If I landed on Mars in a version of a Martian secondary school I would be able to teach. This is comforting. I’ve kind of known this anyway, since I had to entertain 200 Years 11 and 12 Chinese students for an hour in a hall in Yunnan province but nice to have the confirmation. I went to see the film The Class on the weekend. The French title is better: “Between the walls”. This title references the small, intense, claustrophobic world which is the essence of the teaching experience. As an adult, it can be lonely and frustrating but also intimate. Director Cantet creates the sense of frustration really well, especially in the first half of the film. The teacher, played by the guy who wrote the book which underpins the film, a man who IS a teacher, is trying to teach some grammar. It’s boring, not pitched at where the kids are at and, as the kids point out, seemingly irrelevant. It’s high culture, formal speech. All English teachers have been there at some time; “Why do we need to know this?” As a viewer, it’s incredibly hard to endure. It’s like being in the classroom. All the teachers in the audience (and there were lots – all my age, daggy shorts, ill-fitting T shirts, little white middle aged stick legs and a paunch or three) were aching to shout “Stop! There are better ways of doing this!”
I was thrown back into the tussle that teaching can be; the tussle for control, order, engagement, forward progress. The way momentum can shift so fast to knock you off balance. The callousness of teenagers. The smell of blood. It can be pretty primal. Francois, the teacher, doesn’t have much fun. This film is about as real a narrative about the job as any I’ve seen.
The second half of the film focuses on a student in trouble. It’s more dramatic but no less real. I have seen teachers escalate trouble, intentionally and by accident, about a thousand times in the 19 years I was a teacher. And I’ve done it myself. Probably more than I want to remember. Easy to critique from the back of the room but you try being the one up the front with 25 lounging adolescents ripe for a bit of a struggle. Francois fucks up. He means well but he fucks up. And then it kind of goes pear-shaped for everyone because the school is bound to support the institutional power relationships. Bound in a kind of unstated and complex arrangement of power, authority and support. Bound because there is a tacit agreement with the people who are in the front line doing the intimate and personal thing that is teaching that you will support them in the process. So what the viewer gains is a small taste of the struggle for a school when a student pushes the last boundary. The film conveys a sense of the investment made in the child, the relationship, the sense of loss at the waste of the efforts of all. And a despair at what might happen to the kid. And anger of course and sometimes relief. The common good argument. It’s all there in this classy film – pun intended.
Lots of critics have written about the way the film has been constructed – student volunteers, loose plot. The success of the film is down to its essential truthfulness; the people making it wanted to show what the work of a teacher is – tedium and all. I’ve been talking about the job with people I work with; we were talking about lesson plans and I admitted that I probably hadn’t done one since about my second year of teaching. I wasn’t much of a teacher then but they didn’t suit me as a way of organising myself. What I ended up saying in that conversation is that your success as a teacher partly depends on pretty quickly having a good sense of how you wanted to be in Role, capital “R” role, and the closer that the Capital R role is to your own sense of self, the better. Then your persona is consistent and predictable and genuinely grounded. It‘s not a stretch – you’d be able to feel, as Francois perhaps didn’t – that where he was heading with kids was down a whole lot of alleyways that were dead-ends. Maybe.
The Monthly critic Luke Davis ends his review of this film by saying “Francois is like the character Glory Boughton in the Marilynn Robinson novel Home who comes to understand, of the children she taught for many years, that her role as a teacher had essentially been that of “helping them assume their humanity.” On first reading, this resonated but it’s not the kind of language which Australians could use about themselves. I see it as trying to have kids get a sharper sense of themselves and the wider world; of what makes it all tick and what they think about it. And why. And to be curious about what other people think. That’s about it. And some skills to communicate. That’s it. That’s enough. (and BTW - I think Luke's pushing it a bit with this description of Francois - calling a couple of teenage girls "skanks" might be a natural human reaction to an incident in the film, but this and the ensuing events hardly amount to helping those particular kids "assume their humanity".)
