In a stroke of well-orchestrated timing, given that September happens to be when school goes back, this month sees the DVD and theater release of La loi du collège (School Law), by Mariana Otero (in stores on the 16th) and the Golden Palm at the last Cannes Film Festival, Entre les murs (The Class), by Laurent Cantet (released on the 24th in France).
The first pioneered a new genre, the documentary series, in relating in six episodes the 1993 school year at the Garcia Lorca Junior High School in St Denis, in the suburbs of Paris.
The second is fiction that takes a school as its setting. For his fourth feature film (after Human Resources, Time Out and Heading South), Laurent Cantet has adapted the book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, which described a French teacher’s year at a junior high in the north east of Paris.
Two “classroom movies”
“Classroom movies” are practically a genre in their own right. Among those that spring to mind, there are comedies (Les Sous Doués (The Under-gifted) by Zidi, Kindergarten Cop by Reitman: the classroom as a backdrop for fooling around), and tragedies (school as the first of oppressive institutions – Young Torless by Schlondorff, If by Lindsay Anderson, etc.). In the second case, sometimes a teacher who is “not like the others” lets in a breeze of freedom (a romantic version as in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, or libertarian style as in Seeking Asylum by Marco Ferreri). Sometimes, too, things are reversed and the violence of the outside world bursts in (Blackboard Jungle by Richard Brooks back in 1955, Class 84 by Mark Lester, It All Starts Today by Tavernier or in a completely different style, Elephant by Gus Van Sant…).
Logically, this fertile playground most often attracts filmmakers interested in political and social issues or groups (Ferreri, Kiarostami, Philibert, Tavernier, Wiseman…).
Mariana Otero and Laurent Cantet undeniably belong here. But School Law and The Class do not fit into these categories. Heirs of a complex world in which “big causes” have disappeared, these two films make do with presenting characters grappling with the complexity of their situation. Both of them see school as a watching ground for “human chaos”. Mariana Otero says she did not want to make a film about learning, but about the law: how it is laid down, negotiated and practiced. Cantet’s film is in the same style. What matters here is language. He looks at how speech circulates and the relationship to power and authority, rather than a depiction of learning in the strict sense. For both filmmakers, school is where people confront one another, size each other up, show respect and try to get along. These films are “team players” (The Class ends with a game of soccer between teachers and students), which doesn’t stand in the way of a few close-ups on certain characters. It’s not easy for a film to give equal airtime all the way.
A similar structure: the issue of time and space
To render this confrontation, the two of them chose to be both radical and modest. Both opted for the same “time and space”: a school year and the closed environment of a junior high school.
Classroom, staff room, corridors, yard and school principal’s office: it all happens here, in a life governed by bells (which sound strangely like an alarm at Garcia Lorca Junior High). Inside this space, there is a lot of noise and cameras are on full alert – 3 cameras for Laurent Cantet’s film and the flexibility of a small crew for Mariana Otero. They share an objective: revealing classroom drama by taking their time. One was filmed over a period of a whole year. The other was constructed around (separate) workshops for students and teachers.
By keeping off-screen the private lives of both teachers and students, psychology and overly obvious determinism is avoided. This was particularly risky for the fiction because the film gives little opportunity to identify with the characters, preferring to explore situations of interaction rather than inner worlds.
Fiction / Documentary
In Laurent Cantet’s film, we leave the school grounds only once: at the start of the film, François Marin has a coffee at the bar of a café, then enters the school with two colleagues. The same is true in Mariana Otero’s documentary: a group of teachers, tired of strikes that don’t get anywhere, decide, as a last resort, to visit the School Inspectorate.
The out-of-school scene in The Class is individual. In School Law it is collective. This difference indicates contrasting approaches. For the sake of efficiency, Cantet focuses on the individual, structuring the film around attentive close-ups on faces. During the film, a story emerges. The teacher veers onto slippery ground. Drama slowly builds. The film ends with the expulsion of a student. For Otero, the camera is hand-held. She films the yard and the meetings. There are more people per shot. She takes in the “whole” school.
Paradoxically, the strength of each film lies in its ability to take on the characteristics of the “other” genre. In School Law characters disappear or reappear depending on events. Stories follow on from one another, which makes relevant the use of the series. On the contrary, in The Class, the actor-students and Bégaudeau, who plays the role of the teacher himself, contribute extra reality to the fiction.
Similar intentions
It is no accident that the classrooms chosen were in junior highs with a reputation for being difficult. In junior highs, the whole process of social sorting has not yet taken place. And in so-called tough neighborhoods, the issue of “getting along” is even more urgent.
These films use school to reflect their era, assuming that the outside will invite itself in – starting with the issue of identity and origins. As Khoumba and Esmeralda say to their teacher François Marin, why use the name Bill in an example, rather than Aïssata?
Furthermore, both of them incidentally raise the fundamental (and unresolved) question of what school can pass down today and reveal a world grappling with a possible breakdown in meaning.
We hear over and over, “You move, you run, you shout, you fly, why do you come to school?” looping a teacher’s sentence like a nursery rhyme in the credits of School Law. Fifteen years later, Henriette echoes her in The Class by saying to her teacher at the end of the year, “I didn’t learn anything this year. I don’t get what we’re doing.”
Through François Marin and the staff at Garcia Lorca Junior High neither of these two films gives an answer but they both give the question a real workout.
Emmanuelle Mougne.
More details about School Law available now on DVD and VOD.