Y tu mamá también (Mexico/US 2001)

Luisa, Tenoch and Julio at the big society wedding where the boys meet their travelling companion (having humiliated her husband).

(These notes were first published in 2004)

Introduction

Y tu mamá también is an accessible and enjoyable film from Mexico (providing that viewers have no problems with the graphic presentation of the sex lives of the characters).

On one level, the film is a mix of familiar genres – ‘road movie’, ‘coming of age’/youth movie and melodrama. But on another level it is a social commentary on Mexican culture. Never didactic, the filmmakers manage to subtly introduce this commentary via the development of a set of very specific aesthetic devices.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, written by Carlos Cuarón and starring Gael García Bernal (as Julio), Diego Luna (as Tenoch) and Maribel Verdú (as Luisa).

Outline synopsis

(These notes assume familiarity with the narrative, so there are SPOILERS embedded.)

Julio and Tenoch are young men in Mexico City who are about to see off their girlfriends who are travelling in Europe. Stuck for something to do for the Summer, they decide on a road trip to find the mythical ‘magic beach’ known as ‘Heaven’s Mouth”. At a family wedding they meet Luisa an older woman from Spain who is married to Tenoch’s cousin – and seemingly unhappy with her lot. To their great surprise, she agrees to accompany them on their trip. The boys compete to seduce Luisa, who is far more experienced than either of them. After a series of adventures, they arrive at the coast and become friendly with a local fisherman and his family. There is a twist at the the end of the tale and an epilogue when the boys meet again after the first year of their degree courses.

Mexican cinema

‘Latin American cinema’ has a long history featuring periods of both commercial and artistic success. Compared to other parts of the world outside Europe and North America, Latin American culture is influenced by three distinctive factors:

• the close proximity of the US to Mexico and the American assumption that all of Central and South America is a ‘US sphere of influence’;
• Spanish as a common language (apart from Portuguese in Brazil and other languages in the Caribbean islands) and the lasting influence of Spanish cultural achievements;
• independence from European colonial powers in the 19th century, but issues about the persecution/assimilation of ‘Native Americans’, still sometimes referred to as ‘Indians’ or in Mexico as Amerindians.

The three largest countries, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, have had the biggest presence in film production (although Cuba ‘punches above its weight’ and Bolivia has produced at least one major filmmaker).

Mexico had a major industry in the 1940s, producing genre films such as family melodramas, musicals and action pictures. At the time of the Hollywood studio system, Mexico produced stars who appeared in both Mexican and Hollywood films – Dolores del Rio, Pedro Armendáriz – and others who were big stars within Mexico. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico was recognised internationally, because of the artistic success of the exiled Spanish director Luis Buñuel. Up until the last ten years, only a handful of other Mexican directors have been granted limited distribution in art cinemas in the UK.

Much of the commercial energy and the attention of the popular audience in Mexico has been diverted towards television since the late 1950s. Mexico is a big producer of telenovelas – popular television serials, similar to US/UK soap operas, but with stronger genre links to romance and melodrama. These programmes attract very large and enthusiastic audiences. They are also exported (along with similar series made in Brazil and Columbia), not only to other parts of Latin America, but also to Africa and the Middle East. This is a clear indication of the potential of Mexican production. In cinema, however, Mexican audiences have largely turned to American films which, as in most countries, take 80% or more of local box office.

The recent resurgence of Mexican cinema as ‘global cinema’ – i.e. significant circulation of a film in different markets across the world – centres on the work of three youngish directors, Guillermo del Torro (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and American films such as Mimic, Blade 2 and Hellboy), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros (Mex 2000), 21 Grams (US 2003)) and the director of Y tu mamá también, Alfonso Caurón (who also directed the third Harry Potter film). All three now live in the US. Nevertheless, they claim (supported by critics) to have made the most definitively ‘Mexican’ films of recent years. In other words, they make films that are not pale genre copies of Hollywood films, but instead offer representations of life in a Mexico that its inhabitants recognise.

The Spanish connection has been important to Mexico. Spanish has long overtaken French as a major world language (alongside Arabic, Mandarin and English) and this increases the market potential of Spanish language culture. There is the possibility of Spanish co-productions and also the exchange of actors and production crews.

The political context for filmmaking is also important in Mexico. In 2000 the Mexican electorate finally voted to oust the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had held power since 1929. The new president, Vincente Fox, represented a new beginning. Fox may have turned out to be something other than what the voters first thought, but his election couldn’t help but change the outlook of most of the population.

In fact, Fox is a conservative, akin to the Republican Party in the US. He has opened up Mexico to both the US and global capital. A truly radical political force does still exist in Mexico in the form of the Zapatistas, the rebels in the Chiapas region of Mexico, close to the border with Guatemala. Naming themselves after Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the 1911 Revolution, the rebels have proved themselves to be adept at low-key but effective organisation and action in resisting the ‘neo-liberalism’ of the multinational corporations.

Genre and Y tu mamá también

One of the ways in which the film works is to set up expectations based on generic conventions, only to confound and surprise the audience in the final act of the narrative.

The road movie

The basic narrative structure of Y tu mamá también is that of the road movie, one of the prime cinematic genres – i.e. a genre developed within the context of cinema, not borrowed from another media form.

A road movie is based around a journey – in its classical form, a journey by motor vehicle across the continent. The journey will require stopovers in strange, usually small town, communities before ending with an arrival at some kind of defining location. The journey is akin to a form of ‘quest’, with the heroes acting as ‘knights of the road’. The thematic of the road movie tends to be ambiguous in that characters are either running away or searching for something new – often at the same time. The journey means that they will have new experiences and meet new people and both of these will set challenges for the heroes. The new situations will also test the relationship between two characters who might think that they know each other very well. At some point in the journey, the characters will find out something about themselves.

In terms of iconography and style, road movies are characterised by certain restrictions on camerawork – either the camera shows relatively close framings of the characters in the car or it shows long shots of the car travelling across the landscape.

Shots of the road are inevitably accompanied by music. Easy Rider (US 1969) was one of the first successful ‘modern’ road movies. The box office success of this low budget film encouraged producers to produce similar films and also to look for music tie-ins. Easy Rider was one of the first Hollywood films to come with a soundtrack album of rock songs, most of which were not written with the film in mind. Ever since, road trips, especially for younger characters, have been accompanied by ‘driving’ music, often guitar-based with lyrics celebrating the ‘freedom of the open road’.

