As part of the BBC Four on BBC Two series there has been a number of excellent European movies being shown on BBC Two including the German movie Das Experiment, which was shown on Tuesday night.
The film is a thriller based upon the real-life experiment carried out in 1971 at Stanford University by a team of researchers led by Professor Philip Zimbardo. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. Volunteers played the roles of guard and prisoner, and lived in a mock prison. However, the experiment quickly got out of hand, and was ended early.
Interestingly I didn’t find it as shocking an experience as I did when I first saw it a couple of years ago. Maybe watching Big Brother and reading the accounts of the abuse suffered by prisoners at Abu Ghraib and in Guantanamo Bay has desensitized me to this sort of thing.
IMDB link for Das Experiment
Purchase the movie from Amazon.co.uk VHS | DVD
The official site of the Stanford prison experiment is at http://www.prisonexp.org/
The article about the Stanford prison experiment at the Wikipedia also makes comparison to the events at Abu Ghraib.
