Review
Culture
Education
6 min read

Back to school on the big screen

It’s back to school for many. Yaroslav Walker picks his favourite films capturing the friendship, the drama, and the expectation of school life and beyond.

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

School students walk across a playground confidently talking and laughing with us
The History Boys.
BBC Films.

The summer is coming to an end, the last BBQ embers are sputtering to sleep, the weather…appears not to have been told, at least in London! Sweltering! Most importantly of all, our children are back to school, nursery or college. In light of this momentous time of year here are my top five back to school film choices, one each for the last five decades, and some honourable mentions. 

1970s - American Grafitti 

A teenage couple dressed in 1950s clothes sit on a kerb in deep conversation.
Charles Martin Smith and Candy Clark in American Graffiti

American Graffiti isn’t just a lovely piece of nostalgia now, it was back then. A misty-eyed look back at 60s Americana, this film is packed with slicked-back hair, classic cars, diners with roller-skating waitresses, and the complexities of teenage romance. Four friends meet on the last day of summer to experience the joys of a California evening one last time before two of them jet off to college ‘back East’. Curt is unsure about his future and is even considering staying in his hometown. Steve is hubristically thrilled about the prospect of fleeing his humdrum life and even shedding his loving girlfriend for new conquests. Terry is insecure and simply desperate to prove he is as good as everyone else, and Milner is the older friend who never left town and is a local-legend drag-racer. Over the course of a long night they go their separate ways, have adventures, and finally find some closure to their ongoing anxieties: one finds new confidence, another begins to take risks, another learns to be happy with his lot, and Milner wins a drag race…oh, an learns the genuine happiness that can be found in adult responsibility. It's too long, but it is a lovely atmosphere to meander about in, and is edited superbly so it never really drags. With superb performances and a soundtrack bursting with 50s and 60s hits, this is well worth a watch. 

1980s - The Breakfast Club 

Five glum students perch on stools in school room.
Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club.

Well what else could it have been!? In many ways the film set the classic pattern of US High School living (which did and sometimes still does inform UK attitudes) and the High School movie. John Hughes didn’t invent these archetypes and wasn’t the first to put them on celluloid, but he was the master of crystallising them. The Breakfast Club presents an all-day detention that just so happens to have a representative from every social caste of the High School system: Andrew the jock (Emelio Esteves), Brian the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), Allison the weirdo (Ally Sheedy), Claire the popular girl (Molly Ringwald), and Bender the burnout (Judd Nelson). These five kids have nothing in common but their dislike of the domineering Vice-Principal (Paul Gleason was born for this role!)…OR DO THEY!? Whereas American Graffiti explored the process of maturing into adulthood and the taking charge of one’s sense of self (with a background hum of Vietnam paranoia and the end of golden Americana days), The Breakfast Club is much more forthright in demonstrating just how difficult being a teenager is. These kids don’t need help ‘growing up’, if anything they need to be allowed to be kids. Over the course of the day their defences break down and they learn that each of them has expectations and pressures that seem overwhelming, and grown to have genuine respect and compassion for each other. A script that is sometimes on-the-nose and prone to soliloquy is saved by the sheer bravura of the performances. A go to comfort film, that will always be iconic. Any film which ends with Simple Minds is a 5 star affair for me. 

1990s - The Faculty 

Two students walk down a school corridor, one looking away.
Elijah Wood and Jordana Brewster in The Faculty.

We move to slightly scarier fare with the 90s. The Faculty asks the question you were all asking…what if Invasion of the Bodysnatchers took place in an American high school? The answer is subtext; a lot of subtext and allegory. You know, when you’re a teenager, everything can seem quite tough. The world can seem like it's against you. It can seem like everyone you know has changed overnight and you’re lost in a sea of hostile faces. It can seem like a parasitic alien is using your school as a beachhead for a planetary takeover. The Faculty is cinematic junk-food and unapologetically so. It is camp and silly and fun. It takes those Hughesian archetypes, puts them on steroids, and then throws them into a plot joyfully riffing on the most classic sci-fi and horror tropes - all held nicely together with a quip-filled Kevin Williamson screenplay. An underrated Robert Rodriguez directorial effort which shows that he can work well across genres, and an excellent opportunity to see early performances from Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jon Stewart, and…wait…is that Usher in that film!? 

