"I think I may not be a good person." - Robert
Antonio Campos directs "Afterschool", an ambitious film which owes a little bit too much to the works of Haneke, Kubrick and Dumont.
The plot: at a private boarding school, an alienated teenager (Robert) watches as two older girls die due to the ingestion of drugs contaminated with rat poison. Rather than call for help, Robert simply walks over to the girls and watches as they pass away. This is all caught on a video camera, though as Robert's back is turned to the camera we don't see him suffocating to death (or does he?) one of the girls.
The camera itself was present simply because Robert was shooting a school project, which he later abandons in favour for making a video memorial of the girls who died.
Due to the presence of drugs on campus, as well as the deaths of the two girls, the school puts in place a harsh, disciplinary policy. Robert's video memorial is itself censored for being too probing and curious, rather than one dimentionally commemorative of the dead girls. The film then ends with two scenes. One in which children receive pills from a school nurse, and another in which Robert is in a library being spied on by an invisible camera.
The film uses a variety of distancing effects, none of which resonate. In the hands of the directors I previously mentioned, these techniques work, but Campos is a novice and his attempts at forcing a sense of Brechtian distance seem pretentious and shine little light on the themes being explored.
If the film is amateurish, Campos' sense of genuine curiosity, as well as the worthy themes being explored, nevertheless demand that this film be taken seriously. Forget the fact that the film has only one visually interesting sequence – a brilliant opening in which Robert sits in darkness, his head framed by the glow of a computer screen as he watches pornography – and focus instead on the ideas being addressed.
Robert, who is addicted to the internet and obsessed with images, is concerned about whether or not he is a "good person". He confesses to a guidance counsellor that he is desensitised to both pornography and violence and reveals that he is fascinated only by the "real". Indeed, when watching a certain piece of pornography, Robert is interested only in that fleeting moment in which the actress is strangled, terrified and so drops her "fake" "porn star persona". What Robert has realised is that everything is an image, everyone wears a mask, and that only at the moment of violence does something authentic tend to slip into view. As such, with childlike curiosity, Robert strangles his girlfriend and forces one of the dying girls to gag on blood. He wants to peek beneath the mask. This is not to say that "violence" is more "real" than other human behaviour, but rather, that all desire has a violent element. As everyone from Freud to Lacan shows, desire and the death-drive are intertwined; in an attempt to satiate desire, the self seeks to transcend the flesh and move toward pain and then outright annihilation (of the Self or Other).
What the film thus does is link this "search for the Real" with, not only the fact that everything and everyone is now an unreal image, our 21stC world a participatory data-bank of pixel-like fragments to be consumed, digitised and digested, but the realisation that the equivalency of all things under the gaze of New Media leads only to the derrealization of a world which can now only be transcended (ie felt) through Kubrickean ultra-violence.
Many have dismissed Robert as a psycho. But like Alex in Kubrick's " Clockwork Orange", the point is that Robert is the only one questioning the world around him. Robert rapes, has sex, indulges in violence and engages in all manners of "dark" things by proxy (using the internet and film), and yet during the death of the "twin" girls (another Kubrickean allusion) he is the only person who steps out of the camera and into the real, where he touches their dying bodies.
"Why didn't you do something?" adults ask Robert in relation to the dying girls. "Are you serious?" adults ask Robert in relation to his probing video about their death. But though everyone dismisses Robert, he is precisely the only person who "does something" and is "serious". When he makes a movie which seeks to investigate the lives of the "twins", reconciling their outward angelic beauty and their need for drugs, their "unified image" and their "fragmented reality", he is thinking about, considering, and questioning his own ethical stance in relation to things.
Significantly, the film ends with Robert in a library. He seems to have escaped the internet, trading the allure of images for his writings and books. He seems to be a "changed subject", able to integrate video images with a tactile life which touches rather than freezes all in the moment of the (machinic) vision. But this moment of uplift is undercut by the film's final image, in which Robert is spied on by an invisible mobile phone camera. Sadly, Robert the artist now epitomises the trauma of 21stC reality, living life like an image, an isolated shard within the mediated universe. What the film says is not only that the young are ill equipped to navigate the ethics of today, but that being equipped to today is itself unethical.
Beyond this the film touches upon other themes - disaffection, alienation, the spread of pornography and mediated violence, the way everyone is now "medicated" in one way or the other, the fact that adults are unaware of the radical (and dark) social changes which teens and kids are facing, hypocrisy, a viewing-obsessed youth culture etc – though only faintly.
