Review: Mr. Bachmann and His Class Basks in the Wonder of Education As Collaboration

Maria Speth’s 217-minute documentary Mr. Bachmann and His Class taps into the space where knowledge is collaboratively constructed, not transferred, and stays there, basking in its magic from start to finish. Speth contemplatively trains her camera on an elementary school class, composed of child immigrants, in the provincial German town of Stadtallendorf. Dieter Bachmann is their maestro, not master, conducting the quiet spectacle of progressive pedagogy with the most tender of grips.

Throughout the film, the students’ grades are discussed, one by one, among the entire class. The process makes it clear that students aren’t defined by the provisional result of their efforts. Clashes are resolved through listening. The rigidity of math is punctuated by music, cooking, and drawing once the teacher senses that boredom and crankiness have surfaced.

And though Mr. Bachmann leaves no room for queerness when asking the kids about marriage, he at least treats them as perfectly able to develop empathy toward an otherness that’s presumed to only exist outside of the classroom’s walls. As such, no issue seems to be off the table, including homosexuality, which isn’t the topic of an aside but that of extensive conversation and delicate confrontation (one of the girls finds it “disgusting”). Mr. Bachmann’s mastery is an effortless ballet, at once hypnotizing and heart-rending.

The documentary exists within the very restricted pantheon of films that successfully reap the cinematic potential of pedagogy. The obvious comparison is to Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch’s Miss Kiet’s Children, which turns its attention to a classroom in Holland inhabited by traumatized refugee children and their apparently gleeful Dutch peers. But Mr. Bachmann and His Class isn’t so much a portrait of a class, but a masterclass in portraiture.

Speth’s commitment to the multi-dimensionality of her subjects draws her project closer to Vittorio De Seta’s genre-bending 1973 Italian miniseries Diary of a Teacher, itself inspired by the work of educational reformer Célestin Freinet, where the pedagogical process flows from abolishing both the authoritarian figure of the master and competition (tests, grades, rankings). Mr. Bachmann’s approach follows Freinet’s, as the German educator scorns the very concept of grading whilst explaining students’ grades. Rigid paradigms are replaced by conversations and collective actions, which necessarily involve the rearrangement of the furniture and bodies in the classroom. It’s not so much improvisation but a sensitive response to students’ needs and feelings at any given moment. It’s not a chaotic free-for-all either, but the denaturalization of violent forms of pedagogical theater in the name of the unaccounted for that can emerge from children and re-shape the classroom anew.

Mr. Bachmann’s pupils’ stifling difficulties with the German language (and foreignness more generally) are eased by their ability to move around, finding a comfortable corner in the room to do individual reading, playing with drums and electric guitars, wielding a sculpting hammer, juggling tennis balls, petting animals, grabbing a cup of tea or taking power naps. Mr. Bachmann’s most defining tool in his pedagogical symphony is his penchant for throwing out the script, discovering and surrendering to the porosity of disciplines with gusto, and purpose.

Speth recognizes this teacher as one big eardrum who absorbs everything, one that isn’t seeking proficiency or the self-serving evidence of knowledge transmission. The class, with all of its diversity, becomes the whole world. Kids from Morocco, Turkey, Bulgaria, Brazil, Italy, Russia, and Kazakhstan savor the luxury of resolving their differences through play and collective action. Even a probability lesson involves the intimacy of their little bodies coming together to draw marked and unmarked golf balls from a brown lunch bag.

In a particularly poignant scene, Jamie, a green-eyed Romanian boy, refuses to help Ilknur, a veil-donning Turkish peer, who’s having a hard time with German because, he claims, it’s her fault that she didn’t learn it like others did. Instead of reprimanding the student, Mr. Bachmann stops the lesson to debrief the situation. In this moment, the lesson becomes this situation, as the teacher walks the children through the reasons why it’s unfair to deny help to the girl because her difficulties are in fact not hers. They’re ours.