Education and social class in international film: The power of affect

• In Event: Tracing the “ghosts” of (modern) schooling and exposing its limits in non-formal spaces: Transnational and translational studies in education

Proposal

Coping with the effects of globalization demands a thoughtful and authentic acknowledgement of the precarity of daily life. It requires an acknowledgement that discrete and independent categories that have shaped our understandings of our role in the world and our power to effect change are more complicated and ambiguous than we have been led to acknowledge. Given the existence of global flows (Appadurai, 1987), and the speed with which cultural products are circulated, conventional assumptions regarding the nature of time and space, and our ability to understand the past, control the present, predict the future, and protect sense of place, are no longer widely shared and are repeatedly questioned (Bauman, 2000).
The conundrum that educational researchers working in the Global North confront is that they reap the benefits of neo-liberal agendas that create continued patterns of oppression in concert with the pre-existing global forces that are destabilizing. While those forces offer new possibilities for reimagining the social world, they also include practices that lead to exclusion and marginalization. The use of English as a global lingua franca, the control of publication venues, the privileged access to teaching and research resources, and the power of assemblage as expressed within the international conference venue, all contribute to the ways in which educational ideas are shaped and then globally circulated in ways that privilege Global North academic authority(Altbach, 1977). But ideas about education are not limited to those that originate within the academy and include those that become influential cultural objects that are globally circulated on their own accord. Film is one such object, and in this presentation, I examine three acclaimed international films and compare their depictions of the relationship between education and social class with widely disseminated educational literature on the same theme. To be clear, the film industry mirrors the previously described neo-liberal sensibilities that address to the production and dissemination of educational research. They include the mandatory use of English subtitles, the hierarchical structure of the global film festival system, and the hegemonic practices of studios that promote international perspectives for their Global North audiences. Thus, when successful, film produces powerful affect that can in some cases complement and in other cases challenge conventional assumptions educators make about the relationship between education and social class.
A Separation, written and directed by Ashgar Farhadi, won the academy award for best international (foreign language) film in 2012. Originally produced with permission from the Iranian government, its domestic popularity compelled officials to submit it as Iran’s national entry for academy award consideration, even though the film was criticized by government loyalists for being overly critical of Iranian society. The film involves the story of a dysfunctional middle class family, where the wife (Simin) sues her husband for divorce, hoping to create a better future for their daughter, Termeh, by moving abroad. Her husband, Nader relies upon a working class care giver, to help care for his disabled father, but a series of unfortunate events results leading to conflict among the protagonists in a sharia court. Formal education referencing plays a relatively minor role in the plot of the film, although education serves as a marker for social class position and future upward mobility aspiration. Other themes depicted within the film include gender discrimination, the exercise of self-interest in opposition to moral allegiance, and expressions of secularism as opposed to adherence to traditional and religious commitments. The witnessing of the effects of family dissolution as viewed through the eyes of eleven year old daughter Termeh makes the questions raised in the film more poignant.
Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, of South Korea, was the first international film to win the Academy Award for best picture of the year in 2020. A film with both comedic and tragic elements, its plot involves a lower working class family, whose son poses as a university student tutor for a wealthy family’s daughter. He soon enlists his sister, posing as an art therapist, to tutor the family son, and then works to ensure that his other family members are employed by the wealthy family, through disguise and deceit. Eventually, their deceitfulness results in violence and tragedy. The film can be viewed as a devastating critique of social class difference, illustrating the hypocrisy of meritocratic values and beliefs that rationalize class privilege. Education is treated as being complicit in the social corruption the meritocratic ideal encourages, and the use of affect to connote bodily injury and harm, with appeals to sensations such as smell and touch, is particularly noteworthy.
Still Life is considered one of Jia Zhangke’s most important films, winning the Golden Lion Award for best international film at the Venice Film Festival in 2006. Jia is one of China’s most acclaimed filmmakers of the sixth generation (the post-1990 era). The film focuses upon Han Sangmin, a coal miner, and Shen Hong, a nurse, both from the province of Shanxi, who travel to Fengjie, a small town on the Yangze River, in search of their spouses. Parts of Fengjie have been flooded, due to its proximity to the Three Gorges Dam, a massive project that has produced significant environmental devastation. Although Sangmin and Shen lead separate lives as befits their working class and middle class statuses, their encounters with marital infidelity, and systemic corruption and violence are similar. The personal alienation they experience as a byproduct of China’s modernization, is a common theme in Jia’s work.
The three films together depict social class divisions within the representative societies that are portrayed. Through the power of affect, they speak to the deceit and corruption that belie personal aspirations for a better future among the poor and working class. And, they view education as being only marginally important to issues of family dislocation that the characters experience and certainly not, a potential leveler of class division and inequality. The films thus ask their audiences to critically examine the limits to which formal, education can successfully address issues of social class injustice.

Author

• Irving Epstein, Illinois Wesleyan University