In Balanchine’s Classroom (2020 | USA | 88 minutes | Connie Hochman)
George Balanchine is arguably the most important figure in American ballet history, and he’s finally got an affectionate and detailed cinematic portrait to help cement his legacy. Now, future ballet enthusiasts as well as plebs like myself can get a glimpse into what learning under this legendary artistic master was really like.
Connie Hochman’s documentary doesn’t stray very far into subject areas like Balanchine’s personal life, and only gives a very brief survey of the important points of his biography before his move from Russia to New York (with a pit stop in Europe) in the 1930s. Its focus instead stays pretty tightly on his work at the New York City Ballet, which he founded (and oversaw the building of its iconic home, the Lincoln Center), as well as his educational organization that feeds into it: the School of American Ballet. This is a portrait painted in the words of his students and acolytes, many of whom have gone on to teach his methods themselves, as well as in archival images and footage of Balanchine at work in the classroom.
It’s clear that this was a man who was deeply loved by his students, all of whom desperately wanted to please him. And actually, although they all describe him as an unrelenting taskmaster and an exacting artistic genius who always pushed to have his vision perfectly executed, in what feels like an unusual twist for a documentary of this sort, there is no intimation of abusive behavior or even any personal controversy. There’s a chance such information exists and was consciously left out in favor of this more entirely fawning portrait. But taken at face value, it seems the man truly was simply adored, and the biggest issue his disciples are left with, now that he’s passed away, is grappling with whether or not they’re each fully equipped to carry on his idiosyncratic and highly influential teachings to the next generation.
Try Harder! (2021 | USA | 85 minutes | Debbie Lum)
Applying to and preparing for elite colleges has always been an exhausting and life-consuming task for top students, but as Debbi Lum’s documentary shows, for today’s kids it is downright brutal.
We follow a set of students in their senior year at Lowell High School, the number one-ranked public high school in San Francisco and one with a majority Asian-American student body. These kids have been working their entire academic careers to put themselves into their best position for acceptance into a top university – most mention Stanford and then the Ivy League – and now it’s time for them to go through the grueling, stressful and expensive processes of test prep, applying, interviewing, and finally waiting for their acceptance results.
A huge concern of this doc is the intersection of race (and, secondarily, class) with these educational opportunities. A Black student is self-conscious that her hard-won acceptance might mean less than it should because of diversity quotas, while her Asian-American classmates with the same kind of insanely high qualifications seem to be rejected at a higher rate – possibly for the same reason. The seemingly small allotted space for Asian students at each college (in order to ensure diversity) means that even those with above-perfect GPAs and amazing resumes are in tight competition for simply not enough spots at those top schools toward which these students are all aiming. Even the high school’s guidance counselor warns them that their racial backgrounds may work against them in this context.
The doc doesn’t have a lot of answers for how to course-correct, but it shines a light on a variety of injustices and inequities in this particular part of the United States’ educational system, and it does so in a very affectionate and empathetic manner. We get to know many of the kids’ parents as well as one particularly beloved physics teacher, and become emotionally engaged in their stories as well as frustrated at the gruelingly stressful, demoralizing, and dehumanizing nature of the process.
The film’s setting in time is a bit ambiguous (although the lack of masks anywhere in sight is one indicator that it wasn’t shot during this past year) until near the end, when it becomes clear that this was the high school class of 2017 (with one younger student graduating in 2018). That means that most of these students would have then been graduating from their undergraduate colleges this past year, 2021, but there’s no “where are they now?”-type postscript. That’s a bit of a loss; I was invested enough that I would have been interested in that kind of flash forward with these students, especially to hear if they believe all that hard work to get into those schools was worth it, and where they’ll be going from here.
In Balanchine’s Classroom and Try Harder! played in-person on prior dates at SIFF DocFest, but are both available virtually Now through Thursday, October 7th. In Balanchine’s Classroom is restricted to audiences in WA State, and Try Harder! is restricted to US audiences.
Follow other updates from this year’s festival via our SIFF DocFest coverage.