2000s - The History Boys 

Yes, we move to British shores at last. Alan Bennett’s stage-play is brought to beautiful cinematic life by original director Nicholas Hytner, who has an excellent track record of translating Bennett’s work from stage to screen. It’s another flash of nostalgia (which all such films are, as adult writers and directors look back to their own school days and teenage angst and adventure) which transports the viewer to 1980s Sheffield. A group of friends at the local Grammar School have all done very well in their A Levels and are now put to the task of preparing for the Oxford entrance exams. All are lovers of History (well, maybe not Rudge) and have received an enviously eclectic education in the full gamut of culture from the eccentric and long-suffering Hector. Like all the films above, The History Boys explores the challenges of adolescence, but with a specific focus on ‘doing well’ in a particularly British way. Sporting excellence or popularity aren’t the measure of student success - Oxbridge is. The teachers don’t push the young men nearly as much as they do themselves, seeing a place at Oxford as the best form of advancement. The witty and moving script also touches on the issue of infatuation, attraction, sexual fluidity, and chaste reciprocity: Posner’s love for Dakin being encouraged only so far in some sort of mutually agreed stand-off, Dakin’s willingness to sleep with the substitute teacher Irwin, and (of course) Hector’s tradition of giving the boys a ride home on his motorcycle and…appreciating them aesthetically. Not easy subject matter, but written and directed and shot and performed with such sensitivity that you can’t help but fall in love with every character. 

2010s - The Inbetweeners Movie 

Two students look at each in in incomprehension.
Blake Harrison and Simon Bird in The Inbetweeners.

We end with crudity. Crudity and friendship and a booze-filled week in Crete. Lovers of the TV show (I was one) - which explored the trials and tribulations of four unpopular, unremarkable, and unfortunate teens at a British comprehensive school- were well served by this upgrade. TV comedies, like plays, rarely translate well; The Inbetweeners Movie is an honourable exception. Will, Simon, Jay, and Neil have come to the end of their school days and decide that they need one final hurrah before they go their separate ways. The proceeding 90 minutes is a torrent of drunken antics, foul-mouthed discourse, and crass toilet humour, all threaded together by hapless and fruitless sexual intrigue. 90 mins of that might seem like it would wear thin, but The Inbetweeners Movie is too kind-hearted to go stale (unlike its successor which was a genuinely squalid and unpleasant affair which had me questioning humanity). The four young men are so pathetic in the true sense of the word, that you can’t help but cheer for them. The overall message of friendship as a virtue that transcends the ups-and-downs of life give the salty humour a sweet edge. For a certain generation - mine - this might be the definitive British school movie.

Honourable Mentions

Grease 

Sort of like American Graffiti…but better. I’m talking Travolta, I’m talking Newton-John, I’m talking songs that are bullet-proof! Graffiti is on the official list because it speaks to the many cultural and political undercurrents of the time…but Grease is so much more fun. If you can only see one of the two, see Grease

Gregory’s Girl 

Pipped by Breakfast because of the archetypes and Simple Minds, but probably one of the finest British rom-coms ever! 

Mean Girls 

Obviously. It's so fetch! 

 

Review
Art
Attention
Culture
5 min read

The very image of kindness

Photography risks cruelty in search of sensation. Andrew Davison contrasts such works with Dorothea Lange’s compassionate gaze.

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A black and white close up of a mothers cradling her jaw in worry as children cuddle into her.
'Migrant Mother', Lange's best known image.
Public Domain, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Do you like your photography cruel or kind? I’m generally an enthusiast for kindness – an unsung virtue – but I was mesmerised by a 2019 show of photography by Diane Arbus (1923–71) at the Heyward Gallery, London, and she’s the cruellest of the lot. Her photographs are a study in the awkward, the disturbing, and the unusual: a pair of brothers with extraordinarily large ears, a child with a grimace and a toy hand grenade, a boy from a pro-war parade, wearing with straw boater and “Bomb Hanoi” badge. 

Arbus’s photographs have an undeniable charge. They hold your view. I’m glad, however, that I stand in front of her prints, not in front of her lens. She was not out to show you at your best. Here is Germaine Greer, describing a photoshoot with Arbus in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. 

'Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest. She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited… as soon as I exhibited any signs of distress, she would have her picture… Nothing would happen for minutes on end, until I sighed, or frowned, and then the flash would pop. After an eternity she climbed off me, put the camera back in her bag and buggered off. A few weeks later she took an overdose of barbiturates and slit her wrists.' 

Reviewing the Aperture monograph that would secure Arbus’s fame, Susan Sontag described her work as ‘a hymn to the isolation and atomization of the individual’. I am not sure that’s entirely fair. There was undeniable cruelty to Arbus. “You see someone on the street,” she wrote, “and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.” Perhaps all photography risks cruelty, depicting us warts and all (at least before the advent of the Instagram filter, although I’m inclined to call Instagram filters the worst indignity of all). Yet, even in Arbus, just in portraying the human as human, compassion lurks at least just round the corner. 

But sometimes compassion is nearer at hand, even centre stage. For that, I turn to Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), and to a recently-opened show of her work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, entitled Seeing People. It holds Lange before us as the archetype of compassionate photography.  

Lange could not have produced the photographs she did, however compassionate she might have been, without time, care, and attention. 

Lange trained as a portrait photographer, establishing a successful studio in San Francisco in the 1920s. Her approach to photography as a humane act developed during her work documenting rural poverty in the decade that followed. With it, she drew public attention to the effects of the Great Depression and the dust bowl, and helped to shift the public mood. From 1935, she did that under the auspices of what would soon become the Farm Security Administration. A photograph taken in March 1936 – “Human Erosion in California” (eventually known as “Migrant Mother”) – proved to be her career-defining shot. It shows Florence Owens, mother of ten children, photographed in the pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. She and her family were in a dire situation, constantly moving to find new, transitory work.  

In the 1940s, Lange documented the suffering of Japanese Americans during the Second World War (“Japanese American-Owned Grocery Store, March 1942”), not least once Japanese Americans began to be moved into internment camps (“Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, July 1942”). For the rest of her career, Lange would travel to places in the United States that rarely, if ever, feature in genteel conversation, to photograph people scraping through on very little, never failing to capture a sense of their dignity. 

So, Lange was a compassionate photographer. I knew that before this show opened, and kindness is there in print after print. I was expecting that. What struck me for the first time is that Lange’s compassion was no light, easily achieved affair. She was careful, prepared, painstaking. She spent extended periods in deprived parts of her country, sometimes travelling for months at a time. She immersed herself in the life of a community, not least in its religious life, rather as an anthropologist would. She took detailed notes, and laboured over how to describe her subjects in captions and accompanying prose. 

It is too easy to say that Lange was compassionate in way in which Arbus was not: too easy, if that implies that the fruits of her compassion were easily achieved. Lange could not have produced the photographs she did, however compassionate she might have been, without time, care, and attention.  

She ‘saw people’, as the name of this exhibition reminds us. She saw people is because she took time to look. Before she clicked her shutter, she looked, she saw, she listened. 

In contrast to Lange’s deliberate intent, Arbus was a wanderer. She had a remarkable eye, and she took what she wanted. She is among the greatest of opportunist photographers. Sontag got to the heart of that, remarking that Arbus treated human beings like the “found objects” that Surrealists elevated to the status of art: 

What may seem journalistic (read “sensational”) in Arbus’s photographs places them, rather, in the main tradition of Surrealist art—with their taste for the grotesque, the proclaimed innocence with respect to their subjects, their claim that all subjects are merely objets trouvés.  

Therein lies the difference from Lange. 

The world could do with more compassion. Who would deny that? The message of the Washington exhibition, and of Lange’s work as a whole, is that compassion is not the work of a moment. Posting outrage to social media, or posting solidarity for that matter, is not going to change very much at all. It may make things worse. Lange’s lesson for this hour is that compassion requires us to take time. Her message is in her anthropological attention to people, communities, stories. She ‘saw people’, as the name of this exhibition reminds us. She saw people is because she took time to look. Before she clicked her shutter, she looked, she saw, she listened. 

  

Dorothea Lange: Seeing People runs from 5 November 2023 to 31 March 2024 in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Entry is free.