I haven’t written enough here about fun. Those kids looked like they’d be fun. I taught in schools like this for most of my teaching life and there is lots of fun to be had, lots of interest to make you hang around amidst the tedium of perrenial staffroom stuff, government directives, union meetings, students wearing caps in class and the rest. The film triggered one of my ongoing desires – to teach again. It comes and goes and is tempered by the memory of the boot-full of correction that dogged my life. Maybe I’ll go back one day.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
How you look at life?
Been mulling this over in terms of my life - Justice Michael Kirby is reported as saying "You have to look at life as if it's a grand nineteenth century novel. A Joseph Conrad tale. This highway robbery, that love affair, now this time of servitude. And so on." Been wondering if my life is like a 19th century novel or some other form. It's easier to describe others - the guy I work with - his life is like a military handbook; marked by strategy and defensive play. Mine - I'm not so sure...
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Life is short and then you die
The length of a film is not the best grounds for choosing which one to watch but the over 40’s Melbourne temperatures of last week made the decision easy. Find the longest film on offer at the closest cinema. And so I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it more than I expected even though I have an automatic resistance to these kinds of films. By this I mean extremely polished, expensive, emotionally manipulative films from the Hollywood stable. I don’t like crying over crap or having sentiment front and centre as a device. I don’t much like Brad Pitt as an actor either. Less pretty is good. And this film is all about pretty – in lots of ways. (And on the Brad topic, I loved this critique of him from film critic A O Scott in the New York Times; “Mr. Pitt seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression”. Originally John Travolta was to have had the role; he would have been a better choice.)
So, what‘s to like? Almost every scene looks like a scene from a picture-story book, with the exception of the “modern” scenes which contrast nicely. The historical scenes are filmed in a luminous sort of candlelight which makes then look both rich and mysterious. I’m sure that part of the reason for this would have been the need to cleverly manage the process of ageing Brad backwards; he is born in the guise of a very old man and becomes younger as the film develops. So soft lighting is important; as the Brad character, Benjamin becomes younger, his co-star, Cate Blanchett, playing Daisy, has to age. The scenes are visually striking; lush and dramatic. It's a lovely film to look at.
The picture story book effect provides the film with licence to be melodramatic. A baby is close to being thrown in the river by his father, a tugboat is blown to bits at war, a woman is knocked down by a car, Hurricane Katrina is whirling round the edges of the modern story. It’s a fable. And provided you accept that it’s a fable, it’s quite satisfying.
A lot of critics have rightly criticised the lack of characterisation in the film. Usually this matters to me but I think this is a film about a larger topic; the passage of time and how humans manage it. It’s about the brief ephemeral intersections of contact and about loss. Loss caused by death and loss caused when people move on or move out of your life.
The most poignant scene for me was late in the film. Benjamin and Daisy intersect many times as she ages and he goes in the opposite direction. After a gap of several years, Benjamin walks through the door of her dance studio and stands, looking at her. She doesn’t initially recognise him. Her face is lined, she is a middle-aged woman. He is a young man, glowing with all the gorgeousness of youth. My mind went immediately to my recent meeting with Geoff, a man I lived with a long time ago. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and so meeting again, were confronted by physical change, by memories of the relationship we had shared and by what was left - nothing really. I felt a sense of loss – not that we no longer had a relationship but that there was nothing left now. No yearning, no nothing. I had the “So what’s it all for?” feeling. It made me feel terribly, terribly sad.
The focus on aging also made me think about my father and his own aging process, the pain of it. It’s painful watching my father go through this. Painful, sad and frustrating. The world becomes smaller and more circumscribed. But not necessarily. Geoff is not in my current life and making that decision decades ago was a good decision. What I have now is rich, lively and full of opportunities. Some options have closed down but I don’t feel like my world is getting smaller; if anything it seems more open-ended and full of promise.
The film comes from a short story written by F Scott Fitzgerald, who had an ongoing preoccupation with the ephemerality of things. I haven’t read it yet but you can download it. The screenplay was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump. I was pleased when I read this – not because I liked Forrest Gump much but I was reminded of that film while I was watching the Benjamin Button film and I couldn’t work out why – something to do with the over-orchestration of effects and emotions, I think. It’s made me want to go and re-read Scott Fitzgerald which is no bad thing…
So, what‘s to like? Almost every scene looks like a scene from a picture-story book, with the exception of the “modern” scenes which contrast nicely. The historical scenes are filmed in a luminous sort of candlelight which makes then look both rich and mysterious. I’m sure that part of the reason for this would have been the need to cleverly manage the process of ageing Brad backwards; he is born in the guise of a very old man and becomes younger as the film develops. So soft lighting is important; as the Brad character, Benjamin becomes younger, his co-star, Cate Blanchett, playing Daisy, has to age. The scenes are visually striking; lush and dramatic. It's a lovely film to look at.
