Wisconsin Film Fest Part 2

Afterschool

I talked in my post about L'Avventura about the value of appreciating filmmaking style as a way to express wordless character development, and this film is an example of how understanding that fact about cinema helps me internalize movies a lot deeper. This film said a lot with very little human expression, and the style made it compelling when the main plot seemed too distracting to the bigger issues of the movie.

The subject matter in the film fest guide description of Afterschool definitely intrigued me... all I needed to know was that the film explored the detachment that comes with an adolescence raised totally on Internet culture. This is a pretty raw movie especially if you spent any amount of excessive time looking at YouTube clips, however funny and innocent, of total strangers doing things. Layer the emotional fragility of high school teenagers and place the main character away from the comforts of home at a boarding school, and you create an environment that allows for the computer and other electronic portals to provide a total distance from real human interaction. When the protagonist is compelled to say anything, it's barely a mumble of emotional expression and it's offered borrowed verbatim from something he just watched online. The film gets darker with this setup, and it definitely makes you uncomfortable. It's a borderline candidate for one of those movies you SHOULDN'T screen for a group of friends just looking for a interesting thing to watch (a friend told me Deliverance is the ideal example of those kinds of movies).

Personally I'm oddly accepting and fearful of the multitudes of access points to knowledge and entertainment that in prehistoric times (pre-Internet) might have required an organized physical gathering of people. Online shopping, dating, online book clubs, film review blogs (heh) and cyber-everythings have made global socializing and discussions convenient but it's also a curse. Afterschool tries to tap into the tattered emotional tapestry that might exist if many of our strong desires and interests are filtered through a passive observation of a computer screen.

This was the director's first film and he really tackled this movie in a riveting way. Mixing the amateur YouTube style video with traditional indie filmmaking and interesting framing, he really creates a interesting relationship between the characters, as they view violence and reality through their own cameras, and the audience, as they watch or are obscured from viewing voyeuristic subject matter. I am excited to see how this director handles other themes.