Between The Walls
Laurent Cantet
Meet Laurent Cantet, director of
"Entre les murs", Palma Gold
Festival de Cannes 2008.
last fortnight, the school is over. The gates are locked, the windows of the whitewashed houses with a sticky dust, the caretaker is on leave. In midsummer Parisian rotten difficult to guess that goes something exciting behind the doors of a college, the underground station Pyrenees. From the street, you can not see or hear anything. The modern, under the windows of a neighborhood, looks like a camp subtracted. The agitated students on the top floor, in an overheated room where they will spend most of their vacation. They are twenty-five retained all summer to participate in an intriguing film company, the "free" adaptation, by Laurent Cantet, the bestseller of Francis Bégaudeau,
Between the walls: the daily life of a French teacher in northern Paris. In the narrow class, Francis Bégaudeau plays himself. The college also being observed by three cameras that navigate between the rows to let nothing slip from their gestures, postures and distributed. The space is confined, the spotlight is burning, everything is negotiable, as in high school, to the brink of crisis. "The Class", we are here for good. Cantet bias that extends well Bégaudeau work: "Not a movie about the school, but a film in school. "
thing led to another, it comes to vocabulary. We are looking for big words. D "illiteracy" to pathetic ideas fuse in perfect disorder. Bégaudeau stays the course and tempo, trying to orchestrate the replicas while letting them gush. His plan in mind, he 'situations that may arise scenes. It has the feeling of "going to fire." Teacher and actor, scout and observer, "bridgehead of the staging, it performs its tasks with a certain nature. "Bill ate a delicious burger," he wrote on the blackboard. Second, Esmeralda, sweat, hair pulled, reacts like clockwork: "Sir, why is not Bill and Rachel? The class is agitated: "Yes, Rachel, it makes me kiffer! "" Bill is not a name dog? . Not without defending his point of view, the pro fessor eventually acquiesce. Go to Ra chid! Esmeraldas adds: "Still, it costs you nothing to write, it looks like it kills you hand! It's not going to put you Sneeze. "A discreet camera records the exchange. Laurent Cantet observed in withdrawal, intervenes by Cimon to refocus energies, "Esmeralda, you have to be more serious than that. There, you do the show ... "Sparkling and theatrical, as sweet qu'écorchée lively little monster vitality of invention and difficult to master, Esmeralda embodies exactly what the filmmaker hopes for his film personalities who gradually assert themselves and stand out from the group, mark the life of a class which will hold the news. Budding actors who will capture the light in any spontaneous ity during filming.
Wednesday Workshops are a great asset. Please take the eye. A dual nature as an actor at all and flush all the time, in the most demonstrative passivi tee as in the euphoria of the speech and patter: "They are amazing," said Cantet, I am easily seduced, I am able to never bored by letting them improvise and execute at the end of an hour, we still drift on the same subject. "Several times requested for the adap tation of The Class, Bégaudeau Francis, who is also a film critic, has embarked with all hands in the draft Cantet, because he likes her look and approach, its "loyalty with reality." "When we started working," says the writer, I really thought the cinema Pialat, L'Enfance nue in particular. How the beginning of each scene rolls the dice again. The characters can react, they are not locked. At the time of capture, the accuracy of the scene is more important than continuity. "Wrought by the interest of truth, the writer and filmmaker has long sailed to view. They thought the book forget to rely on improvisation adolescents, but they were easily outflanked and struggled to breathe their share of drama. They finally resumed pressing the scenes of the novel to give material to embroider.
Laurent Rigoulet January 2007
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Teaching File
towards Teachers:
towards Teachers:
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Press Kit
(Click image)
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Cahiers du Cinema in September 2008 :
Francois, a French teacher in fourth grade, sitting at the counter of a Parisian bistro. He spends a few moments of respite in a pose motionless, tense and pensive, like a sprinter before departure. Suddenly he drains his coffee, as it swallows a breath of air before we know work hard long and dark around the beginning of the school year.
ago this begins the astonishing composition of spontaneity and control, proximity and restraint, of lyricism and coldness that characterizes the films of Laurent Cantet: a delicate balance, but controlled, between objective and subjective. The long lens on one side and the camera range of the other can interfere. The image shakes up the tolerable limits. What does the presence of this defect superfluous, except that the filmmaker would not allow any more ? The four sides of the frame shaking figure of our hero, excluding anything that is not his face. How to say, the rhetoric of a pure silent filmmaker, the film will not accept any intrusion, including ideological, the outside world. And at the same time, there can be no question of bringing to light anything of psychology professor. We observe it, that's all.
We took this initial image to enter the film. We could choose another. Any other. Between the walls is a great work Flattening between characters, situations, opinions. A fortiori between shots. We can perhaps say that a scene is more or less successful than another. It may, for example, take the sequence of the Disciplinary Board decides finally the expulsion of Souleymane and find that this is one of the strongest scenes that French cinema was invented to oppose to a young Black of white officials. Still
. From the perspective of the film - from Cantet if you prefer - no image has priority over another. All involved the same degree of reality. Movement the movie does indeed work only to show how much they look alike. We start by finding similarities between the inhabitants of the college Dolto. The look of a student is as imposing as that of a teacher. The happiness of a teacher, soon mother, is also a girl in her teenage embarrassment ill at ease. Even more amazing, you end up not seeing the difference between the college and its people. A door takes the color of a sweater, a painting is synonymous with the tones of a T-shirt, display case is filled with photos taken with a cell phone. Another proof of this amazing unit formal could be the difficulty of talking about cinema Cantet. Difficulty of placing critical in modulating the distance to the object, that is to say other than wholly within or wholly beside the pictures.
