Moving in unexpected ways, this meta-filmic documentary about a director who conducted a series of film classes for a group of German girls in 1968, brings everyone back for a reunion as they revisit those wonderful days when filmmaking seemed to have limitless pedagogical possibilities.  

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In 1968, a class of German girls took part in an experiment.  They were given Super 8 cameras and taught how to tell a story visually. 

More than half a century later, these girls, now women in their sixties—and their film teacher-cum-director Edgar Reitz, now in his nineties—meet up to revisit their once-in-a-lifetime encounter all those years ago. 

Filmstunde_23 (also known as Subject: Filmmaking) played at the Berlinale earlier in the year, but while it might appear to be a nondescript documentary, it will move you in a meta-filmic way, which is rare as meta-films usually put viewers at a technical or philosophical distance. 

Meant to seek political leverage in getting film to be taught in public schools, this experiment ultimately failed to garner any momentum.  But its failure shows us how difficult it is to get policymakers and educators to buy into this medium of limitless pedagogical possibilities. 

It’s the same here in Singapore, where film has largely been neglected at the pre-tertiary level.  The irony, as with most developed countries, is that many kids and teens today have already bought into the idea of ‘content creation’ via social media like TikTok. 

“Our thesis was that everyone can make movies.”

But education systems around the world remain behind in the assimilation of new media knowledge, skills and critical thinking into the classrooms. 

So, Filmstunde_23, modest by design but valuable as evidence of the importance of learning how to think about what we see through the lens or on the screen, becomes empowering. 

Those girls had shot a bunch of eclectic shorts that are now time capsules—these works would have made the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès very proud, from observational documentaries to fantastical adaptations, and even more experimental stuff that would make the French New Wave radicals blush. 

Types of shots, montage techniques and the philosophy of personal cinema may have been deliberated, but what these girls learnt in those few weeks was to find themselves, or as the late American film critic Andrew Sarris famously expressed about auteurism, the “élan of the(ir) soul(s).”

Grade: B+

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