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Spielberg And The Requiem Mass

Decent Essays

In this film the director used diegetic sound combined with digitally added music to emphasize the chaos of what the Nazi soldiers were doing. The soldiers shouting out and screaming in German over top of the Requiem Mass which was playing loudly in the foreground accompanied by the exaggerated sound of shovels breaking through the ground, and the hissing sound of the fire together created thick polyphonic sound. This overwhelms us, and emphasizes the action, and the severity of what they are doing, attempting to wipe a whole race from history. The soldiers in this scene are chaotic, desperately attempting to hide what they have done, and the loud, screaming song of the Requiem Mass adds to this. This chaos and desperation also suggests that they knew what they were doing was wrong as if they felt it was completely justified they wouldn’t have attempted to hide it. …show more content…

Because they were considered vermin, subhuman, they didn’t receive the luxury of a funeral, or now even a grave, they were just tossed into the fire, like a ‘rag’ as Amon Goeth referred to them as, not caring if they had a name, a family or a past. Because in the Nazi’s eyes they weren’t considered human, none of that no longer mattered, they were Jew’s. The Requiem Mass is a prayer for the dead so by playing it at a volume that drowned everything else out, it was singing remorse for the countless victims. It was also expressing that there were to many murdered for an individual, personal mourning of their passing, and names no longer mattered, so they all joined together fighting to be heard above the chaos, fighting over each other, in an attempt to be more than just a number. Steven Spielberg used polyphonic sound very effectively to convey these messages and affect the viewer with the severity of what really

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