NEW BOYS, THE

PART 4 OF THE DOON SCHOOL QUINTET

The fourth film in David MacDougall's Doon School Quintet, THE NEW BOYS provides a comparison to the group viewed in With Morning Hearts, for these boys appear more divided and class-conscious. Within the group there is a range of personalities and backgrounds - some are natural leaders, some subject to teasing and bullying, some argumentative and some peace-makers.

The social dynamics of the group is the focus of this study of life in Foot House, one of Doon School's dormitories for new boys. It begins a few days before the boys appear and shows them arriving, struggling with their trunks and suitcases. It then follows them for the next two months of their lives in the house. An important feature of the film is the inclusion of conversations among the boys about the causes of aggression and warfare, homesickness, restaurant food, and how to speak to a ghost.

VIEW TRAILER HERE: vimeo.com/670540840

"Continues MacDougall's Doon School project with a series of nuanced observations on the adolescent struggle of making locality out of an alien place. Through exploring the contexts of conflict, loneliness, confidence, trust, and friendship, the film evocatively captures children's strategies of negotiating a world where belonging can not be taken for granted. This is a poignant document of young lives manoeuvring between personal anxiety and worldly confidence, at once reflective and entangled in the moment." - Associate Professor Sanjay Srivastava, Head of School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University; author of Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School. (Routledge, 1998).

"Without doubt the Doon Project will provide plentiful material for discussion of such matters as the place of such a school in a democratic society; the acculturation of children; identity in its old sense versus 'identity' in its new sense of national or cultural conformism; how an elite perpetuates its values; or, at a more experiential level, how we may each position ourselves in relation to the machineries of social constraint. Nevertheless, simply to call these anthropological films would, while true, be a little like calling [Chinua Achebe's] Things Fall Apart an anthropological novel. They are major contributions to our screen culture, and deserve to be seen well beyond the confines of the discipline." - Dai Vaughan, Visual Anthropology.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM RONIN FILMS IN THE DOON SCHOOL QUINTET

PART 1 - DOON SCHOOL CHRONICLES
PART 2 - WITH MORNING HEARTS
PART 3 - KARAM IN JAIPUR
PART 5 - THE AGE OF REASON

0 Shares Tweet0 Pins

Related files

• preview Click here to download article - Social Aesthetics and The Doon School (PDF 204.4 kb)

Permalink: https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/412