The neutrality of the staging was there from the Bloodthirsty. The flat, obvious in the struggle between generations, Human Resources, agreed to idleness postcapitalist of Time Out. The lightness ideological finally blossomed into the narrative of Vers south - in these pages, then Francis Bégaudeau recognized Cantet most politically astute filmmakers of "subtle" French (Brief No. 609) link. Between the walls re-enter all these elements into one project has been remarkably consistent. A few months away from the selection and consecration Cannes, vacation and a return projection room does not alter the impression created by the first vision (Brief No. 635) link. They reinforce it. The film charming and convincing. There is also the feeling of a project from hell, an unbeatable machine, a film lab to operate which the filmmaker had to don the towering spectacle of the scientist.
It took at least that for daring to bring the camera between the walls of the school (a school? College difficult? An institution in Zep's 20th district [1]? Nothing will). The school is the theme of themes. It is both the public place par excellence, the first we encounter in our lives. And when the pedagogy, sociology, political discourse make the most divisions. Often, filmmakers seek double the company, evidence of its failure or the dream of a alternative. The feeling is that in adapting the book Bégaudeau, Laurent Cantet has found the cure to the cumbersome and abstraction movies on education. Something that would come straight from sociology, but has been deployed here on the mode of a physical knowledge, a principle of indeterminacy: we can not know both a school and the school. When one digs, the debris falls on the other.
The Class performs a program known to be that of Francis Bégaudeau, as much as Laurent Cantet. Program guided by a phrase of Nietzsche " It is simply a prejudice to believe that moral truth is worth more than appearance. "Which is to say: why should it be fiction writer? An author, that is to say someone whose job would be in the picture, to identify and deconstruct the doxa. And thus represent, as Socrates in Plato's dialogues, the dialectic of operator sharing between truth and falsehood, the ferryman of the passage of a particular school at Universal School.
In his class, François Marin is a Socrates declined. "A guy who talks about everything," the words the pugnacious Sandra commenting Republic. He tries to apply the Socratic method with his students to analyze and reject the positions of his colleagues. Most often, his words are refuted. It is never to have another point of view to take the front. Rather to show some fatigue from the discussion, the difficulty for an officer to play the game with a circulation of power and the continuing risk that uses its principles, or simply his good will against him.
is precisely at times when the French teacher's strategy seems to emerge from its isolation element the most difficult of class, a misstep causes that right before the disciplinary board, and thereby to expulsion. Significantly, the first course of teacher work, as they say, the self-portrait. Students protested strongly, after all not without reason: we have nothing to say, our life is not worth it looks. The film, He sees an opportunity to slip through his own self-critical walls. Still the same function as earlier: the difficulty to draw a picture of the school on the one hand, the reality of a small class and its everyday other.
But if it is indeed real people, not sure we can about real people. Instead, operators of an equation of forces set up to counterbalance the vitalism of Francis on his land: speech, discussion, argument. The Class Is exposure to pedagogy? The beginning of the film suggests. In a brief interview with the professor histoiregéo, Francois returns to sender any attempt on the other, at the beginning rather willing, to build bridges between subjects. And without further explanation than generic "one oar," "it's complicated." Francis has his way. In the following scenes, the film proposes, absence of a demonstration test. He starts with what exists, what interests or is deemed to be interested in, students. And from there seeks to return to his French-language program. It is far from being a success. Especially in terms of discipline, the film continues to lay the blame on the optimism of the teacher, and in parallel to confirm the history and geography in his dark sense.
He is not sure that exposure is a teaching center of the film by Laurent Cantet, as it was, however, certainly at the heart of the book Bégaudeau. The film benefits disputes an entirely different way. It records the birth of an open space by the dialectical opposition between teachers and students, between teachers and more marginally, and decorated by the presence of tangible objects sometimes - book binding, bells, glass, and balloons in the playground - sometimes abstract - the rules, habits, devices.
At the end of the year, the school Cantet appears mainly as a political place. A large maze which is exercised under the most diverse forms power : The vote, the assembly committee. It is less a truth known to the institution which the reverse directed to the public. This is perhaps the reason for the success of the film: the desire of viewers to participate in the power games that scroll across the screen, the ephemeral utopias who gush.
Interview with Francois Bégaudeau for the release of "The Class" adaptation of his book of the same title .
"I made a movie, not a documentary"
Laurent Cantet and two French teachers share their experiences and their vision school.
Debate chaired by Gérard Lefort AND VERONICA SOULÉ Transcript by Corinne and Christine Cantin Rouxel Monday, September 22, 2008
Do you think a good teacher is a good actor?
