SCHOOLS OF UNIVERSE

St. Valentines Day 1900. A party of schoolgirls set out from an exclusive boarding school to go on a picnic at Hanging Rock, an awe-inspiring and sacred Aboriginal site. During the heat of the afternoon, four girls decided to climb higher into the rock but one turned back and told a teacher who then followed the others. The women who went up onto the rock disappeared and despite exhaustive searches were never found, bar one girl, who had no recollection of anything that had happened to her.

This is not a true story, but is handled so as to give the impression that it uses facts as a starting block from where to start dealing with uneasy and delicate subjects such as the strain between seftlers and Aborigines, and the suggestions of sexual repression.

The soft focus, exquisite photography, and unusual lighting effects create a dream-like atmosphere which is far more disorienting than sentimental. There are no conclusions offered as to what might have happened that day, leaving one's imagination to run wild with slight suggestions of haunting mysticism.

By EUFS

Although Robin Williams had several serious roles before this one, DPS opened viewers' eyes to just how good an actor he really is. Williams stars as John Keating, an unorthodox professor at Welton Academy who inspires his students to seize the day. Excellent acting and directing make this one of Weir's best.

John Boorman's reminiscences of childhood during the London Blitz form the basis of this unconventional but believable comedy. This film is filled with memorable characters and a child's sense of wonder at the War. There are lots of films made about World War II. Some are idealised - and just about any English language film made during the War was - and some are more realistic. There are at least some films made about the British home front but very, very rare is the film that does not idealise. You get this vision of a dedicated British people suffering bombs and bullets with an idealised British stiff upper lip. Many seem inspired by Mrs. Miniver, John Boorman, whose films usually are abstract and in the fantasy genre, has turned out a realistic reminiscence of the WWII British home front which probably has more than a little autobiography. Hope and Glory is a child's-eye view of the home front, though we see what is happening with the understanding of an adult.

2nd one in the USA by Gus Van Sant


A low angle shot, camera looking up at the blue sky as the clouds float by. A lamp post and electric wires create a perfect frame. Evening draws in and darkness envelops the beautiful sky however the camera remains steady, looking up to the summer sky as if the filmmaker is waiting for a cue from the heavens to tell his story. This is how Gus Van Sant?s Elephant opens. And this film is supposed to be on something as horrific as a high school shoot out.


Elephant is a work of an auteur. It?s so original in its style that people used to conventional storytelling could feel uneasy. One often felt as if the film is shot without a script and the filmmaker has simply spent a day in a high school and edited the footage. However the ease with which camera follows the characters and an un-underlined manner in which events unfold is not easy to achieve.

Gus Van Sant?s Elephant almost looks like a case study which doesn?t go out of its way to find a reason behind the things but in an impassionate way chronicles rather calm lives of students of a high school that?s destined to undergo a sea change. Although we know all along and the filmmaker gives us ample hints throughout about the shootout that?s about to happen, his style is such that we don?t anticipate and even if we know that shootouts are happening, we don?t feel the need to feel anything.

The filmmaker takes us through the high school life through a cross section of students whose lives criss-cross and we keep coming back to the same event from different perspectives. However none of these lives are more significant than the other. Their stories happen to be told only because they fall in the gaze of camera and since they fall in the gaze of the camera we follow their lives till the end.

The camera moves effortlessly in the film and there are many long takes where camera follows characters usually from behind. The most remarkable such sequence comes towards the end when amidst the firing one black student Benny casually and without any signs of shock or fear goes to the shooter, only to be shot. A heroic walk to an unglorified death.




Elephant is one of such films where treatment takes an upper seat than the story. Everyone know what the story is about so much so that the director doesn?t even care to hide it in the turns and bends of the plot. One of my favorite scenes is where Alex, the shooter plays Beethoven while the other shooter Eric is playing a gory video game. Gus van Sant uses Beethoven?s this composition as a refrain throughout the film.

Another startling sequence that kind of sets the motion is the opening scene where the son takes over the steering wheel from his drunken father. Is this a comment on the society?

