Table of contents for No. 91 in Screen Education

‘When you least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot,’ Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) tells his heartbroken seventeen-year-old son in the penultimate scene of Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017). Elio (Timothée Chalamet) has just returned from a few days away in Bergamo with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American graduate student who has spent six weeks with his family as his father’s intern, and with whom he has fallen unexpectedly and deeply in love. Professor Perlman’s reflection is wise and warm – a father’s wish to normalise, not remove, the pain his son is feeling at this vulnerable time. The conversation that unfolds between them confirms Call Me by Your Name’s deep fabric of compassion: a father who absolutely accepts his son’s sexual…

Typically, the films selected for Cinema Science are relatively mainstream – movies you can expect the average high school student to have heard of, if not seen. Annihilation (2018) is different. Despite its formidable pedigree (written and directed by Alex Garland, starring the likes of Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tessa Thompson), this sci-fi film proved too cerebral for Paramount, which infamously dumped the end product onto Netflix. Consequently, Annihilation only received a theatrical release in North America and China1 – hardly the typical trajectory of a mainstream movie. But Annihilation boasts something not necessarily shared by its blockbuster competitors: accessibility. Some 38 per cent – and rising – of the Australian population have access to Netflix,2 so many of your students will be able to watch Annihilation ……

So reads the brass plaque that conveys the meaning of the titular artwork in Ruben Östlund’s The Square (2017). A 4 × 4 metre area on a footpath, it’s a public-art manifestation of the idea of a ‘safe space’, a place in which people can come to seek – or give – help. In the movie, it’s a work assigned to artist Lola Arias, but, in reality, Östlund and collaborator Kalle Boman actually staged it themselves, in the Swedish city of Värnamo, in 2015.1 Appalled by the emergence of gated communities in Sweden a decade ago, the pair created an installation built around common trust.2 Inspired by the zebra crossing – a simple but powerful social contract between motorists and pedestrians – they wanted to create a public space that…

What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either, with all due respect to the partisans of pure cinema, who would speak with images as a deaf-mute does with his hands. After all, I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject. The rest, I agree, is literature.– Éric Rohmer1 The least typical film by central French New Wave figure Éric Rohmer, Perceval (1978) offers a wonderfully strange and evocative version of Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century poem – set to music and translated into contemporary French by Rohmer himself – about the adventures of the title character (Fabrice Luchini), a callow and innocent youth…

Shalom M Fisch has used the term ‘spinach television’ to refer to programs that take a didactic approach and have little entertainment value, pointing out that, while these programs can of course teach young children a lot, children might not be willing to deal with them. Mobile devices are now available in almost every household; as a result, children have very early access to mobile phones and tablets.1 While older children use them independently, even toddlers and young children have access to mobile devices due to the ‘pass-back effect’, wherein parents hand their devices to children for a short period of time in order to keep them occupied.2 Hence, there is no doubt whether children have access to media on smartphones and tablets; the question is, rather, what they play…

Over the past several years, there has been a notable shift in the types of children’s films being produced by Walt Disney Studios. There have been stories featuring a Polynesian princess (Moana, Ron Clements & John Musker, 2016); Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations (Coco, Lee Unkrich, 2017); Hindu gods reimagined as superheroes (Sanjay’s Super Team, Sanjay Patel, 2015); a sidekick with same-sex desires (the live-action Beauty and the Beast, Bill Condon, 2017); and anthropomorphic animals navigating systemic racism (Zootopia, Byron Howard & Rich Moore, 2016). The studio is embracing narratives that explore gender and feminism, queer identity, race, and minority cultures and their mythologies, arguably as a genuine effort towards championing equity – or, more cynically, as a commercial response to the current culture of ‘wokeness’. While this shift…

Film has, from its beginnings, leant on, stolen from and imitated the world of the theatre; the language of cinema itself is infused with theatrical techniques, structures and modes of representation. Increasingly, theatre has begun to adopt, emulate and cannibalise the language of cinema, so that it has sometimes become difficult to differentiate between the two disciplines. This cross-pollination has become a möbius strip of influence, not always comfortable or successful, but so comprehensive that it almost goes unnoticed. Of course, when film was in its infancy, theatre was the dominant and supreme performative artform. While cinematic innovation came quickly – one need only study the in-camera special effects that are the raison d’être of Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) to see how eager cinema was to…

