Mainstream documentaries tend to handhold audiences through a story, pummeling them with talking head interviews and bright graphics to keep their attention. In one of 2022’s best documentaries, Mr. Bachmann and His Class, director Maria Speth and her crew eschew common filmmaking tools like voiceover and a soundtrack in favor of a cinéma vérité approach. The film depicts one year of a German grade school class composed of immigrant children from various Eastern Europe countries. But instead of setting up the story with white words on a black screen, Speth instead dumps the viewer blind into the industrial city of Stadtallendorf, relying on a highly observant camera to build a complex picture of one teacher’s (Mr. Bachmann) attempt to integrate his students into the German school system. The effect is initially bewildering for an American like me, but apt, considering the fish-out-of-water circumstances of these migrants. Like them, I was immersed in an alien world, learning on the fly. The film begins not with the students or their teacher, but with their parents and neighbors driving and walking in the dark morning to work in the local bakeries and factories. It’s an unorthodox move making a clear statement: this is a story about a community, not just a class.
Depicting the community of a classroom and how it relates to the broader cultures mixing outside of the class is a tall task that Speth handles beautifully. The camera is stationary for the most part, simply observing various moments in the classroom via medium and close shots to build a full understanding of the day-to-day. We see the 6th graders sharing meals together during recess and field trips, airing out misunderstandings, and supporting one another through tough assignments. They teach each other words and phrases in their respective languages, and communicate lively through the universal language of music in scenes you would be forgiven for mistaking for Richard Linklater’s School of Rock. Those adolescents that choose not to contribute productively to the comfortable domesticity are temporarily booted to the stairs outside the room. “I made out of this class an [Indigenous] tribe that dances and plays music…all these things come before learning,” Bachmann says in an interview. What I saw seems to back this assertion up; there are relatively few sequences of traditional math or language instruction, and many more scenes showing how these 19 kids and their teachers relate to each other.
For life outside of school, Speth makes good use of quiet, mundane shots in between the classroom scenes to fill in blanks. We get glimpses of prayers in a mosque as a precursor to class discussions about religion preferences. We see one student do a bit of break dancing during one of the music sessions in class, and then we later cut to him doing a full-on performance in a dance studio. Another boy’s confrontational attitude with his classmates is given new dimensions when we see him destroying the competition in a boxing ring. Not only do these interstitial scenes give the viewer a break from linguistic-heavy student-teacher interactions, they also gave me the context these children live in. They tacitly imply a strong link between school and home life, where the former is simply an extension of the latter. The filmmakers show how simple editing can convey so much meaning.
The context of Mr. Bachmann’s life is also sketched out pretty well. He can initially come across as aloof, with his beanie hat and crossed arms, perpetually sitting even when giving hugs, as if the weight of the world won’t allow him to stand. We learn of his alcoholic parents, his degree in sociology, and most importantly, his feelings on the education system he has participated in for over 15 years. It’s clear that Bachmann considers his duty to be providing these children with a home. As immigrants, they are all searching for that welcoming place of love and stability, free of stereotypical judgments and ridicule. His pedagogy isn’t flawless. I cringed when he pesters his students with questions about their romantic attractions and harps on standard gender tropes like a typical dad might. But the topic of sex comes back up later in the film, specifically in regards to how the students feel about lesbian love, and Mr. Bachmann handles it with the careful questioning of an experienced instructor. Grace, trust, recognition of others, selflessness, openness, togetherness — teaching these values is a worthy cause for sure, especially for immigrant families looking for belonging in a historically hostile area of Germany.
However, teaching those values takes a lot of time and effort. Much has been made about this film’s hefty length (217 minutes), but I needed that time to reinforce how much work it takes to create the tribe Mr. Bachmann is striving for. He is often forced to choose between information transfer and character building, the two primary modes of school teachers. At one point, he expresses doubt about letting them juggle and bang on drums all day instead of pushing more math and German comprehension. We see students and administrators alike stressing about the results of standardized tests, letter grades, and what level of schooling the students qualify for. Mr. Bachmann’s class seems to be performing poorly by strict German standards, but he keeps reminding them about their relatively great progress compared to their skills on their first day. In the very first classroom scene we see, instead of starting the early morning class with a lesson on grammar, he notices how tired the kids are and just lets them rest their eyes for a few minutes. “I want to work with the kids, not against them,” he declares later in the film. It’s a tension familiar to not only teachers, but parents like me who want their children to succeed within the confines of a society that values education and production far more than happiness and integrity. There is no school district testing for art appreciation or patience. Honesty and compassion do not pay the bills in this system.
As the last day of class looms nearer and nearer, I couldn’t help but think Mr. Bachmann’s cause is doomed considering how societal incentives are aligned. The culture of the classroom he so painstakingly cultivated over 10 months will inevitably fracture as the students move on. In one particularly hard to watch parent-teacher conference, Mr. Bachmann (using the student as a translator) pleads with a mother to reconsider her decision to move the family yet again for a new job. The student looks on with moist eyes as her mother shrugs, seeming to say, “It can’t be helped.” It’s hard to know how much impact Bachmann’s class will have on these kids’ lives; the film declines to give an update despite the events taking place in 2017-2018 (this is one place where the tried-and-true white text over black screen would have been welcome). Without many more successive teachers like Bachmann, it’s all too easy to imagine them growing up and participating in a world just as isolated, competitive, and capitalistic as today.
Mr. Bachmann begins and ends his classes with 30 seconds of silence, creating a space of calm awareness. Speth does something similar by opening the film with the wordless work commute and ending with Mr. Bachmann in quiet reflection. It’s clear the filmmakers are on his side, including all of the ambivalence about the future of integration he holds. The last shot, behind Bachmann’s head engulfed by the rigid chairs on tables, is a gloomy metaphor for his fight against structural immobility. Again he is sitting, the world pressing harder than ever. It’s an ending nowhere near as tragic as the year’s other best documentaries (Cow, Mariupolis 2), but it’s haunting nonetheless.
