Alan Parker and my education

Two days ago I spent most of the time gathering energy and inspiration to write a post for my blog. I decided to make a weekly one and publish it every Wednesday.

I had thought of various topics. One of them was about Alan Parker as he just died last month.

In the evening I showed it to my girlfriend, who usually checks over for mistakes, spelling and content. She made some observations that I corrected and improved. Then I had for dinner some quinoa that was left in the refrigerator from the day before. I brushed my teeth and went to bed satisfied.

In the morning I woke up early to throw the keys across the balcony to my uncle, who had asked to borrow my car. Then I went to the computer to search the web for images of the film Birdy, since all the writing had been triggered by a memory of my childhood when I saw it for the first time on TV.

I thought it would be easy to find the classroom scene. I had inclined the whole speech towards the issue of education and how there is something wrong with it and that (according to me) Parker suspected. Due to the recurrence in his filmography to represent scenes that take place in classrooms.

I wanted to do a visual and written tour through all those films, while expressing my reflections on them.

But nowhere I looked could I find a photo of that part of Birdy’s movie. Since the previous day I´ve had downloaded the torrent to be able to see it again. I grew fond of that film. But the file was particularly large and it was taking too long. So I looked for it on Stremio. I went through most of the movie in fast forward mode, I would surely run into that shot.

I had not seen it  for more than 29 years. The physical age of the actors and the situations in which they are seen are not like those of a teenager about to be of legal age. At least from that quick review it looked like there were no scenes not even close to a school or high school. Then scenes from the Vietnam War came up that I didn’t remember. Were they that old?

Could it be that I invented that scene in my memory?

I really like the film music Peter Gabriel has composed. Quite often I listen to the one he made for Birdy. For a long time I have taken for granted the existence of that scene as I described it in the writing that I was going to publish instead of this … I remember it very vividly every time I listen to that soundtrack.

I wrote:

The first time I saw an Alan Parker movie I was around 10 years old. It was early in the morning and I turned on the TV. Sundays always had that languid and sad taste of something imminent and unwanted that was approaching. Tomorrow I would have to go back to school. Fun, rest, and freedom were coming to an end.

I switched channels and the first image that caught my attention, presented me with a dream in which to escape from my fear of school. It showed a boy who released an ornithopter into the classroom´s air, causing the general distraction of his classmates.

What was it that had triggered my memory to stray so far from reality?

In the remembered scene I saw Birdy, dressed in a white uniform, lost in the middle of a class that could be of math. Without thinking about it or considering what was happening around him, he takes the ornithopter he had been working on all night out of his backpack, winds it up and sends it flying through the air in the class room.

In the real scene, a empowered Bridy is seen, dressed in everyday clothes, (the students in this version do not wear a uniform) leading the class in a presentation about birds (his pasion topic) and uses his ornithopter to illustrate the operation of wings, and how flying is more about confidence than physics.

In the first, Birdy is a withdrawn student who manages (unintentionally) to attract the attention of his classmates.

In the second all the elements persist: class environment and flying artifact. But this time Birdy owns himself, directs the attention of his colleagues in an articulate and precise way.

They are two Birdys with different attitudes towards their environment.

Somehow in my head I had reconfigured the memory of that character, I had potentiated his alienated personality and I adapted it to my own school experience at the time I saw the film. I put on him a uniform like the one I used, and gave him an attitude similar to the one I had when I was 10 or 11 years old, always dreaming things far removed from what the teacher taught us. I identified my self so much with that film that I unconsciously decided to adopt it and invested it with my own sense. I created my own version within my mind.

But isn’t that what happens every time we watch a movie? We have to allow ourselves to be touched by it and recreate it within ourselves in order to give it meaning.

I kept writing:

Something in Alan Parker longs for those times. He uses classrooms on a recurring basis showing them as confined spaces where children dream of freedom. Is there a feeling of unconscious criticism towards education as we know it, or at least towards the sensation that such an experience provokes in us? Why should we as children be forced to go to a place we hate to learn things that we are not interested in?

Below images from the films where these classroom scenes take place:

I have spent years rethinking what school would ideally be like. When writing my script about the Rural Teacher, I try to imagine a form of education that really transforms and enhances the essence of each child, and not only turns us into memory-repetition machines, without reflection or creativity.

Now that Alan is no longer with us, I am forced to turn back and realize that films like Birdy or The Wall have marked me in a very special way, without me knowing it consciously. I think he managed to touch subtle fibers that we all have as children, when more than rules, quantities or dates, we wanted to speak from the heart.