Valerie Sultan, Professor of French College Rosa Parks in Gentilly (Val-de-Marne) : Probably there one part where they play a role. At the same time, it is a job which includes all sorts of tricks. There is a structured course, with a concept to transmit specific activities. But in this movie, I did not really feel to see a teacher doing a lesson. The transmission of knowledge, and all the problems associated with it - yet the great business school - are completely evacuated. That's what bothers me, because I'm fighting to show that what is at the heart of the school, they are learning.
Nicolas Morvan, French teacher at Collège Jean-Lurçat Ris-Orange (Essonne) : Prof. actor, yes, of course. Nevertheless, one can not ignore what we are, what we love, this what we believe. Laurent Cantet has, I believe, no attempt to show an exemplary teacher. It is very important. In the film, we see also that teachers have different teaching practices. A student in college, will
thirty teachers. It seems important to me that one day, something resonates in front of him. Perhaps, for this student, Prof. Francis will like Marino in the film and, for another, one who resembles a professor of history and geography.
How do you deal with the eyes of students?
N. Morvan : I am first very careful how I am dressed. After a moment, things are much simpler. And we forget that we are watched by twenty-five or thirty students.
V. Sultan: I try to function as a model. The teacher of the film is also struggling with that. That's where I am embarrassed. Here we have a very ambiguous status of reality and fiction. You never know if it is in one or the other. Yet there are elements that the director may implement to show that it is in fiction, music for example. Many teachers will watch this movie and come out pretty uncomfortable.
Laurent Cantet, director : I understand that the film gives an impression of reality. This is what we sought. However, I never could imagine that a viewer might think that such a density of events coming in five minutes that takes a sequence. For me, there was necessarily a response writer. This confusion was quite surprised. About the function of schools to transmit knowledge, as a director, this is not what interested me. We shot a scene of dictation, and then we watched the rushes.
We felt that we did not tell much. Above all, we broke the rhythm of the film, based on these comparisons, those moments where words escape, where, in one fell swoop, we will not learn anything, but question the fact to learn that thing. It is these moments that interested me, times when the class is transformed into a school of democracy, and sometimes in school school. What do you do there? Why are we here? I feel that if we do not have to share this with students, we have very little chance to teach them something, if not a theorem or a combination they will quickly forget.
N. Morvan At the same time, we see the students work, typing on the computer texts they produced, we see them write ... The exercise of the combination does not like that at random in the course . We much doubt that there was something done before. And when at the end of the film, the teacher asked everyone what he can retain his year, one of them explains plate tectonics, the other the theorem of Pythagoras. We can not say that the film sums up the school into a comprehensive forum where the key is to talk.
V. Sultan: In the press kit, Laurent Cantet, you say that you have language issues as central. I doubt it. You say you enjoyed filming the verbal jousting between students and their teacher . The problem is that at the end of the film one has the uneasy feeling of not having seen much more than a tennis match that does not really lead educationally. This issue is however a wealth
educationally. But the answers the teacher to student questions are distressing, even destitute.
L. Cantet : In the moments we watch, the teacher does not respond to questions he raises. He pushes students to go further in their thinking, to help them move forward, or make them aware that this reasoning is archaic, invalid.
N. Morvan : The film, which is involved in a political context rather special about the school, shows the intelligence of students. They are able to speak a controlled manner - on the poster for the film, they raise their hand before speaking - and share arguments, valid or not. The teacher tries to pinpoint malfunctions. Do not forget that a minister (Jean-Pierre Chevenement, then the Interior, 1998) spoke of "savages."
V. Sultan: Instead of starting with what students say, the teacher could reflect on the mechanisms of language, the difference between language spoken and written language, the plurality of language use.
L. Cantet : That's what he does.
V. Sultan : No. The standard language is she? Who fixes it: dictionaries, grammarians, the street, the academicians? What is the standard? Language issues are central to a power struggle. But which one? Why the teacher did not he put these issues on the table? Because when we do, by showing that the balance of power can be social, cultural, after all this is appeased by students, learning the simple past becomes much easier. But the teacher does not open the black box and
a number of academic knowledge that could translate to these students, he keeps to himself. And French remains the classroom door.
Have you experienced scenes like in the movie in your classes?
N. Morvan : I hear the question of students when the teacher tries to learn the imperfect subjunctive: "What's the point?" He answers elsewhere, speaking of language levels, contexts in which we can use them, read them.
L. Cantet He says - this is the excerpt from the trailer: "It is still strange that whenever we want to teach you something, you put first questioned the need to learn . Learn it, and after we discuss it. "This is a summary of everything the film says.
V. Sultan : "Learn it, and after we discuss it, just that is being discussed. The fact that knowledge is put in doubt when it is presented by the teacher is a healthy sign of the school, which should highlight the major debates, including historical.
L. Cantet : We agree. In fact, I did not want to portray a difficult class, but the portrait of students and a teacher who, during certain times of the year, come to discuss in almost equal.
N. Morvan : At the same time, the film shows that equality in schools is a fiction. The school is not the place of democracy works. Moreover, to be believed, the student who goes to the Disciplinary Board is somehow like the victim.
Some criticize the fact that Teacher starts at the student level. What do you think?
N. Morvan : Students know that one is never at the same level, there is the teacher and students there. In a school year, there are moments of pure transmission, and others where the level of language you can use with them is not necessarily that of a grammar lesson or explanation of text.