Why the film is called Elephant remains a question for me. My guess was that it refers to the story of the ?Blind man and the elephant? where three (or four?) blind men interpret an elephant differently. However have found a better reason at IMDB that says that the title has been taken from a 1989 Television series ?Elephant? that ?comes from the writer Bernard MacLaverty, who said that the Troubles were like having an elephant in your living room?.

People could also find elephant little slow, wandering and not to the point. If you find it like that in the first fifteen minutes, my suggestion is don?t watch the movie at all. Elephant is an unconventional film that requires a different sensibility to savor it. If you don?t have it, you might find the film boring, arty and too intellectual.

2 important works about schools. The first one in Germany by Dennis Gansel.

61st Cannes Film Festival.

FOR most kids, school is where they go to get bored,? says the charismatic star of The Class, François Bégaudeau. ?And six or seven years of your life is a long time to be bored. We need to change the method a bit. It could be a more fun place, more lively, we could do things better.?

A headmaster?s son, Bégaudeau spent a year teaching French in a difficult neighbourhood of Paris after graduating. In 2006 he wrote about his experiences, and the resulting film, directed by Laurent Cantet, is based largely on that book.

Playing the teacher in the film was ?great fun? - certainly more enjoyable than the real job - and the rowdy pupils, of north African, Caribbean or Chinese descent, seem to have relished playing versions of themselves. They even marched up the red carpet, under camera flashes, to collect the Palme d?Or at the Cannes film festival; and now they are up for an Oscar for best foreign film.

?I said to myself, ?Make the most of these moments, it will probably only happen once in your life?,? recalls 16-year-old Angelica Sancio, who plays one of the pupils. ?It was crazy.?

People used to point at us, call us trash,? says Sancio, whose parents are from Guadeloupe. ?But we won. We beat the greats of cinema.?

Bégaudeau, 37, a wiry figure with stubbly cheeks and a satisfied smile, dreams of a revolution in school where what is taught is more relevant to pupils? lives.

?When I hear teachers say some pupil doesn?t have a good memory, I say, ?Ask him the 22 players selected for the French team in the World Cup. He?ll tell you. It?s not a question of memory. He?ll remember the players because that interests him - because he likes football. So give him pleasure in what you teach and you?ll see.?

?For too long school has been a centre of selection. You do an exercise and you mark it and there are some who pass and some who fail,? he says. ?But school shouldn?t be like that. It is humiliating for them. You can?t guess what it?s like to wake up every morning knowing all day that you?re going to fail.?

François Truffaut?s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut?s life-long cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut?s own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime. The film marks Truffaut?s passage from leading critic of the French New Wave to his emergence as one of Europe?s most brilliant auteurs.

A lumbering, full-grown pig, muzzled through a leash that has been tied around its snout, is led outside the barnyard doors of an unidentified farm and into a clearing where a group of apparent bystanders cavalierly await its slaughter. The skittish, herky-jerky video image taken from the handheld camera moves in relatively tight side view close-up to frame the head of the animal as the farmer places the barrel of a revolver onto its forehead between the eyes and, amidst its persistent (and disturbingly unnerving) suffocated grunts and squeals, pulls the trigger - the pig's body immediately collapsing to the ground, its limbs still involuntary twitching from the residual neurological response impulse to the bullet's fatal impact. The video image is then curiously paused and rewound in slow motion, the soundtrack audibly slowed to a cadent, monotonic bass to the point where the origin of the sound becomes strangely alien, disembodied, and haunted. The viewer of the amateur footage is revealed to be its unseen videographer, an adolescent named Benny (Arno Frisch), who shutters himself for hours in his dark, cluttered room perpetually immersed in the self-induced, often compounded stimuli of loud music, rented videos, and broadcast television, his view of the outside world paradoxically reduced to a live video feed onto a monitor from a camera that has been positioned to point out of his shade-drawn window and onto the street. His distracted, emotionally distant father (Ulrich Mühe) and equally disaffected, obliging mother (Angela Winkler) seem tolerant of Benny's hermeticism, even exploiting his estranged, sentinel-like omnipresence in the household and penchant for video surveillance to spy on their older daughter Evi's suspect activities after moving out of the family home, as she uses the well-appointed apartment to host a party designed to generate revenue through a pyramid scheme in her parents' absence. It is a convenient domestic arrangement of tacit mutualism (and mutual disregard) that soon reveals the moral crisis innate in their dysfunctional relationship when Benny befriends a seemingly bored and aimless young girl (Ingrid Stassner) who transfixedly watches the random features displayed from the shop window of a local video store each afternoon after school, and brings her home to share in his obsessive, alienated reviewing of the slaughter footage.

