1984 screening

What a brilliant film! Everything about the film helped to reinforce the topic of the lecture which I found helped me to memorize the terms by seeing them, for example Chris talked about filtering language to cut out forms of resistance by abolishing certain words; which means if there is no word for the emotion or idea it cannot be expressed. This was shown through Winston's job in which he looked through newspaper articles and reported anything that could be construed as resistance. In addition the final part of the film part of the film where Winston is asked during his reprogramming how many fingers he is holding up and Winston replies the correct answer but the questioner wants him to admit that it is 5 by replacing the word five with four. This reinforces the principal that if you control words and language you can control what people think and say.

At the end I was left questioning what had happened because I felt it was a bit obscure, which was created by the scene where Winston writes the sum two plus two but leaves the answer blank. This I believe does indicate that Winston is eventually brain washed as he hesitates to put the answer, indicating that his mind set has changed as before he would have put four without hesitating.

Another thing that could be inferred is that this film bears a strong resemblance to Lang's 'Metroplis' which shows the robotic conditioned workers in uniforms drifting along to work. This was also Hitler's favourite film and it is easy to see that he based some of his ideals of a perfect Germany on the film, therefore the programming of people it seems has actually been translated from screen to real life. An issue I think Orwell foresaw happening in the modern age.