Schoolscapes

Inspired by the cinema of Lumière and the ideas of the 20th century Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti, David MacDougall follows up the Doon School Quintet, his series of films about a traditional school in North India, with this film made at the Rishi Valley School, a famous progressive co-educational school in Andhra Pradesh, South India.
Throughout his life, Krishnamurti taught that one should strive to observe the things around one more calmly and clearly.  This was also how cinema began, and what excited its first audiences.  SchoolScapes attempts to recapture that freshness of observing the world.  It is dedicated to the simple act of looking, in which each scene is a single shot.

David MacDougall

David MacDougall has made documentary and ethnographic films in East Africa, Australia, Europe and India, many in collaboration with his wife, Judith MacDougall.  His films include To Live With Herds (1972); the "Turkana Conversations" trilogy (filmed 1973-74); Photo Wallahs (1991); Tempus de Baristas (1993), and five films on a school in northern India: Doon School Chronicles (2000), With Morning Hearts (2001), Karam in Jaipur (2001), The New Boys (2003), and The Age of Reason (2004).  He is the author of articles on cinema, and two books, Transcultural Cinema (1998) and The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (2006). He is currently a Professorial Fellow at the Centre
for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University.