V. Sultan : This contract is completely egalitarian demagogy. I am responsible for their safety, I put notes, I organize teaching, I corrected copies. I am not equal with my students.
L. Cantet François Marin is also not equal and he knows it! He tries to spare the beaches where dialogue can take place. And he accepts a level of language that will allow it.
V. Sultan: I was also shocked that the confusion between public and private spheres. I quote the professor: "I want to fuck you peace." This is not because it's not just you who do stupid things that I should not punish you. " Moreover, it leaves them in class and went alone to the headmaster. Malpractice huge! I did not at any time recognized in this teacher. And the ambiguous status between fiction and reality that some will think that the school is all about.
L. Cantet : This is a training problem of the viewer. Maybe you have not seen the film as I hope, be seen, and as many see it. As a film, not a documentary.
Do you fear a recovery ideological?
N. Morvan : The concern is real. We know well as the reaction of one of your colleagues who officiates on France Culture, will be questioning the college unique.
Finkielkraut Thinking?
N. Morvan : Yes, but not exclusively. Yet these students will have their place: they question the relevance of certain knowledge, they are smart, think fast, often well.
L. Cantet : The diversity of profiles in the class so rich. I spent my school in a small provincial town. We were among "poor whites" of the middle class, because the college one did not exist. Already some were being sent to transition classes. I did not feel "good"
students today suffer from this multiplicity. Instead, my children seem much more open to the world having gone to college in Bagnolet, a class that resembles the one I describe, me in age.
N. Morvan : There are about twenty years, these students were in class professional level. This film shows a school's success which they live. And I am proud that Valerie and me other teachers manage to take them forward.
L. Cantet : We felt that the risk of recovery just after Cannes. But these people began to see the movie, and they do not know what to say, because it describes the complexity of a system without judging. So we do not know where to take it to retrieve it. We can say that this class gives a demeaning portrait of the school, but we can also say that these kids are really smart. We can say it is a great place because we exchange
enormously. And we can also say: "Look, school is a place of exclusion."
V. Sultan : The film and book, called The Class. This gives an unpleasant feeling of enclosure, of confinement.
L. Cantet : There is a sense that school is a black box to anyone who has nothing to do there.
Why did you choose to stay in isolation?
L. Cantet : First, because I think the school is permeable to what is happening around. We feel how each student arrives with his problems. Then, because I felt that this class becomes a kind of cash
resonance, which is struggling to broader issues that seem to say that the dialogues. Finally, because I always feel that when one wants to talk about something, you had better define his look. For it is in the details that things appear.
N. Morvan : At the same time, the exterior keeps disappearing into the classroom. Students tell us about their origins through the football games. Others question the professor about his sexuality. There is also the mother of
student said: "I want my student to another college, because this one has a bad reputation. "We see the concerns of parents about the school, which is the problem of school mapping, which the Minister would be no more debate!
V. Sultan : Whether one defines a subject does not bother me, but how to shoot in camera perspective cup. Bodies are glued to each other. The playground is filmed underwater, there is no horizon line.
L. Cantet : This is not me who built the set!
V. Sultan : You can also shoot out establishment, the door in front, lots of things!
We also feel that there is, on one hand, people who lectures and, on the other, those who are in dialogue. It is a vision of the school completely binary.
N. Morvan : I can not find. We see that there is a transmission of knowledge, and students who are trying to build dialogue with the teacher, and that vis-à-vis themselves.
L. Cantet : The film also gives the picture of how 90% of students live in school. At fifteen it was the hormones bubbling and spend six or seven hours a day sitting listening to a teacher. The kids live it as a lockdown!
V. Sultan : One thing that you have shown. The film by Alain Resnais, My American Uncle, transposes research biologist Henri Laborit. If you put mice in a cage and you swing them electric shocks, they will end up throwing one over the other to devour. However, in our difficult schools, the same thing. The relationship between the teachers tend. What are the CPE, the head teacher, the nurse ? But today, the government reduces the size of the cage, the mice increases and multiplies the landfills.
L. Cantet : I can not see my characters as mice!
V. Sultan : But I regret that there is not much talk about those who swing landfills.
N. Morvan : The loneliness of the teacher is very well filmed. In an interview with two students, it requires an apology, they made him to finally tell him that we do not think so. The door closes. After he finds himself alone. I have often been moved. Many find
the end of the film is pessimistic, with the little girl who eventually confides that she has learned nothing ...
V. Sultan : I share the concern of many of my colleagues over this film. I'm afraid that some people take for granted what might be the reality of the school and use it ...
L. Cantet : Obviously, this did not imply any generality, but from the reactions I had in the rooms, the parents are much more shocked by the film professors. Their chart is obviously easier to establish, because they are less in this kind of mirror that seems to lend you the movie.
Laurent Cantet and two French teachers share their experiences and their vision school.
Debate chaired by Gérard Lefort AND VERONICA SOULÉ Transcript by Corinne and Christine Cantin Rouxel Monday, September 22, 2008
Do you think a good teacher is a good actor?
