Cinema and the classroom

School is something that cuts to the heart of us all. It was when we experienced life as social beings for the first time and when, in most cases, we were the most scared in our lives - a fact to which we devote, in adult life, a great deal of subconscious energy to suppressing and forgetting.

It is most intense when the pupils are in their late teens: old enough to be almost-adults (old enough in this country, in fact, to serve in the armed forces), old enough to feel the pain of humiliation, despair, a broken heart, and also rapture and love, but without yet having grown the vital thick skin of cynicism and experience that allows adults to manage and contain these feelings.

No wonder that for many people school was the most vivid period, perhaps the only real period of their lives. And it is strange to think that some of the teachers we knew, and to whom we were closest at this late stage in our school careers, were maybe just five years older than we were then. How extraordinary to realise that some of the gruffest teachers who terrified you the most were younger than you are now.

It made me think: wait, why aren't there more films about school and schooldays? Why, in fact, aren't all films about school? After all, the genre is such a rich seam: it's got such potential for heartbreak, for passion, for violence - of both the metaphorical and literal sort. And it also has such an enormous capacity for idealism.

It is intriguing because it offers two social worlds: the world of child-pupils and the world of adult-teachers, which I mentally label "play ground" and "staffroom" - which overlap as in a kind of Venn diagram in the classroom itself.

The private emotional lives of the children may be a mystery to the teachers, and those of the teachers are certainly opaque to the pupils. Most of the time. But it is when this private business encroaches onto the formal world of the classroom, that ritual arena of disinterested learning which is in fact so easily encroached upon, that the classic drama begins.

There's always a nerdish pleasure in pointing out omissions to a list, but I can't help but regret that the organisers of a recent poll of top school movies did not include Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, a French thriller from 1955.

A horrible, disciplinarian headmaster - and corporal punishment enthusiast, naturally - is beastly to pupils and staff alike. He beats his wife and has just dumped his mistress, who is one of the teachers. So the spurned mistress makes a sensational proposal to the beaten wife, no longer her rival but a sister in oppression.

They will murder the headmaster and dump his body in the school swimming pool, making it look like suicide or an accident. School is an exquisitely appropriate context for this scheme: as it is a place where violence lingers heavily in the air.

Children were beaten routinely, at school and home, and male violence towards women was urbanely tolerated. Ingeniously, Clouzot yokes the two together and invents a revenge drama. Children everywhere must have fantasised about revenge on a horrible schoolmaster: it is a wish-fulfilment fantasy for grown-ups and children alike.

Violence at school was so commonplace until relatively recently. (You may remember an arch reality TV show recently called That'll Teach 'Em, in which modern schoolkids supposedly endured the rigours of a 1950s-style grammar-school education. It was of course meaningless, because no one got beaten. Corporal punishment was not mentioned, still less practised. On this programme, the nasty little secret of traditional educational values remained a secret.)

This was generally a subject of jollity in 50s school film: think of Jimmy Edwards in his chalk-dusted mortarboard and gown, thwacking away. But there is a startling exception to this: Carry On Teacher has a remarkable scene in the staffroom in which the masters debate the matter in all seriousness, and Kenneth Williams plays a teacher who says that though he will sometimes beat a boy if there is no alternative, he does so with an awful feeling of failure. I rather admire the Carry Ons for including this moment, and not going along with the dishonest pose that it was something that could be taken lightly.

I went to a liberal UK independent school in the 1970s, Haberdashers' Aske's in Borehamwood in north-west London. It had an excellent no-corporal-punishment rule, but some of the masters certainly felt entitled to hand out the odd informal clump.

I never received any such punishments and witnessed only one. Two boys were talking in a corridor just before going into a lesson (against the rules) and I saw a teacher literally bang their heads together. It was a petty, yet completely disgusting act of violence: an assault, in fact, by the stronger upon the weaker.

Even today I wince when I read journalists casually using that image. I remember that the event was made even more contemptible by the master visibly realising in the next fraction of a second what an unforgivable thing he had done, and in a breezy, cowardly way, trying to laugh it off.