The youth/‘coming of age’ movie

The emergence of the ‘teenager’ as a new marketing concept in the US in the early 1950s coincided with the decline in Hollywood’s traditional family audience. Young people were the new audience and films were made to target them directly – hence the ‘youth movie’ (often shown in the new drive-in cinemas).

Youth pictures are not just a Hollywood phenomenon. Youth culture is central to the export of American consumerist culture and encompasses music and fashion as well as cinema and videogames, the internet etc. The ‘youth picture’ could be argued as a generic category, but it is a broad category within which there are several distinct groupings. One is the so-called ‘coming of age’ film in which a boy or girl goes through a form of, usually sexual, initiation into adulthood. The road trip provides the perfect opportunity for the staging of this narrative – freedom from parental control and the restrictions of school and the excitement of new places to see, new people to meet etc. There is also a time limit on the story – the trip must end in time for the youths to go on to university – and this provides some of the narrative tension.

Luisa and Tenoch

Social comedy

Another sub-group of the youth movie is the ‘teen comedy’. In the female variant of this narrative, the comedy is ‘romantic’ and centres on the obstacles in the path of true love in the romantic comedy. In the male variant the focus is much more likely to be whether or not the lead characters can find the way to lose their virginity. The young men of Y tu mamá también are certainly not virgins (although they are in some ways still ‘innocent’). However, the narrative they inhabit does at first glance appear to have been plucked from the pages of a lad’s mag – the fantasy of an ‘older woman’ on the road trip and the possibility that she might sleep with one or other, or both, of the youths. The comedy comes from the fact that although the youths can fantasise, they have little idea about how to deal with the reality of the narrative events and inevitably make mistakes in their social behaviour.

Political commentary

The least likely generic reference would seem to be ‘political film’ – but this is precisely what the critical consensus on Y tu mamá también suggests. This is partly down to the director Alfonso Cuarón himself, who has spoken about his own experiences as a teenager in Mexico City in the 1970s (he was born in 1961). Cuarón recalls seeing the films of Jean-Luc Godard in ciné clubs and suggests that this is where the idea of the voiceover commentary comes from. He makes specific reference to Masculin féminin and Bande à part. Godard, one of the most important directors associated with the ‘French New Wave’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s made films that were avant-garde in terms of both aesthetics (how they used sound and image) and, increasingly in the 1960s, revolutionary politics.

The voiceovers in Y tu mamá también, as Edward Lawrenson suggests, tend to give an air of melancholy to the film, often commenting on death – something unconsidered by the teenagers, but an important element of the narrative. But it is another aspect of the voiceovers and the general aesthetic of the film that reveals its political sub-text. Cuarón takes care with his camera to reveal to the audience the ‘other Mexico’ through which the boys travel and which most of the time, they fail to properly see.

Tenoch and Julio are both, by Mexican standards very well off. Mexico has a large population (over 100 million), most of whom live in urban areas. This means that in many parts of what is a large country the rural population is sparse – and poor. The per capita income in Mexico is something like a quarter of that in the UK and Canada and perhaps one fifth of that in the US – one of the reasons why the inclusion of Mexico in the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) with the US and Canada is such a contentious issue. (Economists debate what the effects might be, but clearly these are not ‘equal’ trading partners.) Mexico is characterised by a small wealthy middle class and a large working class, many of whom have moved to Mexico City to look for work. This is the subject of the ‘commentary’ about the worker who is killed crossing the road in order to save time getting to work.

The division by social class is mirrored by the ethnic divisions in the country. The largest ethnic group in Mexico (around 60%) is classified as mestizo or ‘mixed’. These are people who are the descendants of intermarriage between Europeans (predominantly Spanish) and the local Amerindian peoples of Central America. The Amerindians themselves make up some 30% of the Mexican population. ‘Europeans’ make up 9%, leaving 1% to cover all other groups. The 9% of Europeans make up the Mexican middle class. On this basis, the decision by his parents to name ‘Tenoch’ after an Aztec chieftain who founded what is now Mexico City is a calculated attempt to assert ‘Mexican-ness’. The Aztecs were from North Mexico and they dominated the Southern Maya people before the arrival of the Spanish. A name like ‘Tenoch’ could be provocative for the people of Southern Mexico (especially in Chiapas, the state that is home to the Zapatistas).

Julio and Tenoch are themselves separated by a class division. Julio lives with his mother and sister who both work. Tenoch has a father who is an important politician and he lives in a grand house with a maid (who was also Tenoch’s nanny). This rift between the boys is central to the narrative.

The journey undertaken by the boys is from cosmopolitan Mexico City, south west towards the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. This is a movement from urban to rural, from sophisticated to ‘simple’, from rich to poor and from European to Amerindian. The film shows the two boys to be almost oblivious to the changing environment, but the camera and the voiceovers mean that the audience is constantly invited to notice the discrepancy between the rich boys’ internal world and the realities outside.

David Heuser (see website reference) offers a fascinating analysis of the film which he reads as a commentary on the impossibility of Mexico getting the kind of government that he thinks it deserves. In this analysis, Tenoch and Julio are representative of the two main political forces in Mexico (the upper class and the lower middle class – the ‘bourgeoisie’). Their obsession with selfish (sexual) demands prevents them from recognising what they could achieve through co-operation. For Heuser, the car represents Mexico and Luisa represents the possibilities of European-style government. Once she takes over, the goal of the journey, ‘Heaven’s Mouth’, becomes real, not a myth – just as the political goals of the country could become achievable. However, when the boys leave their tent, the pigs (i.e. the peasants) run amok, ‘proving’ to the boys that the peasantry can’t be trusted. When they wake up in bed together, the boys are horrified – they can’t face the prospect of being together. When Luisa dies the experiment has come to an end. This is a detailed and quite convincing reading.

In an interview on the DVD, director Cuarón says the film is about ‘identity’, for Luisa, for the boys and for the country. He says Mexico is a teenage country that still needs to find its identity. He also confirms that the names of the characters refer directly to Mexican history. Luisa is a ‘Cortés’ – the name of the original Spanish conqueror (‘conquistador’) of Mexico. Tenoch is an ‘Iturbide’ – the name of one of the early political leaders of revolutionary Mexico who wanted to become President. Julio is named Zapata – the name of the great revolutionary fighter (from whom the contemporary ‘Zapatistas’ take their name).