Valerie Sultan, Professor of French College Rosa Parks in Gentilly (Val-de-Marne) : Probably there one part where they play a role. At the same time, it is a job which includes all sorts of tricks. There is a structured course, with a concept to transmit specific activities. But in this movie, I did not really feel to see a teacher doing a lesson. The transmission of knowledge, and all the problems associated with it - yet the great business school - are completely evacuated. That's what bothers me, because I'm fighting to show that what is at the heart of the school, they are learning.
Nicolas Morvan, French teacher at Collège Jean-Lurçat Ris-Orange (Essonne) : Prof. actor, yes, of course. Nevertheless, one can not ignore what we are, what we love, this what we believe. Laurent Cantet has, I believe, no attempt to show an exemplary teacher. It is very important. In the film, we see also that teachers have different teaching practices. A student in college, will
thirty teachers. It seems important to me that one day, something resonates in front of him. Perhaps, for this student, Prof. Francis will like Marino in the film and, for another, one who resembles a professor of history and geography.
How do you deal with the eyes of students?
N. Morvan : I am first very careful how I am dressed. After a moment, things are much simpler. And we forget that we are watched by twenty-five or thirty students.
V. Sultan: I try to function as a model. The teacher of the film is also struggling with that. That's where I am embarrassed. Here we have a very ambiguous status of reality and fiction. You never know if it is in one or the other. Yet there are elements that the director may implement to show that it is in fiction, music for example. Many teachers will watch this movie and come out pretty uncomfortable.
Laurent Cantet, director : I understand that the film gives an impression of reality. This is what we sought. However, I never could imagine that a viewer might think that such a density of events coming in five minutes that takes a sequence. For me, there was necessarily a response writer. This confusion was quite surprised. About the function of schools to transmit knowledge, as a director, this is not what interested me. We shot a scene of dictation, and then we watched the rushes.
We felt that we did not tell much. Above all, we broke the rhythm of the film, based on these comparisons, those moments where words escape, where, in one fell swoop, we will not learn anything, but question the fact to learn that thing. It is these moments that interested me, times when the class is transformed into a school of democracy, and sometimes in school school. What do you do there? Why are we here? I feel that if we do not have to share this with students, we have very little chance to teach them something, if not a theorem or a combination they will quickly forget.
N. Morvan At the same time, we see the students work, typing on the computer texts they produced, we see them write ... The exercise of the combination does not like that at random in the course . We much doubt that there was something done before. And when at the end of the film, the teacher asked everyone what he can retain his year, one of them explains plate tectonics, the other the theorem of Pythagoras. We can not say that the film sums up the school into a comprehensive forum where the key is to talk.
V. Sultan: In the press kit, Laurent Cantet, you say that you have language issues as central. I doubt it. You say you enjoyed filming the verbal jousting between students and their teacher . The problem is that at the end of the film one has the uneasy feeling of not having seen much more than a tennis match that does not really lead educationally. This issue is however a wealth
educationally. But the answers the teacher to student questions are distressing, even destitute.
L. Cantet : In the moments we watch, the teacher does not respond to questions he raises. He pushes students to go further in their thinking, to help them move forward, or make them aware that this reasoning is archaic, invalid.
N. Morvan : The film, which is involved in a political context rather special about the school, shows the intelligence of students. They are able to speak a controlled manner - on the poster for the film, they raise their hand before speaking - and share arguments, valid or not. The teacher tries to pinpoint malfunctions. Do not forget that a minister (Jean-Pierre Chevenement, then the Interior, 1998) spoke of "savages."
V. Sultan: Instead of starting with what students say, the teacher could reflect on the mechanisms of language, the difference between language spoken and written language, the plurality of language use.
L. Cantet : That's what he does.
V. Sultan : No. The standard language is she? Who fixes it: dictionaries, grammarians, the street, the academicians? What is the standard? Language issues are central to a power struggle. But which one? Why the teacher did not he put these issues on the table? Because when we do, by showing that the balance of power can be social, cultural, after all this is appeased by students, learning the simple past becomes much easier. But the teacher does not open the black box and
a number of academic knowledge that could translate to these students, he keeps to himself. And French remains the classroom door.
Have you experienced scenes like in the movie in your classes?
N. Morvan : I hear the question of students when the teacher tries to learn the imperfect subjunctive: "What's the point?" He answers elsewhere, speaking of language levels, contexts in which we can use them, read them.
L. Cantet He says - this is the excerpt from the trailer: "It is still strange that whenever we want to teach you something, you put first questioned the need to learn . Learn it, and after we discuss it. "This is a summary of everything the film says.
V. Sultan : "Learn it, and after we discuss it, just that is being discussed. The fact that knowledge is put in doubt when it is presented by the teacher is a healthy sign of the school, which should highlight the major debates, including historical.
L. Cantet : We agree. In fact, I did not want to portray a difficult class, but the portrait of students and a teacher who, during certain times of the year, come to discuss in almost equal.
N. Morvan : At the same time, the film shows that equality in schools is a fiction. The school is not the place of democracy works. Moreover, to be believed, the student who goes to the Disciplinary Board is somehow like the victim.
Some criticize the fact that Teacher starts at the student level. What do you think?
N. Morvan : Students know that one is never at the same level, there is the teacher and students there. In a school year, there are moments of pure transmission, and others where the level of language you can use with them is not necessarily that of a grammar lesson or explanation of text.
