’s “you are what you read” motif.

The recent book: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark is consistent with this sense of things.