The voiceovers in the narrative structure

The narrator’s voice appears roughly twenty times during the film (more frequently in the first half). The function of the voiceover is to do three things. First, it tells us the important information about the backgrounds of Julio and Tenoch, their families and their girlfriends. This enables us to make a ‘reading’ of the characters and place them accurately in the Mexican class structure. Cuarón argues that giving this kind of detail in his Hollywood films proved impossible, but here it adds a great deal to our understanding.

The second purpose is to reveal to the audience things that Julio and Tenoch do not know about each other and also to show aspects of Luisa’s behaviour that the boys don’t notice. A good example of this is when the car breaks down and Luisa buys a doll from a local woman because it has her name. The voiceover tells us that she is thinking about the doll when she passes a funeral procession for a child. This links to later scenes by the beach when she plays with the fisherman’s children. Finally the voiceover tells us that she left the doll to the fisherman’s daughter. Throughout the film Luisa is much more aware of the lives of people around her – in contrast to the boys who are interested only in themselves. Another good example is when the car is stopped by a group from a small village and the boys are asked for money for the village queen. Only Luisa looks at the young woman. (Yet a little while earlier they have passed the village where Tenoch’s nanny was born.)

The third purpose of the voiceover is to tell us about characters who are either peripheral to the story (like Chuy, the fisherman) or completely outside the boys’ story. These are comments on the lives of Mexico’s rural/migrant poor. Further examples include the migrant worker killed crossing the street and the road accident which is marked by a roadside shrine. As well as these incidents, the voiceover reminds us of the political changes in Mexico. This stealthy political comment is also taken up in the cinematography and mise en scène.

Camera and mise en scène

The camerawork is an integral part of the overall ‘feel’ of the film. It is fluid but not overly expressive. Much of the time, scenes are shown in relative long shot, e.g. in the two scenes when Luisa seduces the boys. The central three characters are in the frame together inside the car for long periods. Organising this when they are driving in the car is quite difficult and sometimes requires a distorting wide angle lens. If it is not peering into the car, the camera is often showing the car in long shot, from in front or behind on the road itself or at an angle from the road. Alternatively, the camera looks out of the car windows at the countryside passing by. It is the shifting balance between these kinds of shots which slowly begins to show the audience more about the conditions of the local people.

In the early part of the journey, the camera is mostly focusing on the trio, but there are several instances, often in conjunction with the voiceover, when it manages to capture what is happening at the edges of the frame, or just out of the frame in which the boys are appearing. The best example of this is in the scene when the trio arrive for their first overnight stay in a country hotel. As they are about to order food, the camera leaves the party and follows one of the family in the hotel into a back room and then on into the kitchen where the family are eating and getting on with their busy lives.

A second example comes a little later when a discussion about sex in the car is undercut when the camera peers out of the car window to notice a pick-up truck carrying two armed police overtaking. Further on down the road the camera again peers out of the car, ignoring the trio who are too engrossed to notice a shot of the armed police who seem to be arresting a group of farmers selling their produce at the roadside. There are several other examples of the repression carried out by police at roadblocks etc., all passed without a sideways glance by the boys in the car.

Popular culture

The political commentary in the film is not recognised by every audience (in fact, it is probably recognised by a small minority in audiences outside Mexico). Some critics have lambasted the film because it panders to American teen culture. It has been described as mirroring American Pie or Dude, Where’s My Car? Although there are some obvious similarities with these films, both the tone and the look of the Mexican film are quite different.

The interaction with American culture is also more complicated than simple acceptance of the dominance of American forms. Xan Brooks quotes Paul Julian Smith on the way that the language used by the boys – ‘chilango’ a kind of ‘Mexican youth speak’ – is quite distinctive. As is the music, much of which is a form of ‘Mexican style’ Anglo-American music – made either by Mexican bands or Hispanic bands in the US. Other tracks are European rock or more traditional Mexican music. (A complete soundtrack listing is available on the Internet Movie Database entry for the film.)

An example of how music ‘codes’ the changing world through which the car travels comes at the point where the portable tape player runs down because the batteries are fading. The boys have been playing American or Mexican rock, but now as the political struggles in the world outside the car become more apparent, the music on the soundtrack becomes more ‘local’ or more ‘roots’ as it must be derived from local radio stations. As the soundtrack switches to this rootsier music of accordions, the world outside becomes more alien – the boys’ car is hemmed in by cattle and they react angrily. Later they have to be towed to a garage behind an ox cart.

The stars

The success of the film is partly down to its young stars, especially Gael García Bernal. Bernal (born 1978) had already shot Amores Perros when he began work on Y tu mamá también. He was a child actor in a soap on Mexican TV and came to London to study acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Since Y tu mamá también, he has appeared in other Mexican and Spanish films, but 2004 has seen two major releases which have confirmed his status as perhaps the hottest young star in World Cinema. Bad Education (directed by Pedro Almodóvar) and The Motorcycle Diaries in which Bernal plays a young Che Guevera both offer interesting comparisons to Y tu mamá también, especially Motorcycle Diaries as it is another Latin American road movie with a political sub-text. Screen International (9/9/04) recognised Bernal as one of the few stars who can expect to be successful in Hollywood and in both Spanish and Mexican films (the large and growing Spanish speaking population inside the United States will also help. Diego Luna (born 1979) has a similar background, again starting as a child star on Mexican television. He has also appeared in several Hollywood films, notably in the lead for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004) and Goal, (2005).

Rudo y cursi (2008) directed by Carlos Cuarón and starring Bernal and Luna is a kind of companion piece to Y tu mamá.

Questions for discussion

1. Find some examples in the film of the youths acting in ways similar to those found in American ‘teen movies’ – how are these scenes ‘undercut’ by local, Mexican cultural differences?

2. Find examples of the ‘voiceover’ technique in the film – including each of the three types discussed in these notes. For each example, analyse what is being shown by the camera and mise en scène during the voiceover. How do sound and image work together?

3. How do the representations of the two boys differ in the film? Is it purely a difference in social class?

4. How do you read Luisa’s role in the narrative? How much is the ending of the film similar to the ‘twist’ in Hollywood films?