V. Sultan : This contract is completely egalitarian demagogy. I am responsible for their safety, I put notes, I organize teaching, I corrected copies. I am not equal with my students.
L. Cantet François Marin is also not equal and he knows it! He tries to spare the beaches where dialogue can take place. And he accepts a level of language that will allow it.
V. Sultan: I was also shocked that the confusion between public and private spheres. I quote the professor: "I want to fuck you peace." This is not because it's not just you who do stupid things that I should not punish you. " Moreover, it leaves them in class and went alone to the headmaster. Malpractice huge! I did not at any time recognized in this teacher. And the ambiguous status between fiction and reality that some will think that the school is all about.
L. Cantet : This is a training problem of the viewer. Maybe you have not seen the film as I hope, be seen, and as many see it. As a film, not a documentary.
Do you fear a recovery ideological?
N. Morvan : The concern is real. We know well as the reaction of one of your colleagues who officiates on France Culture, will be questioning the college unique.
Finkielkraut Thinking?
N. Morvan : Yes, but not exclusively. Yet these students will have their place: they question the relevance of certain knowledge, they are smart, think fast, often well.
L. Cantet : The diversity of profiles in the class so rich. I spent my school in a small provincial town. We were among "poor whites" of the middle class, because the college one did not exist. Already some were being sent to transition classes. I did not feel "good"
students today suffer from this multiplicity. Instead, my children seem much more open to the world having gone to college in Bagnolet, a class that resembles the one I describe, me in age.
N. Morvan : There are about twenty years, these students were in class professional level. This film shows a school's success which they live. And I am proud that Valerie and me other teachers manage to take them forward.
L. Cantet : We felt that the risk of recovery just after Cannes. But these people began to see the movie, and they do not know what to say, because it describes the complexity of a system without judging. So we do not know where to take it to retrieve it. We can say that this class gives a demeaning portrait of the school, but we can also say that these kids are really smart. We can say it is a great place because we exchange
enormously. And we can also say: "Look, school is a place of exclusion."
V. Sultan : The film and book, called The Class. This gives an unpleasant feeling of enclosure, of confinement.
L. Cantet : There is a sense that school is a black box to anyone who has nothing to do there.
Why did you choose to stay in isolation?
L. Cantet : First, because I think the school is permeable to what is happening around. We feel how each student arrives with his problems. Then, because I felt that this class becomes a kind of cash
resonance, which is struggling to broader issues that seem to say that the dialogues. Finally, because I always feel that when one wants to talk about something, you had better define his look. For it is in the details that things appear.
N. Morvan : At the same time, the exterior keeps disappearing into the classroom. Students tell us about their origins through the football games. Others question the professor about his sexuality. There is also the mother of
student said: "I want my student to another college, because this one has a bad reputation. "We see the concerns of parents about the school, which is the problem of school mapping, which the Minister would be no more debate!
V. Sultan : Whether one defines a subject does not bother me, but how to shoot in camera perspective cup. Bodies are glued to each other. The playground is filmed underwater, there is no horizon line.
L. Cantet : This is not me who built the set!
V. Sultan : You can also shoot out establishment, the door in front, lots of things!
We also feel that there is, on one hand, people who lectures and, on the other, those who are in dialogue. It is a vision of the school completely binary.
N. Morvan : I can not find. We see that there is a transmission of knowledge, and students who are trying to build dialogue with the teacher, and that vis-à-vis themselves.
L. Cantet : The film also gives the picture of how 90% of students live in school. At fifteen it was the hormones bubbling and spend six or seven hours a day sitting listening to a teacher. The kids live it as a lockdown!
V. Sultan : One thing that you have shown. The film by Alain Resnais, My American Uncle, transposes research biologist Henri Laborit. If you put mice in a cage and you swing them electric shocks, they will end up throwing one over the other to devour. However, in our difficult schools, the same thing. The relationship between the teachers tend. What are the CPE, the head teacher, the nurse ? But today, the government reduces the size of the cage, the mice increases and multiplies the landfills.
L. Cantet : I can not see my characters as mice!
V. Sultan : But I regret that there is not much talk about those who swing landfills.
N. Morvan : The loneliness of the teacher is very well filmed. In an interview with two students, it requires an apology, they made him to finally tell him that we do not think so. The door closes. After he finds himself alone. I have often been moved. Many find
the end of the film is pessimistic, with the little girl who eventually confides that she has learned nothing ...
V. Sultan : I share the concern of many of my colleagues over this film. I'm afraid that some people take for granted what might be the reality of the school and use it ...
L. Cantet : Obviously, this did not imply any generality, but from the reactions I had in the rooms, the parents are much more shocked by the film professors. Their chart is obviously easier to establish, because they are less in this kind of mirror that seems to lend you the movie.
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Daniel Pennac: "Violence to learn"
About Interview by Eric Libio (L'Express)
former teacher, author of Sorrow School saw the film by Laurent Cantet. He loved. And say why.
"Great, this movie! First game by students and teachers (Ah, Souleymane Ah, Esmeralda Ah, Khumba Ah, Mr. Marino - Francis Bégaudeau - what actors! And the mother of Souleymane, then!). Then by the incredible intensity of the narrative. And finally, because all reached this rendering of true fiction that should seek Laurent Cantet. The viewer is plunged alive in this class where everything is made to the nearest.
