French Film "Entre Les Murs" - Theoretical Analysis
Entre les murs[1], Theoretical Analysis
Entre les murs presents a new cinematographic style that pushes away borders of reality… to build it.
Entre les murs can be seen as reflexive and realist. It illuminates the true-life realities of the social conjuncture-the school and educational system. This fiction brings the everyday assumption about nature of space and time as well as social and cultural relationship within the world of education. Unlike the poststructuralist theory that assumes we do not have direct access to the real, Entre les murs is a constructed work that pictures a social reality. As Robert Stam mentioned once[2], the challenge is to avoid naïve realistic view where all texts are seen as nothing more than a play of signification without any reference to social world. This film manages to get an all of a social vision through his text and picture. The language structures the film; the film also structures the language. The movement is not unidirectional.
Relevant to the auteur theory[3], in which a director reflects his personal vision, Laurent Cantet wanted in his film to confront each character with its environment and social turmoil. The author’s creative voice takes effect in the film, shaping a chronic that follows the main events of the school year.
In the movie, the first scene introduces the teachers at the start of the school year while in the last one, students play football right before the summer break. The film’s rhythm is performed with the use of upbeats that punctuates life in this specific microcosm that we call school, or rather classroom (only the first shot shows the school from outside). There is no real time in this film’s approach, no proportionality. Few minutes are given for speech in “real time” to represent a class supposedly running for 55 minutes.
Jacques Rancière describes in his book[4] the opposition between the linearity (of narration) and centrality (of characters) of the Hollywood model to a more creative
Entre les murs presents a new cinematographic style that pushes away borders of reality… to build it.
Entre les murs can be seen as reflexive and realist. It illuminates the true-life realities of the social conjuncture-the school and educational system. This fiction brings the everyday assumption about nature of space and time as well as social and cultural relationship within the world of education. Unlike the poststructuralist theory that assumes we do not have direct access to the real, Entre les murs is a constructed work that pictures a social reality. As Robert Stam mentioned once[2], the challenge is to avoid naïve realistic view where all texts are seen as nothing more than a play of signification without any reference to social world. This film manages to get an all of a social vision through his text and picture. The language structures the film; the film also structures the language. The movement is not unidirectional.
Relevant to the auteur theory[3], in which a director reflects his personal vision, Laurent Cantet wanted in his film to confront each character with its environment and social turmoil. The author’s creative voice takes effect in the film, shaping a chronic that follows the main events of the school year.
In the movie, the first scene introduces the teachers at the start of the school year while in the last one, students play football right before the summer break. The film’s rhythm is performed with the use of upbeats that punctuates life in this specific microcosm that we call school, or rather classroom (only the first shot shows the school from outside). There is no real time in this film’s approach, no proportionality. Few minutes are given for speech in “real time” to represent a class supposedly running for 55 minutes.
Jacques Rancière describes in his book[4] the opposition between the linearity (of narration) and centrality (of characters) of the Hollywood model to a more creative