Free screening and discussion with director Amanda Rose Wilder
Amanda Rose Wilder's feature film debut dives head first into the inaugural year of the Teddy McArdle Free School in New Jersey, where all classes are voluntary and rules are determined by vote: adults and children have an equal say. Wilder is there from the beginning to end of the school year, documenting and observing founder Alex Khost and a cast of outspoken young personalities as they form relationships, explore their surroundings and intensely debate rule violations, until it all comes to a head. Approaching the Elephant is a rare, inspired portrait of unfettered childhood.
Following a theatrical run this winter in New York City, Approaching the Elephant has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The New York Times writes, "Ms. Wilder, in her debut feature, riskily opts to leave much of the children’s educational activity fairly vague. Which gives it one more thing in common with school: You need to pay attention."
In a recent essay titled, "All Documentaries are Participatory Documentaries," Richard Brody writes,
"“Approaching the Elephant” is a tour de force of participatory filmmaking. Wilder documents the first year of a small “free” elementary school in New Jersey, a school without tests, grades, mandatory classes, or fixed classroom structure. Its rules (other than those involving fundamental matters of safety) are decided democratically by its students, of whom there are about a dozen, ranging from approximately six to 10 years old.
Wilder installs herself, or is in effect embedded, in the school for extended periods of time; she’s on hand for a full range of activities, and her camera (which she wields along with the sound equipment—she’s a crew of one) gets close to children, teachers, and parents. (In one scene, she’s even in a car that’s dropping a child off at school.) Teachers gather children for rule-making meetings, which are themselves not mandatory; discipline is overseen by the students, too, who call meetings with both other children and staff to discuss and resolve conflicts.
... What Wilder does film is astonishingly nuanced and intimate. She observes children’s conflicts—outer ones that then give rise to inner ones—that swing from “Lord of the Flies”-style cruelty and egotistical willfulness to the struggle to earn respect and live up to one’s own compassionate ideals. As for the unusually loose and diverse educational component of the school, which seems to involve more woodworking than reading, Wilder reveals the many vectors (social as well as creative) that it enfolds. If the school and its activities are holistic and microcosmic, [Actress filmmaker Robert] Greene’s editing, with its splendidly complex weave of gazes and gestures, action and dialogue, conjures a world within its grounds. Nonetheless, the filmmaker’s invisibility and silence, the artificial elimination of her conspicuous presence from the action, places a sort of upper bound on its aesthetic achievement; she evokes a world, but falls short of placing it within the world."
Screening and discussion are free and open to the public.
Read the interview, "Amanda Rose Wilder on Bringing a Poetic Eye to Her Documentary 'Approaching the Elephant'" here.
GMU Visiting Filmmakers Series: Approaching the Elephant and Amanda Rose Wilder is sponsored by Film & Media Studies and Film & Video Studies, Delta Kappa Alpha (DKA), English, University Life, and Women and Gender Studies.
For more information:
Cynthia Fuchs
Director, Film & Media Studies
cfuchs@gmu.edu | @gmufams