The picture story book effect provides the film with licence to be melodramatic. A baby is close to being thrown in the river by his father, a tugboat is blown to bits at war, a woman is knocked down by a car, Hurricane Katrina is whirling round the edges of the modern story. It’s a fable. And provided you accept that it’s a fable, it’s quite satisfying.
A lot of critics have rightly criticised the lack of characterisation in the film. Usually this matters to me but I think this is a film about a larger topic; the passage of time and how humans manage it. It’s about the brief ephemeral intersections of contact and about loss. Loss caused by death and loss caused when people move on or move out of your life.
The most poignant scene for me was late in the film. Benjamin and Daisy intersect many times as she ages and he goes in the opposite direction. After a gap of several years, Benjamin walks through the door of her dance studio and stands, looking at her. She doesn’t initially recognise him. Her face is lined, she is a middle-aged woman. He is a young man, glowing with all the gorgeousness of youth. My mind went immediately to my recent meeting with Geoff, a man I lived with a long time ago. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and so meeting again, were confronted by physical change, by memories of the relationship we had shared and by what was left - nothing really. I felt a sense of loss – not that we no longer had a relationship but that there was nothing left now. No yearning, no nothing. I had the “So what’s it all for?” feeling. It made me feel terribly, terribly sad.
The focus on aging also made me think about my father and his own aging process, the pain of it. It’s painful watching my father go through this. Painful, sad and frustrating. The world becomes smaller and more circumscribed. But not necessarily. Geoff is not in my current life and making that decision decades ago was a good decision. What I have now is rich, lively and full of opportunities. Some options have closed down but I don’t feel like my world is getting smaller; if anything it seems more open-ended and full of promise.
The film comes from a short story written by F Scott Fitzgerald, who had an ongoing preoccupation with the ephemerality of things. I haven’t read it yet but you can download it. The screenplay was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump. I was pleased when I read this – not because I liked Forrest Gump much but I was reminded of that film while I was watching the Benjamin Button film and I couldn’t work out why – something to do with the over-orchestration of effects and emotions, I think. It’s made me want to go and re-read Scott Fitzgerald which is no bad thing…
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Slap
The empty suburbs
propel them in a fruitless
quest for connection.
Yes, the demon haiku strikes again. Maybe it's better than the "reflection demon" which lurked the other morning - I caught sight of a middle-aged woman with fat arms, wearing my shirt, in the window of the train. Aaargh!
More of The Slap later, but it's definitely part of the zeitgeist. Let if be recorded that I didn't love it but I found the first two thirds quite engrossing...
propel them in a fruitless
quest for connection.
Yes, the demon haiku strikes again. Maybe it's better than the "reflection demon" which lurked the other morning - I caught sight of a middle-aged woman with fat arms, wearing my shirt, in the window of the train. Aaargh!
More of The Slap later, but it's definitely part of the zeitgeist. Let if be recorded that I didn't love it but I found the first two thirds quite engrossing...
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
What if?
You only had a few minutes to pack your bags and escape some horror. When I went overseas for the first time, I stored my first quilt and some photos with my friend Jane but I've become blase now and don't bother doing this when I travel. However, I would be upset if my jewellery, my photos and Dora's paintings went astray.
I've been thinking that one of the reasons I like reading history is that wondering about how I would've coped. Would I have been one of the first to die in the Holocaust or would I have been one of the SonderKommando? I think I would have been pathetic. I've been thinking about how people surrvive as I start Kokoda, a big fat book about WW11 and what happened just north of us.