Bursts intelligence
But the flip side of this evocative strength is that it might suggest Entre les murs reflects the situation of the 12 million students who populate the school today. This is obviously not the case. We are in a particular class, with problems of her own, and visited number of establishments whose social composition was the same but the behavior of students who are very different, because the teaching team did it with them otherwise.
A fourth class, therefore, a college of the twentieth arrondissement in Paris. 14 years of age the hardest, the explosion of biological, expressed here by the explosion itself.
However, within this tumultuous mess, piercing shards of intelligence. Esmeralda, for example, one of the "characters" key, displays a Shakespearean cunning: it is Iago who manipulates, testing the limits of each other and accumulate know-how which we feel that it will use adult.
Exploring the limits of Professor
But the most striking is the general loneliness. A professor crackles in the staff room, and what silence among his colleagues! A class council is held and no one takes account of two students heckling delegates, and any gap between these adults and those elusive teens! The kids, moreover, are not more supportive than larger ones. Each picnic his personal crisis at the option of changing circumstances. "It's his life, Khumba, me I do not care for his life!" Esmeralda loose.
Yet, despite this awful cacophony The film reveals the invariants of the teacher-student confrontation, regardless of the time, regardless of the social environment: Find the limits of the professor, in recognition of his contradictions, ask him to justify the usefulness of knowledge, permanently mark the gap between what is taught and what the student claims to be the real. Without doubt, the Lycée Henri-IV, Paris [one of the best in France], manners are they different, but remain invariant: Students are also seeking the limits of the professor, in a more subtle that is all, but it seeks.
These invariants also affect teachers, particularly when they pose the eternal question: "This class is it worthy to receive what I have to teach him?" What student has not heard from a teacher: "You are the worst fourth, third, first or end of my career!''Said
All this violence is intrinsic to the need to learn and to duty to investigate. The difficulty of the teacher's job is to constantly clash between ignorance and knowledge will ignore always perceived as coming from elsewhere. Very violent, here, the clash between these walls, very!
The art of teaching is likely to convert that desire into violence. "
former teacher, author of Sorrow School saw the film by Laurent Cantet. He loved. And say why.
"Great, this movie! First game by students and teachers (Ah, Souleymane Ah, Esmeralda Ah, Khumba Ah, Mr. Marino - Francis Bégaudeau - what actors! And the mother of Souleymane, then!). Then by the incredible intensity of the narrative. And finally, because all reached this rendering of true fiction that should seek Laurent Cantet. The viewer is plunged alive in this class where everything is made to the nearest.
Bursts intelligence
But the flip side of this evocative strength is that it might suggest Entre les murs reflects the situation of the 12 million students who populate the school today. This is obviously not the case. We are in a particular class, with problems of her own, and visited number of establishments whose social composition was the same but the behavior of students who are very different, because the teaching team did it with them otherwise.
A fourth class, therefore, a college of the twentieth arrondissement in Paris. 14 years of age the hardest, the explosion of biological, expressed here by the explosion itself.
However, within this tumultuous mess, piercing shards of intelligence. Esmeralda, for example, one of the "characters" key, displays a Shakespearean cunning: it is Iago who manipulates, testing the limits of each other and accumulate know-how which we feel that it will use adult.
Exploring the limits of Professor
But the most striking is the general loneliness. A professor crackles in the staff room, and what silence among his colleagues! A class council is held and no one takes account of two students heckling delegates, and any gap between these adults and those elusive teens! The kids, moreover, are not more supportive than larger ones. Each picnic his personal crisis at the option of changing circumstances. "It's his life, Khumba, me I do not care for his life!" Esmeralda loose.
Yet, despite this awful cacophony The film reveals the invariants of the teacher-student confrontation, regardless of the time, regardless of the social environment: Find the limits of the professor, in recognition of his contradictions, ask him to justify the usefulness of knowledge, permanently mark the gap between what is taught and what the student claims to be the real. Without doubt, the Lycée Henri-IV, Paris [one of the best in France], manners are they different, but remain invariant: Students are also seeking the limits of the professor, in a more subtle that is all, but it seeks.
These invariants also affect teachers, particularly when they pose the eternal question: "This class is it worthy to receive what I have to teach him?" What student has not heard from a teacher: "You are the worst fourth, third, first or end of my career!''Said
All this violence is intrinsic to the need to learn and to duty to investigate. The difficulty of the teacher's job is to constantly clash between ignorance and knowledge will ignore always perceived as coming from elsewhere. Very violent, here, the clash between these walls, very!
The art of teaching is likely to convert that desire into violence. "
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BLACKBOARD
The defeat of the School
Iannis Roder
Young Professor of History and Geography catapulted from his first school year in college "suburban" Iannis Roder runs very quickly to a tragicomic reality, contrary to his ideals and the official discourse of the institution. What can be taught to children who have five hundred words to communicate, some of whom can barely read? Children's vision simplified or simplistic world. Who can not lie somewhere between their neighborhood and foil their country of origin they are not. Children released by the system and deceived, lulled by the imaginary golden television, only dreaming of fame and money. In its establishment as in many others, everyday violence, almost commonplace, carries its share of sexism, homophobia, racism, antisemitism ...
