Kultur 10

I’ll go ahead and say it: this weeks readings were fundamentally unimpressive. Perhaps I enjoy the strange cultural nuances that separate countries, and therefore this weeks more subdued examples weren’t that interesting. Except for the fathers day piece. That was rather odd. The most intriguing article to me was actually the first on “Dinner for Two.” It’s interesting how certain movies, stories, and other entertainment can take hold in an entirely unintended audience. In this article they were talking more about a British movie that foundered in the UK, but exploded in Germany, but the same holds true for other transfers.

I’ve often wondered that about the many movies made in the US about other countries stories we have no connection to, like the Sound of Music as the article mentions. For example, how do the Germans feel about Steven Spielberg’s production of Schindler’s List? A famous, Oscar award-winning movie on a story completely separate from American culture, and yet so intimately apart of German society and history. My point is that you don’t really see other countries producing movies on the US (The Artist being an outlier), and it actually seems a little weird to imagine that they would.

Finally, the reason this article stood out (aside from a rather dull pool of competition) is the fascinating way individual cultures view one another. The misperceptions and “lost-in-translation” nuances make the study of other cultures so interesting, and I think this article captured it well.