It begins with the Reverend Nelson, a Christian missionary who, in the face of the Japanese anchoring just off shore, collects together his watch, tobacco, a notebook, pemcil, some hamkies and a compass. I like the inclusion of the hankies, I go into slight panic attack mode if I have no hanky. He is accompanied by 2 women; one of whom is called Mavis Parkinson who says "Scrummy! A real naval battle and we are here watching it. I do wish we knew if they are our troops." (They weren't!) Her colleague, May May Hayman collected up some cans of food in preparation for escape. Mavis took a change of clothes and Rev Benson also threw in some mosquito nest, old blankets and intriguingly, a square of calico. Mayber he was a closet quilter.
In contrast the Japanese troops had a big bag of rice, some bullets, 2 hand grenades, a steel helmet and a toothbrush. They were instructed that if they were thrown in the water, they were to sing songs until help came!
The locals were best prepared for any contingency. Some of the tribes had only just given up head-hunting but still had traditions of "living food", of keeping people alive and just slicing off a bit of leg or buttock when things got tough. I have no stomach for this sort of survival...
I've been thinking that one of the reasons I like reading history is that wondering about how I would've coped. Would I have been one of the first to die in the Holocaust or would I have been one of the SonderKommando? I think I would have been pathetic. I've been thinking about how people surrvive as I start Kokoda, a big fat book about WW11 and what happened just north of us.
It begins with the Reverend Nelson, a Christian missionary who, in the face of the Japanese anchoring just off shore, collects together his watch, tobacco, a notebook, pemcil, some hamkies and a compass. I like the inclusion of the hankies, I go into slight panic attack mode if I have no hanky. He is accompanied by 2 women; one of whom is called Mavis Parkinson who says "Scrummy! A real naval battle and we are here watching it. I do wish we knew if they are our troops." (They weren't!) Her colleague, May May Hayman collected up some cans of food in preparation for escape. Mavis took a change of clothes and Rev Benson also threw in some mosquito nest, old blankets and intriguingly, a square of calico. Mayber he was a closet quilter.
In contrast the Japanese troops had a big bag of rice, some bullets, 2 hand grenades, a steel helmet and a toothbrush. They were instructed that if they were thrown in the water, they were to sing songs until help came!
The locals were best prepared for any contingency. Some of the tribes had only just given up head-hunting but still had traditions of "living food", of keeping people alive and just slicing off a bit of leg or buttock when things got tough. I have no stomach for this sort of survival...
Rabbit
Returning to the haiku tradition for Rabbit Redux:
"Suck it and see" is what
Rabbit might have thought
If he thought at all.
Just finished Rabbit is Rich which I loved. Will post some more about this novel which is now almost 30 years old.
"Suck it and see" is what
Rabbit might have thought
If he thought at all.
Just finished Rabbit is Rich which I loved. Will post some more about this novel which is now almost 30 years old.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Wrangling India
It’s worth seeing Slumdog Millionaire just for the Bombay character which is ever-present. The film begins with a long chase scene through the slums; two small boys followed by a policeman. They have been playing cricket on the tarmac of an airport runway. As you do. It’s a great opening sequence that sets up the whole film; these kids are resilient, cheeky survivors in a city that requires these qualities.
Mumbai/ Bombay was the first Indian city I ever went to. Here is what I wrote back in 2000 about arriving:
The next day I planned to go into the “city” to go to the museum. I caught the suburban train. It cost 2 cents. The description above doesn’t do it justice. I missed several trains because they were too full and people sort of waved me off. It took me a while to realise that I was trying to get into the wrong carriage; I should be in the women’s carriages which were at one end of the train. My journey took a long time. It’s no wonder I found India hard going on that trip; there was no cushion of protection from ‘real’ India as I experienced in later trips. It was like being hit over the head with a shovel. I looked at a lot of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire with a kind of wonderment that I managed it at all. And have been back. And love it.
An English guy, Danny Boyle, made Slumdog Millionaire. I haven’t seen any of his other films. He said that working in India was not like “wrangling India’ as one interviewer suggested; it was like “accumulating India”. It’s a version of “Don’t fight the Ganges”, the very sage advice I learnt on my first trip. The notion of wrangling anything in India is kind of hopeful. Boyle said "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy." Ironically it's a film about survival when the very process of making the film must have felt about as scary and out of control.