References

Jose Arroyo (2002) Review of Y tu mamá también in Sight and Sound, April

A. G. Basoli (2002) ‘Sexual Awakenings and Stark Social Realities: Interview with Alfonso Cuarón on Y tu mamá también’ in Cineaste Vol XXVII No3, June

Xan Brooks (2002) on http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4463899,00.html, accessed 8/8/04

David Heuser on http://music.utsa.edu/electron/YTuMama.htm, accessed 8/8/04

Edward Lawrenson (2002) Interview with Alfonso Cuarón, in Sight and Sound, April

Paul Julian Smith (2002) ‘Heaven’s Mouth’ in Sight and Sound, April

All text in these notes © 2004 Roy Stafford/itp publications unless otherwise indicated. Images from Y tu mamá también © Icon

Rudo y Cursi (Mexico/US 2008)

The wonderful Mexican poster for the film

This film is very much a companion piece to Y tu mamá también (Mexico 2001). Carlos Cuarón wrote the earlier film which is brother Alfonso directed. This time Carlos both writes and directs and Alfonso produces (alongside the two other amigos, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarittu). The same two actors, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna again play the leads and the film is a co-production involving Luna and Bernal’s Canana, the tres amigos Cha Cha Chá and the Hollywood studio Universal/Focus Features.

The earlier film saw Luna and Bernal as middle-class sophisticated Mexico City adolescents on a road trip to a kind of maturity in the Pacific seaboard province of Guerrero. The new film reverses the narrative so Tato (Cursi/Bernal) and Beto (Rudo/Luna) are ‘country hicks’ spotted by a talent scout who stumbles across their performances in a local football team. With the two plunged into Mexico City life as unlikely stars of top teams, a sharp satire of football and Mexican society ensues. If you are a football fan you’ll quickly work out all the likely scenarios, though the ending might throw you a little.

Like many aspects of the film, the ending seems almost devised to alienate an American audience. I presume that most of what happens to the pair as footballers also happens to basketball, baseball and American football players as well, but American audiences may not be familiar with the references that Latin American and European audiences will pick up on. There are also a couple of specific points that I noted thanks to posters on IMDB. The Mexican film poster above shows Diego Luna clutching his genitals – a reference to an incident in the film, but also an iconic image of footballers protecting themselves on the pitch. In the American film poster (look on the IMDB page for the film) Luna’s hand has moved to a pointing finger. The talent scout in the film speaks Argentinian Spanish and the subtitles reflect this by giving him British English words like ‘wanker’ and ‘bugger’ – quite a clever idea, I think, but puzzling for some audiences.

I’m sure that there is a lot of the film that I don’t get. Like Y tu mamá también, I suspect the film offers a discourse on Mexican politics and social issues, though not as directly or as pointedly as the earlier film. Once again, there is a voice-over that comments on events, although this time it is one of the characters in the narrative rather than an anonymous observer. The film seems ‘realist’ rather than escapist (another ‘anti-Hollywood’ trait?). I don’t want to spoil any narrative enjoyment, so I’ll just point out that the inevitable often happens to characters and though the film is clearly a comedy for the most part, it isn’t starry-eyed or overly-optimistic. That was a slight problem for me in that I didn’t laugh all that much because I knew what was coming (i.e. as a football fan). However, I did enjoy the film overall and the twin performances of Luna and Bernal are excellent and worth the price of admission alone.

I recommend the Bulletin Board discussions on IMDB. One board in particular carries a detailed discussion about the ethnic mix in Mexican society and the rights and wrongs of having ‘white’ European Mexicans playing Rudo and Cursi. Unlike the all-to-common slanging matches on IMDB boards, this is an interesting and thought-provoking discussion. Slightly less revealing are the attempts to translate the nicknames ‘Rudo’ and ‘Cursi’ given to the two country hicks by the Mexico City tabloids. I like the ‘rough’ and ‘mushy’ translation best, although ‘corny’ is possibly more correct for Cursi. Like many sporting nicknames, these are both derogatory and affectionate – there is a lovely scene in the film when Cursi meets fans who state their intention to tear him limb from limb if the team doesn’t win and then beg for his autograph.

For Gael García Bernal fans (I know that there are plenty out there), I should also mention that Tato’s dream is not really to play football (which he is very good at) but to sing (which Tato certainly isn’t good at – but Bernal may be, for all that I know). Still you do get to watch him in a nice Western suit and hat combination.

Global Media for A Level students

On March 20, I presented materials for studying ‘Global Media’ at the OCR A Level Conference in London. The materials related to:

• Slumdog Millionaire as a ‘global film text’
• Otaku culture in Japan and the associated media forms of manga, anime, videogames etc.

All the materials can be downloaded as follows: 

Slumdog Millionaire (Word)

Manga (Word)

Manga 2 (pdf)

Otaku culture (pdf)

Presentation (pdf)

In addition, on this site you can find entries on anime. Explore the ‘Animation’ category on the left.

El orfanato Part 2

 

The UK poster for the film

Nick posted his reaction to El orfanato a couple of months back and now that I’m teaching the film, I’d like to expand on his comments about one of the best films of the year in UK distribution. The DVD of the film offers a rich mixture of extras and commentaries which help to explain the director’s approach – and why it was so enthusiastically ‘presented’ by Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro’s name on the credits helps to sell the film in the US and UK, but it is a little misleading in terms of audience expectations. El orfanato is much more closely connected to Spanish cinema history/influences than El laberinto del fauno, even though the latter refers more directly to Spanish history. The different box office careers of the films are interesting – in Spain, El orfanato was the much bigger success, grossing over €24 million and taking top box office position for the year (by comparison, Pan’s Labyrinth took under €8 million). In the US, the fortunes of the films were reversed with Pan’s Labyrinth taking five times more at the box office ($37million to $7million). In the UK, Pan’s Labyrinth took slightly more. Overall, the figures show a very successful pair of films, which are both Spanish-language productions with a focus on children in various genre mixes that involve horror and fairy tales. The difference between the other genre repertoires involved in the mix is the means of separating them.

Perhaps the most interesting essay on El orfanato that I have read was published in Sight and Sound, April 2008. Maria Delgado situates El orfanato in terms of the lost children and families from the Spanish Civil War, making the observation that it is only within the last year that the Spanish government has finally passed legislation that allows families to finally come to terms with their losses:

Spain’s Law of Historical Memory was finally passed by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government late last year, with the result that the bodies of between 30,000 and 150,000 civilians who opposed the right-wing Nationalists during the Civil War and its aftermath can be exhumed from the mass graves in which they are believed to lie. The Orphanage adeptly explores the legacy of a buried past.

