A Visually Literate, Critical Generation

by Lucie Hecht

This fall marked the 8th year of BAM’s Young Film Critics After-School Program, inaugurated in 2006. Fourteen students from Brooklyn area high schools spent 10 weeks with instructor Josh Cabat, watching films and learning how to talk and write about them. Cabat selected movies made by directors “outside of the white male-dominated mainstream,” introducing the students to directors such as Agnès Varda, Akira Kurosawa, and Hany Abu-Assad, among others. As is tradition in the program, the Young Film Critics benefited from a visit from a professional film critic; this year’s guest was Wesley Morris of Grantland.com.

According to BAM’s Assistant Director of Education John Tighe, “these kids are astute because, more so than any generation before, they are visually literate… They all love film because they can ‘read’ images.” The idea of a universal language of cinema that is best read by someone who has grown up immersed in its grammar is nowhere better exemplified than in the work of BAM’s Young Film Critics, whose final film reviews can be as elegant as A.O. Scott’s. Here’s an example from Ali Motte, a junior at the French-American School of New York: “While film is completely valid as a form of entertainment, Cleo from 5 to 7 engages the viewer in a melting pot of the gravity of reality and the light nature of fiction, inducing a delightfully confusing third reality.”

This season continued a powerful tradition and also marked a first: the fledgling expedition into distance learning between BAM’s Young Film Critics and Cabat’s students at Roslyn High on Long Island. The two student groups made strides for BAM’s expanding technological education initiatives as they discussed Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and its powerful resonance with youth today.

To read more of the students’ reviews, visit the program page. And, if you know a high schooler who would benefit from the program, check back in the fall for information on the 2015 application process.

Lucie Hecht is the general management administrative assistant at BAM and takes great photos of her cats.

Are You as Smart as a High Schooler? A Doll's House Edition

by Jessica Goldschmidt

BAM Education offers comprehensive study guides to the more than 220 schools that attend our live performances and film screenings every year (we quizzed you on Rime of the Ancient Mariner back in December). But what goes into the making of those guides? How do you approach inventive, multi-layered art and make it legible to a younger audience?

We asked Josh Cabat—BAM Education writer, Young Film Critics instructor, and chair of English for the Roslyn (NY) public schools—to talk a bit about what went into his study guide for the Young Vic's upcoming production of Ibsen's A Doll's House—and learned some fascinating things about the show in the process.

View/download the study guide for A Doll's House

What's the first question you ask yourself when starting to write a student study guide?

As someone who has been through a lot of bad professional development, I only have two things in mind when I undertake something like this:
1. Can a teacher use this tomorrow in a real classroom?
2. Have I set it up in such a way that it casts a net wide enough to encompass as broad a range of students as possible, based both on grade level and relative comfort with literary analysis?

Did you learn anything new/surprising about the play while researching this guide?

I was surprised to learn what great lengths Ibsen went to deflect attention from a purely feminist reading of the play. Although lauded at every turn by the Emma Goldmans of the day as feminist in a visionary way, Ibsen insisted that Nora's struggle was simply another manifestation of the grand theme of his work of that period, which was the oppression of the individual by the strictures of society. According to Ibsen, anyway, Nora is something of an accidental feminist.