The second installment on the correlative effects of urban alienation and media violence in contemporary society in what would become known as Michael Haneke's trilogy of "emotional glaciation" (along with The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance), Benny's Video is a provocative, confrontational, and indelibly haunting exposition on isolation, rootlessness, displaced turmoil, and human desolation. Using the opening sequence of the animal slaughter home video as Benny replays, hyperextends the moment of death through frame by frame pauses, or otherwise manipulates the resulting images captured on tape into increasingly indistinguishable resolution and textured, decontextualized audiovisual patterns of signal noise, Haneke illustrates the underlying process of cognitive abstraction - and consequently, systematic dissonance - that serve to not only dissociate the innate violence of the act with its logical consequence, but also blur the distinction between the experiential levels of fictional and real violence through the synthesis (and contextual anesthetization) of public information and entertainment in the creation of a commercially viable, commodified consumer media product. Moreover, through the narrative incorporation of Evi's pyramid scheme, Haneke also provides an intrinsic structural correlation to the collapse - and perversion - of the nuclear family in the absence of communication, trust, moral guidance, and emotional engagement as the ever-widening confidence game reveals an overarching socio-behavioral pattern of self-interest, a mindset that compels the individual to become progressively distanced from the initial source of the "investment" in order to realize profit, and the requirement of the participant's covert complicity (and cover-up) in the perpetuation of the scheme. It is this underlying disarticulation of moral responsibility and dissociation of cause and effect in the wake of media saturated infotainment and socially fostered, empty shell games of deflected accountability that is inevitably reflected in the film's eerie prescience on its examination of the consequence of desensitizing technology and the pervasiveness of media violence - a senseless and tragic portrait of empty privilege, alienated communication, and despiritualized bankruptcy.

Jule is a waitress that can't make ends meet. She moves in with her boyfriend Peter and his friend Jan, two young men united by their passion to change the world. But Jule has a secret: A past auto accident has burdened her with lifetime payments to successful businessman, Hardenberg. Peter and Jan also have a secret: They are the notorious "Edukators," mysterious perpetrators who break into expensive homes of the local yacht club members as an act of political rebellion. They wreak havoc and leave notes that read, "Your days of plenty are numbered."

While Peter is away on holiday, secrets between Jan and Jules are disclosed and feelings between them intensify. They impulsively break into the home of the businessman to whom Jules is indebted. But their growing passion has made them careless and when they're forced to return to the villa the following night to retrieve a forgotten cell phone, Hardenberg surprises them.

They have no choice but to call Peter for help, even if it means his finding out about their betrayal.

The trio makes a rash decision and their futures (as well as Hardenberg's) are quaked. Ideals are tested as generations collide, passions rage, and loyalties shatter.

The Edukators is co-written and directed by Hans Weingartner and co-stars the rising international star Daniel Brühl of Goodbye Lenin. Fr. official web page.

P.S. I found this German film, 2004 more realistic than The Lives of Others, 2006. I believe that new German comers are not bad.

Bakhtay, where are you ?

I have enormous respect for writers and I don't subscribe to the auteur theory of film-making. When I direct a film, I don't try to be the author. It's self-evident to me that a film is a collaboration, in which, if anyone is the most important contributor, it's the writer. Still, what the writer has provided is only a stage in the process. What matters is that what is actually on the celluloid is a valuable experience and that there's a sense of authenticity about what you've created.
- Ken Loach

How are little boys made?
Take one new baby,
Poke it and toss it, force it and push it,
Leave it alone a lot, and never speak softly to it.
How are little girls made?
Take one new baby,
Cuddle it and coo at it, soothe it and calm it,
And never let it stray.
What are little boys made of?
Scrapes and pains, fears not shown,
Lessons learned the hard way,
Loneliness ingrown.
What are little girls made of?
Questions and dreams, secrets never told,
Trusts nurtured and betrayed,
Life waiting to unfold.