Faced with the daily experiences of many teachers, Iannis Roder delivers a lucid testimony, against the current of unspoken and patronizing speech. Restoring of shocking dialogue with students, he invites us to roll up our sleeves, change the world, the school and provide opportunities for citizen children.
Preview: http://www.denoel.fr/Denoel/extraits
Barometer annual report to school
of children neighborhoods:
of children neighborhoods:
(Click image)
Law College
Mariana Otero
"School Law", conducted fifteen years earlier, gives a unique perspective on the permanence of the questions which have discouraged more than one. So when the director decided in 1994 to make a film based on the general theme of the law, its operation, its methods and its problems within a human group flagship, the school, specifically the College PTA Garcia Lorca in a Paris suburb (Saint-Denis), has established itself as the place to argue with this review. Welcoming teenagers from different social and family difficulties, the four walls of what was to become a mini-observation laboratory, answered more than another very successful for this necessary reflection of reality. The college offered a range of stories including without detours, all bearing signs of a school in which everyone could be projected by levying in parallel causes of discomfort as deep as recurring. Mariana Otero tells more, how his meeting with the principal of the college Garcia Lorca was decisive at a time when in 1994, most institutions usually refuse to open their doors to cameras: the valiant Mr. Duattis is the hero this exciting series, supervising students and teachers, supervisors and a guidance counselor which without exception have agreed to be filmed. Sentry at the crossroads of a jungle it is as ordinary extraordinary, the main bearer of moral law and saw the making of this film as an aide memoire that was lacking as he faced throughout the year, events also qu'inénarrables incalculable. Despite the qualities of the film by Laurent Cantet, "The Class," "The Law College, its duration (the series is segmented into six episodes of 26 minutes), suggests greater spirit of everyday life and that recurrences are school Building on an authenticity that does not, contrary to the Palme representation. More importantly, the series off the individual from the group to better approach them and talk sometimes causes problems, whether the boy who lies about the death of his grandmother to escape the course until top of the class seeking by every means to flee the 4th Techno in order to reach a section called "normal". Faced with these professors, confused or exhausted, wavering between pickets or disciplinary boards, try to avoid spit, insults and kicks, fighting every day to teach the mind without ever losing it. In fact it appears from "The Law of college" a sense of uncontrollable chaos, immutable and fifteen later, terribly relevant.
Olivier Bombarda
Zero for Conduct of Jean Vigo
Mariana Otero
"School Law", conducted fifteen years earlier, gives a unique perspective on the permanence of the questions which have discouraged more than one. So when the director decided in 1994 to make a film based on the general theme of the law, its operation, its methods and its problems within a human group flagship, the school, specifically the College PTA Garcia Lorca in a Paris suburb (Saint-Denis), has established itself as the place to argue with this review. Welcoming teenagers from different social and family difficulties, the four walls of what was to become a mini-observation laboratory, answered more than another very successful for this necessary reflection of reality. The college offered a range of stories including without detours, all bearing signs of a school in which everyone could be projected by levying in parallel causes of discomfort as deep as recurring. Mariana Otero tells more, how his meeting with the principal of the college Garcia Lorca was decisive at a time when in 1994, most institutions usually refuse to open their doors to cameras: the valiant Mr. Duattis is the hero this exciting series, supervising students and teachers, supervisors and a guidance counselor which without exception have agreed to be filmed. Sentry at the crossroads of a jungle it is as ordinary extraordinary, the main bearer of moral law and saw the making of this film as an aide memoire that was lacking as he faced throughout the year, events also qu'inénarrables incalculable. Despite the qualities of the film by Laurent Cantet, "The Class," "The Law College, its duration (the series is segmented into six episodes of 26 minutes), suggests greater spirit of everyday life and that recurrences are school Building on an authenticity that does not, contrary to the Palme representation. More importantly, the series off the individual from the group to better approach them and talk sometimes causes problems, whether the boy who lies about the death of his grandmother to escape the course until top of the class seeking by every means to flee the 4th Techno in order to reach a section called "normal". Faced with these professors, confused or exhausted, wavering between pickets or disciplinary boards, try to avoid spit, insults and kicks, fighting every day to teach the mind without ever losing it. In fact it appears from "The Law of college" a sense of uncontrollable chaos, immutable and fifteen later, terribly relevant.
Olivier Bombarda
Warning schoolchildren and students
Raoul Vaneigem
School is indicative of the dominance of a conception of society destructive for human relations, research deadly profitability at the expense of development through creation. Such is the thesis the author, and his demonstration combines the art forms that score quality of brevity.
is stimulating reading, which has lost none of its relevance ten years after its release.
EXCERPT: http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/vaneigem_ecoliers.html
Raoul Vaneigem
School is indicative of the dominance of a conception of society destructive for human relations, research deadly profitability at the expense of development through creation. Such is the thesis the author, and his demonstration combines the art forms that score quality of brevity.
is stimulating reading, which has lost none of its relevance ten years after its release.
EXCERPT: http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/vaneigem_ecoliers.html
Zero for Conduct of Jean Vigo
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