Table of contents for No. 92 in Screen Education

In the century-and-a-half since Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865, it (along with its successful sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, published in 1871) has been welcomed by an enthusiastic audience of young readers delighted by its mixture of humour, fantasy and sheer nonsense. Funny, silly, fantastical and full of unexpected characters, images and ideas, Alice’s adventures quickly entered the public imagination, and over time have gone on to exceed their narrative context. The Alice books are among the most quoted and referenced texts in the English language, and are a recurring visual and thematic source within the creative arts and popular culture. There are also myriad moving-image adaptations of Carroll’s books, beginning with Cecil M Hepworth and Percy Stow’s Alice in…

The Spirit of the Beehive is an appropriate text for middle years and senior secondary students, and may relate to learning outcomes in History, Media Arts and Spanish. It is recommended that teachers watch the film beforehand to gauge its appropriateness for use as a classroom resource. Schools are also advised that The Spirit of the Beehive contains scenes that some young viewers may find frightening. The film has a running time of 98 minutes, and is in Spanish. It is available on DVD with English subtitles internationally through The Criterion Collection and StudioCanal. ‘I once showed a dozen or so classic non-American films to students at the Royal College of Art,’ wrote UK critic Derek Malcolm in 1999, as part of The Guardian’s ‘Century of Film’ review series. ‘To…

In my last column, I went through the lessons, apps and techniques I use in my Media Arts syllabus to teach upper primary students video production. In that piece, I said that what I ultimately wanted to do was to turn students from pure consumers of video into creators and, ultimately, critics. Once you get a feel for the process of creating a film, you can watch a movie (even if it’s a short YouTube clip) and start to appreciate how much work, time and effort goes into it. Occasionally, when there’s time, I like to show students some YouTube clips so we can discuss that process. Some of my favourites are by Natalie Tran, a hugely successful YouTuber from Sydney. She has made a name for herself by creating…

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) begins and ends in the same place. A wailing wind blows dust and tumbleweeds through the main street of a dying Texan town, the fictional Anarene. The focus of the first and final shots is the building that gives the 1971 film its suggestive title: the Royal cinema, the town’s sole ‘picture show’. In the opening scene, the camera frames the Royal – at this moment, still in operation and advertising its current feature, Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1950) – then pans away horizontally to take in the rest of the street and its dilapidated buildings, including the Texas Moon Cafe and the pool hall, which will also feature prominently in the film’s action. In The Last Picture Show’s final scene,…

The pre-credit prologue to the first episode of the final season of HBO TV series Girls in 2017 achieves many things in less than two minutes. In a montage comprising twenty rapid shots, it sums up plot elements (especially from the previous, fifth season); reminds us of all the key, familiar characters in the series; and sets out a new milestone in the life of young adult Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham): she has a candid, autobiographical story published prominently in The New York Times. But there is so much more than mere plot information embedded here. As directed by Dunham, the short sequence is complete ecstasy for any Girls fan. Carefully set to the musical rises and falls, swells and lulls, in a performance of ‘Amsterdam’ by Gregory Alan Isakov…

According to sociologist Hernán Vera and film critic Andrew Gordon, the ‘white saviour’ is defined as ‘the redeemer of the weak, the great leader who saves blacks from slavery or oppression [and] rescues people of color from poverty and disease’.1 Though this theme existed well before the 1960s, scholars have attributed its prevalence in film to an American post–civil rights climate in which African-Americans were expected to attain racial equality and whites were expected to be colourblind.2 In film, specifically, narratives about white saviours have several characteristics. Although they often include African-American characters and may seem to tell diverse stories, white saviour films are told from white characters’ perspectives, oftentimes marginalising diverse points of view.3 These characters are initially unaware of societal or structural racism,4 and eventually develop into anti-racist…

Earlier in the year, I was teaching a class about audience consumption, engagement and reception of film. In defining engagement, I provided an example that I knew for sure certain students would be consuming. ‘Who will be seeing the new Avengers movie next week?’ I inquired. Immediately, four or five hands shot up. ‘And what do you expect it to be like?’ I asked one of them. ‘I don’t know,’ came the reply with a shrug. ‘You don’t know?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘So why are you so keen to see it, then?’ ‘Because it’s The Avengers!’ Although franchises weren’t the juggernaut that they are today back when I was growing up on a healthy diet of popular cinema, sequels were nonetheless a welcome commodity. A sequel was an opportunity to return to…

Art is full of techniques and processes that we either take for granted or only have a surface-level understanding of. We forget that there is a science to it – that, at some point, someone figured out how to capture an imprint of life, harness waveforms and reproduce them, paint with pixels. It’s super-complex stuff, and its ubiquity tends to result in a severe watering-down of its marvellousness. But we understand that marvellousness at some level – it’s what makes us hold art at arm’s length, label it as too hard or time-consuming or difficult or ‘not my sort of thing’. The thing is, we’ve all been shown how interconnected art is to everything, and how perfect it is as a way to explore even quite complex concepts. Well ……

In 1998, when it first came out in cinemas, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show would have appeared to many viewers a canny statement about privacy and modern broadcasting. The film, in which mild-mannered suburban husband Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) gradually comes to understand that his entire existence is a wholly manufactured television program broadcast to millions (in which he, the sole unknowing participant, is the star), seemed to double as a media critique, skewering both the mass audience that laps up the minutiae of Truman’s life and the unscrupulous producers who exploit him. In his review, American critic Roger Ebert was keen to argue that the film’s obviously fantastical premise had a clear foundation in the contemporary media landscape: Television, with its insatiable hunger for material, has made celebrities into…

It goes without saying that kids today just don’t know how good they’ve got it. They have the ability to view a broad range of high-quality films and television shows at any time and any place. Easy access to streaming services means that they can view recent and ancient (like, from when we were their age) films from near and abroad in mere moments. The entire digital history of the world’s cumulative cultural productions is at their fingertips, meaning that they’re surrounded by beauty and art. And they want to watch Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008). And you’re letting them. It’s far from uncommon, nowadays, to find Marvel, DC or other superhero-genre films being used in classrooms. They’re certainly popular choices with students; but the temptation at play here, to…

You always know when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. Perhaps more than any other contemporary auteur, he brings an unmistakable visual style and aesthetic blueprint. Anderson curates meticulously precise, flamboyantly detailed hermetic worlds. Indeed, his characters and settings are so distinctive that it is as though they produce a spatial and temporal reality that is all their own. His signature ‘look’ is so culturally pervasive that it has inspired an Instagram account (‘Accidentally Wes Anderson’) that has over 450,000 followers.1 On it, photographs are posted that replicate Anderson’s use of symmetrical framing and ‘frontality’, a formal composition of visual elements whereby characters and objects stare back at us ‘dead-on’. This self-reflexive style eschews naturalism, instead privileging the visual pleasure of looking at an obsessively ‘staged’ set of images that…

When the pop-up book that she has torn up and thrown away reappears on her doorstep, Amelia (Essie Davis) decides to pick it up and bring it inside. Reading it for the second time – pages formerly blank now filled with words – she encounters the lines: The more you deny the stronger I get. Let me in! You start to change when I get in, the Babadook growing right under your skin. With these words, writer/director Jennifer Kent encapsulates the key themes of her debut feature, The Babadook (2014), whose titular monster terrorises Amelia and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), in the weeks leading up to his seventh birthday. Her husband, Oskar (Ben Winspear), was killed – as Samuel seemingly revels in telling strangers – ‘while driving [Amelia] to…