A strange film from 1968. A film on education in Great Britain. The education of the middle class or what could be called the bourgeoisie, second social stratum after the aristocracy. Education in a boarding school, with prefects, whips, and everything like corporal punishments and mean nasty segregational attitudes towards those who have too much personality or do not accept to be wimps marching along to the dictatorial rule of the prefects, whips and other real or false headmasters. It is all wrong from the very start. It represses originality, initiative and creativity and develops the desire to be on top one day to become the torturer who will be able to impose on smaller ones what they have been imposed by bigger ones when they were small. Democratic slavery. You have to submit to the system totally in order to become the slave master later on and compensate your frustration when you were a slave on the slaves under your control. This is no education, this is taming. This is not teaching morality but teaching savage displaced vengeance. Of course the film is showing exactly what may happen when you victimize the more brilliant, the more original because they are more brilliant and original than you are (two meanings intended). It is the survival of the old feudal education system that was making all children who were to be in the superior class later on be pages or chambermaids, as soon as they had crossed the first year or so of puberty, in the hands of aristocrats. They just had to do what they were told to do, including personal service to their masters and mistresses, or they had to suffer punishment that could be of the most violent type. To educate the future leaders of our society by making them go through the false and fake choice of submission or rebellion, being used in the most debilitating ways or being punished with the most vicious means, being humiliated or being violently broken. It cultivates rebellion without a cause in these young people, and we say it is without a cause without any clue at all about what it is really, because to be humiliated, victimized, brutalized, and even violated is the best cause to be rebellious, though it is not rebellious they should be but plainly advocates of the violent change of this society. It is that survival of feudal customs and methods that produced the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose leadership had been too often forced to go through this process of humiliating the future master out of the humiliation itself. The end of the film then is purely phantasmagoric but it is exactly what this society deserves: good old strong deadly bullets right in the center of the forehead. This film is the British pioneering version of the American "Zabriskie Point", just a few years later. We are coming back from deep deep under in the dark realm of Hades and we are far from the clear and trans-lucid target of total transparency and honesty. This film, in its way is just as powerful and brain raking as "Clockwork Orange" or "The Dead Poets Society".
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne