Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 97 i Screen Education

As kids move into their tween years, they usually leave their early-childhood loves behind. The music of The Wiggles falls away, to be replaced by K-pop, boy bands and rap music. TV programs that once fuelled their imaginations and viewing habits are replaced by teen romances, gross-out comedies (both animated and live-action) and dramas like Stranger Things. The catchphrases and theme songs of the earlier years are filed away at the back of their brains, and the merchandise that once demonstrated their often-obsessive affection ends up at the back of the cupboard, thrown away or handed down to the next bunch of up-and-coming little kids. Nickelodeon’s beloved animated TV series Dora the Explorer, which features six-year-old Dora and her similarly aged cousin Diego exploring the jungles around their Peruvian homes,…

William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is a perennial staple of required-reading lists in secondary schools. And, with it, Peter Brook’s 1963 cinematic adaptation of the book is routinely wheeled out in front of classes. Unlike the book, the film isn’t exactly an unimpeachable classic. It’s slightly clunky, and often poorly acted; there’s a reason why Hugh Edwards, the ten-year-old who plays Piggy in the movie, never appeared in another film. And where the book is hailed for its timelessness, this movie feels dated – the music, mise en scène and, uh, full-frontal boyhood nudity very much of their day. The production itself sounds as wild as the story, in which a group of schoolboys survive a plane crash and end up stranded on a deserted island; there,…

Arnhem Land. Smoke billows from a small tuft of green ironwood leaves, rustling in the wind. Two men hold a portable hard drive up to the smoke. This hard drive, the narrator tells us, contains the raw files for the film we are about to watch. Etched in Bone (Martin Thomas, 2018) opens with the standard preamble for films about Indigenous Australians – that the film contains images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, a widely recognised avoidance practice considered a mark of respect for the dead in Indigenous cultures – and immediately follows it with the scene in which two Aboriginal men smoke the raw data of the film itself. Smoking an object is believed to calm the spirits of the deceased and protect those who come…

Secret Sunshine is an appropriate text for senior secondary students, and may relate to learning outcomes in Media Arts, Philosophy and Korean. It is recommended that teachers watch the film beforehand to gauge its appropriateness for use as a classroom resource. Schools are also advised that Secret Sunshine contains adult themes (including the death of a child and depiction of self-harm) and a sex scene. The film has a running time of 142 minutes, and is in Korean. It is available on DVD with English subtitles internationally through The Criterion Collection. In South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong’s second film, Peppermint Candy (1999), the protagonist, Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu), chances upon a woman (Ko Seo-hie) watching the rain as he wanders through the nocturnal streets of Kunsan. As they sit in an…

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most renowned filmmakers of all time, albeit with a daunting reputation for being a master of slow cinema and the formidably esoteric. When describing the Russian director’s films, it is almost impossible not to reach for the term ‘auteur’ –his seven features constitute a distinctive oeuvre. Produced over a twenty-five-year period, these films form an ongoing meditation on themes relating to time, memory and human existence expressed through a mosaic of recurring motifs. The pace of his films is a distinctive feature, and integral to his understanding of the purpose of filmmaking: to be ‘sculpting in time’ in order to engage with lived experience. Tarkovsky trained at the Soviet state film school VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), embarking on his filmmaking career during…

‘I like to watch.’ That’s unquestionably the defining line from Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). If you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember it as a punchline. It’s twice delivered by protagonist Chance (Peter Sellers) in response to being propositioned – once by a man at a ritzy Washington gala, then by Eve (Shirley MacLaine), the wife of political ‘kingmaker’ Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) – and is interpreted as an admission of and invitation to voyeurism. In the latter case, it culminates in the famously funny scene of Eve writhing around the floor racked with performed self-pleasure as Chance, perched on the bed above her, remains oblivious to her efforts. Chance has no perverse intent when he declares that he likes to watch. He’s simply professing his fondness for television; hence,…

More often than not, Cinema Science introductions include a passing reference to the chosen film’s or franchise’s box-office takings. While I’m loath to overemphasise the importance of a film’s profitability or lack thereof – in stark contrast to a large chunk of contemporary entertainment journalism – these figures are important in the context of this column. Box-office success, perhaps better than any other metric, measures the popularity of a film. Given that Cinema Science is built around choosing films whose cultural ubiquity ensures their relevance in the classroom, it makes sense to talk about box-office figures. It’s not a perfect measure, though, as exemplified by Chinese sci-fi film The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019). Measured purely on its box-office receipts, it’s one of the most popular films of 2019: at…

A melancholy piano score plays over a montage of similar images. Two people, faces unseen, reach out for each other’s hands in a range of everyday situations: walking together, climbing a tree, sitting at a table, lying by a pool. The pairs come closer to touching with each image, until we see each pair clasp hands at the same moment that it is revealed we are looking at same-sex couples holding hands in public spaces. Eventually, we cut to a shot of two women walking hand in hand onto a bus and sitting down. One of them looks warily at a man sitting nearby with a scowl on his face, and we see the women’s hands again as they release their grip. From there, with just seconds between each scene…