Delgado references a wide range of films in her persuasive account of how El orfanato is so deeply embedded within Spanish film culture. I haven’t seen all the films she mentions, but certain links – to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and to both The Spirit of the Beehive and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) are ones that struck me straight away. The last two titles both feature Ana Torrent, then aged 6 and 8 respectively. She made her name with these two films, becoming a child star right at the end of Franco’s domination of Spanish culture – when children were venerated in cinema and society at large. Both films were critiques of fascism presented in highly ambiguous metaphors. In Cría cuervos, Ana is a little girl who believes she has murdered her father – motivated by her mother’s death for which she thinks her father was responsible. (The father was an Army Officer and Ana’s family offers a kind of microcosm of Spain under Franco.) Ana’s mother is played by Geraldine Chaplin (director Carlos Saura’s wife) and she also plays the older Ana who is later revealed to be telling the story in flashback. In El orfanato, Geraldine Chaplin plays the ’spirit medium’ who Simón’s mother hires when he goes missing.

None of these references will mean much outside Spain, but they clearly had resonances for sections of the Spanish audience. Some other aspects of the plot offer more universal symbols associated with 20th century wars – e.g. human remains hidden in ovens.

The extracts I have been using during an event analysing El orfanato are:

The Innocents (UK 1961)

The Others (Spain/US 2001) 

Dark Water (Japan 2002)

Kilómetro 31 (Mexico 2006)

What has struck me most is the repetition of quite specific elements across several films. For instance, drawings of ghosts by children occur in The Ring (US 2002), The Others, Dark Water and El orfanato. Children’s games such as hide and seek or ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ appear in The Innocents, Dark Water and El orfanato etc.

I’ll try to add to this over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here’s a useful fansite reference:

http://www.horrorphile.net/el-orfanato/

The Terrorist (India 1999)

Ayesha Dharker as Malli in one of several scenes by water.

(These notes were written for a student event addressing the concept of ‘Shocking Cinema’, part of the A Level Film Studies syllabus in the UK. The Terrorist is an example of ‘emotional violence’ – physical violence is mostly off-screen, so the film was rated as ‘12′ in the UK.)

This is a Tamil language film, although its director is from the neighbouring state of Kerala where Malayalam is spoken – the two languages are similar.

Plot outline

Malli is a young woman in a guerrilla army. After her lover is killed, she is chosen to be a suicide bomber. The narrative follows her preparation for the assassination of a politician. During this period, she discovers that she is pregnant. Will she go through with the mission?

Institutional background

The Terrorist was seen mainly in smaller arthouse cinemas in selected Indian cities – it was not released widely like a Hindi language ‘Bollywood movie’. Although Bollywood movies have the biggest budgets and are enjoyed by Hindi speakers (about 40% of the population) in all parts of India, in South India films in other regional languages are more widely seen. Chennai (Madras) actually produces more films than Mumbai (Bombay). The Terrorist properly belongs to what has sometimes been called the Parallel Cinema or New Cinema in India. The director, Santosh Sivan, is from Kerala, the South Western state with the highest level of education and political sophistication. He was trained at the main Indian film school in Pune and has a wide knowledge of global cinema. He has acted as cinematographer on films in both Hindi and Tamil Cinema (notably for director Mani Ratnam) and after The Terrorist directed the big budget spectacular Asoka – the story of a legendary Indian king, starring Sharukh Khan, one of the biggest Bollywood stars. In 2003 he photographed the ‘British Indian’ film Bride and Prejudice.

Sivan is a cinematographer who directs, rather than a director who photographs and The Terrorist is a low budget film in which the quality of the images becomes a central feature. Sivan exploits the lush landscapes of South India and the beauty of his leading actor. There are many close-ups and shots of water and other natural features – in stark contrast to the violence of the armed struggle.

The Terrorist was seen at the Cairo Film Festival by the Hollywood actor John Malkovich, who wrote enthusiastically about the film and helped its release in the West. Made for only $50,000, one small New York cinema took $3,000 a day in its opening run. (see http://www.rediff.com/news/2000/jan/21us3.htm)

Civil war in Sri Lanka

The film does not explain the ‘real world’ background to the specific political struggles being explored. The assumption is that it refers to the Civil War in Sri Lanka and its effects in India. Sri Lanka has a majority population of Sinhalese Buddhists (about 14 million), but in the North Eastern corner of the island, the majority population is Tamil and Hindu (about 4 million). This Tamil minority is linked directly to the people of Tamil Nadhu, the Indian state in South Eastern India with a population of 62 million. Since the 1980s Tamil separatists have been fighting against the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka. The struggle also has major implications in India as Tamil Nadhu is one of the most important Indian states. (Look on a map to see how close Sri Lanka is to Tamil Nadhu.)

Extracts from an interview with writer/director/cinematographer Santosh Sivan on http://www.rediff.com/broadband/2000/sep/05trans.htm
“The idea came when I was talking to a friend of mine, Joe Samuel, who on the day of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination could not travel. That day we spent a lot of time talking about the assassination and were wondering what could have made her do it. This stayed with me for quite some time. So finally when I wanted to make a film I decided that since in our country women are considered very creative people here you have a person who is very destructive.

Maybe if you put a woman in a natural environment where she is very much associated with nature, it rains, there’s violence and very real things and maybe she starts feeling differently! Maybe it affects her. I liked the whole idea of how these thoughts run through someone’s head. So we did a lot of screen tests. We finally discovered Ayesha Dharker who I thought was simply beautiful because she didn’t need not to talk to express her feelings which was I think what I like about her.”

On the reaction of Western audiences to The Terrorist
It is about a subject which is very much in the news. It has a universal appeal to it. The whole idea that here is a film about a terrorist without much of violence in it and not much bloodshed made it a very different film. Even though it is not a very ‘audience friendly’ film, it still has evoked interest in an educated audience, which supports the film.”

The background to the Rajiv Ghandi assassination
Assassinations have had a devastating effect on Indian political life since Independence in 1947. The ‘father figure’ of peaceful resistance to the British, Mahatma Ghandi, was killed in 1948 by a Hindu fundamentalist unwilling to accept Ghandi’s belief in the equality of Muslims in India. Indira Ghandi (no relation, but the daughter of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawarhal Nehru), Prime Minister of India for all but three years from 1966, was assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984, following repression of Sikh militants. She was succeeded as Prime Minister by her son Rajiv as leader of the Congress Party, which then lost the 1989 election. Rajiv Ghandi was assassinated by Tamil separatists in 1991.

