Antoine and Myself: When the System Fails the Kid

 In a weird way, I kind of see myself in Antoine Doinel. No, I didn't steal a typewriter or money from my grandmother, but I did live in an education system that tried to belittle and control me, a system that I just escaped. 


The education system in this movie is portrayed in a hyper-realistic way for the time frame of the movie, but it was even more surprising to see so many parallels between that system and the one that I attended. Looking deeper into it, It wasn't like I was being verbally abused by my teachers, but there was always a system which made the dynamic King v. Peasant, rather than Teacher v. Student. When Antoine turns in his plagiarized paper, and the teacher berates him in front of all his classmates, I felt that in such a deep way. Though his actions are inexcusable, the teacher's method of discipline was not helpful, and it's these seemingly small things that shape a kids life, that tell a kid if he's enough or if he's a failure. Because parents are not able to be unapologetically present, teachers are important for children to flourish into decent human beings, especially when the parents are prisoners of labor, and to some extent of each other as well. 

It was here that I drew the comparisons between Antoine and myself, just two kids in a broken system, me in College, Antoine, who knows. I have made it to higher education but what happens to the kids who don't make it? In my case, they die, or they become victims of yet another system made to keep them down. Some of my closest friends from high school are drug dealers or in gangs. Some of them call me in the middle of the night wishing that they could leave the system, wishing that they could turn back time.  The French New Wave helps us see the injustices that they wanted to fix back then, but in some ways, maybe even worse, they have not been fixed, and many kids will end up like Antoine, victims painted as villains. 

Comments

  1. Kanyon BeringerOctober 21, 2020 at 12:13 PM

    I really like how you use parallels between your experience and this one and shows that even though this film is alot older we can still draw parallels that make this film worth watching and studying great blog!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AmyOctober 24, 2020 at 10:03 PM

    I love the idea you present her as "victims painted as villians." Some people talk about the education system in poor Black and Brown communities as being "a school to prison pipeline." In fact, some locations decide how many prison beds they will need in the future by how many students are in kindergarten. I think that you're right that this film shows the reality that the two systems are intertwined. The plagarized essay is a good example of the teacher's failure to teach. Antoine copies the essay not to be devious but because he worship's Balzac's writing. Instead of encouraging that interest while disciplining him for plagarizing, the teacher just attempts to crush his soul. It's all very sad and wrong.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art Imitates Art: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

Image
    After the reading discussion, I went into a deep thinking about the state  of art, and more specifically a new saying: art imitates art. This saying is very much how I feel about art right now. Nothing is original. But to some extent, this is completely okay. I mean our humanity holds us back from truly creating something new every time, and surely, this also means that there is a limit to how many new things we can truly create.       If this is true, then that would mean that a web of the already created genres and mediums and formats also exists, and this web keeps expanding, creating small pockets of sub-genres, which create even more pockets of sub-genres. To me, this is originality, pushing the envelope to more pockets, to more sub-genres, to new ideas that merge with other already created ideas. This is the peak of human intellect.       In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, there are various parts that seem to appeal to Western Culture...
Read more

Ali: Fear eats the soul, Why Filmmaking will never die

Image
    Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is probably one of the weirdest films I've ever watched, and it was very cool to see just how much influence Fassbinder had on modern filmmaking and the new writers of today. One of the clearest parallels in influence that I saw was that of Fassbinder and Kaufman, both of them use all of the elements of film to create awkward yet enlightening films that touch on many subject matters. However, I don't want to simply explore the parallels between the films. Instead, I want to talk about Fassbinder's methods and approaches to this story.        In the movie, an almost  darkly comedic take on racial tensions and love become the main center pieces of the story, and through this, Fassbinder is able to play around with most of the element of the film, creating whimsical yet disturbing scenes that play with the emotions and reality of the spectator.         ...
Read more