Subtitles section Play video
-
Evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures
-
create their identity in some kind of narrative form.
-
From mother to daughter, preacher to congregant,
-
teacher to pupil, storyteller to audience.
-
Whether in cave paintings
-
or the latest uses of the Internet,
-
human beings have always told their histories and truths
-
through parable and fable.
-
We are inveterate storytellers.
-
But where, in our increasingly secular and fragmented world,
-
do we offer communality of experience,
-
unmediated by our own furious consumerism?
-
And what narrative, what history,
-
what identity, what moral code
-
are we imparting to our young?
-
Cinema is arguably
-
the 20th century's most influential art form.
-
Its artists told stories
-
across national boundaries,
-
in as many languages, genres and philosophies
-
as one can imagine.
-
Indeed, it is hard to find a subject
-
that film has yet to tackle.
-
During the last decade
-
we've seen a vast integration of global media,
-
now dominated by a culture of the Hollywood blockbuster.
-
We are increasingly offered a diet
-
in which sensation, not story, is king.
-
What was common to us all 40 years ago --
-
the telling of stories between generations --
-
is now rarified.
-
As a filmmaker, it worried me.
-
As a human being, it puts the fear of God in me.
-
What future could the young build
-
with so little grasp
-
of where they've come from
-
and so few narratives of what's possible?
-
The irony is palpable;
-
technical access has never been greater,
-
cultural access never weaker.
-
And so in 2006 we set up FILMCLUB,
-
an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools
-
followed by discussions.
-
If we could raid the annals of 100 years of film,
-
maybe we could build a narrative
-
that would deliver meaning
-
to the fragmented and restless world of the young.
-
Given the access to technology,
-
even a school in a tiny rural hamlet
-
could project a DVD onto a white board.
-
In the first nine months
-
we ran 25 clubs across the U.K.,
-
with kids in age groups between five and 18
-
watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes.
-
The films were curated and contextualized.
-
But the choice was theirs,
-
and our audience quickly grew
-
to choose the richest and most varied diet that we could provide.
-
The outcome, immediate.
-
It was an education of the most profound and transformative kind.
-
In groups as large as 150 and as small as three,
-
these young people discovered new places,
-
new thoughts, new perspectives.
-
By the time the pilot had finished,
-
we had the names of a thousand schools
-
that wished to join.
-
The film that changed my life
-
is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, "Miracle in Milan."
-
It's a remarkable comment
-
on slums, poverty and aspiration.
-
I had seen the film on the occasion of my father's 50th birthday.
-
Technology then meant we had to hire a viewing cinema,
-
find and pay for the print and the projectionist.
-
But for my father,
-
the emotional and artistic importance of De Sica's vision was so great
-
that he chose to celebrate his half-century
-
with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends,
-
"In order," he said,
-
"to pass the baton of concern and hope
-
on to the next generation."
-
In the last shot of "Miracle in Milan,"
-
slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms.
-
Sixty years after the film was made
-
and 30 years after I first saw it,
-
I see young faces tilt up in awe,
-
their incredulity matching mine.
-
And the speed with which they associate it
-
with "Slumdog Millionaire" or the favelas in Rio
-
speaks to the enduring nature.
-
In a FILMCLUB season about democracy and government,
-
we screened "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
-
Made in 1939, the film is older than most of our members' grandparents.
-
Frank Capra's classic values independence and propriety.
-
It shows how to do right,
-
how to be heroically awkward.
-
It is also an expression of faith
-
in the political machine as a force of honor.
-
Shortly after "Mr. Smith" became a FILMCLUB classic,
-
there was a week of all-night filibustering in the House of Lords.
-
And it was with great delight
-
that we found young people up and down the country
-
explaining with authority
-
what filibustering was
-
and why the Lords might defy their bedtime on a point of principle.
-
After all, Jimmy Stewart filibustered for two entire reels.
-
In choosing "Hotel Rwanda,"
-
they explored genocide of the most brutal kind.
-
It provoked tears as well as incisive questions
-
about unarmed peace-keeping forces
-
and the double-dealing of a Western society
-
that picks its moral fights with commodities in mind.
-
And when "Schindler's List" demanded that they never forget,
-
one child, full of the pain of consciousness, remarked,
-
"We already forgot,
-
otherwise how did 'Hotel Rwanda' happen?"
-
As they watch more films their lives got palpably richer.
-
"Pickpocket" started a debate about criminality disenfranchisement.
-
"To Sir, with Love" ignited its teen audience.
-
They celebrated a change in attitude
-
towards non-white Britons,
-
but railed against our restless school system
-
that does not value collective identity,
-
unlike that offered by Sidney Poitier's careful tutelage.
-
By now, these thoughtful, opinionated, curious young people
-
thought nothing of tackling films of all forms --
-
black and white, subtitled,
-
documentary, non-narrative, fantasy --
-
and thought nothing of writing detailed reviews
-
that competed to favor one film over another
-
in passionate and increasingly sophisticated prose.
-
Six thousand reviews each school week
-
vying for the honor of being review of the week.
-
From 25 clubs, we became hundreds, then thousands,
-
until we were nearly a quarter of a million kids
-
in 7,000 clubs right across the country.
-
And although the numbers were, and continue to be, extraordinary,
-
what became more extraordinary
-
was how the experience of critical and curious questioning
-
translated into life.
-
Some of our kids started talking with their parents,
-
others with their teachers,
-
or with their friends.
-
And those without friends
-
started making them.
-
The films provided communality across all manner of divide.
-
And the stories they held provided a shared experience.
-
"Persepolis" brought a daughter closer to her Iranian mother,
-
and "Jaws" became the way in which one young boy
-
was able to articulate the fear he'd experienced
-
in flight from violence
-
that killed first his father then his mother,
-
the latter thrown overboard on a boat journey.
-
Who was right, who wrong?
-
What would they do under the same conditions?
-
Was the tale told well?
-
Was there a hidden message?
-
How has the world changed? How could it be different?
-
A tsunami of questions flew out of the mouths of children
-
who the world didn't think were interested.
-
And they themselves had not known they cared.
-
And as they wrote and debated,
-
rather than seeing the films as artifacts,
-
they began to see themselves.
-
I have an aunt who is a wonderful storyteller.
-
In a moment she can invoke images
-
of running barefoot on Table Mountain and playing cops and robbers.
-
Quite recently she told me
-
that in 1948, two of her sisters and my father
-
traveled on a boat to Israel without my grandparents.
-
When the sailors mutinied at sea in a demand for humane conditions,
-
it was these teenagers that fed the crew.
-
I was past 40 when my father died.
-
He never mentioned that journey.
-
My mother's mother left Europe in a hurry
-
without her husband, but with her three-year-old daughter
-
and diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt.
-
After two years in hiding,
-
my grandfather appeared in London.
-
He was never right again.
-
And his story was hushed as he assimilated.
-
My story started in England
-
with a clean slate and the silence of immigrant parents.
-
I had "Anne Frank," "The Great Escape,"
-
"Shoah," "Triumph of the Will."
-
It was Leni Riefenstahl
-
in her elegant Nazi propaganda
-
who gave context to what the family had to endure.
-
These films held what was too hurtful to say out loud,
-
and they became more useful to me
-
than the whispers of survivors
-
and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo
-
on a maiden aunt's wrist.
-
Purists may feel that fiction dissipates
-
the quest of real human understanding,
-
that film is too crude
-
to tell a complex and detailed history,
-
or that filmmakers always serve drama over truth.
-
But within the reels lie purpose and meaning.
-
As one 12-year-old said after watching "Wizard of Oz,"
-
"Every person should watch this,
-
because unless you do
-
you may not know that you too have a heart."
-
We honor reading, why not honor watching with the same passion?
-
Consider "Citizen Kane" as valuable as Jane Austen.
-
Agree that "Boyz n the Hood," like Tennyson,
-
offers an emotional landscape and a heightened understanding
-
that work together.
-
Each a piece of memorable art,
-
each a brick in the wall of who we are.
-
And it's okay if we remember Tom Hanks
-
better than astronaut Jim Lovell
-
or have Ben Kingsley's face superimposed onto that of Gandhi's.
-
And though not real, Eve Harrington, Howard Beale, Mildred Pierce
-
are an opportunity to discover
-
what it is to be human,
-
and no less helpful to understanding our life and times
-
as Shakespeare is in illuminating the world of Elizabethan England.
-
We guessed that film,
-
whose stories are a meeting place
-
of drama, music, literature and human experience,
-
would engage and inspire the young people participating in FILMCLUB.
-
What we could not have foreseen
-
was the measurable improvements
-
in behavior, confidence and academic achievement.
-
Once-reluctant students now race to school, talk to their teachers,
-
fight, not on the playground,
-
but to choose next week's film --
-
young people who have found self-definition, ambition
-
and an appetite for education and social engagement
-
from the stories they have witnessed.
-
Our members defy the binary description
-
of how we so often describe our young.
-
They are neither feral nor myopically self-absorbed.
-
They are, like other young people,
-
negotiating a world with infinite choice,
-
but little culture of how to find meaningful experience.
-
We appeared surprised at the behaviors
-
of those who define themselves
-
by the size of the tick on their shoes,
-
yet acquisition has been the narrative we have offered.
-
If we want different values
-
we have to tell a different story,
-
a story that understands that an individual narrative
-
is an essential component of a person's identity,
-
that a collective narrative
-
is an essential component of a cultural identity,
-
and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself
-
as part of a group.
-
Because when these people get home
-
after a screening of "Rear Window"
-
and raise their gaze to the building next door,