7.9/10 – Interesting.
Antonio Campos directs "Afterschool", an ambitious film which owes a little bit too much to the works of Haneke, Kubrick and Dumont.
The plot: at a private boarding school, an alienated teenager (Robert) watches as two older girls die due to the ingestion of drugs contaminated with rat poison. Rather than call for help, Robert simply walks over to the girls and watches as they pass away. This is all caught on a video camera, though as Robert's back is turned to the camera we don't see him suffocating to death (or does he?) one of the girls.
The camera itself was present simply because Robert was shooting a school project, which he later abandons in favour for making a video memorial of the girls who died.
Due to the presence of drugs on campus, as well as the deaths of the two girls, the school puts in place a harsh, disciplinary policy. Robert's video memorial is itself censored for being too probing and curious, rather than one dimentionally commemorative of the dead girls. The film then ends with two scenes. One in which children receive pills from a school nurse, and another in which Robert is in a library being spied on by an invisible camera.
The film uses a variety of distancing effects, none of which resonate. In the hands of the directors I previously mentioned, these techniques work, but Campos is a novice and his attempts at forcing a sense of Brechtian distance seem pretentious and shine little light on the themes being explored.
If the film is amateurish, Campos' sense of genuine curiosity, as well as the worthy themes being explored, nevertheless demand that this film be taken seriously. Forget the fact that the film has only one visually interesting sequence – a brilliant opening in which Robert sits in darkness, his head framed by the glow of a computer screen as he watches pornography – and focus instead on the ideas being addressed.
Robert, who is addicted to the internet and obsessed with images, is concerned about whether or not he is a "good person". He confesses to a guidance counsellor that he is desensitised to both pornography and violence and reveals that he is fascinated only by the "real". Indeed, when watching a certain piece of pornography, Robert is interested only in that fleeting moment in which the actress is strangled, terrified and so drops her "fake" "porn star persona". What Robert has realised is that everything is an image, everyone wears a mask, and that only at the moment of violence does something authentic tend to slip into view. As such, with childlike curiosity, Robert strangles his girlfriend and forces one of the dying girls to gag on blood. He wants to peek beneath the mask. This is not to say that "violence" is more "real" than other human behaviour, but rather, that all desire has a violent element. As everyone from Freud to Lacan shows, desire and the death-drive are intertwined; in an attempt to satiate desire, the self seeks to transcend the flesh and move toward pain and then outright annihilation (of the Self or Other).
What the film thus does is link this "search for the Real" with, not only the fact that everything and everyone is now an unreal image, our 21stC world a participatory data-bank of pixel-like fragments to be consumed, digitised and digested, but the realisation that the equivalency of all things under the gaze of New Media leads only to the derrealization of a world which can now only be transcended (ie felt) through Kubrickean ultra-violence.
Many have dismissed Robert as a psycho. But like Alex in Kubrick's " Clockwork Orange", the point is that Robert is the only one questioning the world around him. Robert rapes, has sex, indulges in violence and engages in all manners of "dark" things by proxy (using the internet and film), and yet during the death of the "twin" girls (another Kubrickean allusion) he is the only person who steps out of the camera and into the real, where he touches their dying bodies.
"Why didn't you do something?" adults ask Robert in relation to the dying girls. "Are you serious?" adults ask Robert in relation to his probing video about their death. But though everyone dismisses Robert, he is precisely the only person who "does something" and is "serious". When he makes a movie which seeks to investigate the lives of the "twins", reconciling their outward angelic beauty and their need for drugs, their "unified image" and their "fragmented reality", he is thinking about, considering, and questioning his own ethical stance in relation to things.
Significantly, the film ends with Robert in a library. He seems to have escaped the internet, trading the allure of images for his writings and books. He seems to be a "changed subject", able to integrate video images with a tactile life which touches rather than freezes all in the moment of the (machinic) vision. But this moment of uplift is undercut by the film's final image, in which Robert is spied on by an invisible mobile phone camera. Sadly, Robert the artist now epitomises the trauma of 21stC reality, living life like an image, an isolated shard within the mediated universe. What the film says is not only that the young are ill equipped to navigate the ethics of today, but that being equipped to today is itself unethical.
Beyond this the film touches upon other themes - disaffection, alienation, the spread of pornography and mediated violence, the way everyone is now "medicated" in one way or the other, the fact that adults are unaware of the radical (and dark) social changes which teens and kids are facing, hypocrisy, a viewing-obsessed youth culture etc – though only faintly.
7.9/10 – Interesting.