Jolyon Hoff’s documentary The Staging Post (2017) is an important piece of cinema for many reasons, not least for humanising Hazara refugees trapped in Indonesia as a result of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders policy, designed to ‘stop the boats’.1 An ethnic minority, mostly based in Afghanistan and predominantly comprising Shiite Muslims, Hazaras are ruthlessly targeted by the Taliban. The Staging Post features two Hazara refugees, Afghanistan-born Muzafar Ali and seventeen-year-old Khadim Dai from Pakistan, who mediate our relationship with their stranded community in Cisarua, a small town south of Jakarta that was once a staging post for boats bound for Australia. Here, men, women and children live in a world of uncertainty as they wait for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to determine their…

aul Newman’s eponymous character in Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) is one of the most iconic in cinema, his radiant smile testifying to his ability to endure almost-inhuman hardship with good humour and grace. Newman’s Luke Jackson is an alienated young man who chafes against the authoritarian impulses of his institutional overseers after a seemingly innocuous act of property damage sees him sentenced to hard labour in the American South. Released at a moment of sociocultural turmoil in the United States, the film uses its ambiguous historical setting to comment on the politics of the day. Its central themes of institutionalisation, dehumanisation, authoritarianism and the nobility of self-sacrifice take on heightened significance in the surrounding historical context of the Vietnam War, the African-American civil rights movement and US counterculture.…

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, Beauty and the misogynist. While that’s not quite what Mrs Potts – voiced with aplomb and a few sugar cubes by the inimitable Emma Thompson in Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon, 2017) – warbles, she may as well have. Fairytales, even the modernised versions, are ripe with antiquated messages about gender, mental health and the idea of attractiveness being a measure of one’s true worth. From Princess Aurora (Mary Costa) being awakened from her slumber with a kiss she did not consent to in Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959) to the decision of Ariel (Jodi Benson) to silence herself to please a man in The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1989), there are some highly problematic messages…

A favourite English teacher of mine used to say that a text can perform two functions: it can be a ‘window’ looking out at other people and places, working to strengthen students’ empathetic muscles as they walk a mile in unfamiliar shoes; and it can also be a ‘mirror’ for self-examination that employs familiar characters and stories, reflecting students back at themselves. We might say that the best texts for teaching perform both these functions. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character tells Horatio that the purpose of a play is to ‘hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’,1 but the play itself also provides a window – into Elizabethan theatrical practices and early modern beliefs about theology, ghosts and the afterlife – that effectively takes readers back in time.…

We live in abundant times. The digital age has transformed moving-picture consumption into an all-you-can-eat banquet, one that is only restricted by our own availability, tastes and inclinations. Where our opportunity to watch movies was once dictated by censorship bodies and other ‘social guardians’ (such as religious organisations or even the studios themselves1 ), we now have few limitations on our ability to stream or access films electronically, whether through legitimate or less-than-legitimate means. We are not starved of content; instead, we’re gorging on it. With this confluence of content – of the moving-picture variety or otherwise – we are being concurrently bombarded with supporting information of any kind we may seek. Who is the director of this film? What did they make previously? What does their Wikipedia entry say…

‘President Trump is a total and complete dipshit,’ says former US president Barack Obama in a YouTube video.1 Except it’s not really him talking; instead, this is a fairly convincing digital creation produced by BuzzFeed, with writer/director Jordan Peele lending his voice to doctored vision of Obama speaking. The video purposefully draws our attention to the rapidly improving technology that can be used to create fake news. ‘We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time, even if they would never say those things,’ Peele (as Obama) says in the video. ‘Stay woke, bitches.’ The technology to create and spread fake news is developing at an incredible rate. BuzzFeed’s video demonstrates the ease with which software can…

Some examples the kids came up with were ‘How to make a nether portal’, ‘How to make a veggie garden’, ‘How to make a light beacon’ and ‘How to make an underground base’. I have been teaching Media Arts for over two years now, and video production (or ‘movie making’, as we call it in the younger years) is probably the unit that engages the kids the most. My teaching philosophy has always been to never dumb it down. When I teach video production, I am not just teaching kids shooting and editing; instead, we go through the process, I teach them skills and concepts, and we talk about shot composition, camera angles, narrative structure, editorial techniques and post-production workflows. If all that sounds really complicated, it is, absolutely. But…

On 5 December 1930, the actor (and, later, director) Leni Riefenstahl attended a Berlin screening of a new war film, All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930). She later recounted the experience: Quite suddenly the theatre was ringing with screams so that at first I thought a fire had started. Panic broke out and girls and women were standing on their seats, shrieking. The film was halted, and it was only when I was out on the street again that I learned from the bystanders that a certain Dr. Goebbels, whose name I had never heard before, had caused … pandemonium.1 Joseph Goebbels had rallied Nazi supporters to disrupt the screening of the ‘anti-German’ film by releasing stink bombs and mice into the cinema aisles, while speeches that…