The following extract from http://www.lankalibrary.com/pol/rajiv.htm is © Asia Times, by K T Rajasingham

When he was about five metres from the stage, he received silk scarves from four persons – one being Latha Kannan, a lady Congress worker, whose daughter Kokila recited a Hindi song in his favor. Suddenly a young bespectacled women, about 25 years old with a sandalwood garland in her hand, popped up in the line to greet Rajiv Gandhi. Some eyewitness had seen this women moving towards Rajiv Gandhi and bending down, genuflecting to pay respects, by touching his feet.

At that very moment, at 10.18, a shuddering loud explosion was heard. Though there was a heavy concentration of policemen and Congress workers around Rajiv Gandhi, immediately after the loud explosion, he was thrown about 1.75 meters to the left, inside the barricade. According to some eyewitness reports, the explosion produced a flash of light about 3 meters high, which lasted for a few seconds, followed by a thick pall of smoke. The blast created a forceful impact, throwing people about, and in all, along with Rajiv Gandhi, 18 persons were killed, including nine policemen, and 33 persons, including 12, policemen were injured.

“The intelligence Bureau later briefed the informal meeting of the CCPA [Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs] about the technology of the assassination based on the inspection of the scene of the blast, discussions with the eye witnesses and experts (including doctors and forensic science experts) study of the photographs, examination material objects recovered from the scene etc. It revealed that: (i) The IED [Improvised Explosive Device] was carried on the body of an unidentified woman wearing a green salwar and mustard colored kameez (ii) It was a highly sophisticated and powerful device which had a foolproof triggering mechanism, electric detonator and a well concealed body jacket to house the IED; (iii) Plastic explosive of the RDX variety was used; (iv) Cause of death of Rajiv Gandhi and the woman later identified as Dhanu, who was carrying the IED, was a direct impact from the blast; (v) Small steel balls (or pellets) were used to create an intense impact; (vi) The assassin appeared to have intimate knowledge of the function, its sequence etc; (vii) Highest impact of the blast was borne by the unidentified woman followed by Rajiv Gandhi. It indicates that the epicenter of the blast was closest to the assassin followed by Rajiv Gandhi.”– The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi: Unanswered Questions and Unasked Queries, Dr Subramanian Swamy, pages 114-115.

Discussion questions for The Terrorist

1. Does Malli press the button at the end of the film? If she doesn’t, what do you think stops her?

2. Could The Terrorist be described as a film which utilises Hitchcock’s ideas about ‘pure cinema’? In what ways does it make use of elements of ‘film language’?

3. Did you identify with Malli? Which techniques are most effective in allowing us to have some idea about how this remarkable young woman might feel?

4. What do you think is the moral position of the film? Does it ask us to identify with a murderer?

5. Is the film shocking?

At Five in the Afternoon (Iran/France 2003)

Samira Makhmalbaf (right) with actor Agheleh Rezaie and Marziyeh Meshkin

At Five in the Afternoon is an Iranian film made in Afghanistan. A young woman and her parents arrive in ruined Kabul. The young woman attends a newly opened school and she takes part in an exercise in which she argues her case to become the next president of the country. She meets various people, including a photographer, a poet and a French peacekeeping soldier. Her conservative father is troubled by his daughter’s assertiveness. When she is out of his sight, she lifts her veil and puts on a pair of Western court shoes.

Samira Makhmalbaf is currently the most visible member of the formidable Makhmalbaf Film House – the Iranian family of filmmakers. At Five in the Afternoon is her third feature and the second to win a prize at Cannes (after Blackboards in 2000). Ms Makhmalbaf was just 18 when she first presented The Apple (1998) to international audiences at various festivals. She also contributed one of the episodes to 11″9′01 (2003), the compendium film focusing on 9/11.

The Makhmalbaf family work together, with Samira and her younger sister, brother and stepmother learning from the established filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. All of them contributed in different ways to At Five in the Afternoon, but the film clearly bears the stamp of Samira.

All of the Makhmalbaf Film House productions appear to draw upon the approaches developed in Italian neo-realist cinema in the 1940s. They develop stories from the reality of people’s lives (rather than writing stories in order to create something to say) and they generally use ‘non-professionals’. These were two of the precepts adopted by Roberto Rossellini. At Five in the Afternoon sometimes resembles the Italian postwar films, with refugees and survivors of the war struggling to find food and shelter amongst the ruined buildings. Samira Makhmalbaf refers to this approach as allowing her to represent the ‘spirit’ of the people of Afghanistan – in direct contrast to the representations constructed by the global media such as CNN:

Basically, radio, TV and satellites are the official voice of regimes and powerful authorities but cinema is the only broadcast medium where the author voices the spirit of nations without any tribune. We understand the spirit of India from Satiyajit Ray’s films, not from musical video clips on satellite TV. Ken Loach presents the spirit of the British people, while the BBC or Tony Blair can only be the spokespersons of England’s official policies. (Cannes interview on www.makhmalbaf.com)

Perhaps it is her father’s teaching or perhaps she has developed her own sense of what it means to be a cinema auteur, aware of the political nature of the medium and the possibilities for individual expression. In answer to a question about whether or not the film is a ‘realistic portrayal’ of contemporary Afghanistan she says:

Godard says that at first cinema was for showing reality but now it has led to entertainment. In the film I tried as much as possible not to entertain – contrary to the style so much a part of the media – but also avoided passing any type of judgment. In that sense this film is similar to The Apple. I have tried to understand a father who is a supporter of the Taliban and their culture and a girl who opposes that culture and depict what exists not at present but what I prefer to exist.

I chose the film’s characters among ordinary people and got the film’s details from their lives. I picked up much of the dialogue while searching for actors and locations and from what I heard from ordinary people in the streets or markets and re-enacted them in the film. In contrast to those who are used to simplify complex matters I haven’t tried to blame the Taliban for all the problems or with their fall, like the American reportage, portray a non-existent well being after the conquest of Afghanistan by Rambo.

This film aims to understand and show the mystery of this region’s backwardness and the hidden war between the two generations of the past and present and the differences that exist between men and women’s situations.

As far as the realities of Afghanistan are concerned, this film is quite realistic in my opinion. On the one hand it also looks at the poetic side of cinema and not because one of the characters is a poet and reads a poem in the film. (Cannes interview ibid.)

This is an eloquent statement about an approach which combines ideas from neo-realism with elements of surrealism or perhaps ‘magic realism’ – a combination also identifiable in films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar 2000) and his second wife Marziyeh Meshkini (The Day I Became a Woman 2000). Samira Makhmalbaf knows Afghanistan from early experiences with her father’s productions and in her previous film she worked across another Iranian border in Kurdistan. She is able to find the actors and create the dialogue, almost from an ‘insider’s position’. Several commentators have suggested that she shoots in a documentary style. Yet she also chooses the incidents in the story and the locations so that they present poetic or perhaps symbolic images rather than something resembling a newsreel. The different feel that this gives the film is central to its message.