A modern classic in which Anderson minutely captures both the particular ethos of a public school and the general flavour of any structured community, thus achieving a clear allegorical force without sacrificing a whit of his exploration of an essentially British institution. The impeccable logic of the conclusion is in no way diminished by having been lifted from Vigo's Zéro de Conduite, made thirty-five years earlier. If... was also a timely film - shooting began two months before the events of May 1968 in Paris. Along with The White Bus, it put Anderson into a pretty high league; the major disappointment of O Lucky Man!, followed by the disastrous Britannia Hospital, took him back out of it again.

From the Saul Bass-inspired opening credit sequence of peeling, layered billboard posters, Almodóvar evokes the densely layered cinema of Alfred Hitchchock to create a reverent, yet continuously inventive, exquisitely realized, and brilliantly modulated comic melodrama in Bad Education. Ostensibly a story about a filmmaker (Fele Martinez) suffering from a creative block (who, as the film begins has resorted to pinching potential ideas from salacious tabloid news articles) who is visited by a former schoolmate and choirboy - now a struggling actor and occasional hustler who now goes by the stage name Angel (Gael García Bernal) (and whose only experience is from an obscure, third rate acting troupe called The Bumblebees) - with a disturbingly sensational, semi-autobiographical story of his abuse in the hands of the schoolmaster Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho), the film soon evolves into a deeply entangled tale of deception, closely guarded secrets, dubious allegiances, inscrutable motivation, and revenge. Richly (and ingeniously) told in intertwining realities of flashbacks, present day, and filmed re-enactments of Ignacio's deeply troubled life, the film achieves a delicate balance of tension, mystery, deception, and ambiguity (Zahara's introduction is through her performance of the song, Quizás, Quizás, Quizás). Recalling the decadence, creative process, and ambiguous and confused sexuality of Law of Desire, the film features Almodóvar's quintessentially bold, but elegant visual refinement, lush construction, tongue-in-cheek double entendres, surreal humor, and complex pulp narrative that have come to define his exhilarating, idiosyncratic cinema.

Ten year old Max (Oscar Copp) is an only child and is smitten by Manouche (Gypsy) jazz when he hears the guitar virtuoso Miraldo (Tchavolo Schmitt) play, in the Manouche neighbourhood of Strasbourg. He buys an old guitar and asks Miraldo to teach him. He is captivated by Swing (Lou Rech), a young gypsy girl, who is the same age as he is. He is fascinated by her charisma, self confidence and freedom and is drawn to the Manouche neighbourhood where music is an integral part of life.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous anti-war film ever made. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's novel, it focuses on a group of German teenagers who excitedly sign up to fight for their country in World War One after hearing their teacher speak enthusiastically for the cause. The boys' enthusiasm however soon vanishes when they come face to face with the reality of warfare. Bombings, gas attacks and hand-to-hand combat destroy any romantic views that might linger in their minds. On the Western front, death is almost obligatory.

An acknowledged masterwork, this film has over the years retained almost all of its potency. It works particularly well on the human level, transcending cultures and generations with its all-powerful pacifist message. Lewis Milestone's direction is very effective and the photography is simply unforgettable. The battle scenes aregruesomely realistic; nothing is glossed over.

A profoundly moving picture, All Quiet is required viewing for every single human being, especially those who still cling to the belief: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori".

By EUFS

In 2009, the novel became a symbol of opposition to President Sarkozy's restructuring of the French Education system. Mr Sarkozy had declared that the French system was so ridiculous and dusty that civil service entrance exams had included questions on La Princesse de Clèves. His comments were interpreted as an indication of his opinion that universities should prepare people for life in business, and not 'waste' time with such things as literature (he had made several other similar comments). As a result, during the long movement of university lecturers in 2009 against his proposals, public readings of La Princesse de Clèves were held in towns around the country. Sales of the novel rose rapidly.

Directly related to this, the novel was used by French filmmaker Christophe Honoré for his 2009 film "La Belle Personne". The plot of the film roughly follows that of the novel, changing the setting, however, to that of a modern-day french lycée (high school), thus quoting both the novel, and the reason for its contemporary fame.