There are two great films about violence in school: Lindsay Anderson's If? and Gus Van Sant's Elephant. A key moment in the first film comes when Malcolm McDowell's rebel is required to submit to a beating not from a master, but from one of the prefects, and he is in a kind of anguished rage about whether or not he should take it - a parable, though a brutal one, for the anguish suffered by many bright high-schoolers suddenly confronted by adult rules which they realise for the first time in their lives are wrong, and being practised by people who are stupid and culpable. They realise that they do have a choice, of sorts, about whether to submit to these rules.

When McDowell finally opens up with a gun on the school, however, it is a bizarre moment of satire, with an edge of un-seriousness, fantasy and even flippancy, which for my money rather undermines the impact of the picture.

In Gus Van Sant's Elephant, the violence is all too serious, inspired by the Columbine massacre - which was also the starting point of Michael Moore's anti-gun docu-polemic Bowling For Columbine.

(Interestingly, his title is a reference to Alan Clarke's Elephant, a stark cine-prose-poem about violence in Northern Ireland.) The violence is all the more disturbing for being filmed in such an affectless, un-dramatic way. It is, of course, an unrepresentative film in that most schools, thankfully - even in the US - are not subject to apocalyptic gun violence.

Yet in its horror, its very extremity, Elephant speaks to a sizable proportion of people for whom school was an endurance test and a grim ritual of humiliation and mortification, in which revenge fantasies might well have found fertile ground.

So much for violence. Sex is a rather more taboo subject. But my favourite school film on this theme, and the film that would come top of my poll, is Alexander Payne's Election of 1999, a film of inspired incorrectness, which I can only describe as the Animal Farm of sexual politics and a brilliant parable for 90s America in the Monica Lewinsky era.

A decent, hard-working yet stressed high-school teacher (played by Matthew Broderick) is feeling a vague sense of mid-life dissatisfaction.

His marriage is in difficulties, due to a failure to produce children, and although entirely convinced of the value of his work, he is increasingly aware that he is going through the same things, year after year.

It is at this delicate time of his life that he conceives an unwholesome obsession with a bright, irritatingly conceited, over-achieving student, Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon - the greatest performance of her career. He is fascinated by her, and also irritated by the fact that her flirtatious manner (which he suspects is far more adult) has ruined the career of a friend of his.

Most importantly, and most abysmally, he is actually envious of her: envious that she will probably grow up to get a more prestigious and better-paid job than his. This is the envy and hatred that the old feel for the young, and which, as Germaine Greer wrote, threatened men feel for women in general. So he plans to wreck her chances at the upcoming election for school president.

The idea of teachers not merely lusting after but actually nailing the pupils is the unmentionable of unmentionables, but Election fearlessly tackles it. These are examples, mostly, of cynicism and irony and alienation. But there are in fact, great school films composed in a cinematic language quite different from this.

Ken Loach's Kes, for all its great moments of comedy, is a serious film about the shortcomings of school. An old warhorse like Goodbye Mr Chips takes the idea of an inspirational, self-sacrificing teacher very seriously.

For my money, one of the best films to emerge this year (and the winner of the 2008 Cannes Golden Palm) is a school film in precisely this non-ironic vein: this is Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs, or Within The Walls - that is, the walls of the classroom. (Perhaps In Class would be the best translation, or just Class.)

It is based on a novel by Francois Begaudeau, which was in turn based on his own experiences teaching in a tough Paris school. Remarkably, Begaudeau plays himself in the film, whose plot turns on the fact that some of the pupils are entitled to attend teacher conferences as pupil 'reps', and start indiscreetly feeding back the teachers' remarks to the errant pupils in question, which starts a monumental confrontation in class.

The fascination of the film is often simply in the non-controversial business of teaching: a longish sequence in which Francois talks about grammar, without any great dramatic subtext, is absolutely gripping: I could watch it all day.

But to return to the three Venn diagram fields I proposed earlier - "schoolyard" "classroom" and "staffroom" - the meat of Entre les murs is in the transgression, or the leaking from one to the other.

Children are allowed out of the classroom into the staffroom to eavesdrop on the discussion of their elders.

Then, in the film's final dramatic scene, Francois leaves the castle keep of the classroom - the stronghold of his authority - and goes down into the schoolyard to explain and justify his behaviour in front of a boisterous jury of pupils, whom he has come to respect. A great film, in a great school-film tradition. Voting for the best ones is always fiendishly difficult, but if pushed, I would go for Election or Entre les murs.