Aesthetics
There are three broad categories of image in the film. Conversations or dialogues are conducted by characters shown in medium close-up and often facing the camera (without actually looking out towards the audience). This works particularly well when the central character Noqreh lifts her veil to speak, often amongst other women who are still covered. A complementary shot is the close-up of Noqreh’s feet as she slips between her workaday slippers and the white court shoes with a floral bow and a low heel. We spend some time following these feet across the ruined streets of Kabul. We are also offered a link to her father as we watch him washing his head and feet.

These shots are contrasted with the long shots of the environments of the characters, including the ruined palace, the wreck of an aircraft and other abandoned buildings. These shots are at once ‘realist’ with the crowds in dusty streets and ‘surrealist’ in the compositions of the women in blue-green burqas and umbrellas. Sometimes, they become symbolic as the motorised rickshaw passes the horse and cart.

The long shots also provide the means to move the narrative along in a series of long tracking or ‘travelling’ shots as we follow Noqreh through the city and across the desert, often with the high mountains on the horizon line.

A female perspective?
Samira Makhmalbaf, her younger sister and stepmother represent an unusual group of women directors in a society that has been reluctant to allow women to express themselves through the variety of media available to women in Europe and North America. How important is gender in influencing the ways in which Samira chooses to show the women of Afghanistan? There are practical advantages for a woman director working in Afghanistan and Samira does on occasion operate the camera (although the crew list shows a male sound recordist). Although Samira wrote the screenplay, the original story idea was her father’s. Making links between the material captured by the camera and the creative talent behind it is not straightforward. This is why the concept of ‘representation’ has so fascinated film and media theorists. Nevertheless, the public appearances of an eloquent and impassioned young woman filmmaker such as Samira Makhmalbaf must have some effects upon the reception of her film by audiences.

Theme
The heart of the film is in the way in which Noqreh moves between the interaction with her father and sister-in-law (the traditional Afghanistan) and a very different interaction with the poet and the soldier (the prospect of democracy in Afghanistan). The sequences in the school are somewhere between the two. There are several occasions when the struggle to define the possibilities for Afghan society are encapsulated in specific actions – e.g. when the photographer tells Noqreh to pull down her veil. He believes that this image of the ‘covered woman’ is the correct one for a candidate for the presidency.

The meeting with the French soldier (a consequence of the co-production deal?) enables the filmmakers to pose questions to a Western audience. What do we really understand as ‘democracy’? Is the soldier’s ignorance of or indifference towards how his president is elected very different to the Father’s reverence for a traditional Afghani way of life? Massoud Mehrabi (see web resource below) suggests that the search for water – always in short supply – is a symbol for the search for democracy. He notes that the water that is desperately needed to keep the baby alive is used by the Father for washing – cleanliness is more important than survival.

The poet appears to represent the sophisticated (optimistic?) view of what could happen in the new Afghanistan. How is this linked to the choice of Lorca’s poem about the bullfight for the title of the film and its opening and closing lines? The more you think about these ideas, the more the film becomes an intriguing commentary on “the new world order”. How must it feel to be an Iranian filmmaker, at odds with your own government, watching the Americans misunderstanding and threatening the futures of your neighbours in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Useful web resources

Interview with Samira Makhmalbaf by Sally Vincent
Article on the Makhmalbaf family by Hannah McGill in Sight and Sound, April 2004
Review by Massoud Mehrabi, Iranian film writer (in English)
Makhmalbaf Film House – a treasure house of interviews, articles, reviews, images compiled by the family and its collaborators.

Questions for discussion

1. How helpful is the suggestion that At 5 in the Afternoon employs both ‘realism’ and ‘surrealism’ in representing the new Afghanistan?

2. What did the film say to you about the possibilities for the future in Afghanistan? Which were the important scenes for you?

3. Do you think the gender of the filmmaker was important in the way the story developed and the ways in which characters were shown by the camera? Can you quote any examples?

4. Samira Makhmalbaf clearly believes that her film has a political purpose. How would you describe that purpose and do you think that she succeeds?

Roy Stafford 3/3/05

(These notes are a slightly adapted version of materials written for a screening of the film at Cornerhouse Cinema, Manchester in 2004)

Solaris (USSR 1972)

Kris and his wife (or is she?) on Solaris

Solaris is one of the films offered for critical study on the WJEC A Level Film Studies course. The notes below were written for a course on ‘Speculative Fiction’ in 2001.

The novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem was published in 1961 and as such stands as a much more sophisticated narrative than most Western science fiction could manage at the time. Lem wrote as a Pole and although familiar with Western SF also drew on the ‘philosophical writers’ of Eastern Europe such as Franz Kafka. The first English language translation of the novel appeared in 1970. The Russian film version followed in 1972 and as such was taken to be a riposte to Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey, even though it drew upon a novel already ten years old.

According to some sources, director Andrei Tarkovsky did not involve Lem in the screenplay of the film. The screenplay adds sequences that refer directly to Earth and the origins of the protagonist Kris Kelvin and his family home, a familiar image from other Soviet directors such as Dovzhenko. The novel is set completely in space.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86)
Tarkovsky was one of the few post Second World War Soviet directors to gain international recognition. His first three features after leaving film school (he had previously studied Arabic and worked as a geologist, unusual experiences for a filmmaker) all gained major international prizes. Solaris was his third film, but the first to get a UK release. It was followed into release by his second film Andrei Roublev, the story of a legendary icon painter which had difficulty in obtaining an export licence.
Tarkovsky went on to make The Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979) (also a science fiction influenced narrative) in the Soviet Union before moving abroad for three more films before his death from cancer aged 54.
Tarkovsky’s method tended to eschew ‘montage’ and to use relatively slowly paced long takes in a process of ‘sculpting time’. This became more pronounced in his later films which tended to attract small, but very enthusiastic audiences. In his later career Tarkovsky became synonymous with the popular view of the arthouse director, but Solaris represents a more accessible work.