If you accept the film as homage to Bombay, it works about as well as it could. Like being in India you need to go with the heavy melodrama and the obvious villains and innocents. It’s not subtle. The theme of exploitation of slum kids was done a whole lot better by Rohinton Mistry in the novel A Fine Balance and more recently in Animal's People by Indra Sinha. Jamal, the main character in the film, is only interesting for what happens to him and for his doggedness and honesty; he is otherwise without screen exuberance. I probably agree with The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis who says "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit." All true but Boyle gets away with it because of Bombay.
As a postscript, I read Paul Theroux's book The Elephanta Suite recently. I have not loved his writing in the past but I really liked this book which is a collection of three novellas. It's very very self conscious fiction; it's not his comfort zone. It doesn't flow sweetly. But he is wrestling with the encountering of American and Indian cultures and I loved what he was trying to say about the process. Here is a snippet from a review in The Guardian: "Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' "That's India for you - big enough for all these stories AND Slumdog and more...
Mumbai/ Bombay was the first Indian city I ever went to. Here is what I wrote back in 2000 about arriving:
“I had been wondering how long it would take for the work 'teeming' to enter the thought process- I had to wait no longer than the Qantas In-flight video where Mumbai was described as "magnificent and teeming" , a "city of contrasts" - great cliché writing. A night journey into Mumbai- hot, heaps of men in the streets, zooming little 3 wheeler auto cabs, no women to be seen anywhere, my driver attempting to keep me awake (4.30 am Melb time) by making a left turn in front of a bus going straight ahead. Buses are invincible in India - just scary in their intent.Unlike a lot of my life, I remember this arrival very vividly. I flew in late at night into a world where people careered round in the little mechanised autocabs. I caught one to my hotel in Juhu, a beachside suburb close to the airport which features a bit in Slumdog Millionaire. Juhu was a strange mix of seeming hipness (lots of bars and clubs) and deadset sleaze. Once inside my hotel room I bounced off the walls. I felt frightened and vulnerable. It was my first time overseas by myself.
A day in Mumbai - caught the train into the 'city' squashed into a carriage full of saris and Jill in her stolid navy! Lovely being with the women and when I finally worked out that I was blocking the way out of the train (10 stops later) they welcomed me and gave me a seat.”
The next day I planned to go into the “city” to go to the museum. I caught the suburban train. It cost 2 cents. The description above doesn’t do it justice. I missed several trains because they were too full and people sort of waved me off. It took me a while to realise that I was trying to get into the wrong carriage; I should be in the women’s carriages which were at one end of the train. My journey took a long time. It’s no wonder I found India hard going on that trip; there was no cushion of protection from ‘real’ India as I experienced in later trips. It was like being hit over the head with a shovel. I looked at a lot of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire with a kind of wonderment that I managed it at all. And have been back. And love it.
An English guy, Danny Boyle, made Slumdog Millionaire. I haven’t seen any of his other films. He said that working in India was not like “wrangling India’ as one interviewer suggested; it was like “accumulating India”. It’s a version of “Don’t fight the Ganges”, the very sage advice I learnt on my first trip. The notion of wrangling anything in India is kind of hopeful. Boyle said "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy." Ironically it's a film about survival when the very process of making the film must have felt about as scary and out of control.
If you accept the film as homage to Bombay, it works about as well as it could. Like being in India you need to go with the heavy melodrama and the obvious villains and innocents. It’s not subtle. The theme of exploitation of slum kids was done a whole lot better by Rohinton Mistry in the novel A Fine Balance and more recently in Animal's People by Indra Sinha. Jamal, the main character in the film, is only interesting for what happens to him and for his doggedness and honesty; he is otherwise without screen exuberance. I probably agree with The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis who says "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit." All true but Boyle gets away with it because of Bombay.
As a postscript, I read Paul Theroux's book The Elephanta Suite recently. I have not loved his writing in the past but I really liked this book which is a collection of three novellas. It's very very self conscious fiction; it's not his comfort zone. It doesn't flow sweetly. But he is wrestling with the encountering of American and Indian cultures and I loved what he was trying to say about the process. Here is a snippet from a review in The Guardian: "Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' "That's India for you - big enough for all these stories AND Slumdog and more...
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