The film and the book

Lem’s book is a classic of science fiction and Tarkovsky stays fairly close to the narrative of events aboard the space station. The main difference between the two narratives is the concentration in the novel on a satire of academic research – Kris refers to a series of theoretical ideas about the planet Solaris. Tarkovsky is more interested in the impact of the planet and its ‘living ocean’ on Kris himself. Although obviously taken with Lem’s story, Tarkovsky wanted to use the visual and aural power of cinema to the full. Even so, he maintains the central focus of the novel – the metaphysical questions about science and conscience – rather than developing the narrative into a mystery or a thriller. In this sense, Solaris represents a genuine attempt to create an ‘sf’ film.

The novel is currently in print and a ‘study guide’ can be found on the website at: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/solaris.html

Alien contact

Solaris, both as novel and film, belongs to one of the major narrative groups of science fiction – stories about the first contact between human beings and aliens. Such stories can be divided into two groups. The ‘alien invasion’ group sees Earth visited by aliens, who are usually portrayed as aggressive and are ultimately defeated through the application of specifically ‘human’ knowledge and personal qualities. These stories were introduced by H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The second group, common since Flash Gordon battled Ming the Merciless, sees humans meeting aliens in space.
In both groups of stories the emphasis is on the humans’ response to an alien ‘threat’ (although occasionally the aliens are benign). It has been argued that the difference in Solaris is that more time is spent on the question of how both human and alien intelligence feel and then react to the meeting. How does the alien intelligence react to encounters with humans? How can human cultural activity explore such issues? Tarkovsky links this question to that of the ‘second chance’ – having your time again.

The following extract from the detailed website operated by ‘Underman’ (I have no idea who s/he is, but the site is well worth exploring) summarises Tarkovsky’s approach:

In 1973, the year after the completion of Solaris, Tarkovsky spoke about the film with a Russian interviewer, Z. Podguzhets. The text appears in Kitty Hunter-Blair’s book, named in the footnote to this section. This is my summary of part of the text. Please note, I use “man” here in a generic, not gender, sense.

As Tarkovsky read it, the key to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris was not the technological sophistication represented by space travel, but “the moral problems evident in the relationship between Kelvin and his conscience”. The spiritual implications of technology were more important to Tarkovsky than the technology itself. He described two opposing forces influencing man: one, a yearning for complete moral freedom; two, the search for meaning in his own existence. The inevitable result was a deep inner conflict and a battle with conscience, which Lem expressed through the relationship between Kelvin and his wife, Rheya, summoned back to physical form in station Solaris. Surrounded as he is by the ultimate products of technological achievement, with which he pursues his urge to explore the universe, Kelvin can do nothing to avoid coming face to face with the implications of his own past actions.

Kelvin can never distance himself from the forces that shaped his own development. However far he journeys, he will ultimately be drawn back to his own roots. Even at the limits of human endurance, Kelvin is a creature of the earth and the people who gave him existence. The dream of returning home and eradicating the mistakes of his past lies at the core of Kelvin’s being, but it takes an alien intelligence to perceive the dream.

Yet that alien intelligence, too, is subject to whatever laws may govern the universe. The inescapable fate bestowed by a spiritual, moral existence is to live with the conscience that arises from the actions a person takes, with no prospect of a second chance. Kelvin’s ultimate destiny is to return to the place where he was born. He can go nowhere else.

http://www.underview.com/2001/solaris.html (Unfortunately, this link is no longer valid – does anyone know if the text is available elsewhere?)

Time Within Time – The Diaries 1970-1986, Andrey Tarkovsky, translator Kitty Hunter- Blair, Faber and Faber, London, 1994.

Tarkovsky and the film critics

Film critics generally, and certainly in 1972 when Solaris was released, are often dismissive of science fiction. In Sight and Sound Spring 1973, the veteran film scholar Ivor Montagu celebrates the arrival of Tarkovsky’s films in the UK, but sees Solaris as the weakest, partly because it fails to represent scientists or science and instead concentrates on the personal. Tony Rayns in Monthly Film Bulletin of June 1973 refers to ‘kindergarten psychology’ and dismisses the film. Rayns suggests that 2001 was ‘totalitarian’ and Solaris is ‘humanist’, but where Kubrick was at least ‘visionary’, Tarkovsky is ‘merely reactionary’. However, Philip Strick, one of the few film critics with a detailed knowledge of science fiction claims that Solaris is:

“… the nearest the cinema has come to capturing the complexities of modern science fiction, with its intermingling of time and memory, acute uneasiness, and emphasis on elegance and style.” (Strick, Sight and Sound Winter 1972/3)

Solaris provides us with a chance to discuss what kinds of questions science fiction can ask when it is not being ‘predictive’. These may indeed turn out to be philosophical, and even spiritual, rather than ‘scientific’.

Roy Stafford 29 October 2001

A Level Media Results

As usual the same tired arguments about A Level Media Studies have been trotted out again in the last few days in the build-up to the release of the actual results. In the Guardian last week Peter Wilby wrote quite a sensible piece offering a refreshing view on the debate — but was then deluged by bloggers representing the ‘dumbing down’ camp. Today the Daily Telegraph has had the nerve to repeat more or less the same story that ran in the Mail at this time last year with rent-an-education-quote Alan Smithers on ’soft subjects’ like media studies.

This year I’m going to try to rebut at least some of the charges on behalf of the Media Education Association. The ’soft subject’ charge is made against a raft of subjects. They are likely to be either potentially radical (sociology is still in this category and still being described as ’soft’, just as it was in the 1970s) or possibly too ‘vocational’ like business studies. The prejudices come from traditionalists and those whose own educational background has involved either ‘high culture’ arts or ‘hard sciences’. The charges have very little to do with any kind of evidence.

Media studies may be many things, but like most subjects it offers the opportunity for students to stretch themselves or to take an easier option and just pass the exam. The problem is really the exam system. The same people who think media studies is a soft option are also those who claim that students are all exam grade chasers. But this is contradictory logic. No student who chooses a course because they think they will get a higher grade would then select Media Studies at A Level, since the proportion of A grades is low compared to most traditional subjects. So, does that mean that students who choose media are the less ’street smart’ students who don’t know what they are doing? That could be true at AS, but they soon learn that it isn’t a doss and many drop out before A2. We know that media students come from all kinds of schools and colleges and there are now enough of them (about 4% of all A Level students) to be confident that the media cohort is representative of the whole student population. There is a small percentage of students who don’t consider taking media studies because the press, their school or their parents have attempted to put them off. Whether these students would get higher grades if they did take media studies is impossible to know. The truth of course is that the students who make it to A2 Media Studies are there because they want to be, because they enjoy